My favorite mountain is North Palisade. My personal hero is David Brower. Soon, I hope, the former will bear the name of the latter.
It was 44 years ago that I climbed the mountain. I was 17. That August in 1964, my friend John Ellsworth and I spent six weeks by ourselves in the Sierra Nevada, sleeping in the open under the stars, exploring 500 miles of trails and cross-country routes, finishing the trip with a night atop Mount Whitney, the highest point in the continental United States.
But Whitney is a gentle mountain, with a trail to the top. North Palisade, at 14,242 feet, the third-highest peak in the Sierra, was something else. There are no truly easy ways to climb it. The least difficult is the original Le Conte Route, on the 3,000-foot west face of the mountain. The guidebooks warn you to use a rope because it is easy to get off course onto treacherous cliffs. But being young and foolish, we didn't have one.
From South Lake near Bishop, we hiked to an austere basin directly below North Palisade, where we camped for the night. We left early the next morning, ascending talus to a chute between two upturned shields of granite at the bottom of the west face. From there, our "Climber's Guide to the High Sierra" described a tricky combination of narrow ledges and other chutes, the highest partially blocked by giant chockstones, boulders wedged between the sides of the chute. In many places, a slip could have meant falling hundreds of feet. But we were blessed; the route worked as the book had suggested.
The summit register had signatures of earlier climbers. One was Brower's. Ellsworth and I recognized his name from the conquests the "Climber's Guide" credited him with making. One was the first winter ascent of North Palisade, another, the first ascent of its imposing Northwest Ridge.
A decorated veteran of World War II who taught hundreds of soldiers in the famous 10th Mountain Division the techniques of rock climbing, David Brower was, in 1964, the executive director of the Sierra Club and the strongest advocate for conservation in the United States. That year, his efforts led the Wilderness Act through Congress. Two years later, he stopped power dams from being built in the Grand Canyon. He helped establish nearly a dozen national parks. After resigning as executive director in 1969, he founded both Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute.
Fast forward 24 years, to the summer of 1988. Ellsworth and I are together again, at Greenstone Lake, a beautiful spot just outside Yosemite National Park, this time with David Brower himself. I had become a filmmaker, and Ellsworth, a U.S. Forest ranger, stationed at the nearby Lee Vining Ranger Station. I was fortunate enough to be making a film about Brower, who over the years had become a personal hero.
Brower spoke of how his early days in the Sierra had shaped his life, how his childhood experience with nature was crucial in compelling him to protect it. "Wilderness made us; we can't make it," he said. "We can only revere it and protect it. It holds the answers to questions we have not yet learned to ask."
Brower died in 2000 at the age of 88, of complications from cancer. He was a champion of environmental causes until the end. Since he died, he has been honored in his hometown of Berkeley. His memorial service attracted more than a thousand people, and a Brower Center is under construction that will serve both as a tribute to him and a home for many environmental organizations.
But there is another honor that he richly deserves.
As the leader who took the Sierra Club from being a California hiking organization with a membership of 7,000 and made it the most powerful conservation organization in the country, Brower has been more closely associated with the Sierra Nevada than anyone since the Sierra Club's famous founder, John Muir. He deserves to have his name bestowed on a Sierra Peak. And not just any peak.
California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer have introduced legislation in Congress that would officially rename North Palisade after Brower.
While it's more typical to name unnamed summits for prominent people, honoring Brower with a bump on a ridge - there are no unnamed major Sierra peaks - would scarcely do justice to his memory. Renaming North Palisade, his favorite mountain, after him, would. Calling the peak Brower Palisade would retain its connection to its original name. Moreover, the Palisade Glacier, on the peak, is the largest in the Sierra. But it is rapidly shrinking from global warming, a crisis Brower warned about 30 years ago.
In the years to come, new climbers will marvel at the magnificent peak that bears his name and ask, "Just who was this Brower, anyway?" Hearing what he did to protect the environment for them, they just might want to follow his footsteps.
About the writer: John de Graaf is a documentary filmmaker and co-author of "Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic." He is a member of the Committee for Brower Palisade.
