Posts Tagged ‘David Brower’

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David Brower: Photographer And Environmentalist 1

January 15th, 2011

In Honor Of The One Year Anniversary Of The Launch Of Landscape Photography Blogger…

David Brower: Photographer, Filmmaker And

Father Of Modern Environmentalism Part One

Storm Over The Minarets, Yosemite Sierra High Trip, now the Ansel Adams Wilderness, High Sierra Nevada, California, 1950 by Philip Hyde. One of Philip Hyde's signature images that came from the 1950 Summer High Trip that started and ended in Tuolumne Meadows and explored the North side of Yosemite National Park and the Ritter Range in the Ansel Adams Wilderness.

(See the photograph full screen Click Here.)

David Brower, an excellent photographer and filmmaker in his own right, did more to help popularize and show the political power of landscape photography than any other single person in the 20th Century.

In light of this, in the year 2000 the North American Nature Photography Association at its national convention honored both Philip Hyde and David Brower with lifetime achievement awards. David Brower, as the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club and leader of its most ambitious conservation campaigns, was in large part responsible for helping to establish Philip Hyde as a leading landscape photographer, along with many others including Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter.

Life Magazine called David Brower the “Number one working conservationist.” The New York Times said he was, “The most effective conservation activist in the world…” The Los Angeles Times said he was, “…America’s most charismatic conservationist.” David Brower dropped out of U. C. Berkeley his sophomore year, yet he holds nine honorary degrees. David Brower changed the course of history and the way we view wilderness and the environment, yet today his accomplishments are not particularly well-known. Even though he was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace prize, he is seldom credited for his impact on activism world-wide. Why? Who was this enigmatic figure?

David Brower: High Sierra First Ascents Climber

Born in 1912 and raised in Berkeley, California, David Brower first started climbing boulders in the Sierra Nevada on a car trip to Lake Tahoe at age six. He went on to become a renowned mountaineer of the Sierra Nevada and far beyond. As a young man he was nearly killed by a loose rock while climbing in the Palisades area of the High Sierra. He met legendary mountaineer Norman Clyde, who gave him climbing lessons. Not surprisingly, it was a climber friend, Hervey Voge, who first introduced him to the Sierra Club in 1933.

In 1934, David Brower and Hervey Voge set out on a 10 week climbing trip in the high Sierra from Onion Valley to Tuolumne Meadows. They scaled 62 peaks and made 32 first ascents. In 1939 David Brower and a number of friends, some of whom also were Sierra Club leaders, climbed Shiprock. The previous 12 attempts to climb the volcanic column had failed.

David Brower Invites Philip Hyde To Photograph Sierra Club High Trip

David Brower led Sierra Club High Trips and managed the whole program from 1947 to 1954. Ardis and Philip Hyde met David Brower in Tuolumne Meadows in 1948 when he came through leading a Sierra Club trip. Ansel Adams later more officially introduced David Brower and Philip Hyde and David Brower asked Philip Hyde to join him for a Sierra Club High Trip in the Summer of 1950. That was the High Trip that Philip Hyde made his photograph of “Minarets From Tarn Above Lake Ediza, Sierra Nevada” that Ansel Adams said he liked better than his own. It was also the Summer of “Split Boulder Near Lake Ediza, Sierra Nevada” that saw major exhibitions including the famous San Francisco “Perceptions” show of Group f.64. Several other Philip Hyde signature photographs were born that summer, “Glacial Pavement, Lodgepole Pine, Sierra Nevada” “Storm Over The Minarets, Sierra Nevada” and a number of Tuolumne Meadows.

At the time David Brower was the editor of the University of California Press and had edited the Sierra Club Annual since 1946. The 1951 Sierra Club Annual gave Philip Hyde his first publishing credit with a signature of 12 of his black and white photographs of the High Sierra Nevada from the 1950 Summer High Trip.

The Sierra Club Sends Philip Hyde On The First Photography Assignment For An Environmental Cause

Richard Leonard and David Brower sent Philip Hyde to Dinosaur National Monument in 1951. In 1952 David Brower became the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club. Within one year he had convinced the reluctant Sierra Club Board to expand the scope of the Sierra Club from a California focused defender of the Sierra, to a national, or at least regional organization with battles and interests in Oregon, Washington, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and expanding to the East Coast. David Brower pushed for the first book produced for an environmental cause, This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country And It’s Magic Rivers.

This Is Dinosaur eventually landed on every desk in Congress and other Washington leaders with the goal of convincing them it was a place too beautiful to destroy. The two dams proposed in Dinosaur would flood 97 out of 106 river miles inside the national monument. David Brower and a growing coalition in the Sierra Club and outside made up of various environmental groups, developed to defend this invasion of the National Park System.

David Brower and the coalition of environmental groups behind him took the position that as long as Glen Canyon Dam would be built anyway, building the dam higher would result in a reservoir that would hold enough extra water to exceed the capacity of both of the proposed Dinosaur National Monument dams. A higher Glen Canyon Dam would thus render the Dinosaur dams unnecessary. David Brower proved in Congressional testimony, using 9th Grade math not only that the higher Glen Canyon Dam would store more water, but that it would also evaporate less additional water. At the time time few people outside of the locals had ever seen Glen Canyon.

David Brower, Ansel Adams And Nancy Newhall Launch Conservation Photography History

In 1960, David Brower, Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall made a significant contribution to photography of the natural scene or landscape photography as it is now called. They re-invented and popularized the large coffee table photography book. This Is The American Earth with text by Nancy Newhall and photographs by Ansel Adams and some of his friends including Philip Hyde, was a song to nature writ large. America embraced This Is The American Earth and others in the Sierra Club Books Exhibit Format Series.

Another major advance came to photography in 1962, also brought to you by David Brower. He introduced color to landscape photography through Philip Hyde and Eliot Porter and the Sierra Club Books Exhibit Format Series in 1962, the same year Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. Eliot Porter illustrated the gorgeous and artistic In Wildness Is The Preservation Of The Earth with quotes by Henry David Thoreau. Philip Hyde illustrated Island In Time: Point Reyes Peninsula, more of a rushed documentary project to help make Point Reyes National Seashore.

Photographers And Other Creatives Sent To Save The Grand Canyon

By 1964, again making a historical advance for photography, David Brower organized a river trip down the Colorado River through Grand Canyon National Park. With Martin Litton as river guide, filmmaker and photographer, photographer Eliot Porter, photographer Philip Hyde, writer Francois Leydet and a number of other Sierra Club board members and artists of various types, the trip promised to be creative. Martin Litton brought the group to the proposed dam sites in the Grand Canyon, to Vasey’s Paradise, to Redwall Cavern, through hair raising and often capsize causing rapids for the purpose of making a book that would be called Time and The River Flowing: Grand Canyon. The book that would be part of the campaign to stop the Grand Canyon from being dammed. David Brower remarked at the time:

The dams the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation plans to build in Marble Gorge and Bridge Canyon, within the Grand Canyon proper, would destroy not only the living river but also the unique life forms that through the ages have come to depend upon the river’s life. The major part of the canyon walls would still be there, but the pulsing heart of the place would be stopped. A chain of destructive forces would be begun in what by law was set apart as part of the National Park System, to be preserved unimpaired for all America’s future.

And needlessly. Looked at hard, these dams are nothing more than hydroelectric power devices to produce electricity and dollars from its sale to pay for projects that ought to be financed by less costly means. The dams would make no water available that is not available already. Indeed they would waste enough to supply a major city and impair the quality of the too little that is left: water already too saline is made more so by evaporation, to the peril of downstream users, especially of neighbors in Mexico. All this on a river that already has more dams than it has water to fill them.

