“The whole air sparkled with diamond particles”

Clarence King

Clarence King led a life than many envied and some reviled.  His professional career reached soaring pinnacles of success, while his personal existence was marked by financial failure, mental problems, serious illness, and racism.  It was Dickensian in scope and consequence.  It is also an important element in understanding the 19th century American West.

Born in Rhode Island in 1842, King graduated from Yale at the tender age of nineteen.  Soon after graduation, Clarence King would serve as assistant geologist under Josiah Whitney and the California Geological Survey from 1863 - 1866.  A year later, 25-year-old King was appointed director of the Geological and Geographical Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel Survey.  His ten-year expedition explored and surveyed a 100-mile wide swath from eastern Colorado to the California border.  King produced a seven-volume report on the exploration.

Clarence King was meticulously scientific, stressing laboratory work; and innovative, introducing the system of contour lines in topography.  In 1878, King was appointed the first head of the newly organized western survey department of the United States Geological Survey.  In 1879, he wrote his most important scientific tome, the 800-page Systematic Geology.  But King is much better known for his attempt to write for the popular audience with his 1872 Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.  Clarence King was convinced that he could present the scientific story of the Sierra Nevada without resorting to the romantic rhetoric employed by, what King dismissively referred to as, “the army of literary travelers.”  King melded geological scholarship with carefully crafted descriptions to present a comprehensive and occasionally moving narrative of the mountaineering experience.  King loved the mountains and hoped that his account would lead to increased preservation efforts, but he feared that his book would promote additional tourism and regional degradation.  He was right on both accounts.

In 1881, King left government service to enter private sector mining engineering.  In 1887, he would secretly marry his housemaid, a black women, by whom he would have five children.  In late 19th century America, their union was a highly charged racial issue.  The family felt the bitter sting of racism.

In the Panic of 1893, King suffered financial collapse.  In its wake, he committed himself to a New York City asylum for a year.  Upon leaving the mental institution and recovered to a degree, Clarence King sent his wife to less racially prejudiced Canada.  Soon afterward King learned that he was deathly ill with tuberculosis.

Clarence King would die in Phoenix in 1901 at age 59.  As a monument, a 12,909-foot peak in the Sierra Nevada was named Mt. King in his honor.

This selection from Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada presents Clarence King’s account of a Sierra storm.

            Warmly rolled in our blankets, we suffered little from cold, but the driving sleet and hail very soon bruised our cheeks and eyelids most painfully. It required real effort of will to face the storm, and we very soon learned to take turns in breaking trail. The snow constantly balled upon our animals' feet, and they slid in every direction. Now and then, in descending a sharp slope of granite, the poor creatures would get sliding, and rush to the bottom, their legs stiffened out, and their heads thrust forward in fear. After crossing the Illilluette, which we did at our old ford, we found it very difficult to climb the long, steep hillside; for the mules were quite unable to carry us, obliging us to lead them, and to throw ourselves upon the snow-drifts to break a pathway.

            This slope almost wore us out, and when at last we reached its summit, we threw ourselves upon the snow for a rest, but were in such a profuse perspiration that I deemed it unsafe to lie there for a moment, and, getting up again, we mounted the mules and rode slowly on toward open plateaus near great meadows. The snow gradually decreased in depth as we descended upon the plain directly south of the Yosemite. The wind abated somewhat, and there were only occasional snow flurries, between half-hours of tolerable comfort. Constant use of the compass and reference to my little map at length brought us to the Mariposa trail, but not until after eight hours of anxious, exhaustive labor-anxious from the constant dread of losing our way in the blinding confusion of storm; exhausting, for we had more than half of the way acted as trail-breakers, dragging our frightened and tired brutes after us. The poor creatures instantly recognized the trail, and started in a brisk trot toward Inspiration Point. Suddenly an icy wind swept up the valley, carrying with it a storm of snow and hail. The wind blew with such violence that the whole freight of sleet and ice was carried horizontally with fearful swiftness, cutting the bruised faces of the mules, and giving our own eyelids exquisite torture. The brutes refused to carry us farther. We were obliged to dismount and drive them before us, beating them constantly with clubs.

            Fighting our way against this bitter blast, half- blinded by hard, wind-driven snow-crystals, we at last gave up and took refuge in a dense clump of firs which crown the spur by Inspiration Point. Our poor mules cowered under shelter with us, and turned tail to the storm. The fir-trees were solid cones of snow, which now and then unloaded themselves when severely bent by a sudden gust, half burying us in dry, white powder. Wind roared below us in the Yosemite gorge; it blew from the west, rolling up in waves which smote the cliffs and surged on up the valley. While we sat still the drifts began to pile up at our backs; the mules were belly-deep, and our situation began to be serious.

            Looking over the cliff-brink we saw but the hurrying snow, and only heard a confused tumult of wind. A steady increase in the severity of the gale made us fear that the trees might crash down over us; so we left the mules and crept cautiously over the edge of the cliff, and ensconced ourselves in a sheltered nook, protected by walls of rock which rose at our back.

           We were on the brink of the Yosemite, and but for snow might have looked down three thousand feet. The storm eddied below us, sucking down whirlwinds of snow, and sometimes opening deep rifts, - never enough, however, to disclose more than a few hundred feet of cliffs.

