NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE 



Climbing Mount Humphreys from Bishop 

 By C. H. Rhudy 



For a little over twelve years I lived in the Owens Valley, practically at the 

 base of Mount Humphreys, before an opportunity presented itself of carrying 

 out a long-cherished desire to look at the world from the top of the noble old 

 mountain. My ambition was realized on July i8, 1920, when with two fellow 

 engineers, LeRoy C. Bogue and Joseph L. Findlay, we added our names to the 

 Sierra Club register found on top of the mountain, making a total of nine sig- 

 natures up to that date.* 



We were fortunate in being able to make the start for the summit from a 

 construction camp, at that time being operated by the writer for the Southern 

 Sierras Power Company, located only three miles horizontally and a little over 

 one mile vertically from the top of the mountain. In this connection, I might 

 add that the camp-site was reached by a Ford car, specially equipped, and, so 

 far as my information goes, no other car has been this close to the summit of 

 Mount Humphreys. 



We were on our way at 6:00 a.m. We followed the trail to its end at the 

 McGee Creek Reservoir, being the higher of the two small lakes shown on the 

 Mount Goddard topographic sheet on the headwaters of McGee Creek. 



We went around the northwest side of this lake about halfway and then 

 turned almost due west up the mountain-side, skirting to the south and west of 

 a prominent ridge projecting from the main range ; we finally reached the crest 

 of this ridge, which we traversed till we came out on top of the saddle on a 

 wide fiat about one mile northwesterly from Humphreys. Our course then zig- 

 zagged along the main crest, now on the east side, then on the west side, 

 around the bases of the jagged sawteeth, any of which would have been fine 

 sport in climbing if we hadn't been in search of bigger game. 



After perhaps an hour of winding back and forth between the pinnacles, and 

 this time scaling along the east side of one of them, we came suddenly face to 

 face with the real thing. There it was, a towering spire five or six hundred 

 feet high. The northwest side of the main peak proper is indented, or trough- 

 shaped, for the first three hundred feet, and gradually becomes steeper and 

 narrower till it pinches out entirely, and ends up against an almost vertical 

 wall. Viewing the thing from a distance of probably eight hundred feet, it 

 simply looked impossible to climb it ; but remembering that others had claimed 

 to have reached the top, we knew that if they had we could do it too; so we 

 started up the trough. The going was good for the first three hundred feet, 

 and then the crevasse played out, and it seemed for a time that we had reached 

 the "end of the trail." After looking around for quite a little while, we discov- 

 ered a slight ledge to our right which seemed to hold out possibilities. This is 



* See Editor's Note at end of article. 



