David Brower: The Making of the Environmental Movement

David Brower

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the General Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the David Brower Center.

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ralph and Shirley Shapiro Endowment Fund in Environmental Studies of the University of California Press Foundation.

David Brower

THE MAKING OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT

Tom Turner

Foreword by Bill McKibben

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2015 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Turner, Tom, 1942– author.

    David Brower : the making of the environmental movement/Tom Turner ; foreword by Bill McKibben.

        pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27836-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-520-96245-3 (ebook)

    1. Brower, David, 1912–2000.    2. Environmentalists—United States—Biography.    3. Conservationists—United States—Biography    4. Sierra Club—History.    I. McKibben, Bill, writer of supplemental textual content.    II.Title.

QH31.B859T87    2015

    508.092—dc232015007045

Manufactured in the United States of America

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10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For my granddaughter, Alice

CONTENTS

Foreword

by Bill McKibben

Prologue: A Tense Meeting in the Mountains

PART ONE: CLIMBER

1 • From Berkeley to the Sierra: An Outdoorsman Is Born

2 • Yosemite

3 • Into the Sierra Club

4 • Love and War

PART TWO: CAMPAIGNER

5 • A Sierra Club Leader Emerges

6 • The Battle Against Dams in Dinosaur

7 • The Battle for Wilderness

PART THREE: VISIONARY

8 • Big Books for a Cause

9 • Growing Pains and Saving the Grand Canyon

10 • Uncivil War

11 • From Archdruid to Friend of the Earth

12 • Friends of the Earth Takes on the World

13 • A Resumption of Hostilities

PART FOUR: EVANGELIST

14 • Back to the Sierra Club

15 • The End of the Trail

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Books Published under the Editorial Direction of David R. Brower

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FOREWORD

David Brower, for all the reasons this fine book makes clear, was a very great man—along with his Sierra Club predecessor, John Muir, quite likely the most important conservationist in twentieth-century America. And that’s because he figured out how to do the hardest thing for any movement leader: capture the attention of a large enough slice of the public to change the American zeitgeist and thus allow a new set of political possibilities.

Muir had invented a new grammar of wildness in his early trips to the Sierra, a brand of stunned sublime that was unlike anything that had come before and that infected people almost immediately—not most people, perhaps, but for the purposes of, say, protecting Yosemite, there were more than enough who could imagine climbing a pine tree in a storm. But there things lingered for more than half a century, with Muir’s Sierra Club the perfect example: it never seemed to really get beyond its status as a hiking club for Westerners with some elite conservation work on the side.

Then came Dave Brower, one of those rare lifelong learners. He went from mountaineering ace to wilderness devotee to the heir of Rachel Carson’s fears, and as the ’60s progressed he managed to keep pace—he understood intuitively that Muir’s homely ecological insight about everything in nature being hitched to everything else applied also to politics: that population and pesticides and nuclear bombs were linked with wilderness and species conservation. He’d been in Berkeley since his boyhood, of course, but he was open to the new meaning of Berkeley as the ’60s wore on; he understood change and was comfortable with it. Excited by it.

Which most people in positions of power and influence are not. It’s so sad to read about the lesser men who dominated the Sierra Club in those days, unable to understand that they had as their leader a truly remarkable visionary who was changing the world in front of their eyes. They were happier to stick with the old, and so they did, casting Brower out in what is arguably the worst management decision any nonprofit organization has ever made (and one that the club is only now recovering from, under the inspired leadership of Mike Brune). But if it cost the Sierra Club, it didn’t derail Brower, who was fully freed to be John McPhee’s archdruid, and to argue and push and prod and provoke and excite with everything he had. And so: Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute and a hundred grand battles. I remember seeing him, near the very end of his life, in an eighth-of-an-acre community garden on the Lower East Side of New York, fighting alongside the impoverished local residents to save their vegetable patch from encroaching development. It was a long way from Glen Canyon, and it wasn’t.

I remember, too, a lovely week with Dave and Anne in Yosemite Valley. I was conducting a long interview with him for Rolling Stone; it was a pleasure for him to reminisce, pointing out all the routes he’d pioneered up the steep granite from the valley floor. But he never looked back for long; he used the occasion to instruct me about what needed to be done in the looming twenty-first century, that it had to be a time when restoration and repair became the watchwords. At the time I thought of myself solely as a writer, but as I’ve gone on to be a small-time organizer as well, his words have often echoed in my head.