            We had been in this position about an hour, half frozen and soaked through, when I at length gathered conscience enough to climb back and take a look at our brutes. The forlorn pair were frosted over with a thick coating, their pitiful eyes staring eagerly at me. I had half a mind to turn them loose, but, considering that their obstinate nature might lead them back to our Obelisk camp I patted their noses, and climbed back to the shelf by Cotter, determined to try it for a quarter of an hour more, when, if the tempest did not lull, I thought we must press on and face the snow for an hour more, while we tramped down to the valley.

            Suddenly there came a lull in the storm; its blinding fury of snow and wind ceased. Overhead, still hurrying eastward, the white bank drove on, unveiling, as it fled, the Yosemite walls, plateau, and every object to the eastward as far as Mount Clark. As yet the valley bottom was obscured by a layer of mist and cloud, which rose to the height of about a thousand feet, submerging cliff-foot and debris pile. Between these strata, the cloud above and the cloud below, every object was in clear, distinct view; the sharp, terrible fronts of precipices, capped with a fresh cover of white, plunged down into the still, gray river of cloud below, their stony surfaces clouded with purple, salmon-color, and bandings of brown,- all hues unnoticeable in every-day lights. Forest, and crag, and plateau, and distant mountain were snow-covered to a uniform whiteness; only the dark gorge beneath us showed the least traces of color. There all was rich, deep, gloomy. Even over the snowy Surfaces above there prevailed an almost ashen gray, which reflected itself from the dull, drifting sky. A few torn locks of vapor poured over the cliff-edge at intervals, and crawled down like wreaths of smoke, floating gracefully and losing themselves at last in the bank of cloud which lay upon the bottom of the valley.

            On a sudden the whole gray roof rolled away like a scroll, leaving the heavens from west to far east one expanse of pure, warm blue. Setting sunlight smote full upon the stony walls below, and shot over the plateau country, gilding here a snowy forest group, and there a wave-crest of whitened ridge. The whole air sparkled with diamond particles; red light streamed in through the open Yosemite gateway, brightening those vast, solemn faces of stone, and intensifying the deep neutral blue of shadowed alcoves.

            The luminous cloud-bank in the east rolled from the last Sierra summit, leaving the whole chain of peaks in broad light, each rocky crest strongly red, the newly fallen snow marbling it over with a soft, deep rose; and wherever a canon carved itself down- the rocky fronts its course was traceable by a shadowy band of blue. The middle distance glowed with a tint of golden yellow; the broken heights along the canon-brinks and edges of the cliff in front were of an intense, spotless white. Far below us the cloud stratum melted away, revealing the floor of the valley, whose russet and emerald and brown and red burned in the broad evening sun. It was a marvellous piece of contrasted lights, - the distance so pure, so soft in its rosy warmth, so cool in the depth of its shadowy blue; the foreground strong in fiery orange, or sparkling in absolute whiteness. I enjoyed, too, looking up at the pure, unclouded sky, which now wore an aspect of intense serenity. For half an hour nature seemed in entire repose; not a breath of wind stirred the white, snow-laden shafts of the trees; not a sound of animate creature or the most distant reverberation of waterfall reached us; no film of vapor moved across the tranquil, sapphire sky; absolute quiet reigned until a loud roar proceeding from Capitan turned our eyes in that direction. From the round, dome-like cap of its summit there moved down an avalanche, gathering volume and swiftness as it rushed to the brink, and then, leaping out two or three hundred feet into space, fell, slowly filtering down through the lighted air, like a silver cloud, until within a thousand feet of the earth it floated into the shadow of the cliff and sank to the ground as a faint blue mist. Next the Cathedral snow poured from its lighted summit in resounding avalanches; then the Three Brothers shot off their loads, and afar from the east a deep roar reached us as the whole snow-cover thundered down the flank of Cloud's Rest.

            We were warned by the hour to make all haste, and, driving the poor brutes before us, worked our way down the trail as fast as possible. The light, already pale, left the distant heights in still more glorious contrast. A zone of amber sky rose behind the glowing peaks, and a cold steel-blue plain of snow skirted their bases.   Mist slowly gathered again in the gorge below us and overspread the valley floor, shutting it out from our view.

            We ran down the zigzag trail until we came to that shelf of bare granite immediately below the final descent into the valley. Here we paused just above the surface of the clouds, which, swept by fitful breezes, rose in swells, floating up and sinking again like waves of the sea. Intense light, more glowing than ever, streamed in upon the upper half of the cliffs, their bases sunken in the purple mist. As the cloud-waves crawled upward in the breeze they here and there touched a red-purple light and fell back again into the shadow.

            We watched these effects with greatest interest, and, just as we were about moving on again, a loud burst as of heavy thunder arrested us, sounding as if the very walls were crashing in. We looked, and from the whole brow of Capitan rushed over one huge avalanche, breaking into the finest powder and floating down through orange light, disappearing in the sea of purple cloud beneath us.

From: Clarence King, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), pp. 198 - 205.

Photo credit:  Clarence King .jpg:  Clarence King on the right.  Credit:  From the Collections of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

Clarence King portrait. Jpg = Credit:  From the Collections of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley