Bay Area Style Tuolumne County Gives Celebrating Wealthy renowned A guide to donors’ S.F. retailer autumn’s legacies Wilkes best live on Bashford’s hiking, through Island Style ever-so- climbing their good Unforgettable Hawaiian adventures. K1 stylish and works. N1 career. J1 biking. M1 SFChronicle.com | Sunday, October 18,2015 | Printed on recycled paper | $3.00 xxxxx• Airbnb measure divides neighbors Prop. F’s backers, opponents split come in the middle of the night, CAMPAIGN 2015 source of his income in addition bumping their luggage down to work as a real estate agent over impact on tight housing market the alley. This is not an occa- and renewable-energy consul- sional use when a kid goes to ing and liability issues. tant, Li said. college or someone is away for a But Li, 38, said he urges “I depend on Airbnb to make By Carolyn Said Phil Li, who rents out three week. Along with all the house guests to be respectful, while sure I can meet each month’s suites to travelers via Airbnb. cleaners, it’s an array of com- two other neighbors said that expenses,” he said. “I screen A narrow alley separates “He’s running a hotel next mercial traffic in a residential they are not affected. Vacation guests carefully and educate Libby Noronha’sWest Portal door,” said Noronha, 67,a re- neighborhood,” she said of the rentals helped him after he lost them to come and go quietly.” house from that of her neighbor tired federal employee. “People noise, smoking, garbage, park- his job and remain a major Prop. Fcontinues on A15 1883 2015 By Tom Stienstra In 1883, Israel Russell took the Yosemite: High on the Lyell Glacier in Yo semite National Park, a vein of water top photo of the cut a narrow gouge as it streamed downslope from the melting ice. Lyell Glacier, Off to the right, you could see a thin, foot-wide current, also from when its size melting ice, which flowed a quarter inch beneath the surface. At the was 13.15 foot of the glacier, drops of water from the glacier’s receding edge hit million square Warming bare granite. Dozens of rivulets poured onto an exposed field of boul- feet. Keenan ders, talus and a moraine that had been covered for thousands of years Takahashi took by snow and ice. the bottom pho- The Lyell Glacier, once estimated as a mile wide and Yo semite’s larg- to in 2015 from the same spot. est glacier when visited by John Muir in 1872, could melt and disappear The glacier takes a toll in as soon as five years, according to park geologist Greg Stock, if warm shrank to 2.9 temperatures at high elevations continue. million square The glacier has lost about 90 percent of its volume and 80 percent of feet, losing 90 Lyell Glacier, largest in the park, its surface area from 1883 to 2015, according to Stock and Peter Devine, percent of vol- a naturalist with the Yo semite Conservancy who has studied the Lyell ume and about is melting, may be gone in 5 years Glacier for 30 years. Stock and a crew of geologists measured the pe 80 percent of Yosemite continues on A16 surface area. Marin poet considers Museums chief Wilsey the nuances of loss under fire for payment Weather C12 By Ryan Kost may learn some things about It’s been all sparkling dress- MATIER & ROSS her, about the thoughts that Dede es, black ties and smiles at the “When you read a poem and it occupy her mind, her wry sense Wilsey has de Yo ung Museum lately dur- communicates to you, you feel that of humor, her sly way with the been ing celebrations of the 10th Museums’ longtime chief fi- you half wrote it. You feel part of words she chooses. Yo u would faulted anniversary of the new build- nancial officer, Michele Gutier- the making in a way. It’s a won- not, however, learn about her for a ing’s opening. Behind the rez, has landed both at City derful thing. You’re in cahoots. dusty youth, the long bike rides $450,000 scenes, however, a bombshell Hall and state Attorney General You’re in cahoots with the writer.” she used to take that had her payment has dropped: a whistle-blower Kamala Harris’ office. It centers that a — Kay Ryan waking up dew-covered on the complaint accusing the queen on $450,000 Wilsey ordered beach or the home she has museums of the ball, museum board paid to an ailing staffer, and Kay Ryan’s poetry stands on made, tucked away in Marin. executive president and socialite philan- both the city and museum its own, separate, as she might Perhaps most notably, you says thropist Dede Wilsey,of fi- Board of Trustees have been lacked the put it, from any “autobiograph- would not learn about Carol nancial misconduct. looking into it, the sources