And more than his words, his great, indomitable spirit. That thatch of hair, that broad smile, that bubbling stream of conversation. It drew you in. A truly great organizer is a person whom others want to be around, who lends energy to everyone he comes in contact with. That was Brower—I remember that he startled me by saying that as far as he could recall, he’d never spent a night outdoors alone, not in all those endless first ascents. He lived for connection, for contact, for gregarious exchange. And if he wore some people out (the Sierra Club board chief among them), he drew far more in to the great fight.

It was in his time that the real contours of that fight became clear. No single mountain range, not even the Range of Light, was terrain enough; the entire planet was at stake. Brower figured that out before almost anyone else. He was a friend of the earth indeed.

Bill McKibben, 2015

PROLOGUE

A Tense Meeting in the Mountains

It is a crisp, bright, clear Sierra Nevada morning, September 15, 1968. The Sierra Club’s board of directors is having one of its quarterly meetings in the meadow behind Clair Tappaan Lodge in the mountains 170 miles or so east of San Francisco.

The air smells of pine, cedar, and fir. The lodge, whose floors creak and are scarred from thirty years of pounding by ski boots, is used mostly for winter skiing parties. The club maintains and operates its own modest ski run, Signal Hill—still served, at this time, by a rope tow—above and behind the lodge. It is a ramshackle affair—half a century later the club’s website description uses the word rustic twice in one paragraph.¹ Visitors sleep in dorm-style rooms in their own sleeping bags and must do a chore—dishwashing, floor-sweeping, snow-shoveling—each day. Meals are served in a big dining room where diners eat at long tables, sit on benches, and serve themselves from bowls of salad; big, steaming trays of spaghetti; and other such communal fare.

The lodge sits about 7,000 feet above sea level, perched just above U.S. Highway 40, rerouted and rechristened a decade previously as Interstate 80, near Donner Summit. The summit is named for the Donner party, which got caught by blizzards on its way to California in 1846. For several months, about eighty men, women, and children were trapped just below the pass near what is now called Donner Lake. The party ran out of food, and after they ate their livestock, according to some survivors, they began to eat each other as people died of starvation.

The Sierra Club, a hundred twenty years later, is about to imitate the phenomenon.

The thirteen directors (two are absent) are sitting behind two long folding tables, set up in a splayed V shape. They are all men, all white, mostly of middle age.

The board president, Dr. Edgar Wayburn, sits at the apex of the V.

Sitting at the end of one of the tables is a tall, lanky, handsome, white-haired man in a plaid cotton shirt, reviewing the agenda. He is David Brower, fifty-six. He has been a member of the Sierra Club since 1933 and is its first—and so far only—executive director.

Brower has served on the club’s rock climbing committee, its publications committee, and its outings committee, among others. He was editor of the Sierra Club Bulletin from 1946 to 1953. He has been chairman of the San Francisco Bay chapter. He led club outings for more than a decade. He served on the club’s board of directors from 1941 to 1952, when he was named executive director. He is a familiar sight on Capitol Hill, where he has led campaigns to create parks, block dams, and win passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964.

He has designed, edited, written forewords to, and overseen publication and distribution of many books for the club, including the celebrated Exhibit Format series of oversize photo-and-text books (don’t say coffee table books within earshot), most of which were published to assist one conservation campaign or another. He is a decorated combat war veteran, a celebrated mountaineer, a skilled filmmaker, and an accomplished photographer, and he virtually invented the use of newspaper advertising for conservation.

The club is on a roll. Its membership is growing smartly, with now approximately 77,000 members, up from about 7,000 when Brower took over sixteen years earlier. The club recently defeated plans to build two hydroelectric dams inside the Grand Canyon and led successful efforts to create new national parks in the redwoods in Northern California and the North Cascades in Washington State. Its short documentary on the redwoods has just won an Academy Award.²

Brower has been at the center of these efforts and many others and is undeniably the public face of the Sierra Club and the main reason for its fame. He is, simply, the best-known and most influential conservationist in the country.

On the downside, the Internal Revenue Service has just confirmed a provisional decree it had made two years before: it has found that the Sierra Club violated agency rules by being too active legislatively, specifically with newspaper ads challenging the Grand Canyon dams. The result is that contributions to the Sierra Club will no longer be deductible by contributors for income tax purposes.

President Wayburn gavels the meeting to order.