Philip Hyde and David Brower also worked together on many other campaigns with the help of many other environmental activists. Philip Hyde made photographs for David Brower led campaigns for the Oregon and Washington Cascade Mountains, Kings Canyon, Redwood National Park, the Wind River Range, Navajo Tribal Parks, Alaska and many other smaller skirmishes. To read about one of Ardis and Philip Hyde’s travel adventures on behalf of David Brower and the Sierra Club see the blog post, “The Making Of ‘Rainbow Bridge From The Upstream Side.’” Future Blog Posts will share more stories and other points of interest of David Brower’s life and work in conservation…

The river trip through Glen Canyon on the Colorado River proved to be one of the most historically significant events that David Brower and Philip Hyde experienced together twice, once in 1962 and once in 1964 after the gates of Glen Canyon Dam closed and “Lake” Powell began to fill. To read Philip Hyde’s tribute to Glen Canyon see the blog post, “Glen Canyon Lament By Philip Hyde 1.”

References:

For Earth’s Sake: The Life and Times of David Brower by David Brower

Work in Progress by David Brower

Wikipedia article on David Brower

Wildness Within Website

The History of the Sierra Club 1892-1970 by Michael Cohen

Sierra Club: 100 Years of Protecting Nature by Tom Turner

(Continued In Another Blog Post…)

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Color Magazine Feature Out Now

January 4th, 2011

Cirios Silhouettes At Sundown, Baja California, Mexico, 1984 by Philip Hyde. This photograph appears on the title page of the March 2011, Issue 12 of Color Magazine, along with 14 other photographs in the feature article.

March Issue #12 Of Color Magazine Featuring Philip Hyde In Stores Now

At home I have three file safe drawers full of clippings of articles either by or about my father master landscape photographer Philip Hyde. The article files start in 1947 and keep going right past Dad’s passing in 2006, up to the present.

A recent issue of Outdoor Photographer contained a well-written feature about Point Reyes by Sean Arbabi that mentions Dad’s photography there, along with that of Ansel Adams, Brett Weston and other great landscape masters. The piece even mentioned that my father’s photographs helped to make Point Reyes a National Seashore. That was one of the better articles.

A few of the articles in my file safes about Dad are excellent. Some even from the very best magazines are riddled with inaccuracies and misconceptions. The majority are essentially mediocre in that they don’t dig very deep or say much that hasn’t been said before. The majority of writers just don’t make those one or two extra phone calls that turn the article into a multi-source story with more dimension. This is mainly because publishers don’t pay writers much for their submissions any more. With this backdrop, imagine the unfortunate freelance writer, David Best, also a photographer in his own right and known as Panoramaman, writing me and telling me he wants me to review his rough draft for his feature on Philip Hyde for Color Magazine.

Color Magazine is one of the most respected photography magazines today, especially for collectors of fine art photography, along with Black and White Magazine, both published by Ross Periodicals. All along Color Magazine planned to do a feature article on Philip Hyde, but they did not want it to follow too soon after their article on Eliot Porter.

David Best interviewed me over a year ago. I thought he asked excellent questions in the interview. It went very well. Then he sent me his article. I warned him I would beat him up on the details. To my pleasant surprise his draft did a wonderful job of capturing the essence of Dad’s love of nature, while also presenting the story of his landscape photography career in a quality, smooth-flowing narrative that showed a fine dexterity with words. I did beat him up to make sure the facts were straight. I’m not sure he was very happy about it, but I went on to also give a hard time to the friendly, conscientious editor John Lavine to get the facts correct too. He said David Best took it all in stride. Regardless, between David Best’s superlative prose and the layout and photograph selection by John Lavine, in my opinion the final article is one of the best ever written about Dad, which is saying a great deal considering there are 63 years of articles in my file drawers.

Do yourself a favor and go out to the bookstore or newsstand and grab your own copy of this excellent magazine. The current issue with Philip Hyde in it is Issue 12, March 2011. It will be on retail shelves through March, but I wouldn’t wait because every time I have gone to get Color Magazine it has been sold out.

For more on the history of color landscape photography and Philip Hyde’s role in it see also the blog post, “How Color Came To Landscape Photography.” To read how color landscape photography changed after 1990, see the blog post, “Did Velvia Film Change Landscape Photography?“

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Notes On “The Redwoods” By Filmmaker Mark Jonathan Harris

December 29th, 2010

Introduction To “Notes On The Redwoods“

Fog, Redwood Forest, Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, California, 1962 by Philip Hyde. The left side of this photograph was the primary promotional cover photograph for the 1968 Academy Award Winning short documentary film, "The Redwoods," written by Mark Jonathan Harris.

The documentary The Redwoods, produced by the Sierra Club and written by Mark Jonathan Harris, was “a major influence in building public and congressional support for the creation of Redwoods National Park.” The film won the Academy Award for Short Documentary in 1968. Writer Mark Jonathan Harris is distinguished professor and head of documentary films at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Besides The Redwoods, he has either directed or wrote several other films that won the Academy Award. The Long Way Home, a film about the period immediately following the Holocaust won the “Oscar” for Best Feature Length Documentary in 1997. Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport was produced for Warner Bros. and also won an Academy Award for Best Feature Length Documentary in 2000. See Mark Jonathan Harris’ short biography on the USC website for more about his other films since 2000 and his many other accomplishments. Today we have the honor of welcoming Mark Jonathan Harris for this guest blog post…

Notes on The Redwoods

By Mark Jonathan Harris, August 2006

Looking back at my early work as a filmmaker forty years later, I see themes and patterns that I didn’t recognize at the time. I grew up Scranton, Pennsylvania, a small coal-mining town in northeastern Pennsylvania, but the first documentaries of any value that I made were both about California, and both were influenced by my youthful impressions of the state.

I first visited California on a summer vacation with my father when I was 13. Two of the obligatory tourist stops left lasting imprints. One was a visit to Paramount where Cecil B. DeMille was shooting The Ten Commandments and I watched hundreds of extras dancing feverishly around the Golden Calf. The other was a trip to Muir Woods where I tried unsuccessfully to capture the towering old-growth redwoods in my box camera. A year or so later, back in Scranton, I discovered John Steinbeck and avidly pored through all his work. If I had read The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle at a different point in my life, perhaps they wouldn’t have had as strong an impact, but at that impressionable age, Steinbeck’s books opened my eyes to social injustice and the need to fight against it.

Did these early experiences really shape the filmmaker I became? Or do I remember them now because they are congruent with my later history? As storytellers, we all try to find some narrative thread in the often incoherent randomness of our lives. Still, it isn’t surprising to me that the first documentary of any significance that I made, Huelga!, explored the farmworkers’ strike in the grape fields of Delano, California, and that I immediately followed it with The Redwoods, a plea to save the ancient and stately Sequoia Sempervirens.

Both of these films were heavily influenced by the idealism of the Sixties and the social protest movements of the times, the civil rights struggles in the South and the burgeoning environmental movement. But I also see a connection in the two subjects I wasn’t aware of then. Both films reflect the belief that there is something more important than self — whether it be the grandeur of nature or the power of collective action—and that we must all join together to fight for what we believe in.

The Redwoods was a collaboration of three young filmmakers–Trevor Greenwood, Richard Chew, and myself–all working together at King Screen Productions, a three-year-old documentary production company located in Seattle. Trevor had come to King by way of UCLA film school, Richard as a dropout from Harvard Law, and me after a brief stint as a wire service reporter covering crime in Chicago. It was Trevor’s inspiration to make the film and his aesthetic vision that guided us. At UCLA he had studied with Basil Wright and been deeply influenced by the British documentaries of the Thirties and Forties and the Pare Lorentz films made for the Roosevelt administration during the Depression. We all carefully studied The River and tried to achieve the same lyrical blend of sound and imagery.

