Ansel Adams (18 page)

Ansel’s wellspring, Yosemite and the Sierra, moved his soul, changed his life, and focused his dreams. Heaven was to be found right here on earth. It did not take long for him to discover, however, that far from being eternal, nature in fact lay hostage to man. What he witnessed in Yosemite Valley, desecrated by a pool hall, bowling alley, golf course, bars, curio shops, and lengthening lines of automobiles, convinced Ansel that he must become a defender of the earth; he must fight to protect it for all those who would follow, and especially for the children who could be cured, as he had been, by the healing power of wilderness.
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The protection of the Sierra was a central concern of the Sierra Club, which Ansel joined in 1920 as a prerequisite of the summer job he would hold for the next four years, as custodian of the club’s Yosemite headquarters. From the LeConte Memorial Lodge, dedicated to the memory of the “original” Joe—Professor Joseph N. LeConte, geologist, conservationist, and founding member—Ansel took his first steps into the established world of conservation.
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What was more, he no longer had to feel so guilty about his months in the valley: his parents revered the word
work
, and he was even getting paid!

In 1921, he opened the lodge on May 15 and closed it on August 20. That spring, the weather was still frosty, and snow surrounded the building. He began by rolling out his bedroll on the lodge’s one small cot, then proceeded to sweep out the mice and prepare for his duties in the months ahead, when he would answer questions, provide access to the lodge’s small library and botanical collections, set out salt licks for deer, and lead tours about the valley.
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Ansel was also responsible for laying down and then removing the clamps that secured the climbing cables on the side of Half Dome, a tradition begun in 1875 to enable ordinary folk, straining to their maximum limits, to attain its summit.
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The clamps weighed about five pounds each; Ansel would load his backpack with ten at a time. This job required him to go up and down Half Dome so many times that he may still hold the record for total number of ascents. It took six full days of work each spring to position the clamps, and six more in the fall to remove them.
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All of Ansel’s responsibilities fell within the club’s stated mission:

To explore, enjoy and render accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast; to publish authentic information concerning them; to enlist the support and cooperation of the people and the government in preserving the forests and other natural features of the Sierra Nevada.
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Although committed to these anthropocentric purposes, John Muir, William Colby, and the club’s other early directors had been well aware of the threats posed to existing wilderness areas—already diminishing quickly at the century’s turn—by the material demands of man. In the late nineteenth century, thousands of sheep had grazed the length of the Middle Fork of the Kings River Canyon, devouring a lush country and turning it into a barren one. The Sierra was heavily pockmarked by mines, a few still active but most abandoned. California’s grand landscape was under attack from all sides.

Muir and Colby reasoned that if enough people experienced the Sierra for themselves, public support would grow and the lands could be protected. Annual group treks, the Sierra Club Outings, began in 1901 and continue to this day.
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The earliest participants were chiefly professors and students from the University of California, Berkeley, whose vocations allowed them luxurious quantities of summer vacation time. Members hiked and camped along a designated route for two to four weeks.

No small enterprise, the Outings at times numbered upward of a couple hundred people and a hundred head of pack mules and horses, a certain definition of the term “high-impact camping.” Their dusty and smoky spoor billowed about them, visible for miles and miles.

Aside from a few days’ participation in 1923, Ansel could not afford to join an Outing until 1927, when he and Virginia participated for the entire month. Enjoying the young man’s vibrant good humor and exuberant energy, and valuing his personal experience in the Sierra and photographic talent, Colby, the club’s president and leader of the Outings, made the trip possible. He appointed Ansel the official photographer for the 1928 trip to the Canadian Rockies, waiving the normal fees, and paying him a stipend. This tradition continued in the years ahead, and from then on, Ansel rarely missed an Outing.

