Ansel Adams Read online

  David and his wife, Jennie, had opened their small camp with a total of seven tents at the foot of Glacier Point in 1899 as an economical alternative to the pricey Sentinel Hotel. When the Adamses arrived in 1916, tourism in Yosemite was booming. Camp Curry had grown steadily thanks to its attractive prices and warm, family atmosphere, and by 1916, the Currys could accommodate nearly a thousand guests at a time. Charlie, Ollie, and Ansel were but three of the ten thousand people who stayed at Camp Curry that year.22

  While planning their Yosemite vacation, Ansel’s parents had studied Camp Curry’s twelve-page-long brochure for 1916, which promised “ice cream daily, chicken every Sunday . . . two pianos, a barber shop, the only swimming tank in the Valley, and the largest and best hardwood dancing floor in Yosemite—experts say it is not surpassed in California—all for $2.50 a day or $15.00 per week. All roads formerly led to Rome. All roads now lead to Camp Curry.”23

  Porters, college students from Stanford and Berkeley on summer vacation, wheeled the Adamses’ luggage to Tent 305, which had a wooden floor, a canvas roof and sides, real beds with clean sheets, and a washbasin. Baths, although available, were not included in the room rate, but the Currys assured visitors that bathing in the Merced River was free.

  Camp Curry was known for its nightly campfire and evening programs boasting professional entertainers who told stories, acted out skits, played the piano, and produced various theme pageants, including a Hawaiian extravaganza complete with hula dancers. The practice was on temporary hiatus in 1916, but sanctions were lifted the following year, and each night’s festivities ended with a bellow from the camp to “Let the Fire Fall!” whereupon a huge bonfire would be pushed off the edge of Glacier Point 3,214 feet above, to tumble, sparks flying, to its demise on a rocky ledge below. This Hollywood-style spectacular, begun in 1872, had been stopped, if only briefly, by government men of good sense.24 As an adult, Ansel would swear that he had felt the Fire Fall to be a blight upon the natural wonder of Yosemite from the first moment he witnessed it.25

  To record their vacation, his parents gave Ansel his first camera, a Kodak No. 1 Brownie, which he took everywhere.26 The rapport among Ansel, the camera, and Yosemite was immediate. His long-smothered energy was finally allowed to burn. He hiked down the Tenaya Canyon and up the steep switchback trail to the top of Yosemite Falls, returning to camp hot and exhausted every afternoon to jump in the swimming pool. Although nearly friendless at home, at Camp Curry he found playmates and learned to play croquet and pool. Upon his arrival in Yosemite, Ansel had been a sickly, enervated fourteen-year-old; once there, he found health, happiness, and companionship.

  The next year, Ansel came back to Camp Curry with his mother. Money was tight, so Charlie remained behind to toil diligently at his new job at the Merchants’ Exchange. Ansel’s letters “To Pop” were brimful with enthusiasm, reporting that in the first two weeks he hiked fifty-five miles, and not long after that, 175.27 Ollie’s postals had a different tone, suggesting that it was taking all her strength to control their rambunctious son, to the extent that she had to block the door of their tent at night with a chair to keep him from sneaking out.28

  Ansel was such a live wire that everyone in camp soon knew him; given that there were a thousand other guests, that was quite a feat. A frequent hiking companion at that time recommended that Ansel consider going into the law: he was such a chatterbox that he would surely be able to talk a jury to death.29

  A retired geologist and amateur ornithologist named Francis Holman invited Ansel on a camping trip to Merced Lake above Yosemite. Uncle Frank, as Ansel called him, became his guide to the outdoors; over the next summers, he would teach his young charge camping, climbing, and a serious respect for the fragile qualities of wilderness.30

  The two left Camp Curry on July 7, 1917, with a mule loaded with their tent, bedrolls, camping equipment, and food. Uncle Frank ensured they would have good grub, packing a side of bacon, coffee, sugar, hardtack, and pancake flour; he expected fresh-caught trout to supply the protein for breakfast and dinner. That night was Ansel’s first away from his parents. He would be gone three nights more on this, his first trip into the High Sierra.31

