Page Type Page Type: Mountain/Rock
Location Lat/Lon: 37.66040°N / 119.1739°W
Additional Information Elevation: 12281 ft / 3743 m
Sign the Climber's Log

Overview

This is the highest of the Minaret chain, which is itself part of the Ritter Range, a dark metamorphic core of the ancient Sierra. Clyde is not only the highest but also the most massive of the minarets. It almost completely eclipses the slender needle of Michael Minaret only a few feet lower when viewed from the southeast. Excellent routes abound on this peak, from easy class 4 to difficult multi-pitch climbs found on the steep south face.

From Minaret Lake to the east, Clyde Minaret appears to rise to a high point. The left side sports the classic SE Face while the right skyline view is the also popular Rock Route. From Iceberg and Cecile Lake, Clyde Minaret appears more massive, with the numerous class 4-5 chutes on the north side visible.

Getting There

From US395, take SR203 into Mammoth Lakes. Follow the highway (turn right at the second light) to the main lodge of Mammoth Mountain. If you are there before 7a or after 7:30p, you can continue past the ski resort, driving over Minaret Summit and down towards Devils Postpile. During the daylight hours above, all visitors must pay a $5/person fee, and use the mandatory shuttle bus. Hikers and cyclists can enter on their own, but must still pay the fee. See the Red Tape section below.

There are two trailheads used to access Clyde Minaret. Minaret Lake Trail, branching off the John Muir Trail from the Devils Postpile ranger station is the shortest approach, about 7 miles. A slightly longer route (about 8 miles) but with less elevation gain uses the Shadow Lake Trail out of Agnew Meadows. The Shadow Lake Trail is easily the more scenic of the two approaches and highly recommended.

Red Tape & Mountain Conditions

Lots of Red Tape. SR203 west of the Minaret Summit(designated "Reds Meadow Valley") has travel restrictions due to the narrow one-lane road (in many sections) and the limited parking available at the popular national monument. Travel by car into the area is unrestricted before 7a and after 7:30p, so try to plan your trip accordingly. Between these hours it is required that you take the shuttle bus which leaves every 30 minutes, and more frequently during periods of high use (buses will accomodate backpacks). If you want to do a loop starting at Agnew and returning to Devils Postpile, you can ride the shuttle for free back to Agnew Meadows. Once your vehicle is in the area, you are free to exit anytime of day, but you will be subject to the $7 per-person charge if you haven't previously paid the fee and the entrance station is manned. Backpackers with permits do not have an exemption from using the shuttle during normal daytime hours.

Entry fee into Reds Meadow Valley is $7 per person, which allows free use of the shuttle. National Parks Pass and USFS Adventure Passes are not valid here. The fee is used to pay for and encourage the use of the shuttle bus.

Everything you need to know about conditions, permits and regulations can be found on the Eastern Sierra - Logisitcal Center page.

On the more popular trails (Thousand Island Lake, Shadow Lake, Minaret Lake, etc.) camp fires are not permitted and camping is restricted to designated areas. On popular summer weekends the quota for permits may run out, so advance reservation is advised (fee apply).

When To Climb

Mt. Ritter can be climbed generally only as long as Highway 203 remains open west of the Sierra Crest. The road is closed during winter months due to the high danger of avalanche on the upper section of the highway. The road usually opens around Memorial Day, and closes sometime in mid-October. Call the Ranger Station for closure information if you plan a trip near either of these times.

Climbing during other times in the year can still be done, but will require a longer trek starting near the Mammoth Mtn main ski lodge. With a bit more of a time allowance winter mountaineering in the Minarets is an unforgetable experience!

Camping

Camping is allowed in most places in the Ansel Adams Wilderness. There are special restrictions in the area between Shadow Lake and Ediza Lake, designed to reduce impact in these highly used areas. You can get information on these restrictions at the Ranger Station when you pick up your permit, and there are maps posted along the trail showing the restricted areas.

The Minaret Lakes Trail is not so restricted and generally less crowded. There are some fine campsites to be found at Minaret and Iceberg Lakes. The latter has one of the most stunning settings in the Minaret area.

Etymology

"The Minarets were the scene of much climbing activity in August 1933, when Walter A. Starr, Jr., was reported overdue from a trip to the Ritter Range. A large search party composed of some of California's finest climbers spent a week in the area, climbing peaks and checking summit registers, continually looking for clues from the missing man. The search was called off on August 19 but Clyde remained, climbing Leonard Minaret and searching the shores of Cecil Lake that day. On August 21 he climbed Clyde Minaret, looking for signs of a fallen climber in the bergschrund along its north glacier. Two days later he searched the cliffs above Amphitheater Lake with binoculars, and continued the search from the summit of Kehrlein Minaret. On August 25 he put all of the clues together, and climbed Michael Minaret via Clyde's Ledge. During the descent a fly droned by, and then another. He moved north, away from the Portal, and turned to face the northwestern side of Michael Minaret. And then he saw the earthly remains of Walter A. Starr, Jr. A few days later, Clyde and Jules Eichorn interred the body on the ledge where it had come to rest, while Starr's father, Walter A. Starr, Sr., watched from below."
-R. J. Secor, The High Sierra, Peaks, Passes, and Trails

"Norman Clyde, a name as legendary as that of Fremont or Muir. Norman Clyde, a man to whom the entire High Sierra was as familiar as ones own back yard. Norman Clyde, whose own life is much less known than that of the Greek heroes whose sagas he carried in his pack.

