Lewis and Nathan Clark and the Evolution of Sierra Club Photography, 1924-1961

University of Nevada, Reno

Activity and Activism: Lewis and Nathan Clark and the Evolution of Sierra Club Photography, 1924-1961

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History

Kimberly J. Roberts

Dr. C. Elizabeth Raymond, Thesis Advisor

May 2013

THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

We recommend that the thesis prepared under our supervision by

KIMBERLY J. ROBERTS

entitled

Activity and Activism: Lewis and Nathan Clark and the Evolution of Sierra Club Photography, 1924-1961

be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

C. Elizabeth Raymond, Advisor

William D. Rowley , Committee Member

Bruce T. Moran, Committee Member

Peter Goin, Graduate School Representative

Marsha H. Read, Ph. D., Dean, Graduate School

May, 2013

Abstract

Using the photography of Sierra Club members Lewis and Nathan Clark, this

thesis explores the relationship between image and landscape in the rise of outdoor

recreation in early and mid twentieth century America. Focusing on the role of

photography in the construction, articulation, and representation of landscape, I trace two

concurrent shifts in Sierra Club history. First, I examine how the Sierra Club members,

who originally used images to write and record their own history, began to deploy those

images as part of public awareness campaigns. Second, I analyze how the Sierra Club

shifted from a social club using landscape as a hub for recreational activity to a political

club using notions of landscape to campaign for environmental causes. By analyzing how

the Sierra Club published and disseminated a set of cultural values through the medium

of photography and by connecting these values to the construction of a physical

landscape, this thesis examines the co-evolution of image, activity, and place as a form of

social practice shared within a community and broadcast outward. By explicitly avoiding

the limiting and passive paradigm of consumption and advertising that has become prevalent in cultural landscape studies of this type through a focus on landscapes as finished products or static images, I offer new methodological considerations as a means to access amateur photography and tourist imagery.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents ...... ii Chapter One: Introduction – “Inspiration Point Reached” ...... 1 Chapter Two: Access and Preservation—“To Explore, Enjoy, and Render Accessible” ...... 17 Chapter Three: The Clark Slide Collection – “Recording for those who have been there”...... 29 Chapter Four: The High Trips—“William E. Colby, left; Clair S. Tappaan, right” ...... 36 Chapter Five: Art and Experience—the Intertwining of Photography and Activity ...... 41 “Peak 13,067” ...... 42 “The ‘Impassable’ Notch” ...... 46 “On Top of the North Peak of North Palisade” ...... 52 “Francis P. Farquhar Roping Down a Ledge Traverse on North Palisade” ...... 56 “Knife Edge in Crest South of Bernice Lake” ...... 57 “Ice Cave, Upper Rush Creek” ...... 58 Chapter Six: Documenting the Landscape—“Pictures of Special Interest not Found Elsewhere” 61 Chapter Seven: First Winter Ascent of Mt. Lyell ...... 66 Chapter Eight: Lyell Revisited ...... 74 Chapter Nine: The Tenaya Canyon Exhibit—“A Wild Impassible Gorge” ...... 76 Chapter Ten: The Visual Education Committee ...... 85 Chapter Eleven: Highways and Contested Landscapes ...... 88 Chapter Twelve: The Sierra Club Slide Library—“Interpreting for those who have not been there” ...... 97 Chapter Thirteen: Photographs and Public Outreach—“Sugar-coated Propaganda” ...... 104 Conclusion: “Amid the Mighty Walls of Zion” ...... 108

iii

List of Figures

Figure 1: Lewis Clark at Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park, ca. 1924 ...... 1 Figure 2: Typical Vacation Photographs ...... 3 Figure 3: Cardboard dividers for synchronized series ...... 16 Figure 4: These images show the how roads function as access points into seemingly pristine wilderness ...... 17 Figure 5: This image, with Lewis on the right, shows the construction work involved in developing recreational wilderness landscapes...... 22 Figure 6: Approach and preparation—driving to road head, unloading cars, etc, typical packs, contents...... 30 Figure 7: Along the trails ...... 30 Figure 8: People in passes, on peaks ...... 31 Figure 9: Pack strings and burros...... 31 Figure 10: Wildlife ...... 31 Figure 11: In camp—fires, cooking, eating, ...... 32 Figure 12: The scene—unusually fine scenics, abstractions conveying sense of wilderness beauty ...... 32 Figure 13: Awful pictures and shockers—results of carelessness, miscellaneous vandalism, etc. Note: as an image of Hetch-Hetchy, this photograph symbolizes this concept...... 33 Figure 14: Misc—educational ‘how to do it’ sequences ...... 33 Figure 15: Humor—if real and understandable ...... 34 Figure 16: William E. Colby, left; Clair S. Tappaan, right ...... 36 Figure 17: North face of Peak 13067 ...... 42 Figure 18: Crest of Peak 13067, French Creek Canyon ...... 45 Figure 19: "Impassable" notch on North Palisade looking NE...... 46 Figure 20: Top of North Peak of North Palisade; Jules Eichorn and Bob Underhill; Farquhar Palisade Party; Aug 1931...... 52 Figure 21: Sierra Nevada: the John Muir Trail. Photograph by Ansel Adams ...... 53 Figure 22: FPF roping down a ledge traverse on summit of North Palisade ...... 56 Figure 23: Knife edge in crest south of Bernice Lake. Yosemite Park...... 57 Figure 24: Ice cave, Upper Rush Creek Basin; LFC, V Ferguson, V Adams ...... 58 Figure 25: Scan of a Level 3 Ski Badge, private collection of George Homsey...... 66 Figure 26: Group of Skiers ...... 67 Figure 27: Winter Camp ...... 68 Figure 28: Winter Mountaineering ...... 69 Figure 29: Summit ...... 70 Figure 30: Mt. Lyell Summit Register ...... 71 Figure 31: Signing Register ...... 71 Figure 32: Register, close up ...... 72 Figure 33: The branch post office in the gorge. Photocopy of notes left at Register Rock, Tenaya Canyon...... 76 iv

Figure 34: These road images stress the mechanics of road design, showing embankments, cutbacks, and ripped out trees, not the romance depicted in figure 4...... 90 Figure 35: “Passing Hours and Seasons Play Color Symphonies on Sculpted Walls” .. 108 1

Chapter One: Introduction – “Inspiration Point Reached”

Figure 1: Lewis Clark at Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park, ca. 1924

Lewis Clark posed for this picture when he was in his early twenties and his teenaged brother Nathan snapped the shot. He is shown standing at Glacier Point in

Yosemite National Park, one of the most photographed places in the American West. It was the summer of 1924 and the two brothers from the Bay Area loaded up the family car, setting out on what was fast becoming an American rite of passage: the cross-country road trip. Already avid photographers, they documented their travels with their cameras, embarking on what was to become a life-long passion for landscape and photography.

They spent the next few summers traveling around California, going up north to Mt.

Lassen, Yreka, and Weaverville, and down south from the Bay Area into Yosemite.

While the northern regions they traversed were relatively remote and undeveloped at the 2 time, other areas such as Yosemite and Lake Tahoe were well known landmarks. The photographs that remain of their travels are typical vacation images, full of scenic panoramas and shots of themselves posed against dramatic and often recognizable backdrops such as Glacier Point in Yosemite. They are the kind of snapshots replicated in family vacation albums across time and space, amateur versions of the same scenery that early photographers such as Watkins and Muybridge had made famous as early as the

1860s, photographs that had been used to market places such as Yosemite, creating a booming tourist industry that had pervaded American consciousness long before the

Yosemite Grant made the area the nation’s first nature preserve in 1864. Because of this landmark status, Lewis and Nathan’s trip to Yosemite would have included preconceptions of the area, packed like baggage along with their gear into the family car, a yardstick for measuring the landscape they immersed themselves within, preconceptions to guide their trip. Evidence of this influence remains not only in the stereotypical nature of their photographs but in the pocket sized notebook Lewis carried with him, a habit he was to keep throughout his life, jotting down everything from mileage and car repairs to food expenses and the amount of oncoming traffic, as well as what sections of roads were paved. This log also reveals the course of their journey to

Yosemite, a well known and much traveled scenic route that had taken them first through

Lake Tahoe, itself the locus of a booming tourism industry and a monumental and well- known landscape. 3

Figure 2: Typical Vacation Photographs

The Clark brothers then, appear to be typical American tourists in every way,

following their fellow sightseers along the same well-worn scenic byways the railroads

first made popular six decades prior, posing on the same familiar vantage points and

snapping their photographs. Amateur tourist photography such as this has generally been

dismissed as neither art nor story, proliferating endlessly as tourist after tourist stands just like Lewis Clark stood at Glacier Point and poses for the camera. Photograph curators have rejected these images precisely because they reveal nothing beyond this prefabricated scene. Reduced to cliché, with the names and journeys of their subjects lost to history, these photographs have been severed from the stories they once told, become mute and without context. Reconstructed alongside the guidebooks that became popular in the earliest days of railroad travel, designed to offer sightseeing advice and provide facts about the area, tourist photographs have been reduced to artifacts of a consumer 4

society, reducing the scenery to predetermined information and freeing sightseers from

“the responsibility of actually observing things for themselves.”1 According to

Christopher Magoc, the grand scenic panoramas pictured in these brochures and

guidebooks show how photographs both “inflated and reduced a forbidding wilderness to

stilted, iconographic imagery,”2 constructing as well as explaining the tourist landscape

and creating a commodified experience. Historians of tourism and photography have

focused on this analysis, arguing that tourism is a visual activity standardized by

suppressing the other senses and looking only at the experience of space, resulting in a

photographic site that preexists the image as an “already structured condition of seeing.”3

Nowhere was this more true than Yosemite, where overexposure had created a region that was, according to Douglas Nickel, “no longer offering surprise or logistical hardship, the once-secret paradise was now fully mapped, its points of view clichéd.”4

The problem with this kind of analysis is that it depends upon an interpretation of the photograph as a product not as a process, treating images as the end result of an activity but not as a part of one. However, the act of taking a picture implies some level of action on the part of the photographer as well as an interaction with the site of the photograph. While the preconceptions that Lewis and Nathan carried along with them may well have functioned as a starting point for their own nascent opinions, they were certainly not the sum of their trip. Evidence of this remains in Lewis’s log, capturing not

1Anne Farrar Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820-1920 (New York: NYU Press, 1990), 122. 2 Christopher J. Magoc, Yellowstone: the Creation and Selling of an American Landscape, 1870-1903 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 50. 3 Peter Manchester Osborne, Travelling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture (New York: Manchester University Press; Distributed exclusively in the USA by St. Martin's Press, 2000), 81. 4 Douglas R. Nickel, Carleton Watkins: the Art of Perception. (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New York; Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1999), 11. 5

just their movements but their impressions, revealing the two brothers responding to the

landscape in an active manner, not the passive, consumerist model discussed above. Their

observations indicate not only their activities but reveal their reactions to the places they

visited, functioning as an access point into the very nature of their interactions with the

landscape and scenery. This shows as early as their arrival to Tallac along the south shore

of Lake Tahoe, a place they had apparently intended to explore but instead left with

dismay upon discovering all the private estates along the waterfront. Lewis described

Fallen Leaf Lake, directly south of Tallac, as all fenced in and snooty, and noted that

while the natural scenery was okay, the people were not.5 Thus, a picture begins to

emerge of these two brothers, indicating an ability to appraise their surroundings on their

own terms and revealing a preference for undeveloped, unpopulated regions. This image is bolstered by what Lewis wrote about their activities in Yosemite, showing that they spent a lot of time out hiking and exploring, recording that on one trek they arrived at the crest of Nevada Falls at about 11:50 and left at 1:20, getting to the base of Half Dome at

3:40 and back to the top of Nevada Falls at 5:05, finally making it back to the car parked at Happy Isles at 6:15 pm.6 They may have read about this trail before their arrival in

Yosemite, but a six hour hike cannot be dismissed as passive or consumptive. In another telling passage, Lewis scribbled “Inspiration Point Reached,”7 indicating both a

foreknowledge of the destination as well as an active desire to arrive there.

Inspiration Point encapsulates into its very name the significance of the Yosemite

Valley in the American landscape. It was from here that many of the early photographs

5 “Climbing Record 1934 Hi Trip” Sierra Club Archives, Lewis F. Clark papers, Box 3, file 3. (Note: this trip log is misfiled as being a part of this log but is in fact separate.) 6 Lewis F. Clark papers, “Climbing Record 1934 Hi Trip” 7 Lewis F. Clark papers, “Climbing Record 1934 Hi Trip” 6

advertising the wonders of the valley were shot, creating simultaneously an iconic stature

and a lure that attracted travelers, resulting in the commodified view historians have

critiqued. However, to conflate a view with the act of viewing is a mistake. Untangling

the image from its status as commodity recovers its inception as process, uncovering an activity that involves consciously looking not passively seeing. While this does not necessarily recover the meaning of each individual photograph taken there, it does provide a space for understanding the place of such anonymous images within a set of

cultural practices. Doing this involves differentiating the act of taking photographs from

the resulting images, showing “the distinction between technology and its products,

human acts and their consequences.”8 The difference between taking a photograph and

looking at one is crucial to recognizing that tourists do not necessarily passively absorb

visual landscapes, but actively engage them, and that the meanings of these images are

not fixed but continually negotiated, dependent on the setting.9

Photograph curator and historian Martha Sandweiss separates the photograph as

product from the photograph as process by arguing that images are primary source

documents accessible both in history and through history. The distinction, she explains, is

that viewing a photograph in history requires reinserting it into its mode of production,

thus making it a tool for understanding the role of photographs as purveyors of

information and creators of myth. Studying it through history involves tracing the

reinterpretations of an image through time and place, and examining its shifting context

8 Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination. Edited by Joan M. Schwartz and James R. Ryan. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 9. 9 Ibid, 5. 7

as an artifact in within different settings, including scrapbooks, attics, and museums.10

Henri LeFebvre writes that “once deciphered, a landscape or a monument refers us back

to a creative capacity and to a signifying process.”11 By understanding the often maligned stereotypical vacation snapshot as part of a signifying process, the interplay between the icon and the sightseer can be understood in history, not as a consumer experience but as an interactive pilgrimage.

Lewis Clark posed at Glacier Point in his twenties and his teenaged brother

Nathan snapped the shot. They had already built a dark room in their parents’ basement in Alameda, California and had embarked on what would become a shared lifelong passion for creating, collecting, and developing slides. But they had not yet done something very important, something that would come to signify their lives and cement their place in the historical record: they had not yet joined the Sierra Club, the group with whom they would forge their identities as photographers, as athletes, as wilderness advocates, as leaders, and most importantly but least understood, as members of a social network that actively created the very reality they would document through photography.

All this was ahead of them when they headed out for a summer camping trip in Yosemite

National Park in the mid 1920s, but in many ways this trip marked its inception. To conflate this trip to a predetermined tourist experience or a passive consumption of landscape is to misunderstand the effort that these two people put forth to engage the landscape. “Inspiration Point Reached,” Lewis wrote, but he also jotted: “Fill up

10 Martha A. Sandweiss, Print the Legend: Photography and the American West. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 9. 11 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), 115. 8

radiator—no H2O at camp.”12 These cryptic, understated words say a lot about how they spent this trip: not in one of the luxury hotels that operated within the confines of the park, but out on the trails and in primitive campsites, serving as a reminder of the uniqueness of each journey and providing a glimmer into an individual story, enriching it beyond cliché. Reaching Inspiration Point, a significant monument that is simultaneously a signifying moment, becomes in the words of Keith Basso, an event “in which citizens of the earth constitute their landscapes and take themselves to be connected to them.”13

For Nathan, this trip was precisely such a moment. Later in life, he would trace

the impact that early trip to Yosemite had on his life both as a member of the Sierra Club

and as a photographer, stating that

One of the early impressions I got that has lasted ever since, was an evening we spent at some building in Yosemite Valley. A ranger gave us a talk about something natural. This was about fifty years ago, and I don't remember what the subject was, but I was very impressed by the beauty of the pictures he showed, and by his remarks about wilderness. That evening, after the show was over, Lewis and I talked with the ranger…I had never seen photographs of the kind of wilderness that you have to pack into; for instance, the country south of Tuolumne Meadows, the Kings Canyon region and the glaciated country where there are erratics and even with the glaciers themselves. This was another experience that built up my interest in the wilderness.14

This is an interesting quote on many levels. First of all, it shows how photography first

constructs and then advertises a specific vision of reality: Nathan, who had spent a good

deal of his life involved in the outdoor trips and activities, had by his own admission

never seen “this kind of landscape.” He also claimed he had never heard of the

controversy of Hetch-Hetchy. This may be due to the fact that most of the trips he took

12 Lewis F. Clark papers, “Climbing Record 1934 Hi Trip” 13Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 106. 14 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, Outdoorsman & Engineer. Oral History Transcript, 1976. By Nathan C Clark; Richard Searle; Lewis F Clark; Sierra Club History Committee. (San Francisco: Sierra Club History Committee, 1977), 5. 9 with his father involved his father’s work with highway construction, which did not yet extend into these areas but was more concentrated on connecting urban areas to one another. The hillsides of the Bay Area and the coastal regions where he had often hiked and camped are a completely different geologic zone. These photographs then presented a new, unknown world to the teenaged Nathan, who framed this visual construct as

“wilderness you have to pack into,” suggesting the discovery of an inherent physical quality the land possessed and the image captured, not one that was created within the context of a lecture and slide show about wilderness. This relates an ideal of romanticized wilderness inherent within the very idea of national parks, wherein “nature must be preserved so that the moment of scientific discovery can be reenacted,” by the process of packing in and seeing, “staging knowledge [and] representation according to a narrative of visual discovery.”15 Preservation laws enacted this vision, resulting in a Yosemite presented as an untouched wilderness when it was in fact a highly managed park, with its economic activity erased for the presentation.

