1904. Sierra Nevada Circuit 7 Mt. Whitney AS cent Page1 of 4 [A TRIP THROUGH THE CALIFORNIA SIERRAS IN SEPTEMBER 1904] PART 1. I had a very interesting trip out west, from first to last, for I had never been in any part of California before and even the things that disappointed me interested me as well. I went straight out to San Francisco, stayed there for three or four days, seeing some of the Berkeley college men to whom I had letters, and then down to Monterey, to 369 its cypresses. From there I went on down the coast to Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. At Los Angeles I ran down for a day and night to Sar.ta datalina Island and then I went straight up through the San Josquin Valley to Visalia in the Keweah River country whence I want up by stage to Giant Porest in the national Sequoia Park where I outfitted for my mountain trip. : BOOK a packer, a Maine man originally and of my am name, and some mules and we went out together for a three weeks' trip across the stuch Sierras to Owen's Valley on their eastern side, go- ing out through the Kern Rivor country and returning by Kearsarga Pans and King's River, then back to Giant Forest where I started from. Some of the men I not at Berkeley dollage, who had been out on geological and botanical expeditions through that region laid this route out for me as the most interesting I could follow and it cer- tainly opened up magnificent ncenary and showed me the Sierra forests in a most interesting way. But the distances were great, the trail steep and difficult, the canons we had to cross profound, and the weather was stormy. in opite of John Muir who writes of delightful Indian summer weather lasting on until November in the mountains there. The first storm broke while my packer and I were climbing Me Whitney, the highest Mountain in the states. and when we reached the tay with 04 has Present (1) wind and bitter, sleet and SHOW I ever ran up against. We had slopt the night before, 2 as we usually did throughout the trip, without a tent although T had carried one of light oil-silk along and when we got back to camp our camping outfit, spread out over the ground, was already buried two or three inches deep in snow. We got the tent up for shelter, with some difficulty, and then my packer, exhausted by the cold and climb gave out, the middle of the afternoon, rolled himself up shivering in his blankets and under mine which I piled up over him until night, and slept until I called him in the morning. We were then camped on the edge of a high Alpine meadow, eleven thousand feet above the sea. It snowed all that day. The next day it snowed again but we got off in the morning and rode all day through the storm, fearing to get snowed in upon the heights and having no feed for our stock who depend on grazing in the mountain meadows. 'Toward dusk we lost our way, my packer never having been over the trail which we were following before, and we camped at sun-down on the edge of another meadow only a thousand feet or 80 lower than the one which we had left. By that time it had stopped snowing and we spread out our blankets and provisions and cooked our supper only to have it begin to snow again while we ate it. We put up the tent again and made ourselves fairly comfortable under it although it snowed all through the night. In the morning it cleared but it was bitterly cold and all the wood about had soaked up so much moisture from the snow that we found it impossible to start a fire. Toward noon, how- ever, the sun came out and then the scene was beautiful beyond words, the mountains all about us covered with fresh fallen snow which covered too the meadow down below us and loaded down the pines and firs that shut it in. The next morning we started out again, found our trail and followed it up over a high pass that led from the western to the eastern watershed. The snow lay three and four feet deep over the 3 summit of the pass, obliterating the trail. The last few hundred feet of climb or either side went steeply up and down a granite slide, the rocks big and loosely piled together and the whole hedded deep in snow. It was very difficult getting un it with our loaded mules but when it came to getting them down on the other side it seemed to me almost impossible without some accident. However, I went first, feeling the way as best I could among the rocks and leading my unloaded saddle horse, a sure-footed beast, behind me. Then when I had explored the way my packer drove the loaded animals down along it and somehow they got through all right no eastern horses could have done it. Then it was plain sailing until we reached the edge of Owen's Valley where we came out on one of the most magnificent scenes that I have ever looked on. Owen's Valley skirts the base of the high Sierras from Nevada southward on the eastern side. Owen's River runs down it, from the eastern slope of the Sierras further north, to Owen's Lake which lies across the valley like the Dead Sea across the Valley of the Jordan, a great salt pool with smooth salt plains that were its bottom once stretching out from it to north and south. The trail that I was following led me suddenly out above the valley opposite this lake which lay six thousand feet below me, its nearer surface pale gray-green, its farther surface lost in the dark shadow and the swirling mists of a thunder squall