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Sierra Club Bulletin 



places its height at 14,051 feet. The first ascent was made by Helen 

 M. Le Conte, Curtis M. Lindley, and J. N. Le Conte in 1902,* 

 and it was afterward used as a triangulation station by the Geologi- 

 cal Survey. The Middle Palisade (14,049 ft.) was ascended first by 

 Francis P. Farquhar and Ansel F. Hall in 192 1. 



About the headwaters of the South Fork of Kings River and 

 those of the main Kern is a splendid group of peaks including 

 Whitney, Tyndall, Williamson, Brewer, and the Kaweahs. Of these 

 Mount Brewer, named after the chief of the reconnaissance party of 

 1864, was the first peak of the southern Sierra to be ascended. It 

 was ascended July 2, 1864, by Professor Brewer and Mr. Hoffmann, 

 and again on July 4 by Brewer, Hoffmann, and Gardner.t Thirty- 

 one years later, C. L. Cory, Harvey Corbett, and I ascended the peak 

 from the west, but did not find the record left by Professor Brewer, 

 as deep snow covered the summit.:]: But in 1896, after ascending 

 from the east, one of the members of the party found the bottle con- 

 taining the record, which was carefully removed, and which I suc- 

 ceeded in photographing. § It bore the record of but one other 

 climber during the period of thirty-one years. The record remained 

 on the summit for a number of years after that ; but the fragile paper 

 was broken by continual handling, and it was finally removed to the 

 Sierra Club rooms for preservation, where it was unfortunately de- 

 stroyed in the fire of 1906. The elevation of Mount Brewer as given 

 by the U. S. Geological Survey is 13,577 ^^^t. 



Mount Tyndall was first ascended by Clarence King and Richard 

 Cotter, on July 6, 1864, || and a graphic account of this trip is told 

 by King himself in "Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada." It has 

 always been a mystery to me why King picked out so comparatively 

 unimportant a peak as this to climb and bestow upon it the name of 

 the great English physicist. As viewed from the summit of Mount 

 Brewer, Mount Tyndall would scarcely be noticed, being entirely 

 overtopped and overshadowed by the huge bulk of Mount William- 

 son, a mile and a half to the east. It would appear that King must 

 have started out with Mount Williamson as his objective, but after- 



*"Among the Sources of the South Fork of Kings River." By J. N. Le Conte, Sierra 

 Club Bulletin, vol. IV, No. 4, June, 1903, page 253. 

 fCalifornia Geological Survey. Geology, vol. I, page 379. 



tSiERRA Club Bulletin. "Notes and Correspondence," vol. I, No. 7, Jan. 1896, page 288. 

 §"Up and Down Bubbs Creek." By Helen Gompertz. Sierra Club Bulletin, vol. II, 

 No. 2, May, 1897, page 88. 



II California Geological Survey. Geology, vol. I, page 386. 



