The Disappearing Sierra Summit Registers

We drove up from California’s Owens Basin with the rising sun still an hour behind the White Mountains. Our objective: to reach the summit of a certain pile of granite blocks amid a range of other such piles thrust more than twelve thousand feet above sea level. Some years before, three young men had stood briefly upon that particular summit, and we hoped that we might find there, on this calm autumn day before the season’s first snow, perhaps wedged into a crevice, a rusted tobacco tin or other receptacle, in which might be preserved a scrap of paper containing the climbers’ names scrawled in pencil beside the year in which they’d made their pioneering ascent: 1934.

That had been eight decades ago—the same year Bonnie and Clyde were gunned down on a Louisiana back road, the year Adolph Hitler became Germany’s Führer, the year the Loch Ness monster was first spotted. It was also the year Hervey Voge, David Brower, and Norman