Norman Clyde of the Sierra Nevada, by Norman Clyde, with Foreword by Francis Farquhar, Prologue by Jules Eichorn, and a long letter by Smoke Blanchard. San Francisco: Scrimshaw Press, 1971. 180 pages, 20 photographs

We … proceeded down the canyon, pleased at having added another outstanding climb to the many already discovered in the Sierra Nevada.” These are Norman Clyde’s words describing the first ascent of the east face of Mount Whitney in 1931. I was struck more by the meaning of a single word than by the meaning of the sentence as a whole: “discovered.”

Norman Clyde didn’t just climb new routes, he “discovered” them. He is as much pioneer as mountaineer. He has climbed some of his favorite mountains forty and fifty times. Climbing historians tend to order mountaineering history by a predictable sequence of events. First comes the era of climbing the summits, then a period of seeking new routes up ridges and easy faces, and finally the ascents of the longest and steepest faces. Norman Clyde was doing all of these simultaneously in the Sierra Nevada. In the same era, he made the first ascent of 14,000-foot Mount Russell, and the aforementioned, rope-and-piton ascent of the east face of Whitney.

Clyde’s prose was an enigma to the many people who became involved with his manuscripts. His writing is tidy, and at times lyrical, but it is not dramatic. He consistently underplays his own personality and in only one essay, “The Quest for Walter A. Starr Jr.,” can the reader feel a sense of involvement. If one has been “Up The Rugged Canyon of George Creek,” then the events become alive. Otherwise they are lost in the constrained descriptiveness. In an epilogue, we are told that Clyde signed a contract ten years ago with a New York publisher who he later feared wanted a “hopped up personal story.” Breaking the contract, the manuscript was given to the Sierra Club, where it glided to the bottom of an eighty-year descending curve of interest in mountaineering, and, in the words of the epilogue, “got caught in the Club’s Armageddon and quietly sank out of sight behind the front lines.” But Norman is a few years older than the Sierra Club; he waited.

Before the reader gets the idea that the book should have sunk into well deserved obscurity, I should change the subject. The importance of the book is not just in the author’s words; one has to read into them — to know that there will never be another Norman Clyde, to know that there are no other Gentle Wildernesses on the face of the earth where a man can spend his life discovering and making first ascents of prominent mountains, to know the reality of, “The Pack that Walked Like a Man, who carried hundred pound loads for weeks on end.

Here is the happy marriage of the book. In a rambling, rollicking letter, Smoke Blanchard gives the reader an inside view of Clyde. The letter is so long that segments of it are distributed throughout the book along with photos mostly of Clyde and Dave Bohn. What Clyde lacks inconveying personality is made up by these sections. Bohn is known for his Exhibit Format book, Glacier Bay, and it is rare that someone who masters the technique to that type of photography is willing to publish the opposite. He has captured moments of Norman Clyde. Sometimes poorly lit and fuzzy, these unpretentious glimpses into Clyde’s recent life were taken at his mountain cabin and on a 1970 Sierra Club pack trip where, in Smoke Blanchard’s words, he went along as “a kind of king of the woodpile and general storyteller, and a sort of museum exhibition, being as he says, about nine hundred years old.” Bohn’s well-chosen photos and Blanchard’s rambling letter save the book from mediocrity and add a historical and visual perspective to the text.

Scrimshaw Press neatly solved the publisher’s dilemma: Clyde’s reticence is preserved, and yet the legend of Norman Clyde is permanently recorded.

GALEN A. ROWELL