scaled them.
This amazing feat in mountain climbing, it is believed, sets a world’s record. So far as information in the possession of the Bureau of National Parks is concerned, no single mountaineer ever accomplished any such feat as this.
Clyde is a member of the Sierra (a mountaineer) Club of San Francisco. He left Glacier Park and returned to California August 25th, the day after he scaled the last of the 36 mountains. This was Mt. Wilbur, 9,283 feet, which he regarded as the most difficult of them all. He left as his cairn, on this peak, a monument to the late Dr. Wynn, of Indianapolis, Indiana, a mountain climber of national repute, who had made unsuccessful attempts to scale Mt. Wilbur.
This monument Clyde heaped up in three hours. He used loose Argyllite rocks he found on the summit, and built a pyramid seven feet high and six feet at the base. Through field glasses this mountain peak monument is visible to tourists from the veranda at Many Glacier Hotel.
Following are the other ten of the 36 mountains Clyde climbed, upon which he failed to find any record of previous ascents: Norris, Mt. Logan and also a pinnacle west of Logan, Almost-A-Dog Mountain, Citadel Mountain, Fusillade Mountain, main peak of Mount Rockwell, Mount Clements, Avalanche Peak, and Iceberg Peak.14
While the Office of Public Information of the National Park Service obviously delighted in Clyde’s accomplishments, using them to promote the park, Clyde felt compelled to set the record straight, even if it was only for his own records. A penciled notation on the press release, written in Clyde’s handwriting, states that the information was “not absolutely accurate. Probably a world record as far as solo climbing is concerned.”15
The summer of 1924 found Clyde back in Montana and Glacier National Park, where he climbed Mt. Merritt.16 It was yet another peak in a series of first ascents in Glacier, and one of nineteen on whose summit he stood that summer. After two seasons of climbing in the park he had ascended virtually every formidable and worthwhile peak that the region had to offer, with the exception of Kinnerly Peak, which he would climb for the first time (and for yet another first ascent) in 1937.17
At the end of each summer, he would return to California. As the summer of ’24 came to a close, Clyde began a new assignment in the town of Independence, east of the Sierra Nevada in Owens Valley. He brought with him a decade of teaching experience, a love of the mountains, and a dark and disturbing side of his personality that would emerge in the rain shadow of the Range of Light.
CHAPTER 3
A Hell of a Thing to Do: Incident at Independence High School
Norman Clyde had a bad temper. His anger could erupt at the slightest provocation, causing irrational and sometimes dangerous behavior. Former Sierra Club President Richard Leonard recalled an incident in 1930 or ’31 when Clyde and fellow mountaineer Bestor Robinson were headed for a climb in Death Valley. Robinson’s brother-in-law, Horace Breed, became impatient following the slow-paced Clyde in his car on unpaved dirt roads. Breed passed Clyde, leaving him in a cloud of dust. Clyde became so angry that he produced a revolver and was preparing to shoot Breed for his callous indiscretion. Robinson grabbed the gun away from Clyde, narrowly averting a tragedy.1
It was not the first time that Clyde had leveled a weapon against another person. In an undated, unpublished article entitled “My Colt Woodsman,” Clyde relates a chilling tale in which he confesses to shooting another man, perhaps killing him. The introductory paragraph of the draft reads:
A hand gun of some sort, provided that its carrier is at least reasonably proficient in its use, is often a convenient [sic] and in case of emergency may even prove a lifesaver. In the mountains and deserts of the west it is rare indeed that one has any occasion to use it against persons. During a considerable number of years of roaming about over them, I have been obliged to do so only once. Had I not, however, on that occasion, a Colt Woodsman and more particularly a Colt 38-40 New Service six gun along with me, it is very difficult to know in what the incident would have culminated. It is very possible that my having a hand gun available and using it for just cause averted certain very serious results: so much so, in fact, that their prevention was far more than worth all the toting of hand guns that I have ever done. There was no law officer to resort to in the affair. I had nothing to depend on to protect two defenseless women, but a hand gun in either hand, and when the menacing party began to shoot, I did likewise with the result that the former was silenced, in very summary fashion.2
After the article was typed in draft, Clyde thought better of the passage, drew a line through it, and wrote “omit.” What cannot be omitted from any comprehensive story of his life, however, is his volcanic temperament. Was Clyde engaging in some Wild West–style fiction, in order to add color and excitement to his story? There does not appear to be any other record of such a showdown.
The most famous and widely spread story of Clyde’s eruptive anger is about when he lost his job as principal of Independence High School. As Neill C. Wilson wrote in a contemporary article, “the high school once had a good, solid sort of principal. And he dealt with his pupils in a good, solid way. But one day one of the older boys took him out in the school yard and offered this good, solid pedagogue a good, solid beating-up, with the result that the school board hired a bigger principal.”3 The school’s new principal was Clyde, a serious scholar and a man strong enough to control his rough-hewn students.
Independence is the Inyo County seat, situated in Owens Valley at the base of the eastern Sierra. The valley was largely occupied by grain farmers, orchardists, and their families. They were slowly being driven from farming by the City of Los Angeles, which had been quietly acquiring land and water rights in the valley since 1904. By the time Clyde had arrived in Owens Valley to stay, the tensions between farmers and Los Angeles’s Department of Water and Power (DWP) were reaching a flash point. In November of 1924, the same year that Clyde assumed leadership of Independence High, the local citizens of Independence, Manzanar, and Lone Pine seized control of the aqueduct floodgates located near the Alabama Hills, on the valley’s west side. They diverted water headed for Los Angeles back to the Owens River, making a symbolic gesture to wrestle control of their lives from politicians and real estate speculators in that distant city. Many valley residents met with financial ruin as their failing farms and businesses were slowly desiccated. It was not an easy time, nor a happy one, in the valley.
Into this high desert town that was struggling to survive came a man who was indifferent to their problems of drought, water diversion, and long-term sustainability. He was a strict disciplinarian hired to do a job: run a school and teach to the best of his knowledge and ability. Whatever economic or political strife the community was experiencing was not his concern. He had no family, owned no land or business, and was not interested in local affairs. He came to Owens Valley to be close to the mountains. On Friday afternoons he would lock the school’s doors and head for the high country, returning on Monday morning (and sometimes not until Tuesday) to re-open the school and resume classes. Many people in the valley thought him strange, eccentric; they didn’t understand his attraction to the mountains, or why he would want to climb them. After all, they’re just there, a constant lurking presence that, sooner or later, everyone took for granted. They could understand going to the mountains to fish, or hunt, or to work in the mines or cut timber, but to hike and climb the more formidable peaks for climbing’s sake was a pastime enjoyed by relatively few. To compound the problem, Clyde did not perform the social duties that were thought proper for a school principal to perform—attend social functions, become active in community affairs.
The students also thought him strange for his habit of shooting birds with a BB gun, an activity that, according to Omie Mairs, then a recent graduate and Los Angeles DWP employee, Clyde spent “a lot of time” doing.4 He was proficient with all sorts of guns—handguns, rifles, shotguns—a skill he no doubt learned while growing up in the mountains and woods of Pennsylvania and Canada.
It was Halloween night, 1928, and Principal Clyde was on patrol at the high school. It was still a relatively new facility, built in 1922, and Clyde was determined to protect the school from the hooligans and rowdies who had committed acts of petty vandalism in the past.