Upward of one hundred members and staffers have gathered on folding chairs in the meadow or sit on the grass behind the lodge. Two or three microphones are set up on the tables for directors to use. The moment the gavel hits, director Richard Sill, a physics professor at the University of Nevada, leans into the mike closest to him and says: The Executive Director, in spite of great energy and remarkable ability, is not an able administrator of money. Sill argues that Brower’s "very energy is hazardous to the Sierra Club, in that he sees what he thinks should be done and acts rapidly, not infrequently involving the Club in unwise contracts, excessive financial burdens, and other actions which countervene [sic] Board policy or budgets. He pauses for effect, then continues: This seems to be beyond his own self-control and beyond the control of the Board of Directors. With the greatest reluctance I therefore feel compelled to support the immediate dismissal of David R. Brower from employment by the Sierra Club."³

Directors Ansel Adams, the world-renowned photographer, and Richard Leonard, an attorney and onetime close friend and rock-climbing companion of Brower, quickly second the motion. Director Larry Moss, a nuclear engineer and supporter of Brower, then moves that the matter be tabled. Martin Litton, former travel editor of Sunset magazine, now operator of Grand Canyon Dories, seconds the motion, which passes on a vote of ten to three. Adams immediately tries again, saying, Because of repeated financial and administrative irresponsibility, I move that David R. Brower be dismissed as Executive Director of the Sierra Club and as an employee, effective at the end of the fiscal year, December 31, 1968. This motion fails on a vote of ten to three. Brower has dodged a bullet, but Sill, Adams, and Leonard are not about to give up.

This is in part a generational matter. Ansel Adams has served on the board continuously since 1934, Dick Leonard since 1938. Brower’s supporters on the board, several of whom he recruited to run for election in the first place, have served for five years or less. The old-timers, who now number somewhat fewer than half the total, are uneasy about Brower’s bold, some would say scattershot, approach to his job. His supporters admire him for precisely the same reasons the detractors are nervous. Feelings run deep. The cannibalism will be only metaphorical but painful, dramatic, and decisive.

•  •  •

I was there that day, age twenty-six. David Brower had hired me the previous May to winnow a book from the writings of the legendary Sierra mountaineer Norman Clyde, a task to which I would bring enthusiasm but absolutely no training or experience. Upon completion of that project, I became Brower’s administrative assistant. When Adams and Sill moved to fire Brower, I was stunned; I’d had no idea what was brewing, being a callow newcomer.

I had known Dave Brower slightly my whole life. His wife, Anne, and my mother, Beth Turner, had met and become friends on the University of California campus in the 1930s before either was married, and our families lived only a quarter mile from one another in the Berkeley hills starting in the late 1940s. My family had been on a few Sierra Club trips, and I was deeply in love with the mountains. When Dave asked me to come work for the Sierra Club, I didn’t have to think twice. I worked with him at the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth for the next eighteen years. I was in touch periodically over the following fourteen years, until his death in 2000.

So I knew him as a grown-up, a boss, and a colleague. He was a many-sided character, who attracted both fervent admirers and dedicated enemies. He was quick to admit his own shortcomings and to forgive hostilities. He tended to keep his eye on the big picture, sometimes at the expense of immediate and demanding details.

I decided to write his life for several reasons. First, to learn. He threw out stories of his early years now and again, but my knowledge was sketchy and I knew the whole story would be fascinating and instructive. I also sensed that, despite his fame, notoriety, and great influence during the years I saw him in action, his legacy as one of the world’s greatest and most effective environmental activists seemed to be slipping to the margins of history. That was confirmed over the course of dozens of interviews for this project, and also by young college graduates in environmental studies or environmental law who, when I said I was working on a biography of David Brower, would say, Hmm. David Brower. I’ve heard that name somewhere. To me, that was shocking and needed to be rectified.

So I set out to write a professional biography of David Brower, an attempt to examine his career as an environmental pioneer and leader. This is not meant to be a thorough personal biography, though many features of his personality show through.

Despite—in some ways because of—the conflicts that rose up around him, David Brower was a key figure in the evolution of the environmental movement or, as some would have it, the evolution of the conservation movement into the environmental movement. There’s much to learn from his story, from his philosophy and his synthesis of various competing themes and concerns. Much to learn also from his mistakes.

Brower was a complicated man—charismatic, impatient with authority, some would say reckless, visionary (a word he probably wouldn’t like), driven. Working for him was exhilarating, maddening, frustrating, and inspiring. I wouldn’t have missed the opportunity for anything.

