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Chapter Four
Many of the Sierra Club's 182 charter members were scientists; consequently the scientific exploration of the Sierra was vigorously pursued by the organization in the 1890s. Among the Club's first publications were Joseph LeConte's maps of the range. Bolton Brown scouted the area from Mt. Williamson to Mt. Clarence King in the southern Sierra. Walter Starr, Allen Chickering, and Theodore Solomons mapped and photographed the Sierra crest from the Merced to the Kings rivers. The Sierra Club Bulletin (first published in 1893 and continuing today as Sierra) included reports of excursions, guides to Sierran geography, and scientific papers on the range's natural history. Stanford Professor William Russel Dudley wrote regular columns on forestry. Likewise, Club-sponsored events furthered the organization's educational purposes. In its early years, the Club shared offices with the California Academy of Sciences and the Geographical Society of the Pacific, wherein it often sponsored public educational and scientific meetings. John Wesley Powell, chief of the United States Geological Survey, lectured in 1892 on his exploration of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, and in 1895 the Club sponsored a discussion of "The National Parks and Forest Reservations," including addresses by Muir, LeConte, and Dudley. Recognizing a need to extend its educational activities beyond San Francisco, the Club established an information center for visitors to Yosemite Valley in 1898. The center included a library, and a young man named William Colby was hired as its attendant. In 1903 the Club completed the LeConte Memorial Lodge in Yosemite to serve as the organization's summer headquarters. This was the first of many lodges, information centers, and trailside shelters that the Club would build and staff. Kicking the House Habit Fueled by the interest of its city-based members in the mountains, the Sierra Club was growing, but slowly. Eight years after the inaugural meeting in Olney's office, membership numbered 384. Aware of the significance of numbers in politics, Muir became a booster of tourism. He reasoned that "if people in general could be got into the woods, even for once, to hear the trees speak for themselves, all difficulties in the way of forest preservation would vanish." The more who would kick Emerson's "house habit," the better for the cause of conservation. By 1901 the Club's Board of Directors had determined that an annual summer outing would be a valuable addition to Club activities. Other organizations, such as the Mazamas in Oregon and the Appalachian Mountain Club, engaged in annual outings, but their aims were purely recreational. Viewed in terms of the goals of the Club, outings would encourage members and other interested people to see firsthand the country the Club sought to preserve. This was no small task at a time when simply reaching the Sierra from San Francisco, many miles distant, required a major effort. While many of the early explorers of the Sierra were Club members, some members had never visited the range and could have little knowledge of Muir's "right manners of the wilderness." William Colby was the man who undertook to teach them. A graduate of the University of California's Hastings Law School, Colby became Secretary of the Sierra Club in 1900, retaining that position for 46 years, with the exception of the two years he served as President. Colby probably became closer to Muir than any other Club member, and he was Muir's steadfast comrade in the campaign to preserve Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. For the outings, Colby had Muir's strong support, and the help of Edward Parsons, who had planned similar ventures for the Mazamas. "An excursion of this sort," Colby said, "if properly conducted, will do an infinite amount of good toward awakening the proper kind of interest in the forests and other natural features of our mountains, and will also tend to create a spirit of good fellowship among our members." At the same time, Colby recognized the necessity of compromise if outings were to initiate novices into the wilderness. He recommended that the trips "combine comparative ease and comfort with the opportunity to see some of the grandest scenery of the Sierra, not too commonly visited as to lack distinction." He also knew that it was necessary to keep the cost of the excursions low; the typical Sierra Club member was of the middle class, and early participants on outings were often college students. (In fact, Colby frequently ran deficits on outings, which he made up out of his own pocket.) He chose Tuolumne Meadows for the first Sierra Club outing, camping at Soda Springs, where Muir and Johnson had laid plans for the campaign to establish Yosemite National Park. The first outing was the model for what came to be called the High Trip. Run nearly every summer for more than 50 years as the Club's chief cultural event, the High Trips were not small excursions: 96 people went to Tuolumne Meadows in 1901, more to Kings Canyon the next summer, and the annual number of participants would grow to 200. In the early days a camp was established in a central location, and meals were prepared at a commissary. Camp equipment was transported first by wagon, later by mule-train, and the participants usually walked alongside. They also walked up mountains. On the first trip, 49 Club members hiked 20 miles and ascended 4,000 feet to the summit of Mt. Dana in one day. Twenty climbed Mt. Lyell, the highest peak in Yosemite National Park. The next year's Bulletin carried two reports of the summer outing, one by Ella Sexton, subtitled "a woman's view of the outing," and the other the "man's view" -- written by Edward Parsons. Parsons noted of the women who ascended Mt. Dana, most of them "Berkeley or Stanford girls," that "their vigor and endurance were a revelation to all of us." With their focus on community and recreation, the outings produced a very different atmosphere from the camps of the gold miners or those of the geologic explorers of the nineteenth century. This was in part because women established themselves at once as active participants in the Club's activities. One such woman was Marion Randall. A close friend of Muir's daughter Wanda, Randall joined the 1904 outing as her first venture into the wilderness. Of that experience she wrote, "It sounds rather alarming at first--to camp for a month with a party of 150 persons, strangers for the greater part." Yet she found that the "crowd" somehow became a community, and the name of the Club "has come to mean an ideal for us. It means comradeship and chivalry, simplicity and joyousness, and the carefree life of the open." Randall joined that community; three years after her first Club outing she married Edward Parsons, and served as a Club Director from 1914 to 1938. Colby's idea worked, and he continued to lead annual outings for 29 years. After he retired from leading, his ideal was still working in 1948 when young Club member Peggy Wayburn joined a High Trip for her first wilderness adventure. "The love of the wilderness had entered into me," she wrote of the effect of that trip. "I was, and forever would be, one of John Muir's disciples." A disciple of John Muir was, in his terms, "hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," and Club members found plenty of mountains to climb. In 1902 Muir led a group of campers from the annual outing to the summit of Mt. Whitney. In 1903 a large Club party ascended Mt. Williamson, and 139 people in two parties climbed Mt. Whitney. In 1905, 56 members of the annual outing, including 15 women, made the ascent of Mt. Rainier, on the first High Trip outside California. Stephen Mather was among the party; he later became the first director of the National Park Service, where he used wilderness outings to promote proposed parks to influential citizens and members of Congress. Photo: Dinnertime at the Kern River during a Sierra Club Outing. John Muir is seated on a log talking with Miss Kneffer, a Vassar professor. At the left is Miss Nora Thomas (1908). Up to Top HOME | Email Signup | About Us | Contact Us | Terms of Use |
