Picture the young man, after a hard day’s travel by foot and horse, jotting down a few words in his journal by the stub of a candle. It’s October of 1833, a searingly cold, snowy season in the Sierra Nevada. California, along with the rest of the world, is in the grip of what will later be known as the Little Ice Age, a period of punishing temperatures that lasted from 1500 till 1880. The Spanish sea captains who first explored California’s southern coast—Juan Cabrillo in 1542–43, Sebastián Vizcaíno in 1602–03—noted how wintry everything was, and Sir Francis Drake, who may or may not have landed at Northern California’s Point Reyes, reported that the ropes froze on the Golden Hind, while his chaplain marveled that the coastal hills were snow-covered even in June.
The young man, Zenas Leonard, recorded that
the ground was covered with a deep snow.… These peaks are…incapable of vegetation; except on the South side, where grows a kind of Juniper or Gin shrub, bearing a berry.… Here we passed the night without anything to eat except these gin berries, and some of the insects…our men had got from the Indians.
Leonard is a clerk and a trapper, one of 58 men on an expedition led by Joseph R. Walker of Missouri. Walker was famous in his day, a contemporary of Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and other prominent beaver skinners. He had led sizable expeditions before and would lead others, but this was the one that would make his reputation, the one that came closest to catastrophe.
Walker, in Leonard’s description, was
a man well calculated to undertake a business of this kind…well hardened to the hardships of the wilderness—understood the character of the Indians very well—was kind and affable to his men, but at the same time at liberty to command without giving offense,—and to explore unknown regions was his chief delight.
Recruited by Benjamin de Bonneville, of later Salt Flats fame, Walker undertook to lead a party across the Intermountain West, trapping and mapping along the way. Then, should conditions prove favorable, he would cross the California mountains, something that Euro-Americans had never done in a westerly direction.
A little short of 200 years later, five of us set out to duplicate that crossing. We would be traveling not on horses but on snowshoes and skis, and we would start out not in future Wyoming but at Grover Hot Springs, scene of many a steamy California frolic.
What I remember from our first day is the ungodly backpack. I was convinced that the others were carrying less than I was, although when I looked their packs over, I realized it was probably the other way around. The amazing fact about the Walker party is that they did it on horses. Leonard recorded that each man had four of them, one to ride and three to carry; by my calculation, that’s 200 horses clambering up granite benches, wallowing through snowdrifts, in places needing to be lowered on ropes.
Mid-October in the Little Ice Age was bleak. We, in contrast, were heading up in April, but conditions were not all that different: The previous December had been the snowiest in Sierra history, and we found snow everywhere above 7,000 feet. Most of the high lakes were frozen. I had an old down bag that I’d borrowed and a flimsy backpacker tent; the guide who came with