Nathan also remembered the physical beauty of the images, but not the specific subject of the presentation, indicating that he responded emotionally to the photography rather than with an intellectual engagement to the content of the talk. This is a powerful example of how images engage and incite the emotions of the viewer, an example of

Finis Dunaway’s observation that the environmental movement was based on the use of photography to elicit an emotional response from the viewer. Nathan also calls this talk an “experience,” indicating an active participation with the lecture and this imagery,

15 Richard A. Grusin, Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America's National Parks (Cambridge, UK; New York, USA: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 76. 10

rather than as a passive audience member. This experience forged his interest in

wilderness, showing the ability of the photograph to actively educate and inform the

viewer. Photographer Ansel Adams, who would become lifelong friends with the Clark

brothers, advocated precisely this transmission of experience through visual education.

He believed that photography was a means to communicate the potential of wilderness as a spiritual resource, a means to translate raw physical nature into an art form, transforming the viewer through a metaphysical experience wherein something already out there in the world is recognized within the self. This, according to Adams, created experiences which are mystical, personal, and life changing.16

When applied to the kind of photography the Clarks practiced, this exemplifies

the idea of the human mind as analogous to the camera in its mode of acquiring

knowledge.17 Historians of science have connected this kind of engagement specifically with the shift to the visual-based culture that arose with the growing emphasis on hands-

on empiricism, as well as with the active cultivation of knowledge about the world

itself.18 This replaced what Carolyn Merchant calls the participatory gaze, a state in which people were fully integrated into a natural world by a mutual consciousness that depended not on sight but on the aural/oral culture that predated writing.19 Using her

16 Summary of Ansel Adams, “Introduction,” in Patricia Maye, Fieldbook of Nature Photography, (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1974). 17 Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 79. 18 See Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Vail-Ballou Press, 2007), 98, for the difference between passive readers and those “actively engaged in “collecting…sifting, sorting, reading, thinking, and writing.” 19 Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Science in New England. 2nd Ed. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010). Note: Merchant uses the participatory gaze as a pre-visual oral/aural paradigm and critiques the shift to a visual based knowledge. However, the term is applicable to Sierra Club activities which engage nature in the way she calls participatory. It is also useful in understanding the Clarks’ landscape photography, linked to oral history as discussed by Barbara Levine 11 notion of the participatory gaze is useful in understanding photography as a process because she focuses on aural/oral traditions as conduits of knowledge. This creates a mnemonic structure that art historian Martha Langford correlates with family photo albums, calling them “oral-photographic performances,” and noting that the very intimacy of their relationship with their creators is the very cause of their lack of context for contemporary viewers: the lack of identification and caption.

For my purposes, Merchant’s notion of the participatory gaze can be extended to photography in two senses: first of all, in understanding the production of photographs as a cultural process that is a participatory, communal activity; and second, as one that is inclusive of all the senses, not just the visual. This includes the element of storytelling as well as physical engagement with the material aspect of nature. Incorporating photographs in this manner opens up new ways of understanding the activity of landscape photography in particular; for example, Nathan described seeing in the wilderness as something he did with his with his sense of balance, not just his eyes.20 This shows how the entire body participates in the process that Adams called visualization, a metaphysical view also espoused by the Clark brothers. It also shows photography as an act of production, a process which engages the senses and the body alongside the outside world, incorporating all of this into the manufacture of an image and serving as a reminder that there are raw materials in nature involved in the act of construction. “To have the facility to create ‘worlds’ in the cultural medium of words or images,” writes Neil Evernden,

in Snapshot Chronicles: Inventing the American Photo Album (New York: Princeton Architectural Press; Portland, Or.: Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, 2006) 20 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, 34. 12

“one must first have had the opportunity of creating a world with the body.”21 By this, he

means precisely the kind of physical exploration and sensory experiences of outdoor

activity.

As for the Clark brothers, their quest for transcendence was not the passive observation of scenic landscapes but required an active participation in an outdoor lifestyle, a way of connecting to the earth that they documented tirelessly, taking photographs, writing about photographs, exhibiting photographs, and ultimately, using them to express political beliefs. The increasing politicization of the Sierra Club can be traced through the lenses of Nathan and Lewis’s cameras by examining not only their own photography but how they steered the activities of the Sierra Club as they attained positions of power and leadership within the organization beginning in the 1930s. By examining their engagement with photography as part of a social process rather than as end products, it is also possible to reconstruct the history of the Sierra Club during a neglected era of its history: the years between John Muir’s death in 1914 and the club’s emergence as an environmental lobbying machine in the 1960s.

During this period, club activities focused less on conservation issues and more on social hiking and mountaineering events, creating an intimate engagement with nature that would ultimately rally members into activism. The Clark brothers were prominent among members who propelled this shift, using landscape and recreation as a means to teach values. Through their careers as club officers and athletes, the shifting notions of access and preservation can be traced by highlighting the relationship between outdoor activities and environmental activism in the rise of outdoor recreation from the 1920s to

21 Evernden, 113 13

the 1960s. By analyzing how the club members published and disseminated a set of

cultural values through the medium of photography and by connecting these values to the

growing urgency of environmental reform, I will examine the co-evolution of image,

activity, and place as a form of social practices shared within a community and how they

came to shape policy.

In 1929, several years after that auto trip to Yosemite that might have begun as a

sightseeing tour but certainly ended as a precedent-setting event, Lewis and Nathan Clark went on their first Sierra Club High Trip, an annual month long camping trip in the High

Sierra. They were to remain active in the Sierra Club for the rest of their lives, rising to positions of leadership and guiding club policy during the decades that lay the foundation for the emergence of the Sierra Club as a political force. Photography remained at the heart of their endeavors as they continued both to craft their own skills with the camera

and to build on the use of imagery as a means of publicity and a rallying cry for

conservation in new ways. Lewis soon became a trip leader and organizer and went on to

serve on the Sierra Club board of directors from 1933 to 1969, spending twenty eight

years on the executive committee and serving in every office, including president and

executive director. Nathan was a member of the Sierra Club Board of Directors for

sixteen years, serving as vice-president from 1958 to 1959, and as president from 1959 to

1961. They are the only brothers to serve as presidents of the Sierra Club.22

The Special Collections Department of the University of Nevada, Reno has approximately 450 lantern slides taken by Lewis and Nathan Clark, dating from about

22 Summarized from Lewis Clark, "Perdurable and Peripatetic Sierran, intro i; and Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, intro v. 14

1923 to 1936, replete with images of travels and outdoor activities in the Sierra Nevada, a testament to their passion for mountain scenery and the rigors of outdoor activity. Bought at auction in 2006, the slides evidently passed through other hands before becoming the property of the University and were once part of a much larger collection since they were housed in fifteen wooden boxes marked with box numbers ranging from 2 to 200. The original cardboard dividers used to organize the slides survived but the slides between them were jumbled and out of order, not corresponding with their labels. Whether they were mixed up while they were still in the hands of the Clarks or at some point thereafter is unknown. Despite these problems, the historical value of this collection is evident—not so much in the quality of the photography but in the documentation of a cultural landscape, a landscape replete with stories indicating the social values written into the very physicality of the mountains. The fact that the images are slides, not prints, is in and of itself important: slides are meant to be projected, to be viewed as part of a group; they are social events, pictures made to be shared and discussed not to be viewed privately or in solitude.

This collection of fragments and misfiled slides can be reassembled into the story that captures a shift in the mission of the Sierra Club as it evolved from a hiking club where membership was based on activities and required the recommendation of a sponsor to join, to one of litigation where membership was marketed as a means to fund important environmental issues. Photography played the starring role in this transformation.

Drawing on the photographs taken by the Clark brothers and other primary source materials and focusing on the interplay between photography, landscape, and conservation as process rather than product, I will explore some of the issues that 15 propelled this transformation, examining the process by which the Sierra Club created and consumed a recreational mountain landscape as a means to promote their civic values and how this played an active role in the growth of club policies and activism.

Approximately half of the slides are completely blank; the other half are dated, and about one quarter of the total slides contain brief identification notes in the form of places, names, and initials, all in Lewis’s handwriting. Cross referencing the dates and places named on the slides with articles in the Sierra Club Bulletin confirms they are club activities. Fourteen of the slides are dated 1924 and 1925, indicating they are the summer road trips Nathan and Lewis took together before joining the club. Some are starred with red and gold stick-on stars which refer to “synchronized” series, slide shows created in

1931 and set to music. These include the Gymnopedie Series and Tintagel II Series, both named after musical scores. Both Clark brothers were very well versed musically, as were many of their friends in the Sierra Club. One group, called the Redwood Empire

Series, includes a scrap of paper left in the box containing the following clues as to what the experience of viewing one of their early slide shows was:

Set to music of Air De Ballet I. Run phonograph at ½ way from slow to fast (i.e., at 6 o’clock) show each of last 16 slides for 15.0 seconds (minor adjustment to fit music) 1st one of the 18 is for remarks, 2nd is for reading of quotation from Duncan McDuffie in “saving the Redwoods” (page 6).23

In an interview Lewis stated that he frequently reedited slides to make shows for different lectures, so the same slides would have been used for difference purposes over time, indicating how meaning shifts with context.24 Various property stamps were used

23 Lewis and Nathan Clark Collection of Sierra Nevada Slides, Special Collections Department, University of Nevada-Reno Library, UNRS-P2006-08. 24 Clark papers, Box 2, folder 4: “There’re always new things to discover,” 1. 16 on the slides, such as “Property of Lewis and Nathan Clark,” or simply “Clark,” indicating a shared project between the brothers; even the ones with individual Nathan and Lewis stamps on them have the Alameda address where they grew up and were filed together. Since Lewis was known as a meticulously tidy and organized person even when elderly,25 the jumbled condition of the slides indicates the strong possibility that someone went through them carelessly before UNR bought them in 2006, at which time Lewis had been dead for about fifteen years. The slides are masked and the emulsions bound together with a secondary piece of glass; the spotted condition of the images indicates improper storage and possible exposure to humidity and mold, with dirt and marks sandwiched within the emulsion layer between the pieces of glass. As works of art, they might not attract a second glance. As stories, they speak volumes.

Figure 3: Cardboard dividers for synchronized series

25 Clark papers, “There’re always new things to discover,” 1. 17

Chapter Two: Access and Preservation—“To Explore, Enjoy, and Render Accessible”

Figure 4: These images show the how roads function as access points into seemingly pristine wilderness

A trail built directly up the Tenaya Canon from Yosemite Valley to Lake Tenaya would enable travelers to reach the eastern portion of the park much more directly and earlier in the year. While a great deal of blasting will be required this trail could probably be built for $15,000.26

These words, dated January 1908, appeared in a letter written to the Secretary of

the Interior, as part of a request for road building and other improvements to Yosemite

National Park. The author was none other than the famed wilderness advocate, John

Muir, writing as President of the Sierra Club on behalf of the Committee of Board of

Directors of the Sierra Club on Welfare and Improvements of Yosemite National Park.

26 Clark papers, Box 2, Folder 2. Original in Sierra Club Bulletin 6 (1908): 262. 18

For those steeped in the legend of John Muir as the iconic preservationist fighting to save

a pristine and unmarked wilderness, these words, requesting the destruction of a virtually

untouched canyon, come as a surprise. However, the Sierra Club was originally as much

a hiking club as it was an advocate for preservation and Muir’s mission was as much to

save the souls of over civilized urbanites as it was to save the ground they trod upon. In

truth, Muir sought a specific kind of constructed landscape that involved a certain kind of

aesthetic preservation, including a pristine scenic backdrop and wilderness-like

appearance, but that was available and easily accessible to a rising class of

recreationists.27

When the Sierra Club incorporated in 1892, its mission statement read as follows:

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 Mountains28

As Michael Cohen notes, the words “render accessible” come before “preserve.”29 He

also points out that the Sierra Club was incorporated the same year that Frederick Jackson

Turner wrote his Frontier Thesis announcing the closing of the frontier in American life

and expounding on its importance in the building of the American character. The Club’s

creation at this time is more than coincidence; it functioned as an extension of the frontier

as a wave of nostalgia swept the country—the scenic, rural outdoors became a simulacrum for the idea the frontier represented in the American imagination, a proving

27 See Jen A. Huntley’s The Making of Yosemite: James Mason Hutchings and the Origin of America’s Most Popular National Park (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2011) for a detailed discussion of the constructed nature of Yosemite as a wilderness area. 28 This mission statement is printed in every issue of the Sierra Club Bulletin. See Michael Cohen, The History of the Sierra Club, 1892-1970. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), 9-10 for a detailed analysis. 29 Cohen, 9-10. 19

ground for those who could afford to go try themselves in its rugged terrain. Part of a

mass movement to repackage the idea of the frontier in a world that no longer seemed to

have one, the Sierra Club was one of many groups to espouse outdoor recreation as a

means to build character, such as the Mazamas of Oregon and the Appalachian Mountain

Club of New Hampshire.

According to Edward Taylor, these groups shared an assumption that the moral

testing and hardship of the frontier were tantamount to character development. Explorers

such as Clarence King had “roamed the Sierra for adventure and science,” linking death- defying adventure to a paradigm that “stressed scientific enlightenment, sober adventure, and cultural propriety.”30 These values linked American culture directly to its landscape.

The idea of the frontier continued to loom large in the American imagination: as prior

representations of it closed, new frontiers sprang up, overlaid upon the same landscape

and providing the same elements of quest and enlightenment, values now expressed

solely through recreational activities.

This led to new encounters with nature. As Peter Schmitt has pointed out, this era

saw the founding of many hunting and hiking clubs. The Boy Scouts were created in

1910, and summer camps began to spring up across the landscape as children were taught

how to engage with the natural world, infusing recreation and landscape with an

educational purpose that came to be equated with character formation.31 This notion has

its roots in the “muscular Christianity” movement of the late nineteenth century in which

30 Taylor, 36-37 31 For a detailed discussion of the rise of these clubs and camps, see Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: the Arcadian Myth in Urban America. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). 20

physical education was understood as a vital component of manliness and virtue.32 While

largely secularized by the 1920s, ideals of athleticism remained linked to ideas of

character, morality, and civic-mindedness and became increasingly associated with the

outdoors. Heather Van Wormer writes that as outdoor recreation grew in popularity in the

1920s and 30s, activities such as hiking and camping very quickly assumed a moral

dimension, seen as a means to develop character and leaderships skills.33 Civic values

were etched in this landscape as well, a point that Roderick Nash illustrates in his

examination of the program for President Coolidge’s 1924 Conference on Outdoor

Recreation, which included a photograph of people camping with the caption “It is the

American Heritage.”34

Because civic and personal virtue were linked to landscape, the need to both

preserve and create access to this important heritage became a national priority, and

government agencies became actively involved in issues regarding land conservation.

Donald Pisani notes that this had a commercial element as well as a moral dimension: the

growing realization that as an area was logged out, it had “little remaining value except

for grazing and recreation.”35 Combined with a new understanding that “scenic beauty

was a commodity like other natural resources,”36 the Forest Service began consciously

developing Federal lands as recreation areas. This resulted in a blending of commerce

32 See Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 33 Heather Van Wormer, “A New Deal for Gender: the Landscapes of the 1930s” in Shared Spaces and Divided Places: Material Dimensions of Gender Relations and the American Historical Landscape, edited by Deborah L Rotman et al (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003). 34 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 190. 35 Donald J. Pisani, “Lost Parkland: Lumbering & Park Proposals in the Tahoe-Truckee Basin” in Journal of Forest History, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Jan., 1977), 14. 36 Pisani, 17. 21

and ideology that Bernard Mergen calls an attempt to “assign economic values to the

‘recreational, inspirational and educational’ uses of the forest.”37 The commercial

potential of this landscape was apparent by the 1920s, when the growth of the automobile

industry produced an even larger boom in the recreational use of public lands. More and more people began to access remote, undeveloped areas using old logging roads and trails.

The New Deal provided the funding crucial to the efforts of the Forest Service to exploit this growing interest in outdoor recreation and reinvent the landscape.

Implemented in 1933, it coincided with a report issued by the Forest Service titled A

National Plan for American Forestry. This report listed hundreds of projects in need of money and manpower to “improve the recreation potential and management of the national forests”38 by building trails, trail facilities, shelters, campgrounds, scenic vistas,

roads, guard and ranger stations, lookouts, and telephone lines. Once the funding was

secured, the Forest Service began to assemble a massive infrastructure in the national

forests, opening and operating recreational facilities, constructing trails and

campgrounds, and leasing plots for summer homes. The Forest Service was literally

constructing a new landscape, seeking new ways to utilize public lands—ways that were

dependent upon concepts of wilderness, access, and conservation. They turned to the

Sierra Club for help as they began to explore recreational development, using the club as

a means to advocate Forest Service issues to the public. Susan R. Schrepfer, who has examined the relationship between the two groups at this time, writes that during the first

37 Bernard Mergen, Snow in America. (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 98. 38 Gerald W. Williams, The USDA Forest Service: The First Century. (Washington, DC: USDA Forest Service, 2000), 67. 22

half of the twentieth century “citizen activism was a complementary, rather than an

antagonistic, development in the evolution of the administrative state.”39

Figure 5: This image, with Lewis on the right, shows the construction work involved in developing recreational wilderness landscapes. This was the landscape the Clark brothers entered when they embarked on their

journey with the Sierra Club. During the first half of the twentieth century, preservation

was part of a comparatively harmonious national movement and public lands were not

yet a contested political landscape. The mission of the Sierra Club reflected this

understanding: activism was the activities they conducted in tandem with Federal

agencies revolving around the development of public land as recreational space. Activism

was the letter writing campaign Nathan started in the late 1930s, instrumental in the

creation of Kings Canyon National Park,40 also aimed at creating recreational space.

