Clarence King (1842-1901) | 2 Scripts

Lava Fields

From Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, 1872

Among the early scientists who ranged throughout California were many men and women whose scientific expertise was evenly matched by their sense of wonder and their ability to capture their feelings in words.

Clarence King was a Yale graduate who had been part of Josiah Whitney's Geological Survey of California. In 1872, he published Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, which contains an account of a scientific trip to Mount Shasta that reads like a travelogue.

. . . here among silent, rigid crater rims and stark fields of volcanic sand, we walked upon ground lifeless and lonely beyond description: a frozen desert at nine thousand feet altitude. Among the huge rude forms of lava we tramped along, happy when the tracks of mountain sheep suggested former explorers, and pleased if a snowbank under rock shadow gave birth to spring or pool. But the severe impression of arctic dreariness passed off when, reaching a rim, we looked over and down upon the volcano's north foot, a superb sweep of forest country waved with ridgy flow of lava and gracefully curved moraines.

Afar off, the wide sunny Shasta Valley, dotted with miniature volcanoes, and checked with the yellow and green of grain and garden, spread pleasantly away to the north, bounded by Klamath hills and horizoned by the blue rank of Siskiyou Mountains. . .

King was head of the United States Geologic Survey between 1878 and 1881 and then became a private mining engineer. In his lively account of his travels in California's high country, though, he created a model blend of aesthetic fancy and scientific description.

Mt. Whitney

From Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, 1872

In 1871 Clarence King thought he was the first European to reach the summit of Mount Whitney. But unfortunately for King, he climbed the wrong mountain.

King learned of his mistake only after he brought out his 1872 volume Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, which included a vivid description of his mistaken triumph.

When all else was buried in cloud we watched the great west range. Weird and strange, it seemed shaded by some dark eclipse, Here and there through its gaps and passes, serpent-like streams of mist floated in and crept slowly down the cañons of the hither slope. . . .

Just for a moment every trace of vapor cleared away from the east, unveiling for the first time spurs and gorges and plains. I crept to the brink and looked down into the Whitney cañon, which was covered with light. Great scarred and ice-hewn precipices reached down four thousand feet, curving together like a ship, and holding in their granite bed a thread of a brook, the small sapphire gems of alpine lake, bronze dots of pine, and here and there a fine enamelling of snow.

King acknowledged his error in a subsequent edition of his book. And despite his mistake, the one-time head of the US Geologic Survey left a marvelous description of climbing the high Sierra at a time when that realm remained little known.