George’s Collection of Sierra Club Bulletins

Bear Creek Spire from Rock Creek Ansel Adams, Sierra Club Bulletin 1931

Recently I found a box in our attic that contained a number of Sierra Club Bulletins dating from February 1931 to December 1963. As I scanned through them I found the writing to be informative and inspirational. Many of the photographs in the bulletins are by well known photographers. I see that the writing and photographs touched George and influenced his work.

In the first article, "Twenty-nine Years with the Sierra Club", William E. Colby, recounts numerous trips into the High Sierra.  It is accompanied with photos by Ansel Adams, such as "Bear Creek Spire, from Rock Creek", shown above.

At the close of Colby's article, he asks, "What is it that appeals to people and draws them year after year like an irresistible magnet into the High Sierra?....We may not consciously realize it, but it is quite certain that one powerful reason which induces us to go back to the high mountains year after year is their cleansing effect on body, mind, and soul.  They take us far from the jarring, jangling noises and jazz of modern life - where we are forced to be constantly on the alert to avoid the real dangers which confront us at every crossing."

Oh, he has no idea of how "jarring and jangling" the world will become 89 years later!

Here’s a view of Bear Spire from Rock Creek, taken on a family camping trip in 1989.

He goes on to surmise that sunrise viewing is one of the cleansing reasons we are drawn to the mountains.  "For the early rising which becomes the custom...enables us each morning to see the increasing light fill the eastern sky until it spills over the crest of the mighty range in a perfect flood as the sun itself finally appears from behind the shoulder of some sublime peak."

Here is one of George's sunrise images, "Dawn on Lone Pine Peak".  Early morning photography was the only thing George did before coffee.  I can see him getting up and out with his cameras, then back to the campsite after the sun rose for his first cup of joe.