say. board’s Multiple sources tell us the Gutierrez says Wilsey got ical gloss.” If you read enough Adair,her partner of 30 years approval. of her poems, say a dozen, you Ryan continues on A6 complaint by the Fine Arts Matier & Ross continues on A12 A16 | Sunday, October 18, 2015 | SFChronicle.com XXXXX• FROM THE COVER Yosemite’s Lyell Glacier victim of climate change Yosemite from page A1 rimeter of the glacier with a GPS in the last week of Sep- tember. “I’m getting the feeling I may be the last geologist to study these glaciers,” Stock said. “Pretty soon, there won’t be any ice here at all, just a rub- ble-strewn basin. I’m starting to think like a biologist, some- body who is studying an en- dangered species, something that can disappear.” “It is disappearing right in front of our eyes,” Devine said on a recent trek to the glacier. Seeing difference in a week Josh Helling, a mountain- eering guide and photographer who made trips to the Lyell Glacier in back-to-back weeks at the turn of the month with Stock and Devine, said he was stunned at how fast the glacier is melting. “In just a week, you can see the difference,” he said. The Lyell Glacier is in the Yo semite Wilderness out of Tuolumne Meadows near Donohue Pass, nestled on the high flank of 13,120-foot Mount Lyell. To see it and the neigh- boring Maclure Glacier, The Chronicle joined an expedition at the end of September that Photos by Braden Mayfield / Special to The Chronicle involved a 30-mile trek with total climbs of 5,000 feet, and A moment Above: The more than 10 miles hiked off dusk sky trail across boulder fields, in time, 1935 appears to talus, scree and bedrock, and “Why is it important that we be on fire six hours of ice travel. should measure our glaciers? over the Sierra Crest Miles above tree line, a What need is there of going to in the high harsh wind blew. A dark, all of this trouble, and what country of cloud-lined ceiling painted the purpose will be served by the the Yosemite sky the color of blue steel. To results? The answer is that gla- ciers are extremely sensitive to Wilderness, trek up the glacier and mea- viewed from sure its edges, hikers dug their climatic fluctuations and register them more vividly than do the Lyell spike-tipped boots, laced with Cirque above crampons, into the ice, and streams, springs, lakes, or vege- tation; and since we have so Tuolumne steadied themselves with ice Meadows axes. It was the last of what delicately, so daringly adjusted some of our great agricultural and near remained of an open ice field. and engineering enterprises and Donohue “If we were standing here their dependent industries to Pass. the day John Muir crossed the existing climatic conditions, it Lyell, we’d be under 150 feet of behooves us for the good of our snow and ice,” Devine said. complex American civilization to “I think about John Muir a keep a close watch on climatic lot up there on the glacier,” changes or fluctuations, howev- Left: Stock said. “I try to envision er slight and transient, that may Naturalist what it was like when Muir be taking place.” Peter Devine was here. It would have been (left) of — Francois Matthes, Yosemite so different. I think about what U.S. Geological Survey, 1935 (Francois) Matthes (of the U.S. Conservancy Geological Survey) said in 1935, and about why we need to measure Chronicle our glaciers, that glaciers are voir capacity and, in some outdoors sensitive indicators of climate areas, much higher than that. writer Tom Stienstra change.” On a global scale, glaciers hold climb the more than 50 percent of the On the John Muir Trail disappearing world’s freshwater, according Lyell Glacier The expedition launched to the National Geographic at 12,500 feet from Tuolumne Meadows in Society. In some areas, such as in the Yo semite National Park, with the Andes and Himalayas, the Yosemite the first steps taken on the recession of glaciers is a long- Wilderness. John Muir Trail, elevation term threat to water supply. 8,700 feet. It was the same The recession of the Lyell route John Muir chose in the Glacier and other glaciers isn’t 1870s when he started measur- from drought, according to state geologistJosiah Whitney ing Yo semite’s glaciers. many climatologists. Over the and others, such as LeConte of The chosen path followed past 100 years, precipitation the University of California, alongside the Lyell Fork of the has remained steady, with that glaciers existed in Califor- Tuolumne River, the stream occasional blips from droughts nia and were a primary force that is created from the first and floods, they say.