39 Susan R. Schrepfer, "Establishing Administrative "Standing": The Sierra Club and the Forest Service, 1897-1956" in American Forests: Nature, Culture, and Politics, edited by Char Miller (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 126. 40 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, 37. 23

Activism was education through recreational activities which ensured the development of

civic virtue and character formation, as well as aesthetic appreciation of nature.

This recreational landscape has been overlooked by most environmental

historians, who have focused on Muir’s message as a call to save the very earth itself. Ian

Tyrrell believes environmentalists and historians have exaggerated Muir’s preservationist

ethic because that is what matters to us in our contemporary world. He points out that

most Sierra Club members during the early twentieth century were educated, urban,

progressives who were involved with what he calls the garden ideal, a less ardent form of

the wilderness ethic that Muir preached. As such, they saw nothing inherently

contradictory in the ideal of a clean wilderness, safe from destruction and yet easily

available via roads. According to Tyrrell, they were not ardent wilderness advocates but

urbanites who “valued the high country of the Sierra as a recreational zone that

complemented their economic activity.”41 This garden ideal was part of the broader back

to nature movement at the turn of the twentieth century that clearly influenced the Clark

family.42

Lewis was born in 1900 in Massachusetts, where his father and mother had met

through the activities of a local hiking club. Shortly after his birth, his parents moved to

the San Francisco Bay Area where Nathan was born in 1906. The family, like many turn-

of-the century urbanites, preferred the more naturally constructed suburbs and built a house in Alameda, just blocks from the ocean and then still mostly farmland. Lewis

recalled that “there was only one house in the entire block across the street…in my youth

41 Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860-1930. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 57. 42 See Peter J. Schmitt, Back to Nature: the Arcadian Myth in Urban America. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). 24

I was certainly used to seeing animals, cows, chickens, horses, and in the fields, rodents,

small snakes and of course many birds.”43 The family was active in the Unitarian Church,

a progressive institution attractive to the educated, civic-minded populace. Their father,

W. Lewis Clark, was a highway engineer and himself a member of the Sierra Club,

getting his sons involved in outdoor activities at an early age, taking them with him when

he went to survey potential routes for roads. Thus, they were exposed to very isolated,

undeveloped regions as a matter of course.

Lewis was active in the first Boy Scouts chapter that opened in the Bay Area,

beginning in 1916. A self-described “organization man,”44 he was to remain active in this group until after his college graduation, this being the normal age of the Boy Scouts at the time. This group was fundamental to his identity and his nascent interest in conservation and outdoor activities. It was Nathan who built the first darkroom in their parents’ house and began collecting and developing lantern slides. Lewis spent several years crisscrossing the country back and forth between California and his graduate studies at MIT, at a time when road trips were difficult and laborious and travelers were thrown to the whims of weather and the vagaries of a very incomplete and poorly constructed network of local roads. These excursions included the first ever automobile trip across Canada in 1925, for which he and his companions won a prize, as well as numerous tours of other national parks.45 Lewis spent his career as an engineer for the

telephone company and lived in their childhood home his entire life. Nathan left the Bay

43 Lewis Clark, "Perdurable and Peripatetic Sierran: Club Officer and Outings Leader, 1928-1984. Sierra Club Reminiscences III, 1910s-1970s. Oral History Transcripts, 1975-1984. By Marshall Kuhn; John Schagen; Ann Lage; Robin Brooks; Anne Van Tyne; Sierra Club History Committee.; et al. (San Francisco: Sierra Club History Committee, 1985), 7. 44 Clark papers, “There’re always new things to discover,” 16. 45 Lewis F. Clark papers, “Climbing Record 1934 Hi Trip.” 25

Area for graduate school and a teaching position at UCLA in the 1930s, remaining in

Southern California as an engineer for Boeing. In many ways, these attributes made them typical Sierra Club members: educated, progressive, and civic-minded.

Figure 2: This image of a scout trumpeter bathed in sunlight captures the ideal of transcendence Lewis attached to the Boy Scouts. This reflects larger notions of civic responsibility and character development.

Among these civic ideals were conservation and preservation. Prominent professional foresters in the 1920s and 30s, such as Aldo Leopold and Robert Marshall, were committed to federal management policies that revolved around building wilderness preserves and creating a community of responsible, educated people who responded emotionally to landscape. Leopold believed that a healthy culture was contingent upon a healthy land, and that both recreation and science were necessary to achieve this end, writing that “recreational development is a job not of building roads into lovely country, 26

but of building receptivity into the still unlovely human mind.”46 Recreation and access then, were not the opposite of conservation and preservation; but rather, all functioned together as part of a larger ethos about the complementary values of culture and wilderness. As Lewis Clark stated, the club “stood for something bigger than ourselves.

Collectively it was a more important organization than just a social club. I felt that to be associated with something that was bigger than my sphere of influence was worthwhile for me.”47

Understanding this ethos as an integral part of John Muir’s philosophy and a

founding principle of the Sierra Club shows how the idea of preservation was linked to

and contingent upon access and development. To suggest that the Sierra Club was

exclusively a social group in its early days is not my intention. Conservation, as stated

earlier, was part of their mission statement when they incorporated, and many club

presidents, beginning with Muir, testified before Congress on conservation issues.

However, the nature of conservation itself changed, and the club shifted its focus and its

tactics in response to an ever changing physical and political landscape. After World War

II, development began to threaten access to wilderness rather than complement it,

resulting in the club’s increasing involvement in politics as well as a more antagonistic

relationship with organizations like the Forest Service.

When asked about the shift in the Sierra Club from “a provincial hiking club to a

national conservation force” when he was nearing eighty, Nathan simply replied, “of

46 Leopold, quoted in Nash, 197. 47 Lewis Clark, "Perdurable and Peripatetic Sierran: Club Officer and Outings Leader, 1928-1984. Sierra Club Reminiscences III, 1910s-1970s. Oral History Transcripts, 1975-1984. By Marshall Kuhn; John Schagen; Ann Lage; Robin Brooks; Anne Van Tyne; Sierra Club History Committee.; et al. (San Francisco: Sierra Club History Committee, 1985), 34. 27 course, it has changed just as everything in civilization has changed in the last fifty years.”48 There certainly were, he went on to say, some people for whom conservation was more of a priority and many who were there for the social activities. The point was to use the activities as a springboard for raising consciousness and to create an interest in preservation: “With all these real conservationists, who fought hard on the cause of conservation, it's almost unanimous that they originally joined the club for the social side--the trips and the outings and the ski trips--and didn't really think much about conservation at first. So therefore we can get good conservationists if we give them a proper exposure to the things that we're trying to conserve. Now of course, that was John

Muir's idea originally, in starting the first outings.”49

Certainly this idea of exposure supported with education describes Nathan’s first heady experience at Yosemite, as well as his and Lewis’s own early activities with the

Sierra Club. Although already active in the outdoors and engaged in landscape photography and sports such as hiking, rock climbing, and skiing before joining, Nathan claimed that he never heard of Hetch Hetchy until becoming a member of the Sierra

Club.50 Their engagement with this group then, gave them a forum they used to broaden the scope and meaning of these activities. Their relationship with the Sierra Club enabled them to elevate recreation into a higher calling that grew to encompass an awareness of their impact on the land and a search for the means to mediate their effect.

This is not a simplistic shift from activity to activism. The underlying meaning of access to wilderness itself shifted as rural landscapes were increasingly developed to

48 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, 129. 49 Ibid, 89. 50 Ibid, 5. 28 accommodate recreational activities and a changing social landscape, including the rapid expansion of the urban population, put new demands on natural resources such as timber and water. These kinds of developments exploded after the Second World War when

Lewis and Nathan were climbing the ranks of the club hierarchy. This created the need for new understandings of preservation and conservation, which in turned called for new tactics and new means of communicating.

This is the context in which the Sierra Club transformed itself from a local hiking club espousing the benefits of outdoor activity into a national organization campaigning for environmental causes. Lewis and Nathan Clark were central to a small group of members who steered the club through these changes, finding new ways to voice their concerns and raise public awareness about conservation issues. Photography, always central to their lives, lay at the heart of their emerging strategy of public education. This thesis will explore their use of images and how they came to shape policy by analyzing the interplay of both activity and activism through the medium of photography. Histories of the environmental movement have focused on the Sierra Club’s role as an advocacy group and have largely ignored the role that access and recreation played in its history, particularly during the 1930s through the 1950s. However, it was these years that saw the shift in the mission of the Sierra Club from a recreational hiking club to a powerful environmental lobby. Photography was central to this transformation, both forming and informing the members of the Sierra Club as they sought to express their values and to gain a foothold into voicing the nation’s land use policies.

Chapter Three: The Clark Slide Collection – “Recording for those who have been there”

Finis Dunaway states that “the history of environmental reform is more than the

passage of a series of laws; it is also the story of images representing and defining the

natural world, of the camera shaping politics and public attitudes.”51 Understanding the

Clark slide collection at the University of Nevada as not only representations of nature but as definitions of it is crucial to understanding the images. Composed entirely of landscapes and scenes of outdoor activity, these images represent the natural world as a place of beauty and play, depicting scenes of adventure, physical activity, and peaceful repose. That this is precisely the expectation most viewers would have of camping

photographs shows how prevalent this definition of the natural world still is. As personal

photographs they are as much stories and memories as they are artistic vision, serving as

visual diaries of both place and activity. Years later, Charlotte Mauk, a fellow Sierra Club

member and close friend to Lewis, would later describe these kinds of images specifically

as “recording for those who have been there.”52 Collaborating with Lewis on the need for

and uses of visual education in the years leading up to his presidency from 1949-1951,

she played a major role in forging many of the visual strategies the club would employ,

including an analysis of club photography up to that point. The University of Nevada

collection, which consists of slides from the 1930s, can clearly be placed within the

51 Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: the Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), xvi. 52 Lewis F. Clark papers, carton 279, file 14: Visual Education Committee, Photographs wanted for educational programs. 30 context of “recording for those who have been there,” correlating directly to Mauk’s descriptions in a startlingly literal translation that reveals that these images, far from being stereotypical or mundane, captured the heart of what the club meant to its members, showing how they elevated both scenery and hobby into a landscape ethos.

Figure 6: Approach and preparation—driving to road head, unloading cars, etc, typical packs, contents.

Figure 7: Along the trails

Figure 8: People in passes, on peaks

Figure 9: Pack strings and burros

Figure 10: Wildlife 32

Figure 11: In camp—fires, cooking, eating,

Figure 12: The scene—unusually fine scenics, abstractions conveying sense of wilderness beauty

Figure 13: Awful pictures and shockers—results of carelessness, miscellaneous vandalism, etc. Note: as an image of Hetch-Hetchy, this photograph symbolizes this concept.

Figure 14: Misc—educational ‘how to do it’ sequences

Figure 15: Humor—if real and understandable

Understanding the underlying significance of the features they chose to photograph is crucial to grasping the larger ethos within the images. This ethos explains why the Clarks took this particular kind of picture, why the Sierra Club listed such particular features as desirable, and why “recording for those who have been there” was so important to the club. To make these photographs speak in this manner involves interrogating them both in and through history as Sandweiss suggests. Re-placing the

images into their own history involves attaching specific images to the events as they

occurred, thus reconstructing their original intent in history. Because these events were

recorded in the many documents and publications the Sierra Club generated, as well as in

the papers and interviews of the Clarks themselves, such recovery is possible. It is also 35 possible to read these pictures through history, tracing the narrative as the Clarks and the

Sierra Club were actively writing it, and in the process, uncovering the symbolic import of these photographs.

Chapter Four: The High Trips—“William E. Colby, left; Clair S. Tappaan, right”

Figure 16: William E. Colby, left; Clair S. Tappaan, right

This slide, which is actually two photographs side by side in the same slide

casing, can be reconstructed in this manner, through close examination and research.

Simply labeled 1929, it reveals little at first glance: it is simply two men, each posed

outdoors in a mountainous setting, with other people glimpsed in the background. To an

expert in Sierra Club history, these two men are easily identifiable as two of its most

famous members, club presidents William E. Colby and Clair S. Tappaan. 53 Knowing the

date and using this identification to turn to other sources, this image becomes a valuable

resource from which a great deal of information can be gleaned about both the Sierra

Club and the Clark brothers. In his oral history, Nathan reminisced about their first high

trip in 1929, recalling that “one of the people that showed up at Tuolumne Meadows to

53 published in the Sierra Club Bulletin and used by other authors—find examples 37 meet us when the club got to Tuolumne Meadows was Judge Clair Tappaan, the one for whom Tappaan Lodge was named. And down in my album I have a picture of him standing there next to Colby.”54

While it is by no means certain that this is the exact image Nathan is referring to, it does nevertheless provide valuable context for the slide in the UNR collection, both in history and through history. In history, it allows me to say with certainty that both photographs in this slide were taken in the Tuolumne Meadows at the end of the 1929

High Trip. Through history, it reveals a great deal about photography as practiced by the

Clark brothers, providing multiple contexts with which to approach the image by suggesting multiple deployments, as both public and private. In the quote above, Nathan refers to looking at an album during his oral history interview, indicating that he kept copies of his photographs in print format as well as slide. Albums are a more private, solitary, and personal way of collecting photographs than slides, which are generally viewed in a group setting. This explains how the Clark images function as artifacts: both as public displays and as private albums. Public displays served to officiate the need to

“record for those who have been there” and were a frequent activity of club members in the form of slide shows and exhibits, including an annual exhibit featuring the photographs taken by members during that year. These official club functions reveal a shared, social facet of these images which will be discussed in depth later.

While this social aspect can be painstakingly reconstructed given the volume of

Sierra Club publications, the private, individual meanings associated with the personal photograph album are contingent upon the personal memories of people, accessible only

54 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, 21. 38

through their stories. Martha Langford writes that the photograph album is part of an

“oral-photographic performance”55 imbedded with structures of an oral tradition in which the camera literally becomes a storyteller rather than a technology used to create images or art. Oral historians frequently use photo albums as memory prompts, calling upon what Langford calls the oral scaffolding of the album to make it speak. This impermanent mnemonic structure is lost once the album is unmoored from its creation; for example, becoming part of a museum archive without any of the accompanying stories that provide context. Because both Lewis and Nathan recorded interviews and left a paper trail, it is

possible to reconstruct portions of this scaffolding, enriching the understanding of the

slides they created.

Knowing that this is a photograph in history of William Colby and Clair Tappaan in the Tuolumne Meadows during the 1929 Sierra Club High Trip provides an access point to view it through history alongside Nathan as he looks at his album and tells his story. This context is that of an older man looking back at his life, reconstructing the underlying tale of how he became involved with the Sierra Club, building Langford’s scaffolding to its original context. Nathan’s recollections reveal the importance of this seemingly innocuous photograph: looking at the picture of Colby, he stated, “He was our manager, and we walked the miles as Colby walked them.”56 This is the statement that

breathes life into this image, filling it with meaning and allowing a glimpse into the mind

of an impressionable youth on his first outing with the Sierra Club. Lewis and Nathan’s

first trip was William Colby’s last trip as a Sierra Club leader and Colby’s place in Club

55 Martha Langford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2008), 122. 56 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, 19. 39

history was legendary: he was looked up to as a prophet by the other members,

considered the heir apparent to Muir himself.

In fact, it was Colby who invented the high trip upon hearing that a group of

Portland mountaineers known as the Mazamas were conducting group outings in the

Northwest. He proposed the first high trip and did all the planning and provisioning, and

went on to lead every high trip from 1901 through 1929. Logistically, this was a massive

undertaking, a month long stroll into the Sierra Nevada involving the use of freight teams

and requiring the blasting of snow banks, the building of fords across rivers. The routes,

the climbs, and even the meals needed to be planned in advance. Colby recalled that fresh

meat was packed in regularly and a chef was hired. For 220 members, 50 packers, and

members of the commissary staff, ten tons of provisions and five tons of equipment were

packed into the mountains. Planning such ventures required research; Colby wrote that he

read books on diet, consulted lists of army rations, and “investigat[ed] suggestions by

authorities on outdoor life and camping.”57 Logistically, these trips were very much like

an army on the march, with pack trains coming in and out to bring supplies. One early

participant remembered "how her father would have the Los Angeles Times brought in

each day by horseback…[and] would sit with her under a tree to read the newspaper in

the middle of the California high country wilderness."58 This reveals a great deal about the nature of these trips and the people who went on them.

Being able to trace this unidentified photograph in this manner also explains some of the symbols in the image, adding a dimension of the shared, cultural meaning that

57 William E. Colby, “Twenty-Nine Years with the Sierra Club,” Sierra Club Bulletin 16 (1931), 5. 58 http://mayamiller.org/testimonials.html accessed 10/04/2012. 40 these photographs represented to those involved in the group. For example, consider the tins anchored to the belts of both men. Colby described them:

the cups are made to order, of pressed tin, with a wire in the rim and forming the handle, which is made so the cups will nest or can be hung on the belt. Each has the name of the club stamped on the bottom. They are patterned after similar cups made for the famous Appalachian Mountain Club, of Boston and the East. At the outset of the trip each member of the party is provided with a cup and a spoon, which are carried at all times. Besides their regular use at meals, they have on several occasions proved particularly useful in emergencies.59

This shows the larger meaning laden in the image, referring to the ritualistic nature of the trips, the cup functioning as a sign of belonging similar to a badge of membership, a physical symbol that would make strangers recognizable to one another passing on the trail. Both functional and symbolic, these cups are important clues to understanding the significance of this picture, pointing to a cultural identity much larger than a piece of tin.