Ansel earned a reputation as a fine companion around the nightly campfire and was designated director of the evening entertainment. Often this meant his conducting the assembled in a few songs (although not singing himself) and then turning the floor over to Cedric, who might perform a movement from a violin sonata, or to Virginia, who would sing a song or two, perhaps giving her sonorous and moving rendition of “Down in the Valley.”
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Since he had already hiked much of the Sierra, Ansel was also assigned the additional task of mapping out each day’s eight- to twelve-mile-long route. He woke up each morning at four-thirty
a.m.
and hit the trail to determine the next campsite for the Outing, enabling him to chart each day’s hike with an eye for the best photographic territory. For some reason, he was also in charge of the Lost and Found, maybe because he already had to carry so much equipment.
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On July 18, 1931, the Outing, two hundred members strong, ascended to Benson Lake, a few days’ hike above Yosemite Valley. With a broad sandy beach, trees for shelter, waters jumping with silvery trout, and gray granite slopes all around, the lake was to be their home for three days. The group’s sheer numbers and rowdy behavior shattered the peace of two women, Lillian Hodghead and Ada Clement, who had already been camping there for three weeks. Their detailed diary of their trip and the Sierra Club’s invasion reads, in part, “The first contingent of ‘hikers’ came at about eight this morning, and immediately began to shout and splash around in the Lake, and swarm around the rocks, fishing. How do people stand it, traveling with a noisy crowd like that for a month?”
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Recognizing this disturbance of their peace, Colby invited the two women to attend all the group’s meals. Wandering over to the club’s camp, Hodghead and Clement, who cooked over an open fire and kept food cold by immersion in the lake, were astonished to witness this version of camp life, which included a “kitchen with three big sheer iron stoves and a large low camp fire with big cans full of vegetables; the chef slicing onions very dexterously at his cabinet which has a folding top that lets down and exposes five or six shelves where his seasonings are kept.”
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The two women were cofounders of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and were acquainted with Ansel and Virginia, whom they invited over to their more modest campsite for a dinner of spaghetti and hot biscuits. At the last minute Ansel had to cancel due to serious rehearsals for a campfire entertainment he had written, entitled “Exhaustos,” which was to premiere the next evening, Monday, July 20.

An energetic keeper of the Sierra Club flame, Ansel joyfully continued the Outing tradition of screwball theatrical productions. In 1905, Outing members had created “Sack-o-Germea,” whose title combined the Native American Sacajawea with the name of a popular cereal. During rainy days on the 1931–1933 Outings, Ansel invented a series of mock Greek tragedies written in deathless prose—“The Trudgin’ Women,” “Exhaustos,” “The Oxides,” and “The Mules”—which he credited to that well-known ancient poet Oresturphannies.
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Lillian and Ada not only attended the final afternoon rehearsal of “Exhaustos,” but returned for dinner and the full performance that night.

The “Auditorium” is a beautiful place surrounded by huge Fir trees and at the back, a big rugged rock with niches suitable for seats . . . We stayed to dinner—it was amusing to see them all eating, filing around and being helped “Cafeteria Style”—very well seasoned food . . . Then the evening performance; a huge bonfire to which all the men contributed . . .

The tragedy went off very well. Ansel Adams, as the “Spirit of the Itinerary” floating in, draped in a sheet with a wreath around his head and carrying a lyre—a work of art made from a crook of boughs and strung with wires. A violinist behind the scenes synchronized her playing perfectly with his motions. The character of “Privus Counsellus” made up with a shovel, burlap and a roll of toilet paper on his head was a marvelous conception—the King “Dehydrus” had extraordinary whiskers made from steel wool, the Queen “Citronella” was very resplendent in a grand batik drapery and had a necklace of tin can tops and earrings of electric flashlight bulbs. The Princess “Climb-An-Extra” and Prince “Rycrispos” who had a stunning brown body like a young Greek athlete, made a very pretty picture and after their grand love scene under the Aspen tree, the tree marched off in back of them.
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When the Sierra Club members finally bundled up their sleeping rolls and moved on, early on the morning of Tuesday, July 21, Lillian and Ada sighed with relief.