PART ONE

Climber

ONE

From Berkeley to the Sierra

AN OUTDOORSMAN IS BORN

I’d like to send Moses back up the mountain. He brought back the tablet with the Ten Commandments telling us how to treat one another. But he never brought back down a thing that tells us what to do about the earth.

David Brower and goat, circa 1920, Berkeley. Photograph courtesy Brower family.

In 1912, the year David Brower was born, the world was a vastly different place, and nature still held dominion in most parts of California, including his hometown of Berkeley. Back then, the town’s population was just over forty thousand. Today, it’s more than 110,000.¹ During that same time, the U.S. population grew from 92 million to something over 300 million. California’s population rose fastest: from 2.3 million to 37 million. Brower often bemoaned this rapid population rise and argued that it must be slowed and eventually reversed in order to avoid running out of air, water, and the other necessities of life—and to leave some space for the other beings that share the planet with us. How dense can people be? was one of his many quips, this one later turned into a lapel button.

Berkeley stretches from Grizzly Peak and its ridgeline down to the shore of San Francisco Bay, with the university campus at the base of the hills. The house David grew up in and lived in until the age of thirty is a handful of blocks from the university. Ross Brower, David’s father, worked there for a time as an instructor of mechanical drawing, and David would attend classes there for a little more than a year.

In the earliest days, the Browers lived on Carleton Street in Berkeley. There were three kids (with a fourth, Joe, to come along a few years later). Edith, the only girl, was eldest. Ralph was two years younger. Then Dave, three years younger than Ralph, then Joe, born in 1920, when Dave was eight.

Ross Brower was born in Bath, Michigan, in 1879. He earned a degree in engineering from the University of California and a master’s from the University of Michigan and then taught in a high school in Oakland and at the university in Berkeley. He was a strict Presbyterian, and alcohol was banned in the house. Dave’s mother, Grace Barlow, was born in Two Rock Valley, near Petaluma, California, in 1882. She earned degrees in English from Berkeley and Stanford and was a devoted mother, but tragedy would knock her sideways by the time she delivered her last child. Grace and Ross met at the First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley and married in 1906, ages twenty-four and twenty-seven—late by the standards of the day.

When David was about four, after brief stays at two other Berkeley addresses, the family moved to 2232 Haste Street, a half-dozen blocks from the campus of the university. Ross’s mother, Susan B. Brower, owned a house on the lot, and Ross had built a second one on it in 1904. The family lived in one of the buildings and rented out apartment space in that building and in the other as well, mainly to students. Monthly rents ran from twenty-five dollars for a single bedroom with kitchenette and bath down the hall to forty dollars for a two-bedroom unit with bath and kitchen.² Browers occupied the house until the 1960s, and it became an official Berkeley landmark in 2008.³

When the First World War erupted, David took credit for his father’s being exempted from military service: One of my first achievements was keeping my father out of combat. They called him in for various physical tests, which he passed, but they did not want to draft the father of three.⁴

When Joe came along, everything changed. Grace, who had mysteriously lost her sense of smell some years previously, abruptly went blind and lost the hearing in one ear as well. It was a crippling blow. She could no longer keep house or cook meals, and she began to have what the family referred to as fits. Much later, doctors surmised that she had had a brain tumor. To make matters worse, Ross soon was laid off from his job. He found a bit of part-time work here and there, but the family subsisted mainly on the income from the rental properties. And when they had vacancies, which, as Dave later wrote, was often, it was very difficult to make ends meet. Things would only get worse when the Depression hit eight or nine years later.

The kids all attended Berkeley public schools, first McKinley elementary (torn down in the 1960s), then Willard Junior High, then Berkeley High School, from which Dave graduated in December 1928. Traffic was light back then, and David and friends spent hours playing touch football (they called it passball) in the streets.

DAMS, BUTTERFLIES, AND THE SIERRA NEVADA

Once the winter rainy season ended, and when they weren’t in class or playing passball, Dave and Joe would spend hours building mud-and-stick dams across Strawberry Creek on the campus, then breaching them and watching the torrent race downstream. That ended in 1921 or ’22, when a new football stadium was built where the Hayward earthquake fault intersected with Strawberry Creek. Dirt was sluiced away from the hillside using a technique that is now illegal. Some of the mud became the floor of the stadium. The rest gushed down the creek.

