Bud Morrison

Bud Morrison died on Monday 9 November 2026 in the living room of his home in Greenacres, Spokane Valley, overlooking the restored Saltese Flats wetlands. He was 85. He had been slowing physically and had recently had memory problems. That morning he told his wife he felt dizzy and should not drive her to physical therapy, and he was later found unresponsive in his recliner. He had signed a do not resuscitate order, and his wife asked responders to stop resuscitation attempts. No specific cause of death was made public.

He is survived by his wife, Sharon, and his children Bryan Morrison, Tina Morrison and Shari Morrison Ide, among others. A memorial service was set for 11.30am on 20 November 2026 at Valley Real Life Church, 1831 S. Barker Road, near the Saltese wetlands.

Bud Morrison was born around 1941 into a ranching family that had worked land in Spokane Valley, Washington, since the 1890s. His grandfather, Peter Morrison, drained a large shallow lake on the Saltese Flats so he could raise cattle and timothy hay on the valley floor. The ranch passed to Bud's father, Millar Arthur Morrison Sr. His mother, Doris Morrison, was a longtime schoolteacher who lived to 103.

After high school he went to Washington State University, where he took a degree in animal science with the aim of becoming a veterinarian. When his brother, Pete, died in an accident, he returned home to the family's land.

Morrison first drained ground near Newman Lake to grow oats, then took over the family ranch when his father died in 1992. His son, Bryan, worked alongside him for about 25 years before leaving the business full time around 2011.

In the 1990s father and son ran about 500 Black Angus mother cows. Morrison artificially inseminated the herd and used ultrasound a few months later to determine the sex of each calf, selling the females to other ranchers as breeding stock. Bryan said they were the only operation in Washington doing this at the time. The ranch also became known for high quality timothy hay, sold to neighbors and shipped to Japan.

His children described him as a savvy businessman who, when cattle ranching hit a low, would find something else to do. Over the years he developed some of the former hayfields. The remaining ranch, at Barker Road and 32nd Avenue, is still owned by the family, with the cattle and hay managed by Utecht Farms.

Morrison had two children, Bryan and Tina, before he met Sharon Foose in January 1972 through friends. They married that May. Sharon brought two daughters, Shari and Debbie, whom he raised as his own. Shari called him Bud for decades after he told her, when she was six, that calling him Dad would disrespect her father; years later he called that the biggest mistake of his life and adopted her, at 49.

He could be stern and was hardest on Bryan, who worked for him. He seldom said I love you aloud, but signed the chore lists he left for his son, written in his well known neat penmanship, with I love you, Dad. He softened with age. He was generous to neighbors and people in need, and often told his children that he hoped he had made a difference.

A keen keeper of the family's pioneer history, he donated many historic photographs to the Spokane Valley Heritage Museum and was a friend and advocate of its founder, Jayne Singleton.

In 2010 Morrison sold several hundred acres of ranch land to Spokane County for the restoration of the Saltese Flats wetlands, reversing the drainage his grandfather had carried out more than a century earlier. His daughter said he saw it as part of his legacy. His condition for the sale was an education center named for his mother, and the Doris Morrison Learning Center opened in 2023. Students from the Central Valley and East Valley school districts visit it to learn about the wetland and its plants and wildlife, and Morrison would watch the buses line up from his house on the hill, sometimes with tears in his eyes.

Jayne Singleton of the Spokane Valley Heritage Museum said the Morrison story was the first account of Valley pioneers she ever learned, and called him a good soul and salt of the earth.