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Clarence King, Scholar-Adventurer william brewer, the field director of the California survey, looked long at the Sierra’s highest peak, then back to his assistant, Clarence King (1842–1901), and shook his head: “A man might as well climb a cloud.” That settled the matter for King, who went through life with an “audacity that invited disaster.”1 He decided then and there to ascend Mt. Whitney, which had been named after sighting by members of the California Geological Survey in 1864. Given other lives, King might have conquered continents or led a nation, but Louis Agassiz’s Harvard lectures on glaciers had inspired him to desert the snug comforts of Cambridge and travel by wagon train and horseback through rough mining towns and rougher country, in search of Josiah Whitney, chief of the California Geological Survey.2 King had to use every ounce of his silver-tongued eloquence to persuade Whitney to add him to his team. He had less trouble convincing Dick Cotter, a drover with the expedition , to join his climb of Mt. Whitney. In the tangy, moist air of a California morning , the young men set off shouldering fortypound packs, which threatened, once they reached higher altitudes, to drag them into oblivion. King, whose favorite literary hero happened to be Don Quixote, had no plan except accomplishing what Brewer had pronounced impossible. With no visible route and none of the sophisticated equipment of today’s climbers, 15 While I looked the sun descended; shadows climbed the Sierras, casting a gloom over foothill and pine, until at last only the snow summits, reflecting the evening light, glowed like red lamps along the mountain wall for hundreds of miles. The rest of the Sierra became invisible. The snow burned for a moment in the violet sky, and at last went out. clarence king, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, 1872 r e p u b l i c o f w o r d s [ 126 ] the two set off, knowing they would have to weave their way through a maze of towering pinnacles, chopping footholds up the sides of colossal boulders, and struggling through gorges and snowfields. The first night they made camp on a narrow granite shelf and tried to sleep as temperatures dropped to zero. Missiles of falling rock drove them from their shelter before dawn. The next day they lunched at thirteen thousand feet. To the west “stretched the Mount Brewer wall with its succession of smooth precipices and amphitheatre ridges. To the north the great gorge of the King’s River plunged down five thousand feet.” The Kern Valley opened below them “with its smooth oval outline, the work of extinct glaciers , whose form and extent were evident from worn cliff-surface and rounded wall; snow-fields, relics of the former névé, hung in white tapestries around its ancient birthplace . . . [and] the broad, corrugated valley [stretched], for a breadth of fully ten miles.”3 Assessing their options, they realized they had one blind choice. Cotter declared they were “in for it now.”4 He braced himself against the mountain , then waved his companion forward. With the other end of the rope around his chest, King inched ahead, clutching shards of rock and wedging his fingers into crevices. They knew that if he lost his balance, both would die. As King told readers of the Atlantic (July 1871), I shouted to him to be very careful and let go in case I fell, loosened my hold upon the rope, and slid quickly down. My shoulder struck against the rock and threw me out of balance; for an instant I reeled over upon the verge, in danger of falling, but, in the excitement, I thrust out my hand and seized a small alpine gooseberry-bush, the first piece of vegetation we had seen. Its roots were so firmly fixed in the crevice that it held my weight and saved me.5 They reached their destination at exactly twelve noon. At the summit, King felt as though he had entered a vacuum drained of all sound. He and Cotter gazed out at a crazy quilt of peaks and discovered that they had not climbed Mt. Whitney after all. Unbowed, King rang his “hammer upon the topmost rock,” the men grasped hands, and King officially christened their mountain Mount Tyndall, in honor of the English geologist John Tyndall.6 He had already begun planning a future climb of Mt. Whitney, which he did a month after...

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