59 Colby, 5 41

Chapter Five: Art and Experience—the Intertwining of Photography and Activity

Alan Trachtenberg notes that in his 1934 book Art and Experience, John Dewey

wanted to return art to the common experience of everyday life, a heightened form of

experience itself rather than an abstract aesthetic.60 This notion of experience lay at the

core of Sierra Club activities, propelling mountaineering activities into the realm of

artistic vision. Ansel Adams, who crafted his landscape vision and became a well-known photographer through his activities with the Sierra Club, was the official club photographer in 1929 when the Clark brothers went on their first high trip and became close friends with both of them, friendships which were to last the rest of their lives.

Believing that physical activity was a key element in the creation of art, Adams insisted that the act of attaining the image was as important as the finished photograph and must involve arduous physical activity. For him the rigors of mountain climbing represented a higher, more spiritual kind of physical activity and provided the necessary path to enlightenment. In 1929, he published a photographic essay in the American Alpine

Journal that accompanied an article called “Moods of Mountains and Climbers.”61 Its author, M.M. Strumia, stated that physical challenge was necessary for mental purification, resulting in a transformation that occurred between the more passive act of viewing a distant mountain and the physical contact of confronting and ascending the rock-face itself. For Adams, this physicality was the key element in making a photograph,

60 Alan, Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 192 61 M.M. Strumia, “Moods of Mountains and Climbers” American Alpine Journal, vol. 1, no. 11929, p 31-39; referred to in Hammond, Anne. Ansel Adams: Divine Performance. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 55. 42

a combination of spiritual vision and corporeal experience. In his 1936 book Making a

Photograph, he wrote that the major difficulty in landscape photography was physically

and emotionally transcending the shot, capturing the literal landscape and simultaneously

creating a figurative one. For Adams, vision was the primary access point to transcendent

nature and could only come through activity.62

“Peak 13,067”

Figure 17: North face of Peak 13067

The writings of Adams describe a commitment to photography as an act, not to a

finished image, but the culmination of a process. This was an ideal the Clark brothers

latched onto and remained firmly committed to the rest of their lives. In 1932, Nathan

wrote a report called An Ascent of Peak 13,238, which appeared in the Mountaineering

Notes section of the Sierra Club Bulletin. This section was dedicated to the technical

details of the various ascents made by members, frequently combining information on

62 Ansel Adams, Making a Photograph: an Introduction to Photography (London, New York, The Studio Publications, 1935), 74. 43 routes, conditions, and difficulties encountered with firsthand accounts and personal observations. Nathan wrote, “Having seen and admired those peaks from nearby mountain tops, and wanting to obtain some photographs of the region, we set out to climb the middle one, Peak 13,238.”63 This sentence provides information on many levels.

First of all, it reveals not only how they practiced photography but how they constructed a recreational landscape that, as I stated earlier, they not only captured with their cameras but actively created in the process. Part of this landscape creation included naming and labeling the many unmarked peaks in the region at this time, claiming undifferentiated geographic features as recreation areas through the process of climbing and naming. Nathan explains that the numbers were their altitudes as shown on the U.S.

Geological Survey topographic map and wrote that “on the west side is a vertical wall rising to sharp, rugged peaks. The three highest, from south to north, are Peak 13,067, which we refer to as Isosceles Mountain because of its appearance from the northeast side, Peak 13,238, and Peak 13,234.”64 Two of the UNR slides that are written on are

Peak 13067. This ties these two images directly to this exact moment in Nathan’s life.

Second, because of the labeled slides and the article, the mnemonic scaffolding between the image and the event is intact, providing an avenue into understanding exactly how the Clarks practiced the art of photography. Nathan states that the purpose of the climb was to obtain photographs. Thus, the photographs are not the triumphant end of the climb—they are its inception, they are its reason, part of an active process not a product or an end result. This shows how Dewey’s notions of art and experience intertwine to

63 Nathan Clark, in “Mountaineering Notes,” Sierra Club Bulletin, 17 (1932): 123. 64 Ibid, 123 44

create a photograph just as Adams believed: the resulting image is as much the process of

climbing as it is setting up the camera and focusing the lens.

It also shows how the features of a Sierra Club photograph become its ethos, how

a mountain becomes more than form captured in a lens, how Mauk’s “unusually fine

scenics” (discussed in chapter 3) come to portray something a great deal grander than the

mere physical features of an unnamed mountain peak, but a culmination of physical risk

and transcendent vision. In his introduction to the Sierra Club’s 1974 Fieldbook of Nature

Photography, Adams explains this process in more detail. Vision becomes synonymous with activity and provides the means to break down the grid of the physical world and to experience a primordial, unfiltered truth in Nature. Achieving this state involves departing from reality into expression; Adams explicitly tells his readers to learn to view the world as if their eyes are the camera lens, to learn to anticipate form and presence. In

Carolyn Merchant’s version of the participatory gaze, the growing reliance on vision and observation acted to sever people from nature; for Adams, vision created a direct and deeper connection to nature.

The development of these spiritual qualities was a vital aspect of the character

formation associated with outdoor recreation, endowing those who possessed it with a

deeper understanding of the world in general. By capturing the spiritual qualities of

nature within its representation as image, landscape photography contributed to this development. The cloud patterns in a photograph or the play of light and shadow along a ridge invoked this sense of wonder in the experienced viewer, becoming the equivalent of enlightenment. The leap from mountain range to the sublime is the leap from physical 45 landscape into visual metaphor, turning a simple photograph of a mountain into a symbolic statement of values.

Nathan concluded: “cool clear air, a slight breeze, and the warm radiant heat of the sun provided perfect conditions for photography and appreciation of the supreme majesty of this part of the range…I spent about two hours taking photographs and then we descended by the southwest ridge.”65 This seemingly factual appraisal reveals the conflation of climbing with the act of photography and the heightened awareness of all the senses: it shows Nathan transcending the literal and reaching for the enlightenment that comes when all these things collapse into a single, transcendent vision.

Figure 18: Crest of Peak 13067, French Creek Canyon

65 Clark, Nathan, “Mountaineering Notes,” 124. 46

“The ‘Impassable’ Notch”

Figure 19: "Impassable" notch on North Palisade looking NE.

Not only did the desire to get the high altitude shot serve as a motive for climbing, but the photographs they took aided the mountaineers on their way, adding a utilitarian element to the practice of photography. Photographs were taken beforehand and used to map out routes, functioning in this role as climbing tools. According to Edward Taylor,

Sierra Club climbers during the 1930s “studied photographs under microscope and protractor”66 looking for routes up the cliffs. The use of photography as a tool in this manner is another aspect of what I have been calling the participatory gaze, a physical interaction with the natural world in a way that incorporates all the senses within a visual

66 Joseph E. Taylor, Pilgrims of the Vertical: Yosemite Rock Climbers and Nature at Risk. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 58. 47 framework. A gymnastic accident had ended Nathan’s mountain climbing career in the early 1930s, dislocating his neck and impairing his equilibrium, leaving him as he explained, unable “to tell straight up and down. I can with my eyes but I can't with my sense of balance.”67 This idea of seeing with one’s sense of balance is crucial to understanding the collusion of all the senses into the participatory gaze. Although he could no longer scale cliffs, Nathan continued to rely on these corporal-visual tools to charter difficult terrains while hiking, explaining that he would first work it out on the map and study all the altitudes and distances with a magnifying glass.68

Visual representations used in this manner function as tools in the construction of a landscape. When physical nature is transformed into representation that allows for the application of precise measurements that elude the naked eye, routes and passages can be abstracted out of the topographical lines and numbers. In the case of photographs, the ability to measure features such as outcroppings and ledges was an important part of preparation. In the 1930s the Sierra Club was revolutionizing the sport of rock climbing, creating new techniques and attacking the sport with a zeal that “began in the mind, not on the rock…success often owed more to relentless planning than spontaneity.”69

Strategizing like this is a constructive process, requiring the use of interpretive tools such as photographs. Maps and photographs do not capture nature in its totality, but serve as constructs that reveal such precisely sought information. A photograph, magnified and analyzed with a protractor becomes a geometric equation, an abstraction that reveals

67 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, 42 68 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, 42. 69 Taylor, 58 (italics added). 48

empirical detail that does not exist in nature itself, but only in its representation, the

photograph.

While there is no specific reference tying any particular Clark photograph to this

use, many of the slides in the Clark collection, featuring close up shots of rock faces and

geologic features would distill and crystallize information in this way, for either the

purpose of climbing or the technical hiking Nathan referred to above. One such image is

the Impassable Notch, above, taken by fellow club member Glen Dawson, who would

become one of the legendary climbers of this generation. This image is important to this

collection in several ways. First of all, since it was not taken by either of the Clarks, it

reveals an active trade in imagery, which I will discuss later. Secondly, it shows how a

photograph shifts in meaning as it shifts in context. If, as I believe, this image helped

trace a route around an imposing geologic feature, its continuing presence as a part of the

Clark collection of slides reveals a new story.

This is because photographs that originally served as guides to map the landscape took on added meaning later as they shifted from a tool to aid a future event to a memory

of a prior one. To understand this, it is important to remember the participatory nature of

the slide show, functioning as a social event. That this Dawson image exists in slide

format in someone else’s collection attests to its use as part of a slide show. The public

slide show, a Sierra Club social mainstay, was something that Lewis put a lot of effort

into: “I like to share my impressions with people. So it is something that absorbs a lot of my time…editing the slides, putting them together, and making a slide show out of them. 49

I’ve given quite a number of slide shows for the Sierra Club and other groups.”70 His handwriting on this slide hints to the original intent as well as a shift in context, indicating this image moved from climbing tool to story: "'Impassable' notch” he wrote, carefully putting quotations around the word impassable, an indication that his copy was annotated after the event and intended to highlight that specific word, “North Palisade looking NE, 1930.”71 The Dawson slide in the Clark collection, then, has already been shifted from its production in history where it functioned as a climbing tool. By being reproduced as a slide and given to someone else where it served as a marker for a shared story and memory, it has been reinterpreted and recontextualized through history,

The importance of this slide as a story is woven into the history of rock climbing.

1930, as it turns out, was a momentous year in the history of a sport that had nearly been declared dead by the Sierra Club the prior year: “Very few reports of first-class mountain ascents made in the Sierra in 1929 have come to the notice of the editor,” read the

Mountaineering Notes in the Bulletin, “It is true that many of the peaks have been climbed so often that there is nothing much new to be said about them.”72 This somber announcement was followed by a plea to all Sierra Club mountaineers to contact the Club should they find new routes up these mountains, predicting that new routes were “likely to become of the chief diversions of climbers in the Sierra Nevada” instead of climbing new mountains.73 As far as predictions go, this one could not have been more wrong.

William E. Colby summarized the summer of 1930 in the Bulletin, stating that “some youthful enthusiasts swarmed over everything that looked formidable in terms of a

70 Lewis F. Clark papers, “There’re always new things to discover,”18-19. 71 UNRS-P2006-08-045 72 “Mountaineering Notes,” Sierra Club Bulletin, v. 15, 1930, 109. 73 Ibid, 109. 50

mountain peak.”74 The Mountaineering Notes section in this volume is nine pages long,

compared to that single paragraph the prior year, full of first ascents and successful

summits; routes once impossible, traversed. The quotations around the word

“impassable” on the Dawson slide in the Clark collection reveal this larger story, telling

the viewer not to take the word at face value. As part of a slide show put on for friends

and fellow rock climbers, this slide becomes a memory, a triumphant story that signifies a

lot more than a chunk of rock, recounted among friends.

It was at this point that rock climbing began to take on the character building and

spiritual aspects associated with outdoor recreation. In 1931, a year after the impassable

notch image was taken Bulletin editor and future club president Francis Farquhar invited

the nation’s preeminent climber, Harvard philosophy and mathematics professor Robert

Underhill, on the High Trip to train the club’s most elite climbers, those “youthful

enthusiasts,” including Lewis, on the latest roping techniques. According to Taylor, the

lessons Underhill imparted to this group were more moral than athletic. They already

possessed the athletic skills, having made that record number of first ascents the previous

summer; what Underhill provided was a “means to convert the technical prowess into

moral authority,”75 attesting to the broader cultural phenomenon of outdoor activities in the United States at this time and their relationship to civic responsibilities and conservation. Climbing was as much about these ideas as it was physical activity.

According to Taylor, a broad culture arose which revolved around mountaineering.

Enthusiasts wrote books and journal articles containing ideas about everything from

74 Colby, 13. 75 Taylor, 42. 51 logistics to technology, innovation and technique, as well as stories of bold ascents and ethical debates.

For the Sierra Club, the ethical questions surrounding mountaineering were not just abstract, philosophical arguments deployed in journals and publications, but issues with very real implications for the act of climbing mountains. For example, the death of club member Peter Starr while soloing in the Minarets in 1933 deepened the club’s commitment to teamwork. This notion was already central to the climbing culture at this time, an integral part of the teachings of Underhill. Taylor attributes this in part to the

Great Depression, which created a need for Sierra Clubbers to pool their resources, sharing rides and equipment. However, as a core concept it ran deeper than mere logistics. According to Taylor, “Underhill created the foundation for not only a far more technologically sophisticated approach to climbing but one that was far more socially and culturally inclusive as well…mountains [were] a means to identity and a connection to community.”76 The Clark slide collection reflects all of these ideas.

76 Taylor, 45. 52

“On Top of the North Peak of North Palisade”

Figure 20: Top of North Peak of North Palisade; Jules Eichorn and Bob Underhill; Farquhar Palisade Party; Aug 1931.

This image taken by Lewis, captures this sense of identity and connectedness in a precise moment, revealing the social aspects of a landscape constructed through its representation. The climbers, Jules Eichorn and Robert Underhill, stand together on top of the spire, relaxed and natural, a beaming grin radiating from Eichorn on the left. There is a clear notion of triumph in this image but it evokes a sense of play rather than an imperialistic sense of “conquering a mountain,” focusing instead on camaraderie, on meaningful, joyful, intensely physical activity. The image is framed to accentuate the route they have climbed; the viewer’s eye automatically follows their journey up the narrow, smooth surface of rock. The focus is on friendship and physical accomplishment.

The rock, constructed through the lens of the camera as a place to climb, has brought 53 these people to a place that isn’t only its pinnacle: it has stamped them as members of a culture with a specific identity.

Figure 21: Sierra Nevada: the John Muir Trail. Photograph by Ansel Adams

As mentioned above, this ideal of community was strengthened by the impact of

Peter Starr’s death while solo climbing in the Minarets in 1933. According to Anne

Hammond, this led club members to avoid the masculinity associated with the lone climber relying on his individual will and strength. She believes Starr’s death inspired this Ansel Adams image, published in 1936 his book Sierra Nevada: the John Muir Trail, showing the communal nature of the climb symbolized by the rope which unites the two figures. While Hammond’s reading captures the symbolic relevance of this image, it also exposes a proselytizing dimension within the image; a step from the relaxed camaraderie

Lewis photographed to the more politically imbued message club photographers would turn to in the coming years. Upon careful examination it appears staged, almost exaggerated, especially when compared to the naturalness of the Lewis’s North Palisade shot: for example, the posture of the upper climber in the Adams image, his arm curved backwards and his head raised to the sky, connotes a certain spirituality that transcends 54 yet imitates the pose of the imperial conqueror so often staged in historical western photographs. The camera angle creates a focus that is not the journey up the mountain— the transformative process—but the arrival, the transformative effect.

By accentuating an eternal sky that stretches all around, Adams creates a timeless, ethereal dimension; these climbers have reached the heights in both a physical and a spiritual sense and the viewer is clearly meant to see this. This is precisely the transmission of experience Adams sought to communicate to the viewer, showing enlightenment through natural form. However, by focusing on the effect of the climb rather than the climb itself, he stages the image for its viewers, directing them to certain, premeditated conclusions rather than allowing them to draw their own as they might with the Clark image, which lacks the quasi-religious tones. Philosopher Roland Barthes describes propaganda as the image in which the message is fixed rather than open to interpretation and it is hard not to see this image as a form of propaganda in this sense.

While it is easy to speculate that the shock of the death of one of their comrades led to the emotional outpouring visible in Adam’s photograph, it is important to notice the turn to more propagandic dimensions in photography because in the future, when these landscapes became more contested and the club became more embroiled in politics, using images in this way became their most potent tool.

Comparing Lewis’s image to the Adams photograph side by side in this manner reveals another facet of the sense of community that both Taylor and Hammond associate with Sierra Club mountaineering at this time. Both photographs show the same basic concept: two figures on a mountain top silhouetted against the sky. Such figures, writes

Hammond, “who move against the backdrop of the infinite, symbolize the attempt of 55

human beings to reintegrate themselves with nature by uniting the appearances of objects

with their own pure emotions.”77 This shows the merging of art and experience. It is important to note that the Clark slide is dated 1931, before Starr’s death and Adams’ photographic tribute. This suggests the possibility that the Clarks also influenced and taught their friend, pointing to a mutually collaborative and two-way exchange of photographic insight, in which Adams, well on his way to fame by this time, played the role of equal rather than teacher, engaging in a collective gaze as well as a participatory one. As artists and philosophers, the Clarks, the Adams, and the rest of the Sierra Club members moved within a community, sharing ideas as well as photographs, framing and constructing a mutual landscape.