At that time, the Sierra Club was leading the fight to establish a Redwood National Park and we went to them for financial support for the film. I don’t remember the exact budget anymore, but I doubt that it was more than $30,000. The Sierra Club put up $10,000 and King Screen Productions agreed to cover the remaining costs. Trevor made an initial research trip to Humboldt Country and hiked over the area being considered for the park with Sierra Club president Edgar Wayburn. “Walking through the fog-shrouded trees,” he told us when he returned, “you could actually hear the droplets of dew falling from the foliage and striking the forest floor.”

Shortly afterwards the three of us went off to make the film. Richard was the cinematographer, I took sound, and Trevor shot additional footage with an Arriflex and a spring-wound Bolex that would only run for about 15 seconds. We took a 16mm projector with us and at night would view the rushes in our motel room in Orick.

There were two principal artistic challenges we faced in making the film.  One was the simple difficulty of filming the trees well. The other was making people care about preserving them. Ronald Reagan, after all, had famously remarked, “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.”

Filming the trees was technically difficult because of both their size and the excessive contrast between light and shadow in the forest. Since we were making the film for the Sierra Club, we were conscious of the high photographic standards it had set in the coffee table books it published by artists like Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, and Philip Hyde. It took some experimenting for Richard and Trevor to find the best photographic approach. Finally, they settled on shooting the trees in a light fog or from the edge of a forest where sidelight struck the trunks and brought out the texture of the foreground trees. The fog helped to create a sense of mystery and of age–the primeval forest–and when the fog drifted through the trees it made them come alive. I still remember standing on the road with my Nagra in the morning damp and mist, recording  the logging trucks approaching in the distance. We used that sound to good effect in the opening of the film.

Although we wanted the trees to speak for themselves, we knew we also had to have a human voice in the film, a person who could provide us some perspective on what we were seeing. We struggled to find that elusive voice. While Trevor and Richard were filming the trees, I spent much of my time searching for a narrator, interviewing long-time residents and loggers in the area. Although all the interviews were informative, I wasn’t able to find any one individual whose voice seemed strong enough to me to carry the whole film. So I ended up creating a composite narrator based on the comments of the people I had interviewed. In the end, a Seattle actor who had worked as a logger in his youth recorded the narration for the film, adding some of his own phrasings and observations to my text.

When we had edited the film to our satisfaction, we took it to San Francisco to show the board of the Sierra Club. The lights went on after the screening and there was a long, almost interminable silence.  Finally, a woman raised her hand and spoke. “That bird call at the beginning of the film,” she said, “that bird is not indigenous to the area.” We had been caught red-handed using a bird call from a library of sound effects. Outside of that memorable and unexpected comment, I don’t remember much more about that screening except that the Sierra Club was pleased with the film and used it extensively in its lobbying and organizing work to establish a Redwood National Park.

Although none of us had great expectations for the film’s theatrical release, we wanted it to be seen by as many people as possible, so we blew the film up to 35mm to increase our opportunities for distribution. The Academy Award nomination was a great boost in getting theaters to run the film. The Oscar itself was a huge surprise. Charles Champlin and other Los Angeles film critics had picked other documentaries to win. The Oscar ceremony that year was postponed a few days because of the assassination of Martin Luther King. Unfortunately, Richard and I were booked for a flight to Colombia the day before the rescheduled ceremony because we were starting a new documentary about the Peace Corps. Given the prediction of the pundits, we decided not to change our flights. Trevor stayed in L.A. to attend the ceremonies. Richard and I read about the award the day afterwards in El Tiempo, the newspaper in Bogota.   It was two more months before I actually held the statue in my hand.  After spending those months in an impoverished rural village in the Andes, the Oscar seemed even more unreal.

Forty years later, the fight to preserve the few remaining old-growth redwood forests against the greed and short sightedness of corporate logging still goes on. Although a definite accomplishment, the national park that Congress established saved less of the ecosystem than the Sierra Club and other environmental groups had battled for. Logging companies continue to threaten the entire redwood forest ecosystem by clearcutting trees to the edge of park boundaries and destroying streams and wildlife habitats throughout the region. In the late 90s, environmental activists took up the battle again to save more of the remaining 3% of the world’s tallest living trees. Julia Butterfly Hill attracted international publicity by climbing an over 1000-year-old giant redwood and living 180 feet off the ground for two years and eight days until she finally  persuaded the Maxxam Corp. to preserve the tree and a 200 foot buffer zone around it. Other activists continue to employ her tree-climbing tactics.

Richard, Trevor, and I have all gone on to make other films since The Redwoods, but this short documentary remains a source of pride. Not only were we able to use our cinematic skills in the service of a cause we believed in, but we were able to help achieve a concrete result. It is impossible to measure accurately the effect any single film has on public opinion, but the Sierra Club did show The Redwoods to members of Congress, and not too long afterwards a bill to create a Redwood National Park was passed. I’m pleased to have contributed to its establishment. Now my grandsons will be able to experience the same feelings of awe and wonder that I first felt as a child, and continue to feel, whenever I enter these majestic forests.

How To Get The Film

The DVD of The Redwoods can now be purchased through the Phoenix Learning Group, where the film is described as bringing “attention to the impending doom of California’s magnificent redwoods which are being logged at a rate of three million a decade. Through the narration of an old logger, viewers are moved to consider the environmental value of these magnificent trees which date back to the age of the dinosaur.”

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Glen Canyon Lament By Philip Hyde 3

December 17th, 2010
Landscape Photography Blogger’s 100th Blog Post started a short three part series on Glen Canyon by Philip Hyde…

A Lament for Glen Canyon by Philip Hyde, Part 3

Continued from the blog post, “Glen Canyon Lament by Philip Hyde 2.”

Originally published in The Living Wilderness magazine September 1980

‘Lake’ Powell’s Coyote Gulch Invasion Brings a Flood of Painful Memories

By Contributing Editor Philip Hyde

Escalante River Near Willow Canyon, Glen Canyon, Utah, 1964 by Philip Hyde.

(To see the photograph full screen Click Here.)

I was introduced to the canyon country in 1951 as the controversy over the Upper Colorado River Storage Project was warming. I was commissioned by the Sierra Club to find out what was in Dinosaur, and bring back photographs of it. On the way home, I had glimpses of other parts of the canyon country: following the wheel tracks of uranium trucks on the then primitive road through Monument Valley, and a stop at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. I remember well the landscape shock that the early geologist Dutton said comes to those from well watered regions when they first confront the Plateau Province. The heat, haze and dryness that dulled my mind, fogged the shadows of my photographs and obscured the vast distances were still leaving their imprint on me when I made my first river trip through Glen Canyon four years later, but there were more important things leaving their imprints, too. The light! The bare rock forms of the land, and the color! These began to impress me more than the discomforts and initial strangeness. Those early impressions formed the core of my feeling for this country and programmed me for my continuing preoccupation with it.

In the spring of 1962, several years after politics had decided that the main artery of the wild Colorado would be bled for kilowatts, I backpacked in to Rainbow Bridge to help in a study that sought ways of protecting this magnificent natural span of stone from the coming encroachment of the reservoir. Later, in June, a second float trip from Hite to Lee’s Ferry really got me into Glen Canyon. Our itinerary was made up of places that must be seen for the last time, for a short time later the gates of Glen Canyon Dam’s diversion tunnels were to be closed and the great canyon condemned to drown.

In 1964, I got my first real look at Escalante Canyon and its tributaries on the last half of a trip that started out as a wake for Glen Canyon. Paddling off from Wahweap on 200-plus feet of water, we floated over the roof of Music Temple and peered through the green water trying vainly to see the great overhang in Moqui Canyon, marked now only by the top of the curve. Floating through the narrows of Aztec Canyon, we landed a short distance below Rainbow Bridge and strode up to pay our respects.

Continuing up the lake, as we entered between the high walls of the Escalante Arm we watched a great sand dune collapsing, undercut by the rising waters. We found Clear Creek just out of the rising pool below the entrance to the Cathedral in the Desert, so we saw the Cathedral pristine, but we learned later that summer that the water had come in and flushed out the lovely green moss carpet on the floor of that great vaulted stone chamber. This June, the last vestiges of the Cathedral were flooded.

We boated past the entrances of half-drowned Davis Gulch and Soda Gulch—too late—straining to imagine their vanishing beauty. In Soda Gulch, we found the water lapping at the base of Gregory Natural Bridge—one named glory among uncounted unnamed glories flickering out.

That sample of the Escalante River Canyon made me want to see more of it, but I wanted to explore a part that wasn’t condemned. So when the opportunity came a few years later to walk down the Escalante River from Harris Wash and back out through Coyote Gulch, I leapt at it. Finding arches and grottoes, plunge pools and great overhanging walls, small waterfalls and desert varnished cliffs—two marvelous weeks of it—was like finding again an old friend you’d thought dead.

You ask me to tell you why the flooding of Coyote’s mouth is a blow? I can only answer that it is quite possible to love a piece of country as one would love a friend, and grieve perhaps nearly as much when it is taken from you.

Twice I have returned to Escalante-Coyote country since that walk down the river. A number of times I have just driven by the edge to look into it, on the way to somewhere else. Wherever I travel in the canyon country, I find myself comparing new impressions to those first excited glimpses, much as you might compare new loves with your first romance. Emotional? Yes, but what finer emotion is there than love? This planet needs more of its people’s love, and less of some other emotions such as greed, or mankind may cease to be its people.

I am not really worried about the planet. It has survived countless cataclysms over the eons of geologic time, and I am certain it can survive the worst that humans can do to it. The planet does not need us as much as we need it. We need unpolluted air and water. We need the life support systems that nature provides. Man, with all his expensive, high-powered technology, can only imitate. And we need the spiritual stimulus that wilderness gives us to continue to grow as humans. The “good life” must include wild nature for our spirits, as well as unfouled nests, or mankind will simply become one of history’s extinct species. So, burn another candle to the memory of Glen Canyon, and listen to the bells, as John Donne urges. They toll for you and me.

To read more about and view Philip Hyde’s landscape photography of Glen Canyon see the blog post, “Glen Canyon Portfolio.”

Afterward (December 2010)

“Lake” Powell after taking 17 years to reach full capacity in 1980 remained more or less full for less than 15 years. Starting with droughts in the late 1990s, and reaching an all-time low in 2003-2004, the water level in Glen Canyon ranges between 50 and 100 feet down from its 1980 apogee. Experts now say that “Lake” Powell will most probably never fill completely again, due to evaporation, over-commitment of Colorado River water, recurring droughts and climate change. A movement is gaining momentum for removing dams that destroy river ecosystems and do not live up to their economic promises. See the blog post, “A River Will Run Through It.” Future blog posts will also include reviews of two new books on Glen Canyon that offer the history and a new outlook for the future:

1. Ghosts of Glen Canyon: History beneath Lake Powell by C. Gregory Crampton, foreward by Edward Abbey with 15 color photographs by Philip Hyde, 2009, University of Utah Press.

2. Resurrection: Glen Canyon and a New Vision for the American West by Annette McGivney, foreward by Bill McKibben with photographs by James Kay and “Cathedral In The Desert” by Philip Hyde, 2009, Braided River Press.

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The Battle Over Dinosaur: Birth Of Modern Environmentalism 7

December 13th, 2010

The Battle Heats Up to Save Dinosaur National Monument from Dams and Philip Hyde’s Photographs Begin to See More Use

(Continued from the previous blog post, “The Battle Over Dinosaur: Birth of Modern Environmentalism 6.”)

Sculptured Boulders, Hells Canyon, Dinosaur National Monument, 1951 by Philip Hyde.

In early 1953, finally David Brower proposed a Sierra Club campaign against the two proposed dams in Dinosaur National Monument. The Sierra Club Board approved the campaign on the grounds that it was imperative to maintain the integrity of the National Park System. In May 1953 David Brower enlisted the donated services of Charles Eggert, a professional photographer, to make a quality film covering the river trips and promoting alternatives to the dams. Martin Litton, a pilot and Los Angeles Times editor and writer, who loved the outdoors and the Sierra from his youth, wrote a series of articles condemning the Colorado River Storage Project in the Los Angles Times. David Brower saw Martin Litton’s articles and convinced him to join the Sierra Club. Martin Litton then began to write articles for the Sierra Club Bulletin while continuing his editorial efforts with the Los Angeles Times.

This Is Dinosaur: Wallace Stegner, Philip Hyde and Martin Litton

In 1955 David Brower enlisted novelist and Stanford writing professor Wallace Stegner to write the forward and edit This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and Its Magic Rivers. Philip Hyde’s photographs joined those of Martin Litton and others to illustrate the book. This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and Its Magic Rivers was the first book ever published for an environmental cause. As a result, Wallace Stegner, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Angle of Repose, became a writer and spokesman for the Sierra Club, and as a land preservation advocate in general. The proposed dams in Dinosaur National Monument turned into a heated national debate in Congressional committees between development interests and an alliance of environmental coalitions including the Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs and the Council of Conservationists. David Brower and the Sierra Club gathered and led the coalition of various organizations.

The environmental coalition rallied the American people around the idea of maintaining the integrity of the National Park System by not allowing any development in Dinosaur National Monument. The Sierra Club used what would become its standard strategy of publicizing, initiating a letter-writing campaign and encouraging recreational use of the threatened area. In 1950, about 13,000 people visited Dinosaur and only 50 of those by river. In 1954 nearly 71,000 visitors showed up, and more than 900 rafted Dinosaur’s canyons. Philip Hyde’s photographs of Dinosaur National Monument appeared with articles in National Geographic, the Sierra Club Bulletin, Life and other national publications. Martin Litton on his own wrote a series of articles not only for the Los Angeles Times but after he became managing editor of Sunset Magazine. He wrote articles for Sunset Magazine and the San Francisco Chronicle on Dinosaur National Monument. Also independent from the Sierra Club, Bernard DeVoto wrote an article in the Atlantic Monthly that raised the national awareness about the Dinosaur controversy. As a result of these efforts Americans began to write letters and over 200 Members of Congress turned against the Colorado River Storage Project. A copy of This is Dinosaur landed on the desk of every member of the House, the Senate, most high-level management in the Department of Interior and newspaper editors nationwide.

The Glen Canyon Sacrifice

The Sierra Club maintained that the water storage and power generating capacity lost by eliminating the Dinosaur dams, could be made up downstream on the Colorado River by building the proposed Glen Canyon Dam higher. As David Brower’s team of volunteer engineers looked into the technical aspects, they calculated that the proposed Glen Canyon dam, if built higher, could store more water with less evaporation than the dams planned in Dinosaur National Monument. The Bureau of Reclamation argued that Echo Park would evaporate more than an enlarged Glen Canyon dam. David Brower’s team not only found errors in Bureau of Reclamation evaporation figures, but discovered flaws and miscalculations in the entire project. The proposed reservoirs in dry years would evaporate more water than they could store from wet years. Environmentalists ultimately won the battle to prevent dams in Dinosaur with the numbers that proved the economics unsound.

