‘Man’s will to do the impossible.’ Mount Whitney’s first winter climb was 90 years ago
Ninety years ago, one man set out alone on a pair of wooden skis on a journey of roughly 300 miles across the length of the snowy spine of the