which lay over it, black and lawful, its cloud-mass rent by flashes of lightning, the whole far down below the point on which we stood. Further up, the valley lay in sunshine, a desert bounded on its eastern side by desert mountains with here and there a splash of green upon its floor where irrigation turned it into garden. A little later we, too, were swallowed up in a fierce hail storm and then descended rapidly to the valley and rode for hours across it until long after dark, to 4 reach a village that had seemed quite near when we stood and looked at from up above. We slept that night at the foot of a great stack of hay, alfafa hay, not nearly so good to sleep on as eastern Timothy, by the way, and ate ripe grapes from off their vines and thawed out in the sun- shine. Then we rode up the valley twenty miles to another ranch above and the next day started up Kearsarge Pass to return back west. [GB.DOER] Page I of 14. A Trip Through The California Sierras In September 1904. Part 2] I started out for my mountain trip from Visalia, one of the small agricultural cities in the broad San Joaquin valley; I went by stage, my way lying at first across the flat plain of the valley floor through yellow stubble fields and past immense orchards of plun-trees whose fruit was being gathered up and dried for prunes, then I came into the foothills region with its great orchards of apples, oranges and lemons and its brown hill-slopes; and early in the afternoon I reached the ranch of a man named Redstone on the Kaweah river where I was to spana the night, p.35 My only fellow-passenger on the stage was a young electrician Redstore from Ohio who had been superintending the construction of a power plant in the high Sierra which was to supply the valley region oppo- site with light and power. He had been out there all summer, and his wife, an Ohio girl they were only married in the spring had been there with him and was waiting for him then with horse and buggy at a station on the stage route. But stopping at another station an hour or two before we got there, they told him he was wanted at the telephone and in a few moments he came back and said that they had rung him up from San Francisco to order him to take the next stage back and the night train on to there. He had been away a fortnight and up travelling nearly the whole night before and had counted on getting at least a day or two of rest and with his wife. But he was only able to drive on with me until he reached the station where she was to most him and then turn back. for another five hours' ride across the dusty plain and & night upon the care. 2 His wife was waiting when he got there and her delight at getting him back and dismay a moment afterward when he told her he had got to leave her again in half an hour she was all alone there with nim so far as friends went was quite pathetic. Early the next morning I left the Redstone ranch and drove up all day into the mountains over a road which climbed six thousand feet and which brought me to a park established by the government in one of its forest reservations for the preservation of a splendid Gimet growth of giant sequoias. There in the midet of a forest of these Farest trees, mingled with pines and firs, a trough summer camp had been established by two ranchers from below, Broder and Hopper by name, who also outfitted people for trips through the mountains beyond. We passed no house upon the way after our first couple of hours upon the road and ate our lunch by a spring at the roadside, taking the same horses through with us all day. IC was fairly late in the afternoon when we reached the coniferous forest, these conifern not growing in that region lower than five thousand feet or so above the sea, and then in the course of another hour or two, after passing two or three camps of negro soldiers stationed there to guard the park and save it from fire, we reached the camp where I was going. It had one wooden cabin which served as dining-room and kitchen, and a number of tents to sleep in. In the evening there was a camp- fire which lighted up in a wonderful way the great trunks of the seguoias and the tall, branchless shafts of the firs amongst which they were growing. The great sequoias have but a narrow range of altitude, growing in fairly level belts along the western slope of the Sierras at a height of six or seven thousand feet above the sea, where the first heavy rain-clouds form. Nor do they follow the deeper valleys east- ward into the mountain range but stay scattered here and there along 3 its western headlands. Up and down the length of the Sierras they range, in widely separated groups, for two hundred and fifty to three hundred miles. The forest I was in, the largest of these groups, lay toward the centre of this range; it was about eight miles in length, terminating at either end with singular abruptness though the pines and firs which grew along with the sequoias in it continued on uninterruptedly. Doubtless the lower limit of the sequoia's growth is set by rain, its growth beginning at the lowest point at which it can obtain from the up-driven ocean air rain and dew sufficient for its needs and a leaf-evaporation checked at night by falling temperature; while its upward limit, lying close upon the downward one, is similarly set by its avoidance of the mountain cold of the region to which it has been driven by its need of moisture but which is perhaps less natural to it than a lower one. Probably too the narrow, island- like areas in which it grows amongst the general forest are not as accidental as they seem but have an unseen cause in warmth-and- moisture-bearing currents of the atmosphere or cold ones from the mountain peaks to north and east. The largest and the finest trees were apt I found to grow in dells or hollows on the mountain slopes where there was greater moisture in the soil. The only other still existing species of sequoia, the Redwood of commerce, grows in similar fashion in northern California along a narrow belt between the Coast Range mountains and the sea where the rain-fall is the heaviest in the state and where its rainless summers are compensated by dense continual fogs. The redwood has developed a vigorous power of sprouting from the root when the trunk has been destroyed by axe or fire and this seems to have weakened, through long absence of selection, the vitality of its seed but the giant sequoia in the Sierras seemed to seed itself, so far as I could 4 see, freely wherever it could get a moist and open seed-bed. Once I saw a small and grassy meadow hordered by some old sequoias where a dense growth of young ones, bunched together where the seeds had fallen, was growing up in the most vigorous way, its trees rang- ing from young seedlings up to others of fifty feet or more in height still clothed to the ground with their dense foliage. So probably the reason why one does not see more young trees growing in the present groves is mainly due to the dry climate of today in California, mak- ing the forest floor even where the old sequoias grow too dry to serve thein well as nursery beds; and partly too to the way in which the sequoia forest is invaded by other trees which grow from a drier seed bed or in deeper shade than the sequoia can. But there can be no question but that if moist and open seed-beds were prepared for it and sown with the collected seed a small expense a new sequoia forest would spring up far greater in extent than the existing one, along its general range. And the tree is so beautiful in its youth and grows SO rapidly that this would be well worth the doing, espec- ially as the region where it might be done is one of immense future importance to California in relief from the summer's heat and drought in the great plains below. The foliage of the sequoia is dense when the tree is young, clothing it to the ground and giving it a cone-like and aspiring form. This form it keeps, with thinner foliage, as an older tree until the growing distance between its leading shoots and the roots from which the sap is pumped to them begins to limit their supply, when the lateral branches, better nourished, broaden out and give the tree in age a round-topped character, some of these branches grow- ing then to a great size. While this is going on the lower branches gradually die away, leaving the great shaft of the trunk bare for a hundred feet or more. The foliage is tassel-like in character, 5 the tassel upward turned and cone-like like the tree itself in shape, the leaves, a warm and yellow green in color, growing stiffly for- ward from the branchlet-stem which is itself as green as they, and having the size and somewhat of the rounded form of bits of twine. The roots are fibrous, not extending far away but filling the ground around the tree with an inverted-cup-shaped mass, while the trunk swells out near the ground to a diameter that is sometimes half again as great as what it has fifteen or twenty feet above, buttressing the shaft, which stands erect through the Sierra gales rather by its own solidity and basal breadth than by a grip upon the ground like that of oaks or pines. The largest tree I saw was two hundred and seventy five feet high and somewhat over thirty feet across upon the ground, its age supposed to be not less than five thousand years and possibly considerably more, judging by the counted rings on others that have been felled or cut into. The rings in all of the outer portion of the older trees are extraordinarily close together, show- ing how slow the growth to that great size has been; I could hardly have counted some that I looked at myself without a microscope. One's first impression of the older trees is that of giant shafts with gnarled, irregular branches and tufts of foliage at their top: the leaves and branches seem but an accessory to the shaft rather than it a column built up for their support. The uppermost branches too heighten this effect in which one feels at first a lack of grace, standing out broken, bare and dead against the sky in nearly all the older trees, which have been either struck by lightning in the course of their long centuries of life or broken by some winter gale when laden with ice and snow. But the color of the warm green foliage high up against the sky and the warm red color of the deeply furrowed bark below are singularly beautiful and the massive dignity of the 6 shaft itself united to the sense one has of its great age and per- manence is most impressive, the impression growing on one rather than lessening as one lingers in its presence. The bark is very thick, fifteen or eighteen inches often in the older trees, and it is said to be very resistant to fire, protecting the tree, together with