“They were trying to build so many dams to hold over storage from the wet years to the dry years that in the period it was held over it would have an enormous amount of evaporation and the water benefit would be negative,” David Brower said. “We were building excellent opposition to the whole project because its economics were now being shown to be faulty. Its hydrology—its engineering of the river—was becoming transparently faulty.” In the Congressional hearings David Brower used what he called ninth grade math to question the Bureau’s figures. “In the course of our looking into the project,” David Brower said at a water resources hearing in San Francisco, “We found it distressingly full of errors, contradiction, inconsistencies and very questionable arithmetic, which is slowly being admitted, item by item.”

Conservation Becomes Modern Environmentalism

In The History of the Sierra Club Michael Cohen said that a group of the leaders of conservation organizations, who called themselves the Council of Conservationists, accepted a donation from Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr., a longtime Sierra Club member and ran a full-page advertisement in the Denver Post on the eve of a meeting of the Upper Colorado River Basin development groups, who stood to gain from the building of the dams. The ad read, “Conservationists who have been leading this battle are NOT anti-reclamationists [not against dam building or against the Bureau of Reclamation], and are NOT fighting the principle of water use in the west.” It warned that their position was stronger than ever since the deficiencies of the proposal were now exposed, that the Dinosaur dams were “obviously extravagant” and “serve far more local political purposes than national economic purposes.” The ad further admonished that congressmen would have to explain an expensive, “controversial project far away,” in an election year. The campaign to save Dinosaur National Monument with it’s use of full-page advertisements coupled with a diverse strategy of publicity, a letter-writing campaign, Congressional lobbying and other political and activist tactics transformed conservation into modern environmentalism.

Congress rewrote the Upper Colorado Storage Project Bill without the dams in Dinosaur and inserted the phrase, “no dam or reservoir constructed under the authorization of this act shall be within any national park or monument.” The environmental groups withdrew opposition and the bill easily passed. David Brower and other conservation leaders afterward regretted that they did not continue opposition to the whole project and thereby save Glen Canyon. Martin Litton said, “If we hadn’t believed in ourselves, we never would have stopped the Dinosaur thing. If we had believed in ourselves enough, we would have stopped Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River.” Wallace Stegner succinctly expressed that at the core of the controversy was the resource-based “development-minded corporate West.”

“Dinosaur was a great turning point in the Sierra Club’s interest and in other people’s interest in the canyon country,” Philip Hyde said. “The more people used the monument, the less power it gave the Bureau of Wreck-the-Nation. It was a turning point for them too. Before that they thought they had carte-blanche to go anywhere and do anything they wanted to, regardless of whether the area had been legally preserved or not. It also probably was a turning point in the use of rivers. People discovered that running rivers was great fun and a wonderful way to see the country. A few years later the Bureau reached for the Grand Canyon and got slapped down by letters and communications from all over the world.”

(CONTINUED IN ANOTHER BLOG POST)



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Glen Canyon Lament By Philip Hyde 2

November 19th, 2010
Landscape Photography Blogger’s 100th Blog Post started a short three part series on Glen Canyon by Philip Hyde…

A Lament for Glen Canyon by Philip Hyde, Part 2

Continued from Blog Post 100, “Glen Canyon Lament by Philip Hyde 1.”

Originally published in The Living Wilderness Magazine September 1980

From The Living Wilderness: Contributing editor Philip Hyde’s photography of the Escalante region was featured in “Slickrock,” of which he and Edward Abbey wrote the text.

Great Overhang, Moqui Canyon, Glen Canyon, Utah, 1964 by Philip Hyde. Photographed after the gates of Glen Canyon Dam were already closed and "Lake" Powell began its 17 year journey toward filling.

(See the photograph full screen Click Here.)

During the 17 years of painfully slow filling of the reservoir, the “robbing Peter to pay Paul” operation  of Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams has left some mementoes: the notices to Hoover Dam power customers to get their power elsewhere; the lawsuits of Lake Mead marina operators when they found their boat-launching ramps not just high and dry but nearly out of sight of water. To make a power dam pay for itself, as both Hoover and Glen were intended to do, requires running water through the turbines. Whenever this is done it draws down the reservoir. During the years that the bureau was trying to fill Glen’s reservoir, it had to borrow water that would have filled Lake Mead. What did this do to the revenues which were the sole financial justification for building both dams? What did it do to the revenue surplus over cost-payback that was supposed to furnish the funds to build the irrigation works planned in association with Glen Canyon Dam as part of the Upper Colorado River Storage Project?

Whatever the answers to such economic questions, the sacrifice of another kind of value is plain enough. Back in the 1930s National Park Service officials were sufficiently impressed with both Glen and Escalante Canyons to urge making them a national park. A 1935 proposal would have created one of 6,000 square miles. But the dam-building fever-the late Elmer Davis once called it “big dam foolishness”—which seized the nation in the 30s and 40s and 50s led to legislation to build a number of dams on the Colorado and its tributaries, including Glen Canyon. Two of them—Echo Park and Split Mountain, proposed for the Green River within Dinosaur National Monument—raised the specter of opening national parks to exploitation and thus aroused the opposition of every major conservation organization in the nation. In those days conservation organizations counted nowhere near the members, funds or public support they do now. Even so, the threat was enough to stop the bill until the two Dinosaur dams were deleted. It was also enough to win protective language for Rainbow Bridge National Monument, on a Glen Canyon tributary, though Lake Powell now laps at the base of this greatest of all natural bridges. But the Upper Colorado River Storage Project, finally approved by Congress in 1956, consigned the magnificence of Glen Canyon to a watery death.

With hindsight, it must seem an unequal compromise that sacrificed Glen Canyon. I consider the loss of Glen Canyon tragic. But I am certain that had Dinosaur been invaded, the precedent would have been enough to make possible the building of dams then on the drawing boards in at least eight national park system areas, including Grand Canyon. As it turned out, the loss of Glen Canyon became a rallying point a few years later when the dam builders actually reached for Grand Canyon. So far, dam proponents have been unable to overcome the worldwide opposition to their scheme. (But old dam proposals don’t die. They don’t even fade away like old soldiers, but stick around to resurface when it is believed that the opposition has relaxed its vigilance.)

Coyote Gulch and the upper Escalante tributaries are important because they constitute the last major remnant of the Glen Canyon system that still has the wild remoteness so essential to the feeling of wilderness. Escalante Canyon, carved into the same sandstone formation of the Jurassic Period as Glen Canyon, has many of the same qualities; the water-sculptured rock, the high, sheer walls decorated with paintbrush-like strokes of blue-black desert varnish; alcoves, stream meanders, natural bridges and arches, and the beautiful riparian plant growth that at once harmonizes and contrasts with the bare stone. Perhaps most impressive of all its qualities is the water—the small streams, springs and seeps so characteristic of the water-bearing Navajo sandstone. In another, wetter country these might be insignificant. But in this arid land of stone and sand, one has only to climb to the rim and walk beyond the reach of these trickles in the desert to appreciate their miraculous quality.

As they were in the original main artery, Glen Canyon, the Escalante’s scenic climaxes are at or close to the stream junctions. Many of the tributaries form incised meanders, a circumstance that gives rise to a whole series of wonders: fluting of the walls, close-linked bends some-times in cliffs hundreds of feet sheer, grottoes, great overhangs, alcoves. Where the meanders leave long, narrow peninsulas of rock, these may be cut through by later stream erosion to form natural bridges, or left above the stream long enough for other forms of erosion to take out the rock at the base, leaving arches.

