On one of those chill rainy days in the Week of Information I unearthed a couple of Sierra Club books from half a century ago, one obviously picked up some years after its publication given its marked-down price from half what a 1941 Dodge panel truck cost around then to $25.00 and finally $12.50, “Baja California”. Although always a favorite location of mine Robert Wood Krutch’s crackpot theology came across as a little ridiculous and though Fairfield Porter’s brother’s* pictures were gorgeous they weren’t exactly the Baja I was looking for.
Not so the earlier book; Tom Horbein’s “Everest, the West Ridge” was much more the real deal, the nuts and bolts [as long as one skipped over the S. Club’s inexorably interspersed platitudes] of mountaineering and still just the thing, these many years later, for a rainy afternoon.
Somehow, despite the sun’s reappearance and increasing evidence [again, so who can say] of Spring this led or veered me into the pre-digital realm of Radar Ranch, my own West Ridge
so back to eighties slidereels…
or early early nineties, while outside
as weather inexorably warmed
I remained inextricable; Onyx, a long gone dog
and the Radar Ranch
with that long gone time of building on mountains
or moving buildings on mountains…just the kinds of things we did
when L wasn’t building other things or dressing for mountaineering.
All exhumed from within the Deep Archives, these and much else…
far away from 21st century days on the Straits of Carquinez/Martinez
and the 19th century alleys
of Benicia…
whereat we’re at. For now.
* Eliot Porter; he and RW Krutch were David Brower’s go-to writer-photographer crutch in the proselytizing years after the Sierra Club’s Glen Canyon debacle [at least Muir knew what was UP with Hetch Hetchy!] as the organization transitioned from a bunch of wildass mountain climbers into the lawyerly lobbyists it remains to this day…but then this IS [and has been] the Great Era of Lawyerly Lobbyists, no question.
So nostalgic. How did you get to Radar in the first place?
Dave [Rumsey] found it, ever on the lookout for desert real estate, in 1985. Or did you mean…take I-80 east of Imlay to exit 151, Dun Glen Road south to first fork, go left up Dun Glen Canyon to nearly the top of the pass, right at the windmill and follow that road up Auld Lang Syne Gulch to a saddle, switchback to the ridge and follow the ridge to the top of Auburn Peak. https://www.google.com/maps/search/auburn+peak+near+winnemucca+nevada/@40.7462429,-117.8610225,411m/data=!3m1!1e3
Takes about forty of fifty minutes from pavement.
Blue car with orange flower foreground ….splendid.
Loved the photographs in the Sierra Club books, but you are correct about the writing..
so sorry I never made it to Radar but wonderful to see the old photos. Agree with Janet’s splendid comment. 🙂
Linda is quite stylish in her ‘Yama Girl’ outfit! 山の女性 !!
Michael – your juxtaposition of the Everest book cover with a dappling of snow at Radar is quite cute.
Ahh, but the yellow boxes of slides really takes me back. Good ol’ wet-process photography, where each shutter release was real money!
REAL money, and a wait to see…right now all I’m doing is sorting the outtakes by category [landscapes, cars, abandoned cars, people, dogs, buildings etc.] and hoping someday I’ll have a studio assistant who can put them into carousels so I can look at them…
moving shacks?
looks like my style
that looks like REAL fun
not like the organized stuff of today
nor the likes^
I’ve mentioned to Bernard [the new owner] that if he decides he doesn’t want that little building I’d be happy to take it off his hands…if at some point he decides that I’ll give you [and Willey, at Courtney Rock and Transport] a call and we can have some fun dragging it over to Wall Spring.
Shack Radar > Wall sounds like big fun. Let me know if that happens; I’ll be there to help document. Really glad I got to launch balsa gliders off the top of Radar Ranch….. classic.