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WHAT ADAMS SAW THROUGH HIS LENS
Louise Story
27 April 2008
New York Times
Wawona Tunnel is a passageway from civilization to natural splendor. The tunnel, dug through a hill on the south side of Yosemite National Park in the 1930s, hides the coming view like a mile-long blindfold.
And then you’re there. Pale, curvaceous granite rocks dance in the skyline. Dozens of people stand along the edge of the pull-off, called Tunnel View, trying to capture the scene. Some snap two quick shots with disposable yellow cameras, and others set up their tripods for hours, watching the light strike Yosemite’s monoliths. On the left, El Capitan, a rock climbers’ mecca, appears the tallest. The Half Dome and Sentinel Dome arch upwards in the center. And the two Cathedral Spires sit on the right next to the sometimes gushing Bridalveil Fall.
Many people know these sights by name, but more know them by sight alone, as captured through the lens of the legendary American photographer Ansel Adams.
Adams first visited Yosemite in 1916 when he was 14 years old. On that trip, he hopped up on a tree stump to take a photo of Half Dome, then stumbled, headfirst, and accidentally pushed the shutter release. The upside-down image remained one of Adams’s favorites, he wrote in his autobiography.
The park itself also remained a favorite. Adams ended up living much of his life in Yosemite, and took many of his most well-known photographs there. Today, it is not unusual to encounter professional photographers and novices alike trying to retrace his path. They wait for the perfect minute of moonrise over Half Dome or a shadow on a fallen tree in Siesta Lake. They remember his photo of a juniper tree they saw in a museum, on a coffee cup or a monthly calendar. Ansel Adams’s work, in some ways, is the best unpaid advertising a national park could get.
The first step on an Ansel Adams-inspired trip to Yosemite is to visit the gallery run by his family. It is in the park’s central area called Yosemite Valley, and displays and sells Adams’s work as well as photos taken by several contemporary artists. Before Adams died in 1984, he spent years living in a house behind the gallery and leading workshops there. Now others teach the workshops, and the gallery is managed by Adams’s grandchildren. The gallery’s staff leads free camera walks three days a week. The gallery also shows a free film about Adams once a week, rents out cameras and tripods and sells keepsakes and guidebooks.
I ordered three books written by Adams from the gallery’s Web site before my trip: Adams’s autobiography, his collected photos of Yosemite and a step-by-step explanation of some of his works called “Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs.” By the time our plane landed in Fresno, Calif., I felt well-equipped to step inside Ansel land.

But Yosemite does not often appear as it did at the moments Adams tripped his shutter. Nor is it easy to stand where he stood and capture the same images.
“I’ve had people say they are kind of disappointed,” says Glenn Crosby, the curator of the Ansel Adams Gallery. “They only know the park through Ansel’s eyes, and he was only showing you the keepers. The park is not always as dramatic as his work.”
Back in 1986, Mr. Crosby was working at a job he didn’t like with too long a commute. So he moved to Yosemite to take photographs for a year and has stayed there ever since. He likes to say he has his own “Moonrise and Half Dome” because in 1998 he photographed the rock with an astronomer who had tracked the exact minute the moon would ascend next to Half Dome in the same way it did in front of Adams in 1960. But as talented as Mr. Crosby is, he says he doesn’t fool himself.
“Someone could be standing shoulder to shoulder with Ansel and come away with a totally different interpretation,” he says.
Once a week, Mr. Crosby takes a handful of people into a backroom at the gallery for a free show of original Adams photos (hint: pre-register). Recently, Mr. Crosby showed visitors Adams’s 1927 photo called “The Diving Board” (which includes Adams’s future wife, Virginia Best, standing on a distant rock) and his 1921 picture “Lodgepole Pines, Lyell Fork of the Merced River,” among others. He handles the photos carefully with white-gloved hands, since the prices for rare prints are as high as $40,000.
“We’re a gallery,” Mr. Crosby says. “We’re not a museum.”
The gallery has been in the family since 1902, when James Best, a local painter, won the rights to sell his work there. Ansel Adams married Virginia Best, James’s daughter, in 1928, and the family still holds the concession license. In the 1970s, Ansel’s son, Michael, renamed the gallery after his father.
Ansel Adams’s family members today say they feel a responsibility to provide education and service.
“We offer a connection to Ansel for people who love Ansel and this park,” says Matthew Adams, president of the gallery and grandson of the photographer.
By the 1950s, Adams had already taken most of his famous Yosemite images. Not unlike tourists today who visit his tripod points, Adams packed up his two teenage children, wife and a couple of burros in 1952 to recreate some of his earlier treks. For 10 days, they hiked through the backcountry of Yosemite, past Merced Lake, Vernal Fall and the peak that would be named Mount Ansel Adams in 1985. It had been decades since Ansel had been to some of those spots, but without hesitation he scrambled up on ledges and visualized new images, recalls his son, Michael Adams, who was 19 at the time.
“He loved the scenery as it was at the time,” says Michael Adams. “Whether it was dead trees or trees that were alive. Or whether the waterfall was full or down. It wasn’t always the big vistas, it could be a wonderful rock.”
Visitors to Yosemite should come with the same openness to appreciating the scenery as it is, rather than expecting to see the living version of Ansel Adams’s pictures. The Jeffrey pine that Adams photographed atop Sentinel Dome in 1940, for example, fell a few years ago, and it is now a rotting log.
Adams was often frustrated with the development of the park during his long life there. When he was young, he felt as if seeing others in the wilderness was “an intrusion or even trespass” and wrote many letters to the national park service bemoaning the commercialization of Yosemite.