As the Escalante River winds down and out of the high plateau, flowing in a generally southeasterly direction toward the Colorado, it cuts through an undulating stone basin bound on the southwest by the straight cliffs of the Kaiparowits Plateau and on the northeast by the Henry Mountains. The Escalante and the Henry Mountains were named by John Wesley Powell in 1868—the last named major river and mountain range in the coterminous United States.

The water of Lake Powell, laboriously rising for the last 17 years, has at last claimed many of the most beautiful tributaries of the Escalante—all of those below Coyote Gulch. Now it washes into Coyote, one of the grandest scenic climaxes of the Escalante basin. Was the ruining of the mouth of Coyote Gulch necessary?

Continued in the blog post, “Glen Canyon Lament By Philip Hyde 3.”

To read more about and view Philip Hyde’s landscape photography of Glen Canyon see the blog post, “Glen Canyon Portfolio.”

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November 2010 Digital Print Contest

November 6th, 2010

Philip Hyde Authorized 11X14 Archival Digital Print Of Your Choice Awarded To The Winner ($450 Value)

Alder And Redwoods In The Fog, Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, California, 1962 by Philip Hyde. Widely exhibited and published including as the promotional photograph for a Documentary on the Redwoods that won the Adademy Award.

(To see the photograph full screen Click Here.)

As announced at the Colorado Environmental Film Festival, I will be giving away an 11X14 Philip Hyde photographer authorized special edition numbered archival fine art digital print of your choice from the images available as archival digital prints on PhilipHyde.com, a $450 value.

As a side note remember that Philip Hyde’s Mountain Landscapes exhibition at Camera Obscura Gallery in Denver is still up for another week, as is the Golden Decade Exhibition in the San Francisco Bay Area at Smith Andersen North Gallery.

Photograph, Film And Contest

The photograph above, “Alder And Redwoods In The Fog, Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, California, 1962,” was the promotional photograph for a documentary film produced in the mid-1960s about the Redwoods that won the “Oscar” or “Academy Award” from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. My father, landscape photographer Philip Hyde, in taped interviews I did of him mentioned the film and that it had won the Academy Award. Also, Michael McCloskey, Executive Director of the Sierra Club after David Brower, wrote about the Academy Award winning film briefly in his book, In the Thick of It: My Life in the Sierra Club. Michael McCloskey is still around and active working in conservation. He was famous for stabilizing the Sierra Club after its civil war, for being a legal advisor to the Sierra Club and earlier for helping to organize and systematize the grassroots conservation efforts in Oregon and Washington. I asked him recently if he could remember the name of the film and he did not know for sure. It may have the same title as the book of my father’s photographs, The Last Redwoods, it may not. I have already checked with the Sierra Club and they don’t know. However, somebody who knows films or knows how to research films in Hollywood may be able to win fairly easily. There may even be a book or a website that lists the Academy Awards.

The Game And The Rules

The rules of the contest are simple. The archival fine art digital print can be won by correctly identifying which year the film came out between 1962 and 1968, the proper full name of the film and whether it won the Academy Award or was merely nominated, as well as some descriptive information, how long it is, summary, etc, about the film including where and how it can be viewed or purchased. Also, here’s the most challenging part, you must prove, either with an image, link to an image, a third-party witness or in some other documented way that it is indeed the film that “Alder And Redwoods In The Fog, Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, California, 1962,” was the promotional photograph for. The first person to get this information to me wins. I will keep the contest open until the end of November. Winning merely requires a bit of digging in the right places. I could probably find it myself, but I have too many other facts to verify and research. Besides, I thought this would be a fun way for someone to participate in finding out. Good luck and don’t hesitate to comment here or write me if you have questions about the contest.

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Glen Canyon Lament By Philip Hyde 1

October 29th, 2010

Landscape Photography Blogger’s 100th Blog Post

For more about why dams are bad for rivers and how dams are being removed in a grassroots nationwide movement to restore the main arteries of life on Earth see the blog post, “A River Will Run Through It.” For more on how reservoirs infringe on wilderness read the blog post, “The Making of ‘Rainbow Bridge from the Upstream Side.’”

A Lament for Glen Canyon by Philip Hyde 1

Originally published in The Living Wilderness Magazine September 1980

Cathedral In The Desert, Glen Canyon, Utah, 1964 by Philip Hyde after the Glen Canyon Dam gates were closed. Named by American Photo Magazine one of the top 100 photographs of the 20th Century. Philip Hyde photographed Glen Canyon on river trips with David Brower and other Sierra Club leaders in 1958, 1962 and 1964.

(See the photograph full screen Click Here.)

Burn another candle to the memory of Glen Canyon—this time for a remnant of the great Utah-Arizona canyon system that most lovers of that rugged country thought safe from the clutches of the sprawling reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam. This time for the mouth of Coyote Gulch, that fine water-sculptured meeting of Coyote with the beautiful Escalante Canyon. And for an Escalante stretch above their junction.

Why in memoriam? Because after 17 years of waiting for the filling of the reservoir euphemistically named “Lake” Powell, this spring it finally happened. And as it did, a lot of people discovered one more error in the calculations made in the planning of Glen Canyon Dam. The maps for the reservoir area originally showed that the maximum pool (highest water level) would reach only to a point well below the Coyote mouth. This June, however, a surge of spring runoff from an unusually heavy snowpack on the Colorado River’s headwaters in the Rockies brought the reservoir level to its operational maximum (3,700 feet above sea level) for the first time since the gates of the dam’s diversion tunnels were closed in 1963. The surge flooded a sixth of a mile or so of Coyote Gulch to a depth of as much as 11 feet and backed up about a quarter of a mile beyond Coyote in the Escalante River Canyon. Thus it proved, the maps were wrong.

Hikers who had thought this the province of land-based, self-powered exploration and enjoyment suddenly found themselves cut off from access, unless they had a boat. Cut off from Escalante Canyon upstream, from the wonderful climb over ledges to the base of Stevens Arch, from Stevens Canyon.

No great loss, says the renamed Bureau of Reclamation (now the Water and Power Resources Service—WAPRS, pronounced woppers), which built and operates the dam. The hikers can swim, or float across on their air mattresses, or scramble up the ledges on a newly cairned detour trail that will even save the hurried some time over the old creek-bed route. Maybe just as well, agrees the National Park Service, which manages visitation in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. Coyote was getting too much use anyway, and the water might help divert users to other Escalante entrances—although not the motorboaters, who already are acknowledging their own improved access to the Escalante and Coyote with deposits of beer cans and other “garbage.” “The wilderness ethic of boaters is different,” says an Escalante ranger.

Coyote is indeed wilderness, as is the rest of the superlatively wild Escalante canyon system, although not yet legally so. The lower dozen of Coyote’s 18 miles (as the crow flies) are part of a 588,855-acre Glen Canyon Wilderness proposal (another 49,000 acres could be added later) already recommended by the Secretary of the Interior and awaiting clearance for presidential submission to Congress. The balance of the gulch is on Bureau of Land Management lands, but BLM favors adding it to the recreation area and wilderness unit. But Lake Powell’s clutching fingers are complicating the wilderness prospect, too. Because Congress gave dam needs priority over all else in Glen Canyon, planners decided to make the wilderness boundary the reservoir water line. Thus when Lake Powell expands, the bordering wilderness would diminish. Sometimes Coyote’s mouth would be in, sometimes out. Therefore, what would be its status? “It’s a slippery one,” admits one official.