the tree's own height, and saving it when all the other forest trees about are swept away. The most striking tree which grows with the sequoias, companion to it in its forests but ranging besides the whole length of the Sierra in its lower forest helt, is the Sugar Pine, Pinus Lambertiana, the largest of all pine trees in the world. I saw many trees in the course of my trip that were from seven to eight feet through, a yard above the ground, and a few that were still larger. The tree grows also to great height, trees of two hundred and fifty feet and upward being often cut by the lumbermen, they told me. Its foliage is like the foliage of our white pine, which its wood resembles also, it being far the most valuable commercially of all the trees that grow on the Pacific slope. It is much more open in its habit, however, than our white pine, not making such dense masses of foliage but thrusting out long limbs that are bare and branchless near the tree, droop at a distance from it, and then rise again as they divide and clothe themselves with foliage in their outer part. And these long limbs, reaching out distinct and separate above the general forest and waving with wide sweeps in every wind, combine with the tree's great height and straight, majestic trunk to give it its dis- tinctive character and the forest where it grows one of its most striking features. The bark is finely ribbed and firm even on the oldest trees and warm brown in color, the trunk being branchless usually to a great height and never, so far as I had opportunity to see, remaining clothed to the ground as it comes to be an older tree, 7 as our white pine does when growing in the open. The forest is an open one throughout the whole Sierra region. Deciduous trees there are none but bush-like willows, poplars and alder trees of no great size along the banks of streams, and in the lower valley-bottoms only, oaks and large-leaved maples. But bushes of the sort one finds in semi-arid regions, low, still and spread- ing, grow over the open slopes and in broad patches here and there among the pines where sunlight falls. But there are other slopes whole mountain sides sometimes open or dotted only with occasional pines, that but for them seem absolutely bare of plant or shrub, steep slopes of rock and sand. There are few herbaceous plants beneath the forest trees and almost none that grow upon the open slopes except where water flows; the soil granitic sands and gravels is too barren and the rainfall in the summer time too slight for that. And though there are many open meadows in among the higher mountains, left by glaciers, they are apt to be too wet for any but marsh plants to grow in them. The real Sierra gardens lie along the banks of streams alone, or here and there in patches upon slopes kept moist by water soaking down from springs above. Or else on ledges, narrow shelters along the faces of the cliffs, onto which water comes dripping down in early summer from melting snow above. When I was there it was too late for any but a few belated flowers gentians in the meadows here and there; brilliant pentstemons glowing along the well-drained sides of some steep water-course, with an occasional belated colum- bine or other mountain flower among the rocks; but it was evident that in spite of countless little mountain gardens brilliant in the early summer yet the region as a whole is barren in herbaceous life though what it has is brilliant in its flowering time and grows abundantly where it can grow at all, in tiny losses along great barren 8 Animal life I hardly saw on all my trip, save deer in the Govern- ment Park from which I started. The foot-prints of wild-cats were fairly common on the snow or running along the sandy trails, and there were occasional tracks of hares and foxes. But almost the only animals I actually saw, the deer apart, were squirrels which were wonderfully abundant and active everywhere, gathering un the forest cones and storing them for winter. Birds were also rare, though woodpeckers were fairly common; I never saw an eagle on my trin and rarely a hawk, but owls I often heard at night, hooting in the forest. The men to whose camp I had come at Giant Forest had no packer there to send out with me nor a full supply of mules and horses but they sent me over with the camp cook a lank, red-bearded man to another place, two days' ride away across the mountains, where they had some men and animals at work [packing cement up for a reser- voir-dam that an electric power company was building. This was a place called Mineral King, a rough camp of a few scattered shanties and a store, occupied in summer only a place to which miners and prospectors came to get supplies or hunters as a starting point from which to go up through the higher mountains and the wild region tc the eastward. It lay at the head of one of the valleys that pene- trated these mountains from the west; a rough stage road ran un the valley to it, and from it several trails led up across the mountains. My own camp out-fit included a light tent; a couple of old comforters comfits as they call them there cotton wadded; a sleeping bag which I had made myself in San Francisco out of an army blanket and a swan's down quilt; a camera out-fit which I found it difficult to make use of upon a trip so rough and hasty; a few books about the trees and mountains; and