And how did this come about? For Clyde was a quiet, sometimes taciturn man, who often failed to leave a record of his achievements, and never boasted about his fabulous ascents. Yet, since he made his first trip to the top of Mt. Whitney, almost a half century ago, climbers have been finding his records on remote summits. A strong team of skilled rockclimbers will conquer a lonely spire, using the most modern of climbing gear and techniques and will summit with well-coordinated teamwork, only to find on a faded Kodak box, the record of a solo climb of more than six decades ago. Or, at the high point of a distant ridge will be found a small cairn, with no written record -- obviously the work of man -- and a climber will turn to his companion with, 'Well, it looks like ours would have been a first ascent, if not for Norman Clyde.' Later, upon discussing the route with him, Clyde would ponder a bit, ask a couple of questions about some difficult pitch encountered on the ascent, then admit he had been there scores of years ago.

Clyde was never one to bring up these mountaineering achievements. He would often sidestep them, or respond with his dry sense of humor, mentioning that he was in fact '350 years old,' but he was never known to make a false statement when talking seriously. It was easy to tell the difference between his banter and his true accounts of his life and work. Research completely verifies the data and dates that he supplied.

Clyde's father, Charles Clyde was born in Antrim County in the north of Ireland in 1854. He migrated to this country at the age of seven. Clyde's mother, born Belle (Isabel) Purvis, was a native of Butler, a small city about thirty miles north of Pittsburgh. Charles and Belle were married at Butler and took up residence in Philadelphia, where Norman Asa Clyde, the first of nine children, was born the following year, on April 8, 1885. His father was a self-taught clergyman of the Covenanter sect of the Presbyterian faith.

When Clyde was three, the family moved to Ohio. His father served at a number of small churches, seldom staying more than a year at any one parsonage. Apparently the independence of thought that was later to dictate Clyde's flight to the mountains was honestly inherited. Eventually, his family moved to Glengarry County, near Ottawa, and Clyde remembered arriving there on the Queen's Jubilee (May 24, 1897).

Clyde lived there from the time he was twelve until he was seventeen. He could fish and hunt, practically in his own backyard, and soon became expert in both. His father, being self-taught and an avid student of the classics, took care of his son's schooling at home. Subsequently, Clyde learned Latin and Greek almost as early as he did his native tongue.

His father was stricken with pneumonia and passed away at the age of 46. His mother gathered up her flock and returned to western Pennsylvania. Clyde enrolled in Geneva College at Beaver Falls, but as he had no formal schooling, he had several deficiencies to make up at the prep level. Graduating with a degree in Classic Literature from Geneva in June, 1909, he immediately started west. He taught at several small rural schools across the country, including Fargo, North Dakota, and Mt. Pleasant, Utah. One summer was spent at the University of Wisconsin, John Muir's alma mater; another on a cattle spread in Utah.

Deciding that he needed more education to progress in the teaching field, he enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley in 1911. Summers were spent in the mountains and in teaching at summer schools. One was at Elko, Nevada, where he spent his spare time climbing the Humbolt Range.

At the end of two years at the university, Clyde found that he still lacked one course in Romance Drama and his thesis. He balked at the drama course, maintaining that Italian plays should be read in Italian, French dramas in French -- neither in English. He could see no sense in struggling with a thesis which no one would ever read, so he quietly left the university without completing his master's degree.

During the next dozen years, the details of Clyde's life are rather sketchy, both in and out of the mountains. We know that he taught in a number of small schools in central and northern California. He remembered teaching near Stockton, and he spent a year each at Mt. Shasta and Weaverville. From his mountaineering notes, he must have spent some time in Arizona. Sometime during this period, he married a young lady from Pasadena. This is one part of his life that he refused to discuss. It is known that they lived together for three years and that she passed away from tuberculosis. It is apparent that he felt a deep love for his bride, and undoubtedly her passing was a strong factor in shaping his character.

In the field of mountaineering, we have a few more records. He was in Yosemite in 1914, where he first met up with the Sierra Club, joining with them on a trip to Tuolumne. Clyde became a member of the Club that year. After leading the annual Club outing, he traveled south along the backbone of the Sierra with a packtrain run by Charley Robinson, an old-time Sierra packer. The trip ended at Lone Pine, and Clyde made the first of his fifty ascents of Mt. Whitney at this time. Another page of his notes lists seven ascents of Weaver Bally in the Trinity country of northern California.

Clyde accompanied the Sierra Club on their trip from Yosemite through Evolution Valley in 1920, during which which time he made several first ascents. It was on this trip that he carried the first of his famous big packs. Leaving the Valley a couple of days behind the Sierra Club and not knowing for sure whether he could catch up with the group, he took along sufficient food. As he swung by Camp Curry, he noticed a platform scale, and weighed his pack in at seventy-five pounds. The next night was spent with a survey crew that he had met on the trail. They seemed amazed at the size of the pack (at the time Clyde weighed 140 pounds) and kept commenting about it. In the morning, one of the crew suggested that he might have trouble finding the packtrain and suggested that he take along a few extra cans of food that they had. Another offered a couple of other items. As later companions were to find out, Clyde never turned down free supplies. The group kept offering him more, while relating the dangers of being caught in the wilderness without food. After they had loaded him down with an additional twenty pounds, he was allowed to go his way. It was not until the next day that Clyde realized it had all been a gag to see how much he could carry, but it is still a question as to which side came out ahead with the gag.

In the fall of 1924, Clyde was appointed principal of the high school at Independence in Owens Valley. Situated at the foot of Mt. Williamson, probably the most magnificent of all the 14,000-footers, it was within easy driving distance of most of the approaches to the High Sierra. Every weekend, he would lock up his school and dash off for the peaks. The record for 1925 shows that he logged 48 climbs, of which exactly half were first ascents. Only on six of the total number did he have a climbing companion. The following year, the number of ascents was boosted to sixty -- that is sixty that have been recorded. Clyde was exploring the range at a rate that far surpassed the records of Brewer, Clarence King, or John Muir.

However, a number of the townspeople were not so impressed by this record. Certainly Clyde was an excellent instructor and he controlled the wild youths of this mountain valley like they had never been controlled before. But a school teacher, especially a principal, was supposed to be an important man in the social and cultural life of the community. On Sunday, he should be attending on of the local churches. On Friday night, if there was a school social function, the principal was an honored, if captive, guest. Many of the neighbors were openly stating that Independence High needed a principal that would act as a principal should, rather than a crazy mountain climber.

Then came Halloween of 1927. Rumor had it that the boys were going to play many a prank on the school facilities and it seemed that these were not to be harmless pranks. Clyde stationed himself nearby, armed with a .38-caliber revolver. As a carload of youths drove onto the school grounds, he challenged them. They refused to stop, so he fired a warning shot. Apparently the rowdies believed that Clyde could be bluffed and kept on. He fired a second shot, which ricocheted fragments of lead onto the car. The hoodlums left and soon were telling the story all over the town, taking the whole thing as a huge joke.

Not so the parents -- they waited upon the sheriff and demanded a warrant for attempted murder. The sheriff turned down this request, saying that if Clyde had attempted murder, it would have been murder, as he was the best pistol shot in the county. Next a request was made for a complaint charging illegal use of firearms. After a few days, Clyde resigned; all charges were dropped and Independence had traded its most colorful principal for a teacher that would act as a teacher should act.

No longer tied to regular employment, he plunged into a full-time study of the High Sierra. Within the next year a large number of articles poured from his pen, including the well-known series 'Close Ups' of Our High Sierra that first appeared in Touring Topics (the predecessor to Westways) in the spring and summer of 1928.

His summers were spent climbing in the backcountry. At times Clyde would guide parties to the summit of difficult peaks and it made no difference if the climbers were a USGS party attempting to place a benchmark on an 'unscaleable' summit or a lady peak-bagger; they made their peaks with Norman Clyde.

His winters were usually spent as a caretaker at a mountain resort. Thus, he was able to hole-in at such places as Glacier Point at Yosemite, Giant Forest at Sequoia, Parcher and Andrews camps on Bishop Creek, Glacier Lodge above Big Pine, and at Whitney Portal. Many were the times that Clyde rescued lost or snowbound climbers, or if not called in time, located their bodies. His ability to locate wrecked planes had been the subject of numerous Magazine stories. In 1939, his alma mater, Geneva College, awarded him a degree of Doctor of Science in appreciation of his mountain writings.

Well into his late seventies, Clyde still spent his summers acting as a guide on Sierra Club Base Camp trips and continued to lead private parties into his beloved Sierra. Much of the gruffness of his earlier years had disapperared, and his clear light blue eyes and pink, freshly shaven face gave him the appearance of an alpine gnome. He used to say that he would continue to climb the Sierra until the day he would just forget to come back.

During his last years, Clyde spent most of his time living at his old ranch house on Baker Creek, near Big Pine, California -- a primitive three-room place with no electricity or plumbing. He used kerosene lanterns and the running water of a stream which flowed through a spring house. His home and adjoining arbor were covered with a canopy of grape vines and climbing roses.

Clyde spent part of each summer at Sierra Club base camps, where he would entertain at campfires with tales of his earlier years. He was always available to chat with those who wished to hear directly from him about those magnificent and legendary days in the Range of Light.

In his mid-eighties, Clyde was found to be suffering from an enlarged heart, and it became obvious that he would require more attention. So his last few years were spent in a rest home in Big Pine -- until he set out for his final ascent on the twenty-third day of December, 1972.

Various newspaper accounts reported that Clyde had been buried in Tonopah, Nevada. Yet a final resting place in a mining town located in central Nevada seemed strange to those who knew him, in part because he rarely left the east side of the Sierra. Actually, a small party of mountaineers, namely Jules Eichorn, Smoke Blanchard with son Bob, and Nort Benner, quiely carried Clyde's ashes up Big Pine Creek to the peak that Norman Clyde looked out upon from his ranch window in Baker Creek. It was on the jagged crest of that peak, which would later bear his name, that Clyde's ashes were scattered in full view of the magnificent Sierra Nevada."
-Walt Wheelock, in the Introduction to Norman Clyde Close Ups of the High Sierra

"I was a young boy when I first met Norman Clyde. Though I don't remember exactly when I met him, I do know that on the Sierra Club High Trip of 1926 to Yellowstone National Park, my father left me in the care of Dr. Vernon Bailey and went off with Norman Clyde and others to climb the Grand Teton.

Norman Clyde lived much of his life in the Owens Valley and the Sierra Nevada. He came to Los Angeles once or twice a year and would use Dawson's Book Shop as his post office, bank, library and storage facility. He was about three years younger than my father, Ernest.

During the summer of 1927, I was again on the Sierra Club High Trip where I made my first High Sierra climb, an ascent of Table Mountain led by Norman Clyde, who at the time was still a high school principal in Independence.

On some of the High Trips, Norman was paid to assist on mountain climbs. Jules Eichorn and I usually preferred to climb on our own at our own pace, but Norman made himself available to us for advice and suggestions.

In 1931, Francis Farquhar invited me and Jules Eichorn to be part of the Palisades Climbing School with Norman Clyde and Robert Underhill. Norman was our guide in the ascents of what are now known as Starlight and Thunderbolt. Following the Palisades, five of us went to Mt. Whitney. Jules roped up with Norman and I with Robert Underhill. On August 16, 1931, we climbed the East Face of Mt. Whitney.

In 1932, Bestor Robinson organized a climb of El Picacho del Diablo, the highest peak in Baja California. Norman Clyde, Dick Jones, Walter Brem, Nathan Clark and I were invited to participate.

In 1933, Jules Eichorn, Dick Jones, and I were asked to join the search for Walter Starr Jr. We found indications of his being on Michael Minaret. After the search was called off and most of us had to leave, it was Norman who stayed on and found Starr's body, which he interred in a great cairn of granite.

I always had to reduce my load of equipment to the bare minimum to keep up with Norman. He could carry monumental loads which included such items as a pistol, a shoe cobbler's outfit, sewing equipment, books, tools and kitchenware. Much of this seemed unnecessary to me.

Once he visited us at our home in Los Angeles. The back end of his car was piled high with camping gear and Norman admitted there was a mouse living in the back of his automobile. He wasn't able to catch the mouse although his experiences trapping martens in the High Sierra during the dead of winter were quite successful.

Norman was always very polite and cooperative with me, perhaps because I was one of Ernest's sons. However, on occasion, Norman could be very persistent, stubborn, and unyielding. His published writings gave elegant details of his prodigious mountain climbing feats, while his personal letters expressed his opinions colorfully and definitely.

Norman wrote, rewrote and recycled his submissions to a wide variety of mostly obscure periodicals, but he had one good paying customer, Phil Townsend Hanna of Touring Topics, the Automobile Club of Southern California's original monthly magazine, and predecessor to Westways and Avenues. A bibliography or checklist of Clyde's published writings would certainly be a challenge to anyone willing to take on the task. One of my own most treasured items, is a four page off-print from the 1931 American Alpine Journal's 'Difficult Peaks of the Sierra Nevada,' which Norman inscribed to me.

There has been an increasing interest in the life and exploits of Norman Clyde. No one has had a closer identification with the summits of the High Sierra than Norman Clyde and no one will ever duplicate what he accomplished in his lifetime."
-Glen Dawson, "Recollections" in Norman Clyde Close Ups of the High Sierra



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MinaretsMountains & Rocks
 
Ansel Adams WildernessMountains & Rocks
 
SPS Mountaineer's PeaksMountains & Rocks