According to David, It was no longer any fun to build a dam on it, or even possible. . . . It was a mess.⁵ And, perhaps, the beginning of an environmental activist.

Although Mother Grace had lost her eyesight, she had not lost her love of walking. David would take long walks with her in the hills behind the campus, describing the landscape, the animals, birds, and butterflies they encountered, trying to help her enjoy the view based on her memory and his descriptions. There were no buildings up there then, and few roads. Much of the walking was cross-country, so David was his mother’s guide dog as well as raconteur. He would later surmise that these walks had been the beginning of his ability to observe and to describe, which he would do with growing command and facility throughout his life.

In 1924 a family named Furer rented one of the units on Haste Street. They were avid butterfly collectors. Albert Furer and his younger brother, Fred, took young David on butterfly-collecting expeditions in the hills above Berkeley, and by the time winter came they had netted about thirty different species, or at least we thought they were different,⁶ wrote Brower.

This began an interest in butterflies that continued for years. David would look for which plants various species of butterfly preferred to feed on, what preyed on them, and how they looked in flight. Eventually, he became so familiar with local butterfly varieties that he could identify them by flight patterns, even at a distance of several hundred yards.⁷ Dave would later observe that this kind of identification of living things [is] almost automatic in any people not so insulated from nature as city people ordinarily are.⁸

The pinnacle of his lepidopterist career came on April 16, 1928, when he found and netted a previously unknown tip or sport (a mutation) of the common checkerspot, which he sold to a collector in Pasadena for ten dollars. The collector then named the subspecies anthotharsis sara Reakerti, transition form Broweri (Gunder).

The butterflies also taught young Brower hard lessons. He was raising some western swallowtails from eggs he had harvested from a wild anise plant. The eggs became caterpillars; the caterpillars, after careful feeding, wove themselves into chrysalids and began the magical transformation into butterflies.

Eventually the chrysalids began to split open as the butterflies strove to make their way out into the world. The exertion pumps fluid from the abdomen into the wings, which unfold and prepare to get airborne. David decided to help. He carefully widened the split so the butterfly could emerge more easily. They came out all right, and crawled to convenient twigs, but the wings never unfurled, not having had the exertion of fighting out of the chrysalids to pump fluid into them. The butterflies ran around helplessly for a little while, then died. Freeing them, I had denied them their freedom.⁹ A lesson that would echo forever: it is a good idea to understand as much as possible about a situation before trying to help.

When David was six, his family took its first big trip into the Sierra Nevada, driving in their 1916 Maxwell. Ross had built an ingenious wooden box that attached to the running board of the car. It carried the camping gear and folded down to make a table for cooking and eating. The first day they got as far as Sacramento, the second to Colfax, still west of Donner Pass. They made camp and David went exploring and found a spring, a wonderful thing to find. The next time they visited the spot a year or two later, the spring was gone, buried under debris from a clear-cut. I was quite upset by that. I’ve never forgiven the Forest Service. And I don’t intend to.¹⁰

On the third day they reached Donner Lake, and on the fourth the south end of Lake Tahoe. After dabbling in the waters of the lake, chasing squirrels and boulder hopping, the Brower clan headed for Yosemite. They drove down into the Owens Valley, whose thin water supply had not yet been appropriated by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and turned west at the tiny enclave of Lee Vining (named for a nineteenth-century miner named Leroy Vining) on the shore of the mysterious Mono Lake. The road up to Tioga Pass from the east is steep, and Grace and the kids had to get out and push to get the heavy Maxwell over the top. From there they wound down through Tuolumne Meadows, and eventually down into Yosemite Valley itself.

Dave, who would ultimately make first ascents of many Sierra peaks and pioneer routes up Yosemite Valley walls, was a late bloomer as a mountain climber. Although he claims credit for the first ascent of the west face of Founder’s Rock (a rock at the northeast corner of the Berkeley campus that towers a good dozen feet high) at the age of about five, he was unenthusiastic about hiking and climbing on his first trip to Yosemite, preferring to chase squirrels or stay in the car while the rest of the family climbed to Vernal Fall and other sites.