  With confidence, the next summer, his third, Ansel came to Yosemite alone. Money had become even tighter in the Adams household. There was only enough for a vacation for Ansel. He was just sixteen years old, but his parents felt comfortable placing him in the charge of Jennie Curry, who was commonly known as Mother Curry, and Uncle Frank. Yosemite’s spell on Ansel had grown. Insisting he needed more time there, Ansel arrived on May 25 and proudly inaugurated the just-filled swimming pool.32

  At five the next morning, he and Uncle Frank left on a full day’s hike to Mount Starr King. When Uncle Frank decided to climb its ice-covered peak by cutting footholds with his ice ax, Ansel, who had promised his parents that he would be very careful, retreated to a nearby meadow to watch.33

  Soon enough, however, Ansel was accompanying Uncle Frank on every ascent, the two foolishly roped together and ignorant of mountaineering techniques such as belaying. Their climbing practices meant that if one had slipped, the other would certainly have been pulled down as well, or, even worse, been cut in half by the narrow cord.

  They had more than one close call. One morning they left their campsite at four-thirty, intending to climb Red Peak. More than fifty years later, Ansel could still remember the events of that day as if it had been yesterday:

  We were going up with the old ice pick and the window sash cords, chopping little steps. It was frozen snow, it wasn’t ice, and about a thousand steep feet of it. About eight hundred feet up, I slipped. And of course I started to slide—it was about 60 degrees to 70 degrees steep—pulled Mr. Holman off his feet, and we both went down. He was yelling, “Keep your feet front—front! Don’t roll!” And finally we got down. We were sliding face-down, and if you just touched your hands to the frozen snow it would take the skin off. We were really going awfully fast. And there was a whole lot of rock and snow piled at the bottom, and we went right through that—but missed all the rocks! Mr. Holman sort of sat there and rubbed the snow out of his eyes and said, “Well, we’ll go right up again.” That was the best philosophy. So back we went.34

  For Ansel, the schism between the healthy world of Yosemite and his humdrum life in San Francisco became even more pronounced. During the autumn of 1918, the Spanish influenza pandemic hit the city, and by the middle of October, the schools, churches, and theaters were closed and people were required by law to wear gauze masks at all times. Thousands died in San Francisco alone, and half a million in the United States; the worldwide toll was twenty-two million, twice the number that died in all of World War I, which ended on November 11 of that year.35

  The killer flu continued its devastation during the first months of 1919. Ansel fell very ill. His concerned parents bundled their thin, hollow-eyed son off to stay with Charlie’s sister and her husband, Aunt Sarah and Uncle Ansel Easton, whose ranch east of Oakland on the sunny slopes of Mount Diablo, would, they believed, provide a healthier climate than fogbound San Francisco.

  Aunt Sarah loaned Ansel a biography of Father Damien, the Catholic priest who had devotedly cared for the lepers on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. After reading that book, still weak in body and mind from the flu, Ansel became phobic. Germs were everywhere, he felt, and terrified that he would catch something, especially leprosy, he did whatever he could not to touch anything. When there was no alternative but to grasp a doorknob or shake hands with someone, he was compelled frantically to seek a washbasin and immediately wash his hands.36

  When he had recovered somewhat from the flu, he begged his parents to allow him to go to Yosemite. He was sure there was no leprosy there. Although his doctor advised against the trip, his parents consented to a one-month stay after Ansel agreed to monitor his pulse rate and to hike only on level ground. He arrived totally exhausted at Camp Curry, where he was again placed under the care of Mother Curry and Uncle Frank
. Slowly, steadily, every day he gained strength and could walk a bit farther.37

  His parents were startled to learn that Uncle Frank and their recently gravely ill son were planning to visit Lake Merced, the site of their first trip together in 1917. They needn’t have worried overly, however, as the hundred-foot-deep lake, brimming with fish, was at the relatively low altitude of 7,200 feet, and its sheltered location made it just about the warmest spot in the High Sierra.38

  They set out early in the morning, Uncle Frank walking and Ansel riding most of the thirteen miles. They began on the John Muir Trail, which climbs easily out of the east end of Yosemite Valley, beneath the broad southern base of Half Dome. Following the north bank of the Merced River, strung with a series of lovely alpine glens—Little Yosemite Valley, Lost Valley, and Echo Valley—they emerged to see Merced Lake glowing under the late-afternoon sun. It was at times like this that Uncle Frank, generally a man of action, not of words, might allow himself to remark, “Pretty fine, my boy.”39

