NORMAN CLYDE
NORMAN CLYDE
Legendary Mountaineer of California’s Sierra Nevada
Robert C. Pavlik
Foreword by Steve Roper
YOSEMITE CONSERVANCY
Yosemite National Park
Text Copyright © 2008 by Robert C. Pavlit
Foreword copyright © 2008 by Steve Roper
Published in the United States by Yosemite Conservancy. All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pavlik, Robert C.
Norman Clyde : legendary mountaineer of California’s Sierra Nevada / Robert C. Pavlik.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-59714-110-9 (pbk.) / elSBN 978-1-951179-07-6
1. Clyde, Norman, 1885-1972. 2. Mountaineers—California—Biography. 3. Mountaineering—Sierra Nevada (Calif, and Nev.) I. Title.
GV199.92.C59P38 2008
796.522092—dc22
[B]
2008017672
Cover photo: Norman Clyde demonstrating, in dramatic fashion, a dulfersitz, a method of rappelling without the use of hardware. Courtesy of Jules and Shirley Eichorn.
Back Cover Photo: Norman Clyde with the tools of his trade: campaign hat, ice axe, rope, and rucksack. Note his sunburned hands, the result of extended exposure to the elements at high elevation. Photo by Cedric Wright and courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; California Faces: Clyde, Norman, 1885–1972, :2.
Book design by Rebecca LeGates
CONTENTS
Foreword by Steve Roper
2 The Pack that Walked like a Man
4 A Prodigious Climber of Mountains
6 A Candidate for a Padded Cell
8 The Occasional Hilarious Indulgence
10 Between the Pioneers and the Rock Climbers
Foreword by Steve Roper
Years fly by. Decades come and go but mostly go. Our collective memories of former peers and heroes thus get more and more lost with each new generation. Thankfully, biographies exist to keep certain people “alive.” Norman Clyde is perhaps not well known to the youths of today, except as a mere name associated with California’s High Sierra. But Robert Pavlik has done an admirable job in bringing to light Clyde’s extraordinary life. The word “unique” is often used inappropriately, but after you read this book I would wager that you can’t think of a better word for this prodigious individual. In an obituary for Clyde in 1973, his friend Tom Jukes captured the essence of the man in a few words: “[He] had lived as every alpinist wants to live, but as none of them dare to do….When he died, I felt that an endangered species had become extinct….He was large, solitary, taciturn, and irritable—like the North Palisade in a thunderstorm, and he could also be mellow and friendly, like the afternoon sun on Evolution Lake.”
Clyde’s name was familiar to all Sierra mountaineers in my youth. You couldn’t turn a page of Hervey Voge’s 1954 book, A Climber’s Guide to the High Sierra, without a reference to a Clyde first ascent. I exaggerate slightly, for the master spent much of his time in the central Sierra, or its south, mostly ignoring the Yosemite region, perhaps too tame for him. Most striking of all in Voge’s guidebook was the fact that so many of Clyde’s ascents were done solo, this in an age when few people roamed the High Sierra, no rescues were possible, and a broken leg away from a popular trail meant an agonizing death. No search-and-rescue teams, no helicopters, no cell phones. A different age, one that Pavlik captures beautifully.
Virtually every solo mountaineer today claims that the inner struggle is what makes the endeavor worthwhile—the overcoming of deep-set fears with no one to turn to for advice or help. In our hectic life today we are so rarely alone that going solo elicits comments about a person’s sanity. Clyde did jokingly refer to his mental health in a letter to an acquaintance in 1925: “I sometimes think I climbed enough peaks this summer to render me a candidate for a padded cell—at least some people look at the matter in that way.” But one gets the impression from this book that Clyde was simply a run-of-the-mill loner, undoubtedly with a few repressed demons lurking about, but not a man who tried to sway anyone with his solitary exploits. To him, being alone must have been business as usual.
Aside from Clyde’s remarkable first-ascent record, what most captivated me back in the 1960s about the already legendary man was the size of his backpack, described with awe by older campfire