a change of boots and cloth- ing. It could be loaded easily enough upon a single mile so far as 9 weight went but the eare we had to take to shelter my cameras and their belongings from the rough mule-hitches necessary to keep the loads from shifting made the load a difficult one to pack. The rest of our out-fit consisted of our food supplies, cooking uten- sils, my packer's bed --- a pile of cotton-wadded comfits and a small canvas bag in which he kept his clothes. This might easily have been made a fairly light load for another mule but my outfitter, to whom I left the detail of supplies, made it heavy with canned foods, preserves and other needless things. We were well started on our way to Mineral King however before I found this out. Our way lay up through the belt of sugar pines and giant sequoias, then along a harren ridge of rock and A1 steeply down a vast slope of dust-like sand with desert vegetation grow- ing sparsely through it, then across the river at its bottom three thousand feet or so below the upland meadow where we had stopped at noon to feed our stock and lunch and up a similar steep slope, not quite so high, upon its other side. My horse, a small one at best, I found in no condition to carry me up or down these slopes without distress, so I got off and walked, leading him, while my long-legged guide, the cook, guide by courtesy, for I found he knew the trail no better than I did my- self -- rode ahead contentedly on a lean gray horse of tougher make than mine which he was mounted on. The last ascent, coming toward the end of a long day and that the first one out, was very fatiguing; I led my horse, moreover, and he instead of being grateful to me for walking had a most exasperating trick of stopping every little while, pulling me back when the climb was steepest. At length we got up to the ton of the steeper slope, however, and passed in solemn twilight into a gently sloping glade shadowed by giant firs. Some larger wild animal we could not distinguish what --- bounded across it as we rode in. Aw we went on the darkness deepened quickly and by the time we reached the further end of the glade and rode on out 10 of it through a low, dense wood to the crest of the ridge we had been climbing, our miles and horses only saw the trail. Then descending again, after a little we came suddenly out of the wood and found ourselves at the head of a grassy opening fringed with tall, dark firs which led far and steeply down into a valley filled with pale blue light and misty distances by the moon just rising over the mountains opposite. It was too dark to go further we had only come so far because we had passed no grazing ground before since early in the afternoon and we were ourselves too tired. We stopped and listened; there was a low gurgle of water near us in the grass, and we unpacked our mules and camped just where we were. It was my first night out; I lay down against one of the roots of a great fir tree a tree which I measured in the morning and found to be eighteen feet around. It overhung the sloping meadow at its very head, just above the little spring, so that I could hear its water gently fall as I lay in bed. Other firs rose up on either side the meadow, which were scarcely smaller than the one beneath which I was sleeping and which seemed in the dimness of the night to rise to immeasurable heights against the sky, undefined. And down beyond lay the great depth of the moonlit, misty valley and the pale blue, moonlit and partly shadowed mountains on its farther side. It was a wonderful camping ground, full of poetry. The next morning I waked with the dawn, the whole aspect of nature changed. A few rosy clouds were floating over the mountains to th eastward, the landscape was full of daytime color. I roused my companion who gathered in our grazing stock; we made a hasty break- fast and started down the trail. An hour below we reached the meadows Wet Meadows called where we had planned, by the map, to camp the night before --- a level bit of open marsh-land set amidst a wood of pine and fir, dense for the region. We did not 11 pause there but rode on all the morning through, crossing the valley down into which we had looked from our camping ground the night before and climbing up its further side. It was not until noon that we reached another camping ground, so rocky and barren of all herbage were the valley sides which we were traversing, but at noon we came to a most interesting spot where a little circular meadow was enclosed by an isolated grove of giant sequoias the first we had seen since starting whose seedlings, growing in dense clumps and ranging from trees just big enough to be visible to others fifty or sixty feet in height with lower limbs still sweeping to the ground, filled the drier fringes of the meadow. This was the best seeding-ground of the sequoia that I saw and showed its need quite plainly, a moist soil and an open, sheltered exposure. We stayed there for a couple of hours I was sorry afterward that I had not stayed on until the next day, to make a better study of these younger trees. Then we rode on up a narrow valley with a tumiltuous stream, which we left at last to climb a huge glacier mor- raine beyond which we passed into a hanging valley with precipitous sides, gradually rising toward a wooded ridge which closed the valley in behind and