  Uncle Frank cooked up oatmeal mush and flapjacks for breakfast, and for dinner they ate trout grilled over the fire and flavored with the pungent wild onion that grew abundantly about their camp. Ansel’s appetite returned. He was no longer gaunt, but instead tanned and happy. His phobias vanished, never to reappear. When they met him at the station in San Francisco, Charlie and Ollie found a very different Ansel from the fever-weakened, almost skeletal son who had journeyed off just a few weeks earlier.40

  Ansel would forevermore credit Yosemite’s healing powers with his recovery.41 Nature became his religion, and Yosemite and the surrounding Sierra Nevada his temple. As he returned to restore himself each summer till the end of his life, Yosemite remained central to his self-concept, as it had been for Uncle Frank, who in poor health at the age of seventy-five, finally had to give up his own Yosemite summers in 1941.42 Lucky Ansel to have been befriended by Uncle Frank, a perfect teacher at this crucial, highly formative time!

  Ansel’s inextricable link with Yosemite then existed only in his mind, but later it would have a place in the memory of a nation. Another man, John Muir, is also closely identified with Yosemite. Muir was a robust Scottish immigrant who, by the time he walked from Oakland to Yosemite in 1868 at the age of thirty, had already trekked a thousand miles from Kentucky to the Gulf of Mexico. He loved the intimate sound and feel of his footfalls upon the earth and the revelations that came because of his slow pace and sharp eye.

  Muir was awestruck by his first glimpse of Yosemite, but he was never speechless. He admired

  the noble walls—sculptured into endless variety of domes and gables, spires and battlements and plain mural precipices—all a-tremble with the thunder tones of the falling water . . . The great Tissiack, or Half-Dome, rising at the upper end of the valley to a height of nearly a mile, is nobly proportioned and life-like, the most impressive of all the rocks, holding the eye in devout admiration, calling it back again and again from falls or meadows, or even the mountains beyond,—marvelous cliffs, marvelous in sheer dizzy depth and sculpture, types of endurance.43

  In Yosemite, Muir found work as a shepherd responsible for a flock of two thousand sheep that he labeled “hoofed locusts.” The sheep’s devastation of the land, a ruminant-caused scorched earth, radicalized Muir, who resolved to rid Yosemite of the sheep and other livestock as well as the tilled fields of hay and wheat that had already changed the character of the valley.

  To earn a basic living, he worked for J. M. Hutchings. He built a water-powered sawmill and then ran it, producing lumber for Hutchings’s many projects using trees felled only by nature, not by man. In his spare time, Muir studied the geology and flora and fauna of Yosemite and the Sierra, keeping detailed notebooks on his finds and becoming an acknowledged expert on and self-proclaimed protector of nature. His articles on his experiences in the natural world began to appear in Scribner’s and other national magazines.

  Although he moved away from Yosemite in 1874, Muir returned frequently, often guiding parties of the rich and powerful. In 1889, he camped in the valley with Robert Underwood Johnson, editor of Century magazine. The state of California was either unable or unwilling to protect the valley from the complete ruination that Muir felt was fast approaching. Believing that Yosemite could be saved only by national protection, he persuaded Johnson to spearhead a campaign to accord it national-park status. Barely thirteen months later, on October 1, 1890, Yosemite became America’s second national park, following the establishment of Yellowstone in 1872.44

  Muir’s books, beginning in 1894 with The Mountains of California, probably did more than anything else to sensitize the nation to the plight of the American wilderness. Through his lyrical prose, he introduced and excited his readers to the great lands of America. His championing of Yosemite was so effective that the park became a priority on many an American’s vacation schedule.

  With Muir as its first president, the Yosemite Defense Association was founded on June 4, 1892, under the name Sierra Club, by a group of twenty-seven California residents.45 Its charter was to rally those who loved the Sierra to learn about it, enjoy it, and protect it.