77 Hammond, 57. 56

“Francis P. Farquhar Roping Down a Ledge Traverse on North Palisade”

Figure 22: FPF roping down a ledge traverse on summit of North Palisade

The Clark slide collection contains fifteen labeled images from the memorable

1931 High Trip which had cemented rock climbing into an ethos. Four of them are

labeled “1931 High Trip” and eleven, “Farquhar Palisade Party.” The latter are signed

with Lewis’s initials, singling them out, indicating not only that he took these

photographs but also that as memories the climbing trips were a significant event.

However, the images are not about Underhill’s climbing lessons. Figure 21 above, is one

of the few that focuses on climbing. Like the image of Eichorn and Underhill atop North

Palisade, the focus of this image is on the physical skills and the treacheries of space the climber tests himself upon.

“Knife Edge in Crest South of Bernice Lake”

Figure 23: Knife edge in crest south of Bernice Lake. Yosemite Park.

The rest of the series are landscapes; it is here that Lewis attempts to capture the transformative aesthetic vision and heightened awareness that resulted from the physical rigors of the climb. In the Knife Edge image above, he experiments with the abstract elements of natural form made popular by Adams during the 1930s, revealing the transcendental moment made concrete by the curve of the ridge and the play of shadows.

This indicates that for Lewis the impart of the trip was, as Taylor indicates, not climbing per se but the aesthetic and moral transformation of Dewey’s idea of art as experience that Adams advocated.

“Ice Cave, Upper Rush Creek”

Figure 24: Ice cave, Upper Rush Creek Basin; LFC, V Ferguson, V Adams

This aesthetic appears not only in the Palisade Party images but also in the other

1931 High Trip images. These photographs capture the growing influence and friendship between Adams and the Clarks. This influence goes beyond the compositional framework and into the realm of metaphysics, the transcendent message Adams sought to transmit through a photograph. The friendship between these men, beginning with their shared experiences on Sierra Club Outings continued with collaborations as all three became administrative and elected officials within the Sierra Club hierarchy.

Their mutual collaboration shows in this image from the 1931 Sierra Club Outing.

Labeled “Ice Cave, Upper Rush Creek,” it represents the best compositional form and artistry that is found in this collection. It can be traced to Nathan, again sitting with his photograph albums and telling his life story to an oral historian, recalling the summer of

1931 as one in which he made the relationships he carried with him for the rest of his life: 59

In 1931 I was also with the Sierra Club for four weeks of its High Trip in northern Yosemite, and that was the year of making important friendships, not politically important, but important in terms of pleasure and pleasant memories… The little group Lewis and I traveled with included Virginia Adams --that's Ansel's wife--and Virginia Ferguson. Virginia Ferguson, as I've mentioned before, was, so far as I know, the first full-time employee of the club.78

Again, this shows the relationship between oral history and the photo album, providing a direct link to the photograph’s history as well as providing its context as the personal memory of a person. However, unmoored from this context, this image captures the cultural landscape it simultaneously constructs to perfection, telling a story larger than its own making, one that cuts to the core of Sierra Club ideology. This image, combining sublime artistry with an implied physicality is a visual imprint of Dewey’s notion of art as experience stamped onto the landscape. Lewis, Virginia, and Virginia have attained the heights of wisdom but they have worked necessarily hard to get there.

They sit outside the cave, bathed in sunlight, tranquilly, reflectively, entranced by the distant horizon. This is what photograph historian Peter B. Hales calls “the naked encounter with infinity,”79 the seemingly universal human response at high elevations to try to capture the surrounding horizon, to make sense of the enormity of the world within the framework of a camera lens. It is the moment of emotional transcendence that Nathan has captured within his lens and the moral dimension of climbing that Hammond refers to, the transformative quest: “the undiluted, physical experience of nature, testing the mountaineer’s resources to the limit, had a power of refinement, drawing out the highest expression of the individual as an intelligent and moral being.”80

78 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, 27. 79Hales, Peter B. William Henry Jackson and the Transformation of the American Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 19. 80 Hammond, 43 60

The ice cave, silhouetted in reflected light, forms an abstract frame around Lewis

Clark, Virginia Ferguson, and Virginia Adams. The cave itself is dark, suggesting Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which reality exists only as shadows on the walls, a state of undefiled metaphysical perfection. This ideal of perfection is something Adams and the

Clarks sought to expose in photography, a vision only attainable in the high, sweeping vistas; however, their version inverts Plato much as Marx inverted Hegel: Plato believed that things such as mountains do not constitute reality but reflect an idealized, preexisting form of it, placing abstraction above practice. For Dewey, art was not form, but experience; similarly for the Adams and the Clarks, perfection exists in the physical world, accessible through practice. For Plato, the cave represents the starting point: in it lies perfection and to leave is a downhill journey into baseness. For these climbers, the perfection of the cave is the penultimate destination, and the climb there is necessary to achieve the metaphysical vision.

Chapter Six: Documenting the Landscape—“Pictures of Special Interest not Found Elsewhere”

The photographs that were created out of this effort reveal a physical landscape

that takes on the very features of the transformative quest. However, they do not

represent a finished product but the start of another signifying process. This involves

what Adams considered the most important and rewarding aspect of photography: the

opportunity for the photographer to transmit this experience and to share the moments of

beauty and wonder found in natural scenery, transferring the intuitive, aesthetic vision

that occurred in nature into the photographic print itself. The act of looking at such an

image becomes itself a transcendent experience, opening new vistas of imagination in the

audience and inspiring them to seek out the world of experience and find it replete with

the opportunity for their own transformations.81 Certainly this had worked with the

teenaged Nathan who had once stood in awe of a park ranger’s Yosemite presentation.

Members of the Sierra Club enthusiastically channeled this educational and transformative message into their social activities, which included not only Sierra Club trips but frequent informal parties and social gatherings involving slide shows. The club also met at the end of every summer for the Annual Photograph Exhibit. More a display than a formal exhibit prepared by a curator for an audience, the photographs shown were comprised entirely of member contributions. The exhibit ran for one week each fall in

San Francisco and was then transported to Los Angeles for a second week-long run. The

Sierra Club Bulletin ran an announcement in their August issue each year:

81 Paraphrase, introduction to Patricia Maye’s Fieldbook of Nature Photography, (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1974). 62

Members of the party who took photographs on the recent Sierra Club outing are requested to send their albums to the Sierra Club…by October 15. Each photograph should be numbered to facilitate ordering of copies. It is hoped that everyone who took photographs will exhibit them for each collection always has some pictures of special interest not found elsewhere.82

This announcement contains information vital to understanding how photographs functioned within the social realm of club members. First of all, it confirms that photography was the central means of telling their stories. They staged public events to commemorate their activities and these revolved around the image. In addition, it affirms the collective nature of photography as practiced by club members at this time, revealing a bond that was both intimate and egalitarian. Every member had the opportunity to exhibit their pictures and share their stories and by doing so, to become part of official club history. This prioritizes the notion of shared memory but is also takes it one step further. By numbering and exchanging their photographs they allowed public memory to be recontextualized as private memory. When Lewis kept a copy of Glen Dawon’s

“impassable notch” image, he was doing just this. This is the moment in which the act of constructing a participatory gaze becomes instilled not only in both image and landscape, but internalized on an individual level.

In addition to memory, these photographs served an educational purpose. The potential of finding “pictures of special interest not found elsewhere” indicates an ongoing effort aimed at broadening the individual base of knowledge each club member had. This complemented not only their civic and moral values but their search for transcendence, by making their photographs a conduit for sharing both knowledge and inspiration. The educational aspect of club photography would come to outweigh the

82 Announcements, Sierra Club Bulletin 15 (1930): 132. 63

inspirational, as Nathan in particular began to use club exhibits as a means to raise

awareness within the circle of club members. This will be examined in depth later.

Overall, the Annual Photograph Exhibit testifies to a dedication to the very idea

of documentation itself. An integral part of a broader American culture at this time,

William Stott calls it the “documentarian impulse” during the 1930s and notes that both

government and citizen went to great effort to document the lifestyles and conditions of

the era through imagery, creating the idea of a kind of participation that was also

simultaneously observation and recording.83 For this reason, photography formed the

crux of Sierra Club social gatherings. It was a means of not only documenting the

landscape but creating relationships to it and to one another. Through representation, club

photographers created a network of connections that transformed abstract nature and

physical land into landscape, and melded social relationships and public history to

identity and personal memory.

In addition to photography and social events, the club also kept meticulous written records of their activities in their publication, the Sierra Club Bulletin. Each issue

consisted of main articles, followed by various reports and correspondence, and then

mountaineering notes, which compiled the ascents made that season. These sometimes

included personal recollections of the trips, such as Nathan’s story about climbing Peak

13,067. The main articles ran in the February issue, which comprised the bulk of the

Sierra Club Bulletin; followed by several small issues comprised of reports issued

periodically over the course of the year. The main articles were historically informative

83 For a detailed discussion, see William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 64 and often personal articles, dealing with exploration, mountaineering, trip retrospectives, and natural history, which chronicled not only the club’s own history but linked it to a broader concept of history that placed their recreational activities in the tradition of centuries of travel and exploration. Written by active club members, the Bulletin is a record of their own activities placed within the broader historical context of the romanticized wilderness explorations they based their own activities on.

For example, J. Monroe Thorington translated and edited parts of Josias Simler’s

De Alpibus Commentarius under the title “Alpine Dangers in the Sixteenth Century.”84

This links the club’s recreational activities to the history of the quest for knowledge itself and the empirical way of seeing the world that arose with the scientific revolution that began as a natural history movement. Full of maps, illustrations, and their own photography, the Sierra Club Bulletin functioned as a visual and textual link to this tradition. As late as the 1930s, many areas of the Sierra Nevada remained relatively unexplored and unnamed; the number of first ascents attributed to Sierra Club climbers attests to the validity of their status as explorers in the same sense as Whitney or King, people they admired. And they were often entering territory relatively untrafficked by

Anglo culture: Francis Farquhar wrote an article for the 1932 Sierra Club Bulletin about

Muir Gorge, which had been untraveled since John Muir’s initial exploration of the area due to high water.85 Nathan led a group back there in 1931; Farquhar felt that was important enough not just for an article but for mention in his 1965 book, The History of

84 J. Monroe Thorington, “Alpine Dangers in the Sixteenth Century,” 17 (1932): 33-42. 85See Francis Farquhar, “Muir Gorge in Tuolumne Canyon,” Sierra Club Bulletin 917 (1932): 82-88. 65 the Sierra Nevada, which is itself a history of exploration and traverse more than an inclusive history of the region.

Record keeping then, served a social and an educational purpose. However, there was also an element of sheer athleticism. A small core of members, including the Clarks, established themselves as an elite group of athletes. This group, including Lewis, kept meticulous, detailed logs recording their activities as well as ranking and grading the participating members according to their skill and technique. Lewis also kept lists of each ascent, creating a cross-referencing record of climbs organized by date, again by peak, and again under the name of the climber. These are part of the Sierra Club archives now, a testament to the seriousness of recreation and the earnestness with which they engaged their landscape. Far more than mere bragging rights, these records served to formalize club activities, legitimating them within the discourse of civic values that were attached to ideas of recreation in the 1930s and allowing club members to write their own place in the history of exploration and the frontier.

Chapter Seven: First Winter Ascent of Mt. Lyell

Figure 25: Scan of a Level 3 Ski Badge, private collection of George Homsey.

Skiing as a recreational sport was in its early stages of development in the late

1920s. Club skiers were actively experimenting with new techniques and creating new

access points into areas previously impassable during winter. Ski-mountaineering offered new opportunities for club members to prove themselves against the elements and attain the transcendent enlightenment that came through intense encounters with nature. In the early 1930s, Lewis was a part of a group of skiers who set out to attempt the first winter summit of Mt. Lyell, a difficult and dangerous journey that became a series of trips ultimately culminating in the first winter summit of Mt. Lyell. The photographs that remain of the trip were undoubtedly among Lewis’s most cherished memories. However, they do more than recount the journey. They capture the act of signifying, showing step by step how these skiers constructed and interacted with a landscape on a symbolic level. 67

Figure 26: Group of Skiers This photograph shows them on the outset of the trip. Lewis, second from left, wears his ski badge prominently displayed on his jacket, visibly identifying himself as an elite member of a group and symbolically conveying the civic and moral code for which it stood. Sierra Club skiers had developed a set of standards and graded one another through a series of increasingly difficult skill tests, awarding ski badges that corresponded to the competence of the skier. Like the tin cups of the High Trips, these badges symbolized a set of values worn publicly, instantly recognizable as a mark of elite status. With a higher ranking came more responsibility. In an article he wrote for Sierra

Club Bulletin titled “Winter Sports Committee: A Progress Report,” Lewis outlined these responsibilities, creating a code that went beyond the physical nature of the activities themselves, but involved participating with the various agencies and outfits also operating in the ski areas, actively advising and planning, educating and cooperating with these groups. Involvement in rescue and safety issues through cooperation and 68

training with other agencies such as the National Ski Patrol and others was prominent

among his priorities.86 Like rock climbing, skiing was an activity aimed at a broader sense of civic betterment through physical activities. As a symbol, Lewis’s ski badge encapsulated all these ideas and was recognizable to the public much like a uniform.

According to David Brower, who recounted the Mt. Lyell expedition in the Sierra

Club Bulletin, the group, carrying fifty pound sacks of food and equipment, made it to the

12,400 elevation to the headwaters of the McClure Fork of the Merced River before

being turned back by weather. The next year they set out again, falling short of even this

mark due to the dangerous conditions of a “sub-zero fair-weather blizzard of wind-

whipped powder snow.”87 Undaunted, they tried again in 1935, only to have nine days of winter storms ruin their trip. On their fourth attempt in 1936, they finally made it to

Bernice Lake, 2000 feet above timberline, where they pitched camp.

Figure 27: Winter Camp

86 Lewis Clark “Winter Sports Committee: A Progress Report,” Sierra Club Bulletin v. 32 (1947): 9. 87 David R. Brower, “Beyond the Skiways,” v. 23 (1938): 41. 69

This photograph of their camp shows the grueling conditions of the expedition with a starkness words cannot convey. This was a time when most outdoor equipment, including tents and sleeping bags, was homemade and extremely heavy, not to mention inadequate as shields from the elements including cold and wet.88 In this image, the weight of the snow on the ground and trees indicates a heavy, wet snow, meaning wet firewood and subsequent difficulties with burning. Brower recounted that there so much snow in their tents they didn’t even have to open the flaps to get water to heat on their

Primus stoves. The next morning the wind was so heavy that Lewis actually fell over, braced against his ski poles, losing a contest to see who could stand the longest.

Figure 28: Winter Mountaineering

88 For example, see Bestor Robinson, “Equipment and Technique for Camping in Snow Part 1,” 22 (1937): 38-47. 70

Figure 29: Summit Four hours later, out of the wind and after climbing up a 65-degree pitch of snow-covered rock, they approached the summit, already a monument with its cairn and register box.

These were stationed and maintained by the Sierra Club at peaks across the Sierra

Nevada. Club mountaineers hauled them up and installed them, repairing them after heavy winter snows, making sure there was paper in them, and meticulously saving the notebooks full of names, part of a larger effort at documentation.

Figure 30: Mt. Lyell Summit Register A close up of the register box shows a hand—possibly Lewis’s since the cuff matches his ski badge jacket—wiping off the marker.

Figure 31: Signing Register A person writes in the register. This moment the trip becomes real: it is the act of signifying and Lewis has captured it on film. It is the activity of people that creates 72

landscape, investing it with meaning and creating a relationship between people and

place that is “thoroughly reciprocal and incorrigibly dynamic.” 89

Figure 32: Register, close up A close up shot of the register, telling the story of the expedition and the signatures of the

participants is taken, a culmination of everything they went through to stand there. These

registers signified history to the Sierra Club: the history of the mountain was the register with the names and dates and the stories of those who stood with their feet on that ground. Signing the register was a symbolic act of participation in that history, making them one with their landscape with a primal urgency that again suggests Merchant’s participatory gaze as a symbiotic act in which participants were not “subjects detached from the objects of observation, but active communicants in a web of consciousness.”90

89 Basso, 107. 90 Merchant, 46. 73

According to Brower, as they stood at the summit, Bestor Robinson lit a match in a symbolic gesture: the wind did not blow it out. They remained there, transfixed by a

Sierra Nevada they had never seen before, bathed in the transcendent glory of struggle and achievement:

The entire range had an Alpine aspect that we had never fully appreciated in forest-belt ski country. Even after the 7000-foot descent in afternoon and moonlight, and the next day’s 19-mile journey to Yosemite Valley, we were still thinking of that view—of those incomparable north slopes, powder that lasts for months, square miles without a tree, the High Sierra above timberline—winter paradise, ear-marked for the ski-mountaineer.91

Lewis’s photographs and Brower’s story contain every symbol of their belief structure: a quest, in this case, one that took several years to reach fruition; a struggle against the elements; the wilderness as proving ground; and the sublime glory only revealed to those determined enough to persevere. All of these elements are cloaked within a philosophy based on the visual: it was more than a mountain trek; it was a vision quest. It is this that

Lewis captured in his photographs, images that are not pictures of people climbing a mountain under difficult conditions, but people engaging place and using it to create both landscape and identity.