formed, pillared on either side by mountains, the pass to Mineral King Timber Gap as it was called. our stock, evi- dently not in good condition when we started and over-loaded for their strength, began to show signs of exhaustion although our pace was slow. Presently one of the mules lay down upon the trail. A horse would not have done it until his last ounce of energy was spent but that is one of the ways, as I found afterward, in which a mule is different from a horse as soon as they get discouraged they lie down. The man I had with me, who had never packed before, knew little more about their ways than I myself. We were only three 12 or four miles at most, as well as we could reckon from the map, from Mineral King; a more experienced packer would have simply shifted the pack from the mile on to one of the saddle horses and left the mule to follow which she could have done quite easily as her condition in the morning showed. But I had her upon my conscience and leaving my man to follow after me in the early morning. with the stock, I took a few things with me for the night in case I missed the trail for it was then sundown and red sunset clouds were already floating in the western sky and went on alone, on foot, to Mineral King. I got up over the pass and through its timbered gap before it got too dark to see. An open slope of dry, hard earth and broken stone swent down from the timber's edge into the valley where the lights of the little settlement for which I was bound could be already seen two thousand feet below. It was rough going for I only had a pair of stout moccasons upon my feet and the twilight was too dim to pick one's way, but at last I got down, found the roadway in the valley bottom, crossed a river, and made my way in the dark to Mineral King's Post Office and only store. It was not a very promising place to arrive at; two or three men were lounging about a roughly carpentered room but no one seemed prepared to shoulder any responsibility for making me at home. At last it was arranged that I should have a room to sleep in there, above the store, and get my meals as I could elsewhere. Then I asked where I could find the man who was to go out with me as packer. A little hut one hundred feet away was pointed out and there I went Four men were playing cards around a table; I asked if Frank Dorr the the man who was to go out with me as packer was there, and one of the men came out to speak with me. Finding who I was he asked me in, introduced me to his companions, one of whom then offered to 13 cook me up some supper - fried ham and fried potatoes --- cut in chunks - soda biscuit and a pot of tea. Afterward, I sat and talked with them awhile and then went back to my room above the store, where I found after I had put my light out that I could see stars from my bed through cracks and openings between the rough-hewn shingles which made the building's roof. The next day the man I had left behind was slow in coming on [rrank] sweeks and we lost the morning but immediately after dinner Dorr and I started on our three weeks' trip, having in the meantime overhauled our nowh dors baggage and left some of the heaviest of our food supplies and other things behind. But as our journey was to be a hard one and Dorr, moreove am unit thought it best to take a heavy Dutch oven, on baking- pan and a few other heavy things along from Mineral King WO decided, we took along Cany fortunately as It to take along an extra mule to earry thom. We rode for a time up the valley we were in, passing on the way a strongly effervescent mineral spring where we stopped and drank, it the water being as pleasant as that of any of the famous springs I know. We passed several office springs upon our trip and they seemed to be common in the region, some of them being hot others cold, all and evidently varying in which they contained. Their Further un we climbed another steep morraine into a Kanging #valley, Tracks bare of trees, which reminded mo much of Alpino valleys I have bace through hist in Switzerland just below the snow line. This valley we rode whom use rods, throughout 15 length coming at its further end to a steep ascent must witose bare crest flanked on either side by mountains, formed the pass to the region we were going to - a pass called Farewell Gap. The crost was narrow its further, southern side was so steep and shalv and the wind that blew across it so gusty and fierce that it seemed to me for a moment my horse could hardly keep his footing The and blew finely across gust that One scarely Lakes 12,874 Pwamid Peak Colosseum Mtn. 12,777 12.473 Volcanic Lates Woods Lookout Point DIVIDE Castle bake 10,144 Granite Pass Kennedy Domes Pass 10,673 Granite: Lake ME Baxter 13,125 Peak Mt. Clarence King 12,905 able to identify sources of historic photographs or paintings of the > Visalia landscape at the turn of the 20th-century. > > My interest grows out of completion of a biography of George Bucknam > Dorr (1853-1944), the founder and first superintendent of Acadia > National Park. This pioneer conservationist journeyed with a guide to > the Sierras in 1904 after receiving some expert advice from > acquaintances at the University of California, Berkeley. He left a > detailed 40- page typewritten naturalists narrative of his travels from > Visalia where "I went up by stage to Giant Forest in the National > Sequoia