  When Yosemite became a national park, the U.S. Army became its administrator.46 The military proved unsuited, however, to protect meadows, creeks, and valleys, or raptors, sparrows, and coyote. A defensive guard of rangers was called for, not soldiers. In 1916, the same year that Ansel first saw Yosemite, Congress created the National Park Service to govern, under the direction of Stephen T. Mather with the assistance of Horace Albright, the sixteen national parks and twenty-one national monuments that had been designated by that time.47

  Under the National Parks Act, it was the mandate of the new service to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”48 This commandment goes to the heart of most of the environmental battles of the twentieth century, pointing up the issue of use versus preservation.

  As an old man, Ansel would recall a story told by his good friend William Colby, who served on the Sierra Club’s board of directors from 1900 to 1949. Standing with Muir at Glacier Point one day, the valley spread before them, Colby had heard his companion ask, “Won’t it be grand when one million people can see what we are seeing today?” Ansel found Muir’s naïveté astounding: though Muir deplored the effects of thousands of grazing sheep, he could not foresee the destruction that would be caused by those visitors, with their cars, tents, and trailers, their campfires, grocery stores, restaurants, doctors, police, and jail.

  Historian Alfred Runte observed, “Too late Americans realized that seeing was not saving and that making observation easier exacted a price.”49 Perhaps Yosemite was condemned to ruination by its geology: a narrow valley with outlets only at its western end. It is testimony to the endurance of granite and the power of nature that after absorbing a flood tide of admirers, the valley still possesses at least a modicum of magic.

  Ansel was just fourteen when Muir died at age seventy-eight. Strangely, considering the strength of Muir’s legacy, Ansel never saw him as a mentor and did not even read his work until he was about eighteen.50 To Ansel’s taste, Muir’s writing was florid rather than fantastic, exemplifying the pompous grandiosity that afflicted too much writing on the natural scene.51

  Ansel never trusted words to describe something as profoundly visual as the “Range of Light”—Muir’s name for the Sierra, and the one phrase of his that Ansel did find perfect. Ansel believed that his photographs were distillations, not translations, of Yosemite and the Sierra, and that through his images the mountains could communicate directly with the viewer. Prose such as Muir’s, he felt, imposed an unnecessary and obscuring layer of interpretation between man and nature.

  John Muir set the wheels of environmental protection in motion. He is acknowledged as the father of the American environmental movement, and t
he conservation of Yosemite must be credited more to him than to anyone else. So, although Muir and Ansel never met, what would Yosemite be without Muir? And without Yosemite, whatever would have happened to Ansel Adams?

  Chapter 3: The Development of Vision

  Despite its familiar landmarks, from El Capitan and Bridalveil Fall to Half Dome, and its relatively manageable dimensions—seven miles long and one mile wide—Yosemite has consistently defeated those who have tried to picture it. Photographers, not painters, have been its most successful interpreters. Photography has further had an enormous impact on Yosemite’s history, first in the park’s recognition and then in the conflicting areas of commercial development and wilderness preservation. Yosemite, Ansel Adams, and photography are inextricably linked. But there were other artists before Ansel.

  Nineteenth-century armchair travelers were a large and lucrative audience for photographers. Everyone wanted to see what the Wild West really looked like, and photographs of famous places were collected and mounted in albums. Each new discovery added to the excitement and to the belief that America, with its splendid natural wonders, was surely the future of the world. And there was no greater glory than Yosemite Valley.

  By a serendipitous coincidence, exploration of the American West began just as photographers were discovering the great possibilities of their medium. Photographs poured back east and into Europe. New settlers made their way to California, no longer fearing the nightmare of the unknown but bolstered by visions of real places.

  Photography escaped from the studio into the outdoors with the invention, in 1851, of the collodion wet-plate process, which required much shorter exposure times than daguerreotypes or calotypes, the two dominant early methods. But collodion wet plate was surely not easy: a glass plate had to be coated with the light-sensitive emulsion in total darkness, after which it was placed in a light-tight holder, exposed in the camera, and then removed and developed in darkness while it was still wet. Photographers may have been able to advance into the field, but they remained chained to their darkrooms, or rather, their portable dark tents or dark wagons. There were a great many things that could go wrong.