91 Brower, 45. 74

Chapter Eight: Lyell Revisited

How photographs are deployed constitutes their meaning. Dependent upon context, the story of a photograph shifts as the same image is redeployed in new situations, creating new connections and meanings. I wrote earlier that photographs that began their lives as climbing tools later shifted into the realm of story and memory, both as publicly shared events like the club’s frequent gatherings and slide shows, as well as the private memories contained in family albums. The reverse is also true. Lewis summited Mt. Lyell again in 1937, and in 1951, one of the members of that expedition wrote him a letter asking him for copies of the photographs from the trip to use in an article he was writing about the changing glaciers of the Sierra Nevada. “I never dreamed that our trip to Mt Lyell in 1937 would lead to this!” he wrote, “I’m enclosing a copy of the story Dave Brower is using in the 1951 annual to give you the idea in advance. I’m planning to return to Mt Lyell in August for another and better look.”92 This shows photography shifting in context to through history, moving from story and memory to scientific evidence.

Harrison wrote two articles for the Sierra Club Bulletin, one in 1951 titled “Are

Our Glaciers Advancing?” and one in 1954 called “Glacier Studies with a Camera.” In the first one, he reports that measurements from photographs taken from the same point on Lyell Glacier in September of 1937 and again in September 1949 indicated an increase of twenty five feet of snow despite the fact that California had been in a drought during

92 Clark papers, Carton 280, folder 2, April 28 1951 letter from Art Harrison 75 these years.93 The article references a variety of other sources and concludes that there is a shortage of data from which to draw conclusions to explain this change but expresses hope that the recession of glaciers noted as early as the 1850s might be in the process of reversal. The second essay reports on the specifics of photographing glaciers, noting that

“stereoscopic photographs offer the greatest advantages because they permit accurate mapping of the entire surface of a glacier as described by Walther Hofmann in the 1953

Mountaineer annual.”94 These observational recordings took on another new meaning by providing instructions and inviting amateurs to participate and record their own. Stating that taking a photograph from the same location at the same time of years over a period of years records the changes on the land, Harrison explains that taking carefully dated pictures of the same area throughout a season is also an invaluable resource for analyzing climatic conditions. The article states that these scenes “spark his mountaineer’s imagination” and “combine to show, in a stop-motion series, progressively more about the coming and going of a primary mountain-sculpting force.”95 This adds a story line to the science and the art, combining them as a resource for both knowledge and appreciation of scenic beauty, a consistent message in Sierra Club photography. While the articles Harriman wrote in the 1950s are not political, his deployment of images as a means to communicate the rapid changes in the landscape was a strategy club members were increasingly dedicated to at this time, as they sought a means to communicate environmental threats to a mainstream audience. This will be discussed in detail later.

93 Arthur S. Harrison, “Are Our Glaciers Advancing?” Sierra Club Bulletin (1951): 78. 94 Arthur S. Harrison, “Glacier Studies with a Camera.” Sierra Club Bulletin (1954): 60. 95 Ibid, 61. 76

Chapter Nine: The Tenaya Canyon Exhibit—“A Wild Impassible Gorge”

Figure 33: The branch post office in the gorge. Photocopy of notes left at Register Rock, Tenaya Canyon.

In the 1933, Lewis curated an exhibit on Tenaya Canyon that demonstrates how the multiple facets of access, conservation, documentary history, and photography coalesced into a singular visual aesthetic and created a terrain rich in symbolism and signifying power. This exhibit, designed to share the history of climbing in the very same canyon John Muir had once proposed blasting, reveals how the participatory gaze constructs a landscape. While none of the images in the Clark slide collection can be directly linked to this exhibit, Lewis’s research notes and correspondence survive, as do 77 the advertisements and programs that supplemented it. With this information, it is possible to reconstruct the exhibit and to examine its underlying intent, decoding the message it contained regarding history and exploration, landscape and civic virtue, athletic elitism and accessibility. Examining its audience and exhibit space provides insight into the social realm the club operated within, testifying to the exclusive, members-only nature of its social network and activities.

The exhibit opened in October 1933, featuring prints made from the glass plate negatives of Joseph LeConte, who had succeeded John Muir as club president and had traveled the canyon in 1912, as well as Lewis’s photographs from two trips up the canyon in November of 1932 and May 1933. The prints were developed by Marjory Bridge, who would later marry Club President Francis Farquhar, and were mounted by the Ansel

Adams Gallery. Motion picture reels from the trips of 1932 and 1933 were provided by another future president, Bestor Robinson. Thus, club insiders were involved in every facet of the production and development of the exhibit, indicating not only the segregated nature of club social relations, but also the many experts in the various facets of photographic production and development within the ranks of club membership, a testament to their dedication to the medium. Aside from Adams, none of these people were professional photographers; the seriousness they applied to photography complements and indicates the seriousness with which they approached mountaineering and outdoor activity.

According to the manuscript of introductory remarks that Lewis retained in his papers, the purpose of the evening’s show was to share stories and pictures about Tenaya

Canyon and to serve both a reunion for those who had been there and an educational 78

opportunity for those who knew nothing about the canyon. This shows once again the

contradictory nature of the club: both catering to the elite—those who had climbed

Tenaya— and graciously democratic and earnest in its zeal to educate other members. It

also shows the Lewis’s vision of the club’s status place in the history of climbing and

exploration with a factual and meticulous documentation of this history. Playing on the

mythical status of the area, Lewis’s lecture began: “For many years a sort of legend was

repeated that Tenaya Canyon was a wild impassible gorge into which no one had been

able to penetrate and come out with his life.”96 Going on to say that two years ago he had heard “the fantastic legend about the canyon’s inaccessibility, told not in its most severe form but sufficiently formidable as to be quite intimidating,” he then dispels the myth by stating that LeConte had published an account of his trip and included in it references to earlier trips, indicating that contrary to legend, the canyon had in fact a long history of traverse.

In addition to relying on LeConte’s references, Lewis had spent the prior months tracking down and corresponding with many of the people knowledgeable about the area, and had compiled an exhaustive list of travelers based on sources as obscure as the scraps of paper left in the canyon at a place called Register Rock, where in 1929 a lively correspondence had ensued between various returning trekkers [see Figure 32]. The cardboard scraps these notes were left on were sent to Lewis by a man named S. L. Foster and are retained in Lewis’s papers at the Bancroft, indicating their importance to him as historical artifacts and as part of the definitive story of Tenaya Canyon. For Foster, who was older and clearly a little threatened by the ever growing commercialization of

96 Lewis F. Clark papers, Box 2, folder 2, “Manuscript of Introductory Remarks,” October 25, 1933. 79

Yosemite, the notes represented a new, more public landscape replacing the private one

he had cherished. His letter to Lewis complained of the “untouched character of the

canyon being defiled by the taint of commercialism connected with the establishing of a

branch post office in the gorge,” but also reveals an ambivalence, a desire to have his

own place in this history cemented: “These rather informal documents with the tang of

the mountains still on them will add a few more names to your list.”97

Lewis echoed this ambivalence, both deconstructing the mythical Tenaya Canyon as remote and unaccessed in a manner both explicit and methodical, while simultaneously using his recollections of trip to bolster the myth: “Altho [sic] we were somewhat prepared by stories of previous experiences, we had all the thrill of pioneers in trying to find our way. We know now that there are a number of possible variations of route; yet the problem of getting thru or around the many obstacles that the canyon presents brings one face-to-face with reality in several forms and offers opportunity for one to test his nerve, his balance and rock climbing skill.”98

This comment is revealing on several levels: first of all, it indicates how and why

Lewis and his companions staked their place in a long line of western exploration and

were so dedicated to the reenactment of discovery. By claiming the thrill of pioneers as

their own thrill, they included themselves in the rank of explorers and staked their claim

to history. The admission that they approached the trip with preexisting knowledge of

what they faced has been interpreted by historians such as Magoc and Hyde as

undercutting this claim. Both scholars describe these types of experiences as passive,

97 Clark papers, Box 2, folder 2, letter to LFC from SLF, October 26, 1933. 98 Manuscript of Introductory Remarks” 80 reducing later travelers to consumers who follow an existing path and rely on previous accounts for their own experience. However, in the context of Sierra Club symbology, these trips can be linked directly to a larger realm of cultural significations as outlined by

Basso, becoming constructive practices that validate the primacy of their own personal experience. By interjecting the notion of process into hiking and climbing rather than the detachment inherent in understanding landscape as product, the act of testing one’s nerve and skill becomes not consumptive in nature, but productive and constitutive. In this manner, it is the Lyell winter summit expedition all over again: a means of actively participating in a landscape that is at once cultural and symbolic. Climbing is an act that constructs the sense of place and provides entry into a signifying landscape.

A list of the scenes from the motion picture reels remain. Opening with a shot of the Spires of Mt. Watkins, the early scenes are interspersed with images of flowers and waterfalls as the climbers pass up through jumbled boulders including “the wedged boulder that has stopped many parties and sent others on a long, hard climb.”99 While still lingering on the ample scenery, the “coming home” section becomes more technical, showing climbers on the lip of Slide Fall, going over the hump and down the granite slope. “Wet spots are bad” is the name of one scene, followed by “bare feet are safer than hob nails.” This shows a mingling of technique and expertise combined with an eye for beauty, a combination of group activities and an awareness of the resplendent landscape they tested themselves upon. This indicates the seriousness with which they documented their stories, capturing a variety of details from the world and combining them into a single story. The variety of images effectively parallels the Clark slide collection,

99 Lewis F. Clark papers, Box 2, folder 2 “List of scenes on 400 ft cine reel.” 81 showing the consistency of message and content among club members with regard to visual formats.

After his introductory remarks, Lewis listed the previous ascents beginning in

1866 with a group of men named Ferrel, Jessup, and Stegman. He then turned the evening over to those present in the audience who had been there, giving them the opportunity to share their stories. There is no rigid delineation between speaker and audience in this interactive event. In what may have been a second event, Lewis recorded that twenty nine people attended; that he, LeConte, and S. L. Foster spoke on Tenaya

Canyon and tea and cookies were served by one R. G. Johnson. An analysis of this audience reveals that all but six were club members and eighteen of these also members of the Sierra Club Rock Climbing Section, leading climbing excursions and providing training, instruction, and testing of novice members. Ten in the audience had been to

Tenaya Canyon, including four of the six non-Sierra-Club members in attendance, indicating their presence was predicated on their experiences in the canyon. This group included Foster, who had provided Lewis with many of the leads he tracked down regarding early explorations including the notes left at Register Rock, and Charles W.

Michael of Yosemite, who had also climbed the canyon in 1932 and provided four hundred feet of motion pictures. Despite the interactive nature of the lecture, the carefully chosen audience created a closed circle of circulation and communication: only two people present had no known association with the club or the canyon.

This carefully chosen audience was at least in part intentional. While Sierra Club members practiced a democratic openness, they also required the endorsement of a sponsor to join, meaning members were prescreened and selected for certain 82 characteristics and values. Thus, while the exhibit and talk at club headquarters was interactive and participatory, it was also emphatically an exclusive event, catering to a very select crowd of invited guests. Earlier I mentioned Charlotte Mauk’s claim that

Sierra Club photographs functioned as “recording for those who have been there.” This exhibit marked a more extreme version of this credo, “there” being specifically Tenaya

Canyon. Indicating the seriousness of the invitations, an attendee whose invitation had arrived late sent Lewis a note reading “I received your kind invitation this morning to

Tenaya Canyon night at the Sierra Club last night. Many thanks. Fortunately both Mr.

Wagner and I were admitted on our faces that time.”100

The invitation-only status of this event can at least in part be traced to ambivalence about advocating access and education on the one hand, but valuing conservation and pristine landscapes on the other. In the correspondence between Lewis,

Charles Michael, and S. L. Foster during research for the exhibit, the issue of inadvertent publicity ruining the remoteness of this exclusive domain had been a primary concern.

All three expressed a desire to keep its secrets yet had to acknowledge word was leaking out regardless. Lewis’s conclusion, in typical club fashion, was to capitalize on the fact that word was getting out and seize upon this as an opportunity to make and control the message, teaching the safe, proper, and moral aspects of climbing and exploration in accordance with the principles of Muir. Lewis was willing to go to great lengths to stress the connection to Muir, using an uncharacteristically unreferenced quote: “Muir said,

‘This canyon is accessible only to mountaineers,’ and it is true today that those who would venture there must be prepared with physique and equipment for strenuous

100Lewis F. Clark papers, Box 2, folder 2, dated October, 26 1933. 83

climbing over rocky ledges and through dense brush.”101 This implies, perhaps

erroneously, that the Tenaya Canyon climbers who made it up the walls of the canyon were living up to the standards and carrying out the mission of their founder, when Muir had in fact wanted the canyon developed and Lewis knew this: he had a copy of the letter

Muir had written to Congress requesting the development of Tenaya Canyon in his research files.

In a letter to Foster explaining why he went ahead with the exhibit despite worries that it might attract attention to the area and destroy its remoteness and privacy in the process, Lewis proclaimed the enthusiasm of club members about out of the way places:

Great spiritual values are to be derived from wild, spectacular, and naturally isolated areas like TC, --places that can be attained only by those who, spurred by curiosity or an appreciation of the rugged beauty and restful atmosphere of these regions, are willing and able to make the necessary exertion to get there. Yet their true charm can be enjoyed by relatively few persons because their very vitality depends upon their lonliness [sic]. 102

He seems to indicate a desire to have both access and information available to those elite

few who had the proper combination of athletic skill and moral sensitivity to appreciate

the landscape but at the same time hoped that the lack of development would keep

commercialization and the masses out. By staging this show for those equal to the task,

and by giving it Muir’s stamp of approval, Lewis built a representation of Tenaya

Canyon in which the values of this core membership of climbers were written into the

very rock of the canyon walls, turning a place that could have been other things, a well-

constructed hiking trail, for example, into something very specific.

101 Lewis F. Clark papers, Box 2, folder 2, “Notice to be posted in the Sierra Club Bulletin.” 102 Lewis F. Clark papers, Box 2, folder 2, dated Oct 27 1933. 84

This demonstrates how the process of making photographs figures into representation. The sense of place captured by the photographs is contingent upon and inseparable from the activity that went into their making. Climbers, hauling heavy camera equipment along with their climbing gear and supplies, photographed a place made accessible only by the act of climbing. The resulting photographs rely on their modes of production for meaning, and the images create as much as capture a sense of place, making place is a relational process, not an inherent quality.

Such a relationship is potentially invisible to the un-indoctrinated who might only see scenic images of nature. By deploying these photographs to members of a select community who already understood Tenaya Canyon as a place to climb, Dewey’s concept of art as experience was clearly visible to the audience. This message was implicit not only in the photographs exhibited, but in the very structure of the event. The members of the audience constructed the exhibit using their own labor to print and frame the images. The exhibit was an event with the audience also serving as the panel and using their own memories and stories to facilitate discussion. By having such an exclusive audience, Lewis compromised with the underlying conflict between access and conservation he and Foster had acknowledged in their correspondence. He created a space he could comfortably promote Tenaya Canyon while dispelling his fear that such broadcasting would ruin the spirit of the place.

Chapter Ten: The Visual Education Committee

During the time Lewis was curating the Tenaya Canyon Exhibit, club officials were starting to consider new ways to reach a broader audience. The first Sierra Club

Visual Education Committee was formed in 1934 by club president Francis Farquhar.

Due to lack of funding, it was dissolved in 1938. Nathan served as the chair and recalled that they met about once a month but that the lack of a budget made it impossible to do much beyond talk about “how nice it would be if the club could make some pictures.”103

While club finances were certainly stretched in the 1930s due to the Great Depression,

Nathan also admitted they weren’t sure what the mission of this committee should be, saying that “we were supposed to develop what visual education should be for the club.

Nobody knew. … There was also the question of whether we should make films to interest prospective people in joining the club, or should we make them to show what good the club had done?”104 This indicates that they were considering the possibility of using visual resources to attract new people in addition to their tradition of documenting their activities. However, they were unsure how to proceed with this. In the 1930s the

Club was still small and local, organized around trips and activities, and lacking both the infrastructure and funding to undertake an outreach campaign of this nature. This would change as the administrative hierarchy of club expanded to include an executive director and growing membership funds were funneled into new initiatives. These developments changed the very nature of club involvement in conservation and preservation issues, as well as the tactics employed by members anxious to spread the club’s message.

103 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, 36. 104 Ibid, 36. 86

In 1941, the Visual Education Committee reconvened under David Brower, who

had produced the 1939 Sierra Club motion picture, “Sky-Land Trails of the Kings.” This

was shown to Congress and was instrumental in the formation of Sequoia and Kings

Canyon National Parks, much like William Henry Jackson’s images from the 1871

Hayden Survey, highlighting its unique and scenic geography, were crucial to the creation of Yellowstone National Park.105 This indicates that despite using the new

medium of film, Brower’s deployment of imagery to highlight scenic wonders played the

same role in the creation of the national park system as the still photography of a previous

generation had. With a budget for outreach, Brower was able to use the latest technology,

film, to broadcast the message; however, the message itself remained essentially

unchanged. Muir and other Sierra Club presidents had also testified before Congress

advocating the creation of wilderness preserves. Club members also used other

conventional tactics to secure parkhood for Sequoia and Kings Canyon; for example

Ansel Adams photographed the area and Nathan was actively involved in a letter writing

campaign urging the land be set aside as a park.