But he outgrew the desire for privacy in the park. “Nature is always better when left to itself — but for what purpose?” he wrote. “Starry-eyed reaction to the splendors of nature is an invaluable experience for everyone.”

THESE RANGERS AREN’T READY TO COME IN FROM THE COLD
Tom Stienstra
The San Francisco Chronicle
30 March 2008
The vision of living in high-country wilderness with no one else around for five months of winter may sound like a movie. Maybe even a mix of “Into the Wild,” “The Shining” and “Jeremiah Johnson.”
But up at 8,600 feet at Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park, the realities this winter for two wilderness rangers bears little resemblance to any of those movies.
Kathi Younger, 51, and Jeff Kamps, 47, are park rangers who live about 15 miles from the nearest plowed road from roughly mid-October through mid-May.
They take snow surveys, water samples, maintenance park buildings, shovel snow off roofs and provide a safety patrol for cross-country skiers. Yet a year ago, they went seven weeks without seeing another person. Another year, at Glacier National Park in Montana, they did not see another person for the entire winter. “Pretty harsh up there,” Younger said with a laugh.
“We like people, but in very small doses,” she added. “We’re not into the rat race, that’s for sure.”
They’ve been snowbound this winter for four months and it will be another five or six weeks before they rejoin civilization. Their first trip will be to REI in Reno to get some fresh clothes. After that, Kamps said he wants a pizza. “We don’t usually do restaurants,” Younger said. “But we miss pizza.”
Both have been rangers for more than 20 years. They started as wilderness rangers for the Forest Service at Desolation Wilderness at Tahoe. Because the National Park Service needs winter rangers at remote parks and also provide wider scope of travel in summer, they joined up and then have worked at Denali and Katmai in Alaska, Glacier in Montana, Grand Teton in Wyoming, Great Basin in Nevada, Zion in Utah, and Yosemite. This summer, they’ll head to Yellowstone.
A hard winter
They awoke last Thursday to a clear, brisk sunrise, with a temperature of about 10 degrees. The previous night, the wind howled at 75 mph up on the Sierra crest. A sky the color of blue steel and a south wind told them that snow was on the way for Friday. But they figured they might actually see another person this weekend.
“Late March is when cross-country skiers usually start showing up,” Younger said.
This past week, they saw their first robin of the year, a major event for them. During a snow survey, they also spotted the tracks of a pine marten. “No sign of any bears yet,” Kamps noted. In the past week, he said they have also seen raven, mountain chickadee, brown creeper, white-breasted nuthatch, Townsend’s Solitaire and Clark’s Nutcracker.
When you’re alone for this long, wildlife becomes an extended family. The arrival of birds and animals in April is a sign that spring in the mountains is not too far off.
Much of their time is spent cross-country skiing, taking snow surveys and water samples. Last week, they were out every day, trekking, including a 24-mile round trip to the base of Mount Hoffman and back as part of the snow survey course.
“If you aren’t in good shape when you get here, you will be when you leave,” Younger said.
Though snowfall has been scarce this March, there is still 44 inches at their cabin, which is located about a half mile from the Tuolumne Meadows Campground (which now looks like a white moonscape). That is a significant amount considering the natural compression of powder, where 12 inches of powder can equal 1 inch of snowpack. At Lembert Dome near Tioga Pass and Snow Flat below Mount Hoffman, there is still 7 1/2 feet.
After blizzards in January and another in mid-February, the rangers feared that some of the park structures and cabins might collapse from the weight of the snow. “It was scary, how much snow was piled on them,” Younger said. “We shovel the peak first, then cut the snow with a wire so it slides off. I had snow up to my head on the peak of the roof.”
No electricity for days
The couple shops in October for everything they’ll need for six months, with the chance of a last-chance food buy in November. They have learned to rely solely on themselves for all needs. Their safety net, communication to the outside world, is often cut off.
One reason for that is because a big storm a few years ago downed the power line that threads up Lee Vining Canyon. It was never fixed.
“They just turn us off if it gets too windy and sometime they forget to turn us back on,” Younger said. “Using a back-up generator is limited because of fuel. It’s impossible to get anything up here at this point. We’re hoping in the future, that we might get off the grid and go solar (with batteries). We do get a lot of direct sunlight.”
Two of the rangers’ more important tasks are helping the U.S. Geologic Survey conduct a study on pesticide drift and coming to the aid of cross-country skiers.
They collect snow samples from a variety of locations for the USGS, which then analyzes them for pesticides. One hypothesis is that pesticide residues from the San Joaquin Valley are being swept up by wind and then delivered in snow and rain to the Sierra. That, in part, could help explain the decline of endangered frogs and problems in some areas with forest health.
It’s a fantasy for many cross-country skiers at Tuolumne Meadows, but it is a difficult journey. You park at a gate on Highway 120 west of Lee Vining, and then from there, it’s a 15-mile trek one-way with a 3,000-foot climb to the ski hut.
“People come with high hopes, but when they get in here, they’re so exhausted they often end up recovering in the hut,” Younger said. “It’s tough. So we check the hut, make sure it’s OK and people are all right, they have enough wood, and it stays clean.”
According to park headquarters, snowplow operations will start clearing 50 miles of Tioga Pass Road on April 16. With avalanche debris in several spots and typical equipment breakdowns, that means Younger and Kamps face another 45 days in remote captivity. So I asked her, “Do you ever feel like you’re going crazy?”
“No, I haven’t gone crazy at all,” she answered with a laugh.
“It’s quiet here,” she added. “That’s why we do this. Some people in cities are disconnected from nature and I think that’s where a lot of problems start.”