Krista West - Ansel Adams

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Too excited to sleep, 14-year-old Ansel Adams was up before the sun. Hours before breakfast, he was wandering around in the small town of El Portal, California. He and his parents, Charles and Olive Adams, were waiting to board an open-air bus that would take them 10 miles (16 kilometers) and 2,000 feet (610 meters) into the heart of the Yosemite Valley. This vast stretch of wilderness is located at the western end of California's Sierra Nevada Mountains. It was June 1916, and it was Ansel's first trip into wild lands.

Prior to this long-anticipated summer morning, Ansel got a sneak preview of Yosemite in a book. He was eager to see it all for himself, and he had no idea of the enormous impact this place would have on his life and career. On this first visit to the Yosemite Valley, Ansel would fall in love at first sight with the beauty of the land. That love changed the course of his life.

Ansel Adams was not a healthy child. The gangly, lonely, energetic young Ansel was often sick in bed. In early 1916, when Ansel was 14 years old and trapped in bed by a bad cold, his Aunt Mary brought him some of her own books to read while resting. One was her copy of In the Heart of the Sierras. First published in 1888, this book contained a complete look at all things Yosemite, including the area's history, illustrations of its now-famous places and trails, and travel tips.

Ansel pored over the pages of the book repeatedly. "The text is florid, commonplace, and not too accurate, but I did not know that-I devoured every word and pored over the pages many times," he wrote in Ansel Adams: An Autobiography, published in 1985.

Ansel was hooked, as he was already prone to long, solo walks exploring the sand dunes near his home at the western edge of San Francisco. He was immediately absorbed by the book's description of a new kind of wilderness. The mountains, valleys, and waterways of Yosemite were unlike anything Ansel had seen or heard of before.

Young Ansel, an only child, soon began to lobby his upper-class parents for a family vacation to Yosemite, only 150 miles (240 km) from San Francisco, but a two-day journey then. Aunt Mary, who lived with the Adams family, refused to leave her cat, Blinkers, unattended on such a long trip (even though a neighbor agreed to watch the cat). Olive, Ansel's mom, thought Yellowstone was much too far away to be worth the trouble. Yet Charles Adams was accustomed to catering to his only son. Eventually, they all gave in to Ansel's nonstop pleadings.

On June 1, 1916, Ansel, Charles, and Olive Adams caught the Southern Pacific train in Oakland, California, to begin the family's first journey to Yosemite National Park. They would take this train to the small town of Merced (a route that is still traveled by rail today). There they would transfer to the Yosemite Valley Railroad (which was replaced by a road in 1926) to follow the Merced River to the town of El Portal. From there, travelers boarded an open-air bus for the bumpy ride into the valley.

At the time, people dressed formally to travel. Men wore hats and heavy jackets; women wore blouses, long skirts, bloomers, hats, and high boots. Such proper travel attire was unbearably hot during the summer in California. Ansel, however, was largely unfazed by the heat because he was so excited and so determined to see the Yosemite he had seen in his book. In March 1980, Ansel Adams recounted the journey to the Wilderness Society, a wilderness protection organization that he worked and wrote for later in his life:

All day long we rode, over the Coast Range down across the heat-shimmering San Joaquin Valley, up through the even hotter foothills to the threshold of Yosemite. I can still feel the furnace blasts of air buffeting through the coaches, and hear the pounding, roaring exhaust of the locomotive reechoing from the steep walls of the Merced Canyon.