When the park land was officially set aside in 1940, it was perhaps the last

uncontested campaign the Sierra Club was to undertake. Nathan recalled that “during the

war there wasn't much need for conservation because nobody was developing anything,

and all the young people were away anyway.”106 What he called “the big conservation

fights,”107 started after World War II with increasing demands for timber and advances in

road design, both beginning to encroach on public lands. Increased recreational use and a

105 See Magoc, Hyde, Hales, Beringer 106 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, 89 107 Ibid, 44. 87 flurry of proposed developments, including new for-profit ski areas, collided to make the post-World War II landscape a highly contested one. The conservation alliances between citizen and government the club had been so integrally involved in began to disintegrate.

Chapter Eleven: Highways and Contested Landscapes

Some club members had already expressed an uneasy awareness of the impact of recreation on the land. In 1930, a club member named Elmo A. Robinson wrote an article in the Sierra Club Bulletin called “The Changing Sierra,” noting the increasing development in the form of roads, dams, hiking trails, and vacation facilities, the direct result of deciding that the mountains were “a playground for a citizenry whose ancestors bequeathed them a Daniel Boone complex and a John D. civilization.”108 Understanding

the complexity of roads and paths is crucial to understanding the shift the notions of

conservation and accessibility underwent in the latter half of the century. In his 1930

article, Robinson concluded that different people wanted different experiences in the

mountains and agreed that there should be fine highways for people to drive through the

mountains with ease and comfort, yet fearing that “throngs of people will destroy the

charm of the Sierra just as surely as if it had been turned into a national sheep-pasture,”

he wanted the mountains themselves to remain untouched, a reward for “those who know

that there will always be those who know that the most marvelous views are seen only

after physical effort to obtain them.”109

Robinson expressed the same underlying conflict between notions of accessibility

and elitism that Lewis had hinted at in his Tenaya Canyon project. This complicated and

contradictory stance lies at the heart of the Sierra Club ethic. Accessibility for all was

their mantra, yet they preserved what they considered the best parts for themselves,

believing in their own superior relationship to the natural world. Highly democratic and

108 Elmo A. Robinson, “The Changing Sierra,” Sierra Club Bulletin 15 (1930): 27-36. 109 Robinson, p 35-36. 89 committed to social equality among all members regardless of their outdoor skill, certain members of the club, the rock climbers and ski mountaineers for example, were nevertheless elitist in glorifying physical exertion as a means to enlightenment.

Until the end of the Second World War, club members supported road construction because roads served their need for accessibility. To understand this, it is necessary to understand the road trip within its historical context. In the 1920s, car travel was new and served as a mark of distinction, as indicated by the prize Lewis and his friends won for being the first automobile drivers to successfully cross Canada. Lewis specifically described driving as being related to outdoors and activity, stating that his early cross country trips between Massachusetts and California were experiences crucial to developing his interest in the outdoors. These trips could hardly be described as either luxurious or detached from the outdoors. Recalling a summer drive across the United

States in 1924, he explained that in order to drive up the steep road to the top of Mount

Washburn in Yellowstone, he and his friends had to get out and push the car, explaining that “the road was steep and winding and on several pitches. Since we were getting up kind of high we all got out except Malcolm, the driver, and pushed the car, then ran to catch up as it lurched ahead. Eventually we got to the top.”110 His diaries and trip logs punctuate the reality of travel during this time, detailing struggles with road and weather conditions, as well as frequent flat tires and breakdowns. The road trip then, was a new means of engaging the landscape, a way of “getting off the tracks” and escaping the

110 Lewis Clark, "Perdurable and Peripatetic Sierran, 16 90

confines of the railroad car and along with that, what Douglas Nickel calls railroad

vision: a detached view that reduces space to the distance between two points.111

With so much of their philosophy resting upon a visual foundation of

engagement, the opportunities offered by car travel would certainly be appealing to the

Clarks, and the photographs of their first trip to Yosemite reveal just this: roads are part

of a lush, verdant landscape, not barriers that separate them from the scenic backdrop

they pass through but gateways into it. In their wilderness aesthetic, resting heavily on a

communion with the visual, roads symbolized the path to enlightenment.

Figure 34: These road images stress the mechanics of road design, showing embankments, cutbacks, and ripped out trees, not the romance depicted in figure 4.

Nathan too, remembered the early hazards of the travel travels he went on with

their father, a Sierra Club member who had hiked with Muir, and one of the ten engineers

hired to start the California highway system in 1912:

There were just the bare ruts, and we had to drive through the rivers. In one place there was a bridge made of two big logs about two feet in diameter flattened on the top sides, and nothing in between, and no railing; we had to center the car on those two logs. I suppose it was about fifty feet across, and we had quite a time getting up onto this bridge. I think it was probably the Eel River…. In many

111 See discussion of Nickel in Anne M. Lyden, Railroad Vision: Photography, Travel, and Perception. (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty museum, 2003). 91

places the road would go between two giant redwoods that were so close together that the road had to go up over a hump maybe three feet high to get between them and go on.112

Nathan, whose love of engineering harkened back to those childhood trips, noted that

their father had been careful to make sure that the roads he constructed were designed to accentuate the scenery and leave the forest intact, cutting as few trees as possible. The problem was, he explained that “in the forties, they got the freeway concept, and the idea of the big heavy cuts, enormous width, wide shoulders, alignment straight as a die, and never mind what it does to the hillside or the trees…. That’s when the Sierra Club got interested.”113 This is a statement that reveals a great deal about the Sierra Club’s design

ethic: the constructed nature of landscape was not the issue but the architectural pattern of

the roadways was.

Disconnecting the traveler from the land was the underlying issue with the battles

over road construction and access that Nathan, in particular, became increasingly

embroiled in. Highways, such as improvements to the road over Tioga Pass in Yosemite

in the 1950s, came to be viewed as barriers that aesthetically separated car travelers from

the scenery. Rather than providing access to a more intimate engagement, they now

separated the traveler from the land, reducing it to passive sightseeing much like the

railroad vision that automobiles had once offered escape from. The Sierra Club bitterly

fought the new road, trying instead to create a policy which, according to Nathan:

would have prevented the construction of freeway-type roads in the national parks. For instance, we believed in dividing the roads going in opposite directions, putting them half or a quarter of a mile apart. We did not believe in having deep cuts and high fills, and making a level road like a railroad. We felt

112 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, 6-7 113 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, 8 92

that in the parks the roads should generally be laid on the landscape…. We developed, for instance, criteria for sharper turns than the park service was then advocating, and for smaller embankments and less clearance of the landscape off the side of the pavement. You probably know that throughout most of the United States and Mexico too, there is a policy of clearing all trees off the right-of-way of all federally-financed highways.114

This battle, as much a fight over the representation of mountains as uninterrupted scenic stretches as over freeway architecture, indicated not only the changing relationship between the Sierra Club and government agencies over the decade following World War

II, but other, broader cultural changes as well. Michael Cohen states that the notion of

“render accessible” changed for the Sierra Club in 1947 when it became clear that heavy recreational use was damaging the very mountains they loved.115 Up until then, conservation work had primarily focused on setting aside large tracts of land but not on the impact of the recreational use of those lands. In 1951 the club reworded its mission statement to “explore, enjoy, and preserve”116 and the notion of conservation expanded to include issues dealing with the aftermath of overuse. Using images to communicate this new understanding of preservation, the Sierra Club began to explore the consequences of recreational misuse. The first step was small and local. In 1946 or 1947, Nathan and a couple of his friends made the decision to bring these issues into the spotlight and raise awareness within the club at the Sierra Club annual dinner in Los Angeles. Prior to that, he stated:

The decoration in the foyer of the dining room where we had the dinner was outdoor equipment-climbing ropes and tents, sleeping bags, and parkas, and things of that type. I thought it might be a good idea, since the conservation problems were growing very fast, to substitute some big, nicely made conservation posters. So that year we…planned these conservation posters….

114 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, 110. 115 Cohen, 93. 116 Cohen, 100. 93

They were big things, done in color, and they had maps and statements and photographs, and I think they were very impressive. They filled the whole lobby.117

The statement, “conservation problems were growing very fast” is indicative of the larger cultural shifts occurring in the United States after World War II and Nathan’s growing awareness of them. By exhibiting his posters internally at the annual club dinner,

Nathan was consciously steering Sierra Club policies into a new direction by shifting the focus from recreational equipment to conservation problems. However, despite the new message, Nathan’s exhibit, like prior club exhibits, was exhibited to club members only.

Despite this, they were an important first step. His posters were the basis of a series of traveling exhibit posters made in the 1950s, a new strategy that would culminate in a series of outreach campaigns. By then, Nathan explained “the amount of money increased, and we had Ansel's photographs, and Cedric Wright's, and the This is the

American Earth exhibit. As more members joined and the total income from dues increased, and the dues themselves increased, of course we could do more things.”118

The recreational activities of the club began to reflect this new focus on conservation issues as well. In the 1930s, Lewis and several other prominent club members had built a ski lodge at Donner Summit that had grown, by the 1950s, to include a vast network of back country ski trails and huts that encompassed the length of the

Sierra Nevada and connected to other Sierra Club lodges. The trail rights had been granted by the Forest Service as a result of their mutual focus on conservation issues. The popularity of the ski huts was one of the main factors in the growth of Sierra Club

117 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, 119- 120. 118 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, 118. 94 membership during the 1950s, demonstrating that the club’s overall strategy was still, as

Nathan had stated, to get people involved recreationally and then teach them about the

Sierra Club’s purpose as an advocate for conservation.119

However, education was becoming a more urgent topic and both Clark brothers were instrumental in implementing it as an official club strategy. Just as Nathan had redecorated the Sierra Club lobby with conservation posters, Lewis made the decision to change the focus of the Saturday evening programs at the Clair Tappaan Lodge from commercial travel movies to conservation education, stating that “pictures shown at CTL should be club-related and have educational as well as entertainment value.”120 In the initial stages of this shift, no inherent conflict existed between the concepts of education and entertainment, and of the social gathering as a hub for distributing information. The club’s mission continued to include both activity and education.

Public outreach began as an internal conservation campaign and turned outward only incrementally. The process relied on visual imagery in the form of movies, posters and exhibits, and these too first circulated internally rather than publicly. This is the central change the Sierra Club underwent as it moved towards environmental lobbying.

During this period, a transition which lasted from the mid-1940s through the 1950s, a gradual shift can be traced from a focus on recreational activity to political activism and from an internal, exclusive line of communication to an inclusive message aimed at the general public. Photographic images lay at the heart of this transformation, defining

119 Summarized from Lewis F. Clark papers, Box 2, Clair Tappaan Lodge papers. 120 Lewis F. Clark papers, carton 279, folder 14, January 17, 1956. 95 activity and informing activism, capturing the message for members and then broadcasting it outward.

Perhaps the most obvious example of the gradual nature of this transition is seen in the reaction to the 1955 This is the American Earth exhibit. The Visual Education

Committee was then chaired by Charlotte Mauk with Lewis, who had served as club president from 1949-1951, on the committee board as a consultant. The Visual Education

Committee first sought to capitalize on popularity of This is the American Earth and the power of its conservation message in a familiar way, by reusing the existing exhibit, initially shown in private club quarters at the LeConte Lodge in Yosemite, as public outreach to reach a larger audience. Mauk, wrote that “the display of Ansel Adams’ work with text by Nancy Newhall used in the LeConte Lodge during summer could be used at the Academy of Sciences in winter. Perhaps duplicates could be made for distribution.”121 These new modes of distribution were the key element of the shift in the club’s deployment of images. As the club began to reach outward, they reused what they had already circulated internally, recycling existing material for use with a broader audience. The members-only credo that had marked the Tenaya Canyon Exhibit was disappearing, replaced by the inclusion of the general public. However, they used the same displays they had exhibited in club lodges, repeating the same message in schools, libraries, and other public spaces. Even as they attracted new audiences, club members continued to rely on the ideals of activity and participation to communicate by staging public events in the form of exhibits and talks. The eventual publication of the This is the

American Earth exhibit in large book format in 1960 shows the end of this activity based

121 Lewis F. Clark papers, carton 279, folder 14, June 1, 1955. 96 transition for the more passive, consumer model of reading in solitude and privacy that followed.

Chapter Twelve: The Sierra Club Slide Library—“Interpreting for those who have not been there”

Another way to retool their message to a broader, more public, and less socially

involved audience was to incorporate the many personal slide collections belonging to

various members into an official part of club activity and activism. Members had used

slide shows as part of their personal get-togethers for years; by the mid-1950s the Visual

Education Committee sought to use these personal slides as an official part of their

emerging marketing strategy, stating that “slides have been used effectively at new

members’ parties to present something of the club’s history, personalities, and

facilities…preparation of such a set, for use within the club’s various chapters and

sections and to introduce the club to other groups, is a project now assigned high

priority.”122 To make this slide collection, the Visual Education Committee requested that

members donate copies of their own pictures for use in this slide library, sending out a

letter that stated:

The programs will be designed to show people who [do] not know mountain wilderness how beautiful it is, how easy it is to approach and enjoy it, and how much it needs protection. We want to lead the viewer into this unfamiliar environment via familiar introductory scenes, [to] show him—through pictures in which he can imagine himself—that wilderness is not necessarily forbidding or arduous. …Each photographer’s approach…will have to be different from what he has done before. Whereas most of us have hitherto concentrated on recording for those who have been there, the emphasis here is on interpreting for those who have not. We need pictures that tell a stranger more than just what the scenery looks like. We need pictures that not only present that scenery to the beholder, but also help him to identify himself with those experiencing and understanding it. 123

122 Lewis F. Clark papers, carton 279, folder 14, “Prospectus and Budget Request for the Visual Education Committee, 1954.” 123 Lewis F. Clark papers, carton 279, folder 14, Visual Education Committee, “Photographs wanted for educational programs.” 98

I have already stated the idea of “recording for those who have been there” is

crucial to understanding the photography of Nathan and Lewis, shedding light on the

original context of the Clark slides and explaining how they construct a landscape.

However, there is a deeper connection to this. In his oral history, Nathan referred to

albums containing print versions of these images. Personal albums serve as repositories

of things and events, functioning as direct stand-ins for personal memories. As personal photograph collections grow, these images represent not just a moment in time, but what

Barbara Levine calls the accumulation of time, revealing a progression through time in which a narrative not apparent at the beginning begins to unfold.124 Viewed collectively,

the photographs of Sierra Club members contain such a narrative. As slide shows once

exhibited socially among the company of other Sierra Club members, the images

represented a shared set of shared values and reflected the club’s aesthetic vision and

commitment to civic activity. Using this visual narrative as the basis for their outreach in

the 1950s, club members hoped to appeal to a larger audience on the basis of their core

values.

It is on this level of interpretation that meaning of the slides of Nathan and Lewis

Clark become clear: they capture more than scenery or events, but the essence of activity

and the aesthetic of outdoor recreation. They are pictures, as Mauk stated, that viewers

can identify with. By using these kinds of pictures to target a new audience, club

members began their publicity campaigns not only with conservation posters but with

their personal memories, their visual aesthetic, and their moral sensibilities. In part this

was an attempt to grapple with the tremendous changes occurring in the mid-century

124 Levine, 122. 99

American landscape, which represented a threat to the landscapes of the Sierra Club.

Their response to these structural and social changes can be read through the changing

use of their photographs, showing how and why an image, once a “recording for those

who have been there,” was recontextualized and redeployed with a new message:

“interpreting for those who have not.”

Initially the Visual Education Committee, still believing in activity and social participation, focused more on the social and less on the political. They realized their slide collection had potential for use in a variety of ways. Initially pre-written shows were

made available for outreach, with club members taking them and giving lectures to youth

groups, and at schools and public libraries. This was consistent with the older club model

used in the 1930s, with select members acting as ski and rock climbing instructors and

public guides. The slide collection grew to include a written narrative available for

checkout, in which case a club representative was no longer necessary for the lecture;

however the narrator supposedly relayed the club’s message verbatim to the audience.

One of the projects involved preparing photographic displays carrying simple messages.

Called Minute Museums, a single picture and accompanying story were to be displayed

in store windows in an attempt to reach large audiences with a single, simple message.

Through these visual displays the Club sought to communicate the symbolic message of

conservation through the act of sharing their activities with the public, hoping to inspire a

more moral and less destructive kind of outdoor recreation. Initially, this involved raising

awareness rather than using overt political statements.

The slide shows, designed for schools and youth groups and catering to children

from kindergarten to fifth grade, were intended specifically to develop their interest in the 100

outdoors and to raise awareness of the need to protect outdoors areas by encouraging

responsible use. By presenting images with the express purpose of educating through “a

series of how-to sequences involving backpacking, ski touring, camping, burro packing,

day hiking, rock climbing as well as information on parks and preserves, geology and

wildlife, and importantly, how to keep a clean camp,”125 the club communicated a

message that Mauk specifically referred to as “images of good and bad practices.” These

included littering and honky-tonk development juxtaposed to attractive roadsides. 126 Her

use of the term “practices” is important to note, indicating the club’s continuing reliance on the notion of activity. Her use of images to convey this message shows the club’s visual aesthetic still in place. However, these visuals no longer attempt to capture the sense of discovery the club had devoted itself through the 1930s, but instead document images of roadside development and trash. Activity, in the form of outdoor recreation was still paramount to their conservation efforts but they were also beginning to include images designed to shock. Their message was shifting from a focus on notions of discovery to one designed to raise awareness of problems.

Other series still relied upon activity as their basis, but again, the message had shifted. A series of how to images on rock climbing from the mid 1950s stated that the pictures “should be deliberately planned and taken” in Berkeley to “illustrate the point” of safety features and to downplay spectacular landscape views.127 Sierra Club

mountaineers had always been concerned with safety and training, especially after the

death of Peter Starr, as discussed earlier. However, then they had used the beauty of the

125 Lewis F. Clark papers, carton 279, folder 14, June 16, 1955. 126 Lewis F. Clark papers, carton 279, folder 14, June 16, 1955. 127 Lewis F. Clark papers, carton 279, folder 14, December 2, 1954. 101

landscape as a backdrop to communicate this, evidenced in the Ansel Adams image of

the two climbers roped safely together on top of an ethereal peak [see figure 20]. By the

1950s, the club still focused on activity but downplayed its potential to move the

participant emotionally and morally through an interaction with the associated imagery.

At the end of the series, when the viewer was properly trained, photographs featuring the

same climbers in the same poses were to appear again, this time with Yosemite in

background. By creating an interchangeable backdrop, the slides de-emphasize the

transcendent nature formerly associated with aesthetic vision and replace character

building with properly disciplined play. The generic backdrop also uncouples the image

from its link to experience, contradicting Adams’ idea that “even a static rock or a

dynamic animal (including man himself) may be thought of in terms of action… both of

things and experience.”128 Rather than using art to inspire viewers to want to learn and create their own connections with nature, the Visual Education Committee became determined to “interpret for others,” as Mauk herself had put it.

This was a response to the growing sense of urgency club members felt as the

damage from overcrowded wilderness areas was becoming more apparent. “Altruism

being rare,” wrote Mauk,

our success in interesting the public in wilderness preservation depends upon our success in demonstrating that appropriate recreational use of wilderness is not necessarily restricted to the exceptionally wealthy or exceptionally hardy, but is feasible for anyone of reasonable physical ability. It is our hope to produce pictures combining this demonstration with attractively sugar-coated propaganda for protection of the few remaining wild places.129

128 Ansel Adams, “Problems of Interpretation of the Natural Scene,” Sierra Club Bulletin 30 (1945): 47. 129 Lewis F. Clark papers, carton 279, folder 14, “Report of the Visual Education Committee,” May 15, 1947. 102

By attempting to wipe out all traces of ambiguity in the intended message and replacing it

with what Mauk refers to variously as “sugar coated propaganda” and “a clear though

sugar-coated moral,”130 the Visual Education Committee was trying to control the

message with a force the club had not previously used. This signified a shift in how the

club created and disseminated photographs. Formerly, any member could contribute to

the creation of the club’s message by taking, trading, publishing, and exhibiting the

photographs they took of their own experiences; now, a board planned and produced

images in a manner similar to a commercial or advertising campaign, intentionally

minimizing individual interpretation as much as possible.

At the same time, the Visual Education Committee was producing a set of stock

images with the opposite effect. The slide library, which had begun with club members

donating their personal photographs, now expanded into new directions with different

intents. In addition to using these slides to write their own pre-packaged lectures and exhibits, the Visual Education Committee also wanted to create a set of stock images available for use as illustrations by other scholars and authors in research, articles, and news stories. This involved breaking down each slide into its discrete parts by formally cataloging each slide in a card catalog, categorizing each individual aspect of each individual picture into separate categories, available for use on “a cross-reference basis for specific combinations of aspects.”131 This eradicates their original context, leaving

them as potential stand-ins for any meaning. Freed from specific meaning in this manner,

these images could potentially illustrate any idea, becoming equivalents beyond and yet

130Lewis F. Clark papers, carton 279, folder 14, May 19, 1954. 131 Lewis F. Clark papers, carton 279, folder 14, September 22, 1954. 103

at the same time strangely consistent with what Adams had envisioned. This is how

climbing trips became reusable as snow survey analyses, or carefree rock climbing

images became charged with social and political messages. Dependent for meaning upon

whatever context the relating text prescribes upon it, this complicates the role between

the photograph as process and the photograph as product, showing that neither is fixed or

permanent, that the image can co-opt either role. By deploying images in this manner, the

Sierra Club was beginning to transform from a group of people engaging in outdoor activities and photography together, into a corporate body with a political agenda and a publishing arm.

104

Chapter Thirteen: Photographs and Public Outreach—“Sugar-coated Propaganda”

The slide library lay at the heart of the Sierra Club’s transformation from activity

to activism. As specialized activities, such as rock climbing and ski mountaineering

became popular in the 1930s, club members organized into sections, creating sub-groups

organized around specific interests. One of these, the Natural Science Section, was

among the first and most enthusiastic to donate their slide collection of over 3200 slides

to the slide library. These included multiple sets about the history of the Sierra Club,

placing club history again into the tradition of scientific exploration stretching back to the

voyages of explorer-heroes such as Humboldt, Lewis and Clark, Darwin, and many

others. The Natural Science Section also donated slide sets on topics such as the history

of Death Valley with geologic notes, marine life at Pt. Lobos, and one called Patterns in

Nature, consisting of images of reeds on water and rocks, and other natural formations

that alluded to nature as photographic form.

While the Visual Education Committee welcomed these images into the slide

library, Mauk noted that

The problem with NSS slides is that they don’t work as propaganda—the material needs to be more personalized, the appeal would be relative to the viewers’ ability to identify with ordinary persons in pictures, “They should be having a whale of a good time,” the scenes should be cozy and then progress from the familiar to the unfamiliar and still seen possible. They could combine scenery, and “how to do it” descriptive material, etc. Younger people need more people in pictures. Animals help. And, primarily, we need to convey why the wilderness aspect is part of the joy.132

132 Lewis F. Clark papers, carton 279, folder 14, September 22, 1954. 105

This quote captures the essence of the shift in club policy. By showing how deep the connection between scientific knowledge and visual aesthetic was, it shows a remarkable consistency with club photography from the 1930s. Empirical observation coupled with natural beauty and engagement with scenery to create both a scientific and metaphysical vision of the world. By rejecting these slides because they didn’t work as propaganda, club members were rewriting their own past. By stressing stewardship and ethical practice over activity and discovery, they were assuming more the role of teacher and less that of guide. In this new club history, John Muir’s role as wilderness advocate fighting developments, such as Hetch-Hetchy, would loom ever larger, and the collective memory of his commitment to other interests, such as natural history and geology, would diminish along with the spectacle of the large outings he and William Colby organized.

During this time, the Sierra Club was not alone in creating public service announcements regarding various conservation issues. Many other agencies, most notably the National Geographical Society and the U.S. Forest Service, were creating outreach campaigns based on visual resources to educate the public. For example, this era saw the creation of the iconic Smokey the Bear campaign, complete with theme song and video teaching fire safety. The Visual Education Committee kept lists of all the agencies and all the films and slide shows available for outreach, including the age group these resources were aimed at; and it seems as if the club used these interchangeably with their own productions, maintaining lists of material available as well as prices and contact information. This shows that the cooperative arrangement between conservations groups and the government, forged back in the 1920s when the Forest Service began to explore recreational opportunities on public land, had not yet disintegrated. 106

Not just government agencies were involved. The Sierra Club sought to “reach a

new audience with sponsorship” and was proud to announce that “‘Big business’ is

devoting increasing amounts of time to conservation.”133 For this reason, the club

explicitly avoided confrontation. The Visual Education Committee minutes of March 6,

1956 included a discussion of the Conservation Education Committee, which worked

closely with the Visual Education Committee. Member Art Schulz stated that “the

committee is taking a broad approach to conservation and tries to avoid highly

controversial issues.” In the appendix to the 1954 budget request, Standard Oil Company

of California is identified as the distributor of a film called “Skyline Hike over the John

Muir Trail,” a film donated by honorary vice-president Walter Starr. Club members were actively avoiding politics at this time, choosing instead to work in tandem with both private extractive industries and other federal agencies to define and clarify a set of mutual conservation goals.

This offers a glimpse down the road not taken, suggesting there is nothing natural or inevitable about the later positions of industry, the federal government, or the Sierra

Club, but that a series of events and decisions sent these one-time allies down very

different paths and very different conservation stances, resulting in a hardening of

positions and the increasing politicization of the issue of conservation. These minutes

capture a Sierra Club in transition. On the one hand, it still relied on images and personal

stories to communicate its message, but it also decoupled the direct link between the two,

by depersonalizing the images to make them stand-ins for conservation practices such as

cleaning up litter. Through this tactic, club members were able to broaden the scope of

133 Lewis F. Clark papers, carton 279, folder 14, June 16, 1955. 107 the message and use it to reach out to a larger public. In one sense, the club was continuing to preach Muir’s message of conservation and recreation as a form of salvation and national pride. However, the effort was no longer confined to an exclusive group bent upon finding enlightenment through physical travail. Now they sought to maintain that civic landscape by reaching out to a national audience. The message was not yet the political message we see today, but one still based on a vision of a broad and responsible civic participation in outdoor activities. However, the propaganda element cannot be ignored as it is clear that the viewer was increasingly targeted to receive a very specific moral from the slide shows and movies, showing the club taking the first steps from creating and documenting its own story into a politicized realm.

108

Conclusion: “Amid the Mighty Walls of Zion”

Figure 35: “Passing Hours and Seasons Play Color Symphonies on Sculpted Walls”

Lewis continued to use images in the tradition of the Sierra Club he had joined in

1929. However, he too, was broadening his audience. In 1954 he published a photographic essay in National Geographic Magazine, titled “Amid the Mighty Walls of

Zion: Explorer-Vacationists Penetrate the Fantastic Narrows of Utah's Virgin River,

Heart of Zion National Park's Many-hued Wonderland,” recounting a river rafting trip through Zion Canyon with Nathan. The conflation of exploration with vacation captures an altered landscape, one in which discovery has been recast within the boundaries of 109

recreation, rather than vice-versa. As narrative, the article differs little from the youthful

explorations they and their friends recounted in the pages of the Sierra Club Bulletin, and

the images are replete with messages of athletic and civic virtue wrapped up in a

transcendent natural setting. Lewis remained deeply attached to the moral code of the

Sierra Club he had joined a quarter of a century earlier and was still using photography

and landscape to communicate it. The difference in this article lies solely in its audience,

broadcast to a nationwide set of readers rather than a through members-only publication.

Just as he had seized upon the growing popularity of Tenaya Canyon to write its history in terms of Sierra Club values, he now wrote a history of Zion, communicating these values through a story that included the natural history of the canyon, the history of the people who had lived there, and its growing popularity with travelers who sought beauty and inspiration in its walled cathedrals.

He was not alone in this. Other club members continued to rely on visual education as an emotional appeal to the viewer, a use of the camera that according to

Dunaway, transformed “seeing into a type of religious ritual and vision into a form of political persuasion.”134 Ansel Adams and David Brower would take this idea of vision,

emotion, and political persuasion to a new level when they began to consciously market

conservation as a consumer product with the Sierra Club large-format coffee table books of the 1960s, including the publication of This is the American Earth as a book not an exhibit. Hoping to raise support to get the Wilderness Act of 1964 passed, Brower marketed these books to affluent urbanites. According to Dunaway, “by linking ideology to personal identity, the Sierra Club tried to inject passion into politics and to present

134 Dunaway, 29. 110 environmental reform as a type of secular salvation.”135 These books would eventually rupture the decades-long relationship between Brower and other club members, leading to Brower’s resignation from the board of directors in 1969. The controversy originated over finances and club priorities, with Adams accusing Brower of misappropriating club funds. Nathan recalled how strained the club budget was as Brower continued to publish books without informing other club members, stating that “if we don't have enough money to hire lawyers to fight dams on the Snake River and also publish a new exhibit format book, which does he think we ought to spend our money on?”136

Brower focused exclusively based on spectacular scenery in the exhibit books, drawing upon an emotional reaction to beauty that the viewer could experience vicariously through the publication without ever stepping outdoors. While this response to beauty had its origins in earlier club photographs, the club had always emphasized that physical exertion was tantamount to its attainment, something that Brower now skipped in an urgent effort to reach everyone. The rest of the Sierra Club administration on the other hand, began to focus more on legislation and legal action and less on the beauty of nature as an abstract, turning to a conservation ethic that continued to stress participation, albeit through political action more than outdoor recreation. Their opposite approaches reveal the foundation of the rift that sent Brower and the Sierra Club into radically different directions in the future, with Brower using the image for political message and the club turning more to litigation. In this sense, Brower, considered by many to be the radicalizing force behind the growing politicization of the club was in fact, more

135 Dunaway, 119. 136 Nathan C. Clark, Sierra Club Leader, 74. 111

traditional in his continuing reliance on visual aesthetics as a means to appeal to and

inspire an audience, than was the club administration’s turn to litigation.137

Michael Cohen states that the club’s participation in the 1951 Wilderness

Conference marked the official entry of the Sierra Club into the national realm.138 This

was during Lewis’s presidency. The year 1961 was another watershed moment,

“mark[ing] the passing of the old, the coming of the new.”139 This coincided with the end

of Nathan’s presidency of 1959-1961; and along with it, the end of the old guard of the

Sierra Club and its alliances with government and business. Prior to 1961, the club board of directors had “included subdividers, developers, and men involved in resource-based industries over its entire history.”140However, a growing understanding of the impact of

industrial pollution and development led the next generation of club administrators to

prioritize environmental issues and assume a more confrontational attitude to industry

and government agencies, becoming the environmental lobby the club is recognized as

today.

In the process, club members recast their own history in terms of this new

understanding of conservation and preservation, creating an ahistorical approach that

environmental writers and historians have used almost exclusively since. This has

resulted in a portrait of John Muir and his followers as environmental activists fighting

development and environmental plunder, white-washing the role of the Sierra Club in

137 This is not to downplay the radicalism in Brower’s overall approach to environmentalism, but to specifically address his use of images in the coffee table books. The issues between him and other club official were multi-faceted and complex, with Brower rejecting many of the environmental compromises officially accepted by the Sierra Club in their legislative dealings; for example, club support of the construction of a nuclear plant at Diablo Canyon. For a detailed discussion of the conflict, see Cohen’s chapter “The Brawl.” 138 Cohen, 267. 139 Cohen, 267. 140 Cohen, 397. 112 land development to fit contemporary understandings of preservation. By historicizing the understandings of access and development and contextualizing them in history as I have, the role of the club’s social activities can be reconstructed as part of an environmental understanding, rather than detrimental to one. A richer understanding of club history emerges through historicizing the notion of conservation and linking it to these recreational activities, revealing landscape as a process, not a product. Access to and enjoyment of mountain landscapes formed the foundation of a visual aesthetic and ethic that constructed the very places later battles fought to preserve. By creating an ideal of wilderness as a proving-ground for character and a path to transcendence, and by deploying this ideal physically in specific places, such as the canyon walls of Tenaya or the stormy slopes of Mt. Lyell, Sierra Club recreationists built the very notion of place that underlies the club’s contemporary focus on environmental protection.

By downplaying Sierra Club recreational activities, much of its history has remained unexplored, a vast resource members themselves created in the form of Bulletin articles, papers, and photographs, all of which give body to their love of the land and create a deeper understanding of what was at stake in these environmental battles.

Understanding these materials as part of a process that recorded a deep engagement with landscape opens new vistas for research, providing not only a deeper understanding of

Sierra Club history or American environmental history, but a way out of the limiting paradigm of tourist-themed travel studies. Rather than casting travelers such as the Clark brothers as passive observers of scenery, and limiting the scenic vistas that enthralled them to products for viewing, tourists can be understood as active participants in their landscapes. A dynamic and reciprocal relationship becomes visible, in which tourists 113

construct broader cultural understandings of landscape through their interactions with it.

By analyzing how constructs of place connect with cultural conceptions of wisdom and

morality and by understanding landscape as an artifact of this process, place becomes what Basso calls a “manifestation of thought,”141 an existential doing as opposed to a

metaphysical being.

Engaging in landscape and tourist photography on this level frees it from

stereotype, allowing seemingly innocuous tourist photographs to become primary source

accounts of engagement with culture. This has major methodological implications for the

study of visual and photographic resources. By uncovering the process of their making,

photographs become reintegrated into their modes of production, rather than confined by

a mode of analysis that limits them to the role of consumer products. This view, as

discussed in the introduction, argues that photographs, guidebooks, and advertisements

reduce scenery to predetermined facts and prevent sightseers from actively engaging with

scenery. This argument rests on and reduces landscape to commodity, photographs to

products, and travelers to sightseers, constructing as well as explaining the tourist

landscape in terms of commodified experiences. While photographs certainly do

construct the landscape, historians such as Hyde and Magoc have limited their

understanding of landscape and photography as parts of a reciprocal process by focusing

on the commodity status of the image.

For example, a man stands at Glacier Point, one of the most photographed places

in America and his little brother takes a picture of him. Rather than dismissing this

photograph as a tourist product, an image we have already seen a hundred times before in

141 Cohen, 110. 114

our own photo albums and those of our friends and families, or the end result of yet

another summer automobile trip gathering dust in the attic, let us think about process:

about why people stand there and what results from their having been there. In the case of

Lewis and Nathan Clark, having stood on that particular spot ultimately affected the

policies of a nation. Although they remain almost unknown even in the annals of Sierra

Club history, and their photographs forgotten, Lewis and Nathan Clark contributed a

great deal to a national understanding of American landscapes and helped forge a civic

relationship with it through the photographs they crafted and the belief system they

expressed. Simon Schama points out that place is continually redefined and expressed

through new connections and new stories.142 By exploring Sierra Club history as not only

the history of environmental or legislative battles, but as the personal stories and

photographs of its members, intimate relationships with place emerge that lead directly to contemporary environmental understandings of wilderness, adding a new dimension to the richness of environmental and landscape studies, and the history of photography.

142 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

115

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