AN ALIEN LANDSCAPE

Before there were climbers in the Southwest, there were explorers. Just traveling through this remote, dry, wilderness was challenging enough. On their travels, they saw amazing sights: vast labyrinths of silent canyons; thundering rivers that arrived from unknown sources and flowed who-knows-where; never-seen-before mountain ranges. The few plucky individuals who began the mountaineering tradition in the Western U.S. started with easy pickings either in the Rockies or the Sierra. Pikes Peak was first ascended in 1820, Mt. Shasta in 1854, Longs Peak in 1868 and Mt. Whitney in 1873. The vast space between the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies was too forbidding, too alien.