S.F. Man's Boyhood Dream Led to Muir Trail
Hiker proposed linking Yosemite to Mt. Whitney

by Carl Nolte
San Francisco Chronicle, May 28, 2001

The trail that stands as one of John Muir’s principal monuments started as the dream of a 14-year-old San Franciscan named Theodore Seixas Solomons.

Solomons, a difficult, high-spirited young man, had been sent to his uncle's ranch near Fresno. In the spring of 1884, he stared at the distant Sierra Nevada on the eastern horizon, glistening after a springtime rain.

It was "the most beautiful and most mysterious sight I have ever seen," he wrote years later.

Boyhood dreams usually don’t come true, but Solomons was no ordinary boy. He was a member of a distinguished Jewish family who expected him to become a lawyer or a scholar.

Instead, he dreamed of mountains. In later life he was a miner, a writer of fiction, a complex man with a prickly personality, "his own worst enemy" in the words of Richard Dillon, the historian.

But in his youth, Solomons was a tremendous mountaineer. He explored the high country and conceived of a trail that would link Yosemite with the mountains around Whitney.

A state-financed survey headed by Josiah Whitney had mapped the southern Sierra in the 1860s, but the country in between was a mystery until Solomons wrote about his 1894 and 1895 trips to the headwaters of the San Joaquin River in the Sierra Club Bulletin, describing a land he called "the unexplored High Sierra . . . terra incognita."

Of course the land was known, at least to the California Indians, who had crossed the range for centuries. Even now, even on the highest mountain passes, travelers find pieces of arrowheads and Indian tools.

But Solomons mapped the land and gave it names. He was in his early 20s when he made his exploring expeditions and was a man of imagination; his names evoke the spirit of the boy he once was. He called one peak the Seven Gables, a gentle meadowy area the Vermilion Valley, a rockbound canyon the Enchanted Gorge, two sinister-looking mountains Scylla and Charybdis, two names borrowed from Greek antiquity.

He called one of the most beautiful Sierra basins Evolution Valley and named its peaks for the prophets of evolution -- Charles Darwin, Ernst Haeckel, Alfred Wallace, Herbert Spencer, John Fiske, Thomas Huxley – "fraternity of Titans," he called them.

On one of his trips, Solomons was accompanied by Joseph N. LeConte – "Little Joe," as he was called -- the son of the first professor of geology at the University of California and the nephew of UC’s first president.

The LeConte name is all over Berkeley -- streets, campus landmarks. It is also all over the Sierra Nevada: a canyon, a mountain divide, a waterfall and a peak.

Other professors -- most notably Bolton Coit Brown of the new Stanford University -- also explored the region. Brown, a superb artist, brought his wife, Lucy, with him on his expeditions. One year, he even brought his 2-year- old daughter, Eleanor, the youngest mountaineer of them all.

Professor Brown was the first to climb a 12,000-foot peak on the Kings-Kern Divide that he named Mount Stanford. A couple of years later, he persuaded Stanford President David Starr Jordan to climb it himself.

But Solomons is the man who is credited with the idea of what became the Muir Trail, through the heart of the high mountains, "the flashing teeth of the Sierra crest . . . it seemed a very heaven on earth for a wanderer."