The lessons of the temporary destruction of Strawberry Creek in the Berkeley hills, the backfiring of good intentions in his informal study of butterflies, and the needless loss of a beloved spring would stick with Brower forever. The Berkeley experiences certainly were important, but Dave’s brother Joe insists it was this Sierra trip and others that followed that started Dave on his life’s journey—a crusade to protect and preserve nature, especially wilderness.¹¹

UC BERKELEY VERSUS ECHO LAKE CAMP AND JOHN MUIR

After racing through grade school, junior high, and high school—Dave skipped three grades along the way¹²—he enrolled in January 1929 as a freshman at the University of California at Berkeley, where his parents and elder brother and sister had gone. He was seventeen. As a senior in high school, he said he got quite a charge out of genetics. . . . I dug through library shelves to find out all I could about the evolutionary course of things.¹³ With that and his love of butterflies, he expected to major in entomology and signed up for several science classes—pomology, botany, bacteriology, forestry, chemistry. He found them less than challenging, and with the urgent necessity to work to help the family pay the bills, he dropped out in his sophomore year.

He delivered the Berkeley Daily Gazette and telegrams for Western Union and worked as a clerk in the Bunte Brothers Candy Company and on an assembly line in the Merco-Nordstrom Valve Company.¹⁴ But his first love by now was the Sierra Nevada, and he escaped there as often as he could, usually with one or two friends.

These were anything but comfortable trips: On one of them, Brower and two friends left Berkeley at 3:45 in the afternoon and reached Merced by 8:00 P.M. They stopped for pie and coffee and pressed on, stopping at Bear Flat for the night. Fate had destined little sleep for that night, though, recalls Brower. His friend George slept in the backseat. Vernon and Dave, each more than six feet tall, made do in the front seat, sleeping for 17 1/2 minutes all told. They listened for passing cars, heard all of four, and spent the rest of the time listening to frogs and wondering why the moon didn’t move a bit faster.¹⁵

In his diary, Dave admitted to a minor larceny the next day: I herewith confess that I took a little sign off the trail [to Bridalveil Fall] for my room: ‘Horses have the right of way. Avoid any act that will startle them.’ It was weather stained and dirty, anyway. A few pages later, he wrote of a surprise: Sunday dawned fairly fair. We found we had been sleeping next to the sewage disposal system, and decided that we would not breakfast there, but a little way down the river. . . . A dozen eggs, 2 quarts of chocolate, and a half pound of bacon furnished our meager breakfast.¹⁶

An important break came when Brower landed a job at a family camp run by the city of Berkeley at Echo Lake in the Sierra several miles west of and a thousand feet higher than Lake Tahoe. He did various chores around camp and, despite his inherent shyness, led campers on hikes into Desolation Valley and up surrounding peaks. He kept meticulous records of his climbs and hikes and wrote letters home, many on a typewriter; he kept carbons.

He wrote of a gala hike, leaving camp in the dark of 3:00 A.M. with two friends and walking around Echo Lakes,¹⁷ up the Tamarack Trail, and along the entire eastern side of Desolation Valley, where they headed east around Heather, Suzy, and Gilmore Lakes up to the summit of Mt. Tallac at 9,785 feet elevation. I don’t think I ever climbed the Tamarack trail under more beautiful conditions, and I have gone over it 53 times. They ascended three more peaks (Dick’s, elevation 10,015 feet; Jack’s, 9,910; and Pyramid, 10,020) before returning to camp, having logged forty-two miles.¹⁸ His brother Joe says that David knew the elevation of every major peak in the Sierra and kept track of all his hikes and climbs.¹⁹

The following May, Brower got welcome news: he would be hired for another summer at Echo Lake Camp. In his second summer at the camp, Brower became acquainted with a camper who suggested that, since he so loved the mountains, he investigate the Sierra Club and consider joining it. As part of the investigation Brower visited the club’s headquarters in San Francisco and began collecting and devouring back issues of the Sierra Club Bulletin, then published annually; it had been started in 1893, a year after the club’s founding in 1892. He wouldn’t get around to joining the club for another two years.

He also began reading the works of John Muir, the Scotsman who arrived in San Francisco in 1868 and wrote volumes about his travels in the Sierra, Alaska, and many other places. Muir’s favorite spot was Yosemite Valley and surroundings, and he and the publisher of Century Magazine, Robert Underwood Johnson, for whom Muir frequently wrote articles, hatched the idea of expanding the Yosemite Reserve—the valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant redwoods set aside by Congress and President Lincoln in 1864—to include nearly a million acres, temporarily leaving responsibility for the valley and the Mariposa Grove to California. There was little resistance,