I was born in Verdun, France and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. My elementary school time was spent in Pacifica, our house located in the Coast Mountains, where I watched and whistled to Redtail hawks, bushwhacked along Linda Mar creek, and listened in fear to storm driven winds. My Dad introduced me to hunting, wildlife, and conservation. My grandmother Ruth introduced me to Yosemite, John Muir, and compassion for all living things. She was a saint.
Our family moved to the east bay town of Danville when I was 11. I could look out my bedroom window at Buddha-like Mount Diablo. On a Boy Scout trip to Pinnacles National Monument, I watched two guys rock climbing and learned that climbing lessons were offered in Yosemite Valley. I took a course and began fumbling my way into outdoor activities. I spent countless hours climbing on sandstone outcrops on Diablo and learned the rudiments of Nordic skiing in Yosemite.
The post-Beat and Hippie culture of San Francisco and Berkeley held sway over my developing adolescent mindset. Concerts at Winterland, the Summer of Love, Earth Day informed my emerging view of the world.
I pursued climbing with a single-minded determination. My parents were appalled when they found out I cut the first month of high school to go climbing.
The challenge of developing my mind and body to acquire the skills needed to climb and ski well, or even a high-end level, meant practice and time. At Indian Rock in Berkeley, I met a group of serious climbing practitioners who would go on to be the leading climbers of the day. At the time, Yosemite Valley was the Mecca of the rock-climbing world. The climbers were transients, taking temporary work in the oil fields of Wyoming, Western ski resorts, or whatever luck offered. The main and only goal was to earn enough money to return to “The Valley” for a spring or fall climbing season. They lived out of their cars, vans, and pickup trucks. And in the Valley in the tent city of Camp 4.
Camp 4 also housed drug runners, Vietnam veterans, and others taking a break from society.
I spent my share of time in the Valley, but Tuolumne Meadows was the center of my climbing experience. The golden glacier polished domes sitting in perfect randomness along the Tuolumne River, Cathedral Creek, and Tenaya Lake created an environment of hidden treasures. It was a place one was meant to get lost in.
In 1979, along with my friend Jim Keating, I made a 33-day ski of the 211-mile-long ski trip of the John Muir Trail. We were tent bound for 11 days, the tent sagging under the weight of heavy Sierra snow. Avalanches roared down canyon walls, at one point hitting our tent in what we thought was a protected spot. We starved our way to one of our food caches. A bouillon cube and a tea bag were the last ounce of remaining food we had. I documented the trip with my Dad’s Kodak Contina and Kodak Kodachrome. The photographs were the beginning of what has been a mostly self-taught photography journey.
The trip snapped the limb off any chance I would lead a conventional life.
After my Muir Trail ski it was inevitable that I felt the desire to explore the deeper reaches of the Sierra backcountry. Wanting to see what lay in the high lake basins, river headwaters, and especially the mountain summits led me to moments of achingly beautiful light. The need to hold onto those moments led me to large-format photography. The 4×5 camera with a 150mm lens was the only camera and lens I would use for 25 years.
At the time finding out about, let alone follow an educational path, photography was basically non-existent. There were a few instructional books, a couple workshops, and a handful of photographers ready to share their methods. Especially in color photography. One might find work as an assistant in New York, but that wasn’t a viable option in my case. Which meant I struggled to figure out the process from loading film to making a print.
But the most important part of the process, the way I wanted to interact with the world, has been happening for over 50 years. At times I followed a single path, for instance hiking and photographing looking at every Sierra lake basin I could get to over the course of five decades. Time will catch up with me soon and I won’t see every nook and cranny of the Sierra. It is a mountain range after all. And I will have to be happy with what I have received.
Besides the Sierra, I have spent many years traveling in the Brooks Range, Alaska and the Great Basin of the American West. Inside the vast tracts of wild landscapes, the presence of Indigenous people and their current and past histories is evident in both places. My thoughts about both extend back to the Beringia land bridge that was caused by the climate change on the Earth that led to what must have been a stunning movement of people and mammals from Asia to the Americas.
Now I have just finished a book titled, The Brooks Range/Journey Life and Art in the Gwazhal. This will be my fifth monograph. The first was published by Chronicle Books in 1995. All the titles have sold out.
My plans include building a house for my daughter and her boyfriend, continuing to travel the Great Basin and Sierra, and exploring the possibilities of making carbon transfer prints. I also have started to photograph people and environments other than the world of the natural landscape. An interaction and self-reflection I am enjoying.