Park where I outfitted for my mountain trip." > > Their three week trip took them across the Sierras--where they made one > of the first ascents on the new trail up Mt. Whitney-- the two men onto > Owen's Valley on the eastern side of the Sierras "going out through the > Kern River county and returning by Kearsage Pass and King's River, then > back to Giant Forest where I started from." The use of historic images > of the landscapes Mr. Dorr encountered would bolster his narrative which > I discuss in my biography (forthcoming from the Library of American > Landscape History/University of Massachusetts Press). I'd appreciate any > guidance you can provide. > > Thank you! > > Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. > 47 Pondview Drive > Merrimack, NH 03054 > (603) 424-6149 > eppster2@myfairpoint.net > Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. 47 Pondview Drive Merrimack, NH 03054 (603) 424-6149 eppster2@myfairpoint.net ISLANDERbioart0605.doc 46 KB https://web.mail.comcast.net/zimbra/h/printmessage?id=2623&tz=America/New_York&xim=1 2/2 8/30/2021 Gmail - 1904 Sierra Exploration Gmail Ronald Epp 1904 Sierra Exploration 1 message Ronald Epp Mon, Aug 30, 2021 at 12:08 PM To: raydelea@verizon.net Hi Ray, On March 29, 2010 you wrote back to me about my inquiry relating to a New Englander making a circuit of the Sierras in September 1904. George B. Dorr was 50 years of age when he traveled to Visalia and crossed the Sierras, climbed Mt.. Whitney, and shared stories with Owens Valley residents before heading back to Visalia on a more northern route. I am preparing my 16 file cabinet drawers of Dorr research documentation for donation to the Bar Harbor Public Library that he founded in 1911. Today I rame across a hardcopy of your email and wanted you to know how much I appreciated your judgment that Dorr's memoirs were "quite unique and something of interest to anyone, packet or hiker, who loves the Sierra Nevada and the pioneers who blazed trails across her." Your support gave me a shot in the arm more powerful than the covid vaccine! If you are interested--and provide an address--I will send you a copy of his memoir--in draft since never published--and a copy of my biography which was published in 2016 as part of the centennial of Acadia National Park and the National Park Service. With Best Wishes, Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. 7 Peachtree Ter Farmington, CT 06032 717-272-0801 https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0ik=7c5f299744&view=pt&search=all&permthid=thread-a%3Ar2836386591924056671&simpl=msg-a%3Ar283803907 1/1 8/30/2021 Raymond Delea '70 I Saint Mary's College resources/nondiscrimination-policy) Login (/onelogin_saml/sso?destination=raymond-delea-70) https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/raymond-delea-70 7/7 Page 1 of 2 Re: 1904 Packer Ascent of Mt. Whitney From "Raymond DeLea Jr." > When Dorr was fifty years of age he traveled West, consulted about a route through the Sierras with Sierra Club members at UC Berkeley, and then traveled with a lone local packer (Frank Dorr) from Visalia across the Sierras and up Mt. Whitney and into the Owens Valley. > > I write to ask whether Dorr's memoirs are commonplace in the annals of the early Sierra era or whether, in your judgment, his account is uncommon within packer history. > > In Dorr's unpublished memoirs, he provides a highly detailed account of the route that took three weeks and the botanical character of the regions he crossed. His interactions with ranchers and his experience of being separated overnight from his companion provide fascinating reading. Within a year he would also climb North Carolina's Mt. Mitchell --the highest peak east of the Mississippi River. Even in his seventies he would again climb Maine's Mt. Katahdin, the termination of the Appalachian trail. > > Dorr's memoirs of the Sierras have likely been seen by fewer than a handful of individuals since their completion in 1905. I am giving some thought to providing a portal for accessing his adventure which helped shape the creation on the East Coast of the first national park created through a gift to the federal government. > > I appreciate your time in consideration of this matter. > > Sincerely, > > Ron Epp > > > Ronald H. Epp, Ph.D. > 47 Pondview Drive > Merrimack, NH 03054 > (603) 424-6149 https://webmail.myfairpoint.net/hwebmail/mail/message.php?index=3020 3/29/2010 8/30/2021 Raymond Delea '70 I Saint Mary's College COVID-19 Information and Resources (https://www.stmarys- ca.edu/covid-19-news-resources) For Alumni (/for-alumni) Raymond Delea '70 Submitted on Wednesday, April 1, 2020 Ray retired from Hughes Aircraft Company in 2013 after 40 years of service as a manufacturing engineer in custom hybrid and microwave microcircuit manufacturing. He has been married to his wife Pattie for 47 years and resides with their daughter Daniella in Lakewood, CA. Ray recently published his first book, "High Sierra Adventures" chronicling his six summers working for Mt. Whitney Pack Trains on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada during the 1960s. https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/raymond-delea-70 1/7 8/30/2021 Raymond Delea '70 I Saint Mary's College TRAIL PASS COTTONWOOD PASS 2/7 https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/raymond-delea-70