Old Man of the Sierra

By now he must be close to 80, but he will not admit it. Only his blue eyes tip off his age: occasionally they betray him by watering. But Norman Clyde still has a face that is unlined and a handclasp that can crumple knuckles. Square and solid, he still can carry a 120-lb pack by the hour with his bent-knee shuffle. And he still knows more than any other man alive about the wilds and wonders of the Sierra Nevada, the giant wall of granite that links Nevada and California with some of the most rugged peaks on the continent.

As one of the nation's most remarkable sportsmen, Norman Clyde is close kin to the West's lonely mountain men of the 19th century, trail blazers who had the curiosity, the courage and the craft to discover what lay beyond the next peak. He works as a guide only long enough to finance his own expeditions, and he can exist for months at a stretch in the Sierra. His towering pack makes him self-sufficient. Not only does it contain such essentials as dehydrated food and a three-quarter ax, but also shoe nails and a cobbler's hammer, material to patch his pants, cameras, prepared breading mix for frying fish, and, to while away the twilight hours, copies of such classics as Cervantes in Spanish and Moliere in French. Says a Sierra guide: "We call him the pack that walks like a man."

"A Buzzing Sound." What is more, Clyde is a self-trained naturalist who contributes scientific reports to the California Academy of Sciences, a pathfinder who has saved stranded motorists by skiing through blizzards with food strapped to his broad back. He is so accurate with a slingshot that he rarely has to resort to his .22-cal. pistol to kill small game. He scoffs at the idea of riding an animal up a mountain: "I can carry a damn mule faster than he can carry me."

Clyde's record as a climber is monumental: he has topped 36 peaks in 36 days, made at least 200 first ascents, and allows with pebble-scuffing modesty that he has scaled the 14,495-ft. Mount Whitney "about 50 times, anyway." Sums up a mountaineering colleague: "Clyde has brought down more corpses, found more airplane wrecks, and climbed more peaks than any other man in the Sierra."

When search parties set out after a lost climber, Clyde usually hunts by himself, preferring to rely on his own knowledge of his mountains. In the early '30s, he started after a lost lawyer by guessing that he would have headed for the highest minaret in the area. Coming upon a pile of rocks of the sort climbers erect as trail markers, Clyde found fresh grass underneath. Clyde reasoned that the missing lawyer had recently built the pile, had probably already climbed and descended the highest minaret. "Then I figured he would try the second-highest minaret," recalls Clyde. "But I couldn't find anything there, not even footprints. Then I heard a buzzing sound above me and looked up, and there was a swarm of blueflies. The body was up there on a ledge."

"First Your Hat . . ." Mountain Man Clyde took the long way around getting to be top climber in the Sierra. Son of a Presbyterian minister in Philadelphia, he graduated as a classics scholar from Pennsylvania's Geneva College, but in 1909 he was lured to California by the writings of Naturalist John Muir. Clyde put in a dozen restless years teaching school, then quit and took to the Sierra for good.

Last week, as the Sierra warmed under the June sun, Norman Clyde was getting ready to leave his winter base in a rundown ranch house outside Big Pine, Calif, and head once again for the uplands. Despite his years, he plans to roam the Sierra indefinitely. He accepts the idea that some day he may fall. He has tumbled twice in the past, lacerating a hand each time, and has chilling knowledge of what can happen to a man who makes a mistake in the mountains: "You usually go end over end, faster all the time. First you throw your hat. Then your knapsack. Then your clothing." The prospect does not faze the old man of the Sierra.

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