16 October 2024
BIG BIRDS. I first had my Dad take us to Pinnacles National Monument in the early 1950s, because I wanted to see where the California Condors lived. Around 1950, somebody gave me a little book called "Reg Manning’s Cartoon Guide to California.” I remember that the author had described California - with all its big and little mountain ranges - as looking like a strip of crinkly, crisp-cooked bacon. More to the point, Pinnacles was described as the home of the nearly extinct condor. Many years later, I learned that there were very few records of condors in Pinnacles after 1900, but Reg Manning didn’t know that, so I didn’t, either. Obviously, I didn’t see condors, but the crags and caves of Pinnacles were well worth the trip for me, and Pinnacles became a regular destination for me in later years for hiking, climbing, and family camping.
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BIG MOUNTAIN. When I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay area, one of the places I loved to go was Mt. Diablo. Rising 3,849 feet above sea level – and all of that in a single isolated mass on the edge of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta – the mountain can be seen and identified from all over central California. While hiking in the Oakland hills on cool winter days, I could sometimes look off to the east and see its highest thousand feet or so covered with a light (but ephemeral) topping of rare Bay Area snow.
Some of Mt. Diablo’s attraction was its height and prominence. Some of it was the fun of going up the amazingly twisty road that you drove to the summit parking lot. For me, it developed a special mystique when I read an early account of climbing the peak (in William Brewer’s “Up and Down California in 1860 to 1864”), in which I remembered that Brewer had said he could see Mt. Shasta, over 200 miles north beyond the Sacramento Valley. By the 1950s, the smog and agriculture haze sometimes made it hard to see the Sierra Nevada - less than 100 air miles away - but I held to the thought that, one day, I might get the absolutely perfect clear weather, and there it would be. Of course, I never saw it.
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So, two big dreams of a 12-year old boy in early 1950s California didn't come true. Well, expecting to see Mt. Shasta from Mt. Diablo was not realistic. Neither was going to Pinnacles to see nesting California condors. So what? In neither case was the pilgrimage diminished by its impossibility.
Besides, there's more to both stories.
CONDORS: it's true that condors are not known to have nested at Pinnacles after about 1900. That doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't. There's a lot of rugged terrain, difficult to access, and nobody was looking for condor nests in the "Fifties." Reg Manning may not have been wrong. We'll never know.
More importantly, condors were seen regularly in the Pinnacles area throughout the first half of the Twentieth Century. On a ranch not many miles to the northeast of the Monument, up to a dozen condors were regularly roosting as late as 1965. Conclusion: If I had looked up at just the right moment, I might have seen a condor at Pinnacles in the early 1950s.
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MT. SHASTA: The rest of the mountain story is a little more complicated than the rest of the condor story. In the first place, I remembered the story incorrectly. Brewer didn't see Mt. Shasta from Mt. Diablo; he saw Mt. Lassen. As he wrote about a visit to the summit in May 1862:
"The great features of the view lie to the east of the meridian passing through the peak. First, the great central valley of California, as level as the sea, stretches to the horizon both on the north and to the southeast. It lies beneath us in all its great expanse for near or quite three hundred miles of its length! But there is nothing cheering in it—all things seem blended soon in the great, vast expanse. Multitudes of streams and bayous wind and ramify through the hundreds of square miles—yes, I should say thousands of square miles—about the mouths of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers, and then away up both of these rivers in opposite directions, until nothing can be seen but the straight line on the horizon. On the north are the Marysville Buttes, rising like black masses from the plain, over a hundred miles distant; while still beyond, rising in sharp clear outline against the sky, stand the snow-covered Lassen’s Buttes, over two hundred miles in air line distant from us—the longest distance I have ever seen."
In the second place, I wouldn't have been looking for either Mt. Shasta or Mt. Lassen in the early 1950s, because I couldn't have read Brewer's account earlier than the very late 1950s. So, I was not only mis-remembering Brewer's observation, I was mis-remembering when I first mis-remembered it. I was atop Mt. Diablo several times in my Senior year in high school (1956-1957). That must have been when my faulty memory originated.
Brewer didn't see Mt. Shasta from Mt. Diablo, but would it have been possible? Obviously, it would have taken a day with extremely clear air. You might think there were a lot of those in the 1860s - before industrial smog and agricultural haze - but the Central Valley had its own natural issues. Stories from the Gold Rush often mention the deep haze and shadows that prevailed over the valley and the foothills. Brewer had a great day in May 1862, but his observations in September 1861 may have been more typical:
"The view from the summit was remarkably fine, but the day was not clear and the distant views were shut out. There were no clouds, but a haze or smoke in the air shut out everything over fifty miles distant."
But it wasn't just the air quality that would have been a problem for Brewer, or anybody else. Even though Mt. Shasta is 14,000 feet high, and even though the view from Mt. Diablo is straight up the Sacramento Valley, and no land form would have been in the way, the distance (probably 250 miles) plus the curvature of the earth makes the sighting impossible.
End of story? Well, some people still claim to have seen the very tip-top of Shasta from Diablo. People who might know suggest that, on rare occasions, you might see what looks like the mountain, but is really just an image, refracted on the sky by the atmosphere. I don't understand the dynamics of this, but apparently it's like seeing a mirage of mountains across a lake on a hot day. Okay, I guess.
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In my life, I've seen condors many times - singles and groups, far away and near at hand. I've seen Mt. Shasta from the Sacramento Valley, from southern Oregon, and from its base. I feel lucky to have had all those opportunities. Still, looking back 70 years to those first adventurous attempts to see the improbable - or impossible! - still stand out in my mind as happy memories.
Mt. Shasta, up close
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