Heavenly peace. The Sierra Club has departed . . . Late in the afternoon we took a short walk. The beautiful forest is much trampled and looks in many places as though a swarm of locusts had swept over it—the aftermath of the Sierra Club. We visited their Camp, and they had left everything in clean condition considering what a horde of people lived in one spot; found their delicious cold spring and also the lyre used by Ansel Adams in “Exhaustos.”
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As an only child, Ansel craved friendship, and the Sierra Club became his extended family. His brothers and sisters were his comrades of the trail; they shared a deep commitment to the earth and pledged to guard it with all their energies. He could use his camera to create, as he could his piano, but the difference was that he could also hike with his camera, and return each evening to a warming campfire surrounded by good friends. The Sierra Club provided a very social and structured way to wander in the American wilderness, and Ansel got paid for going along: for his work on behalf of the 1935 Outing, he received $250.
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Ansel routed the 1934 Outing through the Lyell Fork of the Merced River, his favorite place in the Sierra. The group camped in an idyllic meadow below a ripple of peaks, among which was an unnamed knobby one, handsome enough but not the highest or the grandest in the Sierra. Around that evening’s campfire, an enthusiastic bunch that had just climbed the no-name mountain proclaimed that from this time forth it would be known as Mount Ansel Adams. Although he rarely mentioned it, Ansel was secretly thrilled that he would be a mountain one day.

When Ansel returned to San Francisco each fall, his social life centered around a circle of Sierra Club friends, including Cedric Wright, David and Anne Brower, Francis and Marj Farquhar, Dick and Doris Leonard, and Ed and Peggy Wayburn, all of whom would eventually become important to the American environmental movement.
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It must be emphasized again how important the Sierra Club was in every facet of Ansel’s life. Respect for him within the club grew as his photographs and articles appeared in the
Sierra Club Bulletin
with increasing frequency. His reports as custodian of the LeConte Lodge were published each year from 1921 to 1924, and his portfolios and books were announced and reviewed. When
Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras
appeared in 1927, Professor Joseph N. LeConte II (Little Joe), himself an accomplished photographer, wrote a glowing appraisal for the February 1928
Bulletin
.
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A few pages later, Ansel’s own advertisement appeared, announcing the availability of the portfolio and how readers could contact him for its purchase (reproduced on page 57).

Ansel was appointed to the editorial board of the
Bulletin
in 1928, a position he would hold for forty-three years. He was becoming well known to the membership, which numbered about two thousand stalwarts from 1920 to the mid-1930s. These lovers of the Sierra were Ansel’s prototypical audience, and with that in mind, he wisely produced portfolios commemorating the Outings of 1928, 1929, 1930, and 1932. These were meant to be instant albums, a record of places hiked and camped; at thirty dollars apiece and containing upward of twenty-five photographs, they were excellent mementos.

Virginia fully shared her husband’s enthusiasm for the Sierra Club. She was elected to the board of directors for a two-year term in 1932, but following the birth of their first child, in 1933, she found that she didn’t have enough time to serve effectively, and resigned. In 1934, she was again nominated, as was Ansel. She campaigned for him, and he for her; Virginia must have been better at it, because he won.
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Once elected, Ansel would serve as a director for thirty-seven years, from 1934 until 1971. His term saw him metamorphose from lover of nature into environmental activist.

Although such events are commonplace now, Ansel was one of the first to devise a celebration of nature when, in 1934, he organized the first Yosemite Wildflower Festival. He chose wildflowers as a symbol of natural beauty under siege by man. Ansel employed movies, hikes, and lectures to teach the public the importance of protecting native plants.

The National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the Yosemite Park and Curry Company (YP&CC), and the Sierra Club always seemed to be at odds with one another, with the two federal agencies each holding fast to an opposing philosophy: the Park Service, led by Stephen Mather, talked of preservation, while the Forest Service, directed by Gifford Pinchot, advocated controlled use. These differing positions ensured conflict at almost every environmental turn. An early proponent of the win-win philosophy, Ansel believed that if people of good faith worked together, a solution could be found for almost any problem.
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