Park Rangers already are trying to manage the Coyote Gulch and the Escalante River as de facto wilderness, and they are understandably worried not only about the littering by the boaters but by campfire rings and other problems of growing public use. This fall they expect to introduce a permit system in order to control use and combat abuses. This is to the good. But there doesn’t seem to be much official concern about the direct impacts of the flooding—the lasting water damage to canyon walls desert-varnished by eons, or the mess left by silt and debris that collect at the reservoir slack water, or worse, the permanent dirty “bathtub ring” that any fluctuating reservoir inevitably leaves behind, and that Lake Powell will too.

Obviously, the former Bureau of Reclamation had a point to make: that it could fill a reservoir whose benefits and cost justification were based on miscalculation of the amount of water available in the Colorado River. One could use the services of an investigative-reporter team, or perhaps an indefatigable Ph.D. candidate armed with the Freedom of Information Act, to find out just how close Glen Canyon Dam has come to paying off anything during these 17 years of painfully slow filling of the reservoir…

Continued in the next blog post, “Glen Canyon Lament By Philip Hyde 2”

To read more about Philip Hyde and the defense of wild places, see the tribute blog post, “Celebrating Wilderness By William Neill.” For more on Glen Canyon and the photographs of it by Philip Hyde see the blog posts, “Glen Canyon Portfolio 1,” “Glen Canyon Portfolio 2” and “Glen Canyon Portfolio 3.”

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Lake Tenaya and Yosemite National Park

October 27th, 2010

Lake Tenaya, John Muir and Yosemite National Park Introduce Philip Hyde To Wilderness

All the merry dwellers of the trees and streams, and the myriad swarms of the air, called into life by the sunbeam of a summer morning, go home through death, wings folded perhaps in the last red rays of sunset of the day when they were first tried. Trees towering in the sky, braving storms, for centuries, flowers turning faces to the light for a single day or an hour, having enjoyed their share of life’s feast–all alike pass on and away under the law of death and love. Yet all are our brothers and they enjoy life as we do, share heaven’s blessings with us, die and are buried in hallowed ground, come with us out of eternity and return into eternity.  — John Muir

Early Morning, Lake Tenaya, Yosemite National Park, Sierra Nevada, California, 1975 by Philip Hyde.

(See the photograph full screen Click Here.)

Philip Hyde had a long association with Yosemite National Park, many years before meeting Ansel Adams and Virginia Best Adams of Best’s Studio in Yosemite Valley and a long association with Yosemite after meeting Ansel Adams. Philip Hyde first visited Yosemite National Park with the Boy Scouts on a 1938 Sierra Nevada high country backpack. He returned the following year with the Boy Scouts for another backpack, and nearly every year thereafter, most often with his father Leland Hyde and his brother David Lee Hyde. All the while he carried a soiled and worn copy of John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir. To read more on how John Muir’s writings inspired Philip Hyde see the blog post, “New Portfolio: Yosemite And Sierra Black and White Prints.”

Philip Hyde’s Early Black And White Landscape Photographs

Philip Hyde made a photograph in 1942 of “Shadow Creek, Minarets Wilderness, Sierra Nevada” on a backpack trip with his father and brother into the Minarets Wilderness, now the Ansel Adams Wilderness. This photograph and others made before World War II in the Sierra Nevada back country, Philip Hyde considered his first fine art quality wilderness photographs, though he did make superb photographs of some trackless wild areas of Sugar Bowl Ski Area in the winter of 1940. A few of these early 1940s photographs are on exhibition for the first time since before World War II, as part of Philip Hyde’s Mountain Landscapes at the Camera Obscura Gallery (post-War digital images from the show are on the Camera Obscura website), currently showing through November 13, 2010. For more details see also the blog post, “Vintage And Digital Prints Together In One Exhibition.”

As described in the blog post, “Photography’s Golden Era 6,” Philip Hyde first met Ansel Adams in the 1946 Summer Session of the California School of Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute, after serving in the Army Air Corp. For Summer Break 1949, between photography school courses, Ansel Adams helped Ardis and Philip Hyde land the caretakers job at the Sierra Club Parson’s Lodge and McCauley Cabin in Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park. Read more about the Hydes in Tuolumne Meadows on Philip Hyde’s Sierra Club History pages. Philip Hyde created some of his best black and white landscape photography during the Summer of 1949 and the next summer on a Sierra Club High Trip led by David Brower that started in the back country of Yosemite National Park, headed north through the Minarets Wilderness and circled back to Tuolumne Meadows. For many years Philip Hyde kept up his association and correspondence with Virginia and Ansel Adams, from time to time visiting them at their home in Carmel.

Philip Hyde Teaches At The Ansel Adams Workshops In Yosemite Valley

In 1968, Ansel Adams invited Philip Hyde to sit in on a workshop at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite Valley. Within the next few years, Philip Hyde began to teach the Ansel Adams June Workshop with Ansel Adams and eventually co-led the Color Workshop for years with William Garnett, Wally MacGalliard, Steve Crouch, David Cavagnaro and others. Philip Hyde also taught the Ansel Adams Landscape Workshop with John Sexton, Stu Levy, Joan Myers and others. The Sierra Photographic Center based in El Portal, California just outside the park, also hosted workshops in Yosemite National Park that Philip Hyde taught, as did the Yosemite Institute and the University of California Extension with such teachers as Philip Hyde, Wynn Bullock, Al Weber, Huntington Witherill, Pirkle Jones, Dave Bohn, Steve Crouch, Art Bacon, Bob Kolbrenner and others. For an introduction and list of the workshops Philip Hyde taught in other places besides Yosemite National Park, see the blog post, “Photography Workshops Taught By Philip Hyde.” In the mid 1970s Best’s Studio was renamed the Ansel Adams Gallery and Ansel’s son, Michael and his wife Jeanne Adams took over the business from his mother Virginia Best Adams. Virginia’s father, Harry Best, originally opened his “studio” to sell his paintings in a tent in 1902. The Ansel Adams Gallery Workshops continued and Philip Hyde with them into the 1980s when he made a number of his best color landscape photographs in Yosemite National Park, before or after teaching workshops, while still lugging around his 4X5 Baby Deardorff View Camera in his 60s.

Ardis And Philip Hyde’s Last Yosemite Sierra Nevada High Country Trip

Ardis and Philip Hyde made their last Sierra Nevada pack trip into the Yosemite High Country July 24 – August 3, 1991, six days before her 66th birthday and 12 days before his 70th birthday. They hiked 6.7 miles the first day from the Dog Lake Trailhead on the Vogelsang Trail to Vogelsang High Sierra Camp. Vogelsang offered “luxurious” tent deck cabins and a common building. Ardis Hyde wrote in her travel log, “Pack trains and numerous hikers going in both directions. The path is a groove but the going is easy and the altitude not noticeable at our slow pace.” They stayed at Vogelsang High Sierra Camp four nights and made side trips while Philip Hyde photographed. The flowers Ardis Hyde identified around Vogelsang were mountain pretty face, alpine hulsea, mountain jewel flower, soft arnica, Gordon’s ivesia, mountain wallflower and ball head sandwort. They also saw an adult Golden Eagle and an immature Golden Eagle. More details of this pack trip in future blog posts. The hike to Merced Lake Camp was 7.6 miles, where they also stayed four nights and then hit the trail at 6:30 am for the long “mostly up” 10 mile hike to Sunrise Camp where they camped for two nights before hiking out to Tuolumne Meadows to end their pack trip and a life-long exploration of the Sierra Nevada High Country and a love of mountain wilderness, particularly in Yosemite National Park.

Falling In Love With The Wilderness Of The Sierra Nevada

This life-long love affair with mountains and Yosemite National Park began for Philip Hyde in 1938 at age 16. The next year at age 17, for the second time he rode in the back of an open truck from San Francisco across California’s Great Central Valley with his Boy Scout friends, “through the foothills of the Sierra into the deep canyon of the Merced River,” as he described it in “Notes On A Life Of Photography” in “The Range of Light”:

This time we headed for Lake Tenaya over the old Tioga Road–that magnificent, unexcelled display road–narrow, twisty, bumpy, steep. We couldn’t go fast; the road’s low standard prevented it–so naturally we saw more of the country, some of the finest in the Sierra Nevada. At Tenaya we had the lake and the wonderful granite sand beach at the east end to ourselves. A camper could borrow one of the camp’s canoes, which I did one night, paddling alone out on the silent, dark lake. I remember sitting for long minutes, my head cocked back so I could see, entranced by the millions of pin-points of light–a city kid whose only views of the night sky had been through fog or haze and light-flared dense city air. That was my first brush with the immensity, silence and solitude of wilderness.

The next blog post will be number 100 for Landscape Photography Blogger. We will honor the occasion with the first part of “A Lament For Glen Canyon” by Philip Hyde, originally published in The Living Wilderness.

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The Battle Over Dinosaur: Birth Of Modern Environmentalism 6

September 23rd, 2010

Ansel Adams Advises Philip Hyde On His Struggles While Action Is On Hold To Keep Dams Out Of National Parks

(Continued from previous blog post in the category, “Excerpts of New Book” blog post titled, “The Battle Over Dinosaur: Birth Of Modern Environmentalism 5.”)

Split Mountain Sandstone Reefs, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado-Utah, 1951 by Philip Hyde.

In 1951, the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society sent my father landscape photographer Philip Hyde on the world’s first conservation photography assignment. Ansel Adams and Cedric Wright contributed photographs to campaigns in the 1940s, but Philip Hyde was the first ever sent on assignment. As a result of Philip Hyde’s trip to Dinosaur National Monument in Northwestern Colorado and Utah, he and Martin Litton became photographers for the first book published for a conservation cause: “This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country” edited by Wallace Stegner.

Philip Hyde went to Dinosaur National Monument in 1951, but “This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country” did not come out until four years later while the Sierra Club worked on other projects. During those years finances were bleak for Ardis and Philip Hyde even though Sierra Club, Wilderness Society and other conservation leaders had seen Philip Hyde’s photographs of Dinosaur National Monument in 1951. “Ansel praised my work to them to the point of embarrassment,” Philip Hyde said. “But nobody was ready to fund a project to use the photographs to protect the National Monument and thereby the whole National Park System.”

In 1951 Philip Hyde’s photographs not only circulated among environmental leaders, they toured national museums and libraries. Earlier that year Martin Litton began writing articles against the Upper Colorado River Storage project in the Los Angeles Times. “The people of Los Angeles opposed the Upper Colorado River Storage Project because it would take water away from California and give it to Arizona, Utah and Colorado,” Martin Litton explained. Martin Litton wrote extensively about the damage to the Colorado River ecosystem that would be wrought by the dams and of the unique beauty of Dinosaur National Monument’s canyons.

The Sierra Club Debates Whether To Go National

Sierra Club leaders also watched David Brower’s rough movie footage from Yampa River and Green River trips in Dinosaur National Monument. The prospect of protecting Dinosaur set off the Sierra Club’s first major internal conflict. Would the Sierra Club reach beyond the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California? As the leaders and members began to take notice of Dinosaur’s unique beauty, debate ran hot in board meetings between those that favored a local California focus and those that favored a national focus necessary to prevent dams on the Colorado River and its tributaries. Preserving Dinosaur National Monument finally became the Sierra Club’s highest priority in 1953.

By 1953 the Hydes had survived two bleak years and were ready to move back to San Francisco or to Monterey. Philip Hyde’s personal journals exhibit misgivings, self-doubt but also faith that somehow they would make it. God or Nature would provide.

Ansel Adams On Isolation And Making A Living

In correspondence Ansel Adams told Philip Hyde that he would have a difficult time making a living defending wilderness. Here is a small part of Ansel Adams’ letter*** to Philip Hyde on May 4th, 1952:

The whole matter does not relate to Nature – it relates to you, and to the ways and means by which you can do what you want to do and at the same time, make a living. The latter is unfortunately important…

Let us look logically at your problem. We all have a great admiration and respect for you and your ideals. Your photography is very fine indeed. the jury for the Bender Awards was much impressed by your submissions… You have a deep and sincere interest in the Natural Scene… I think the basic motive is identification with principles which you honestly believe are imperative to the security of civilization.

However – to get back to the pressing problem which we have all been concerned – you must recognize the need to exist in the world and truly function. This you cannot do in isolation, or by condensing your life into a narrow pipeline of dogma. But to really know nature you must know humanity, because nature does not exist without humanity. You will never know Nature if you “escape” and bring yourself to Nature as a separate entity with separate and personal problems to solve.

I think that you are making a great mistake to isolate yourself; you really should be right in the middle of humanity – bringing them the messages of nature which are of real value.

With Regret Ardis And Philip Hyde Leave The Mountains

In response, Ardis and Philip Hyde bought a city lot in Carmel and moved there planning to build and leave the mountains behind. Philip Hyde’s log entry for August 20, 1952:

On the eve of our move to Carmel on August 27—Though I recognize the rightness of the change and acknowledge that it came as an unfolding of progress for us, still something of me will remain in these mountains to attend the rites of the seasons: to watch the first magically gentle falling of snow, savor the turning of leaves and burst with enthusiasm as nature bursts with Spring’s new life. No collection of cities can ever offer the opportunity of being with nature as these mountains have. The tinkling of coins in the marketplace will never still the memory of a meadowlark singing across the February snow, or the sounds of the pines when Fall shouts her warnings of winter. We are not retreating from the mountains, only going where we can find more people to sing to of them. And we shall still have our pilgrimages to renew our songs.

The Sierra Club worked on other projects and put Dinosaur on hold. The Hydes could not qualify for a home construction loan on their property in  Carmel because in those days banks did not count the wife’s income of a young couple because she might become pregnant and lose her job. Philip Hyde contracted a bad case of poison oak trying to remove the vines from the lot in Carmel. “Everything seemed to go wrong in Carmel,” Philip Hyde said.

Hyde Fortunes Improve In French Morocco, North Africa

Meanwhile, Ardis Hyde’s father, my grandfather Clint King, was a Project Manager and Design Engineer for Engineering Conglomerate P.U.S.O.M. that built and designed many of the “Cold War” bases in French Morocco, North Africa. Clint and Elsie King, my grandparents, were doing well and enjoying Morocco and they thought Ardis and Philip Hyde would love it too. Grandpa could get his son-in-law a draftsman job at the base near Casablanca. Having few other options to make a good living, Philip Hyde took the job as a draftsman and Ardis Hyde worked in the PUSOM office on the base. “They took the wings of the morning,” and went to live in the distant land of Morocco.

The Hydes got caught up financially and explored Morocco in their off time. Stay tuned for a future series of blog posts on life in Morocco. After a year in Morocco, by June 1954 back in the U.S. the battle over dams in Dinosaur National Monument finally began to heat up. The Sierra Club designed “This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and Its Magic Rivers” and made plans to use Philip Hyde’s 1951 photographs with a series of essays to be edited by the acclaimed novelist Wallace Stegner. David Brower became Executive Director of the Sierra Club in 1952 and in 1953 sent letters to Morocco asking Philip Hyde to go back to Dinosaur for more photographs.

***Excerpts of Ansel Adams’ letters used by permission of the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

(CONTINUED THE BLOG POST, “The Battle Over Dinosaur: Birth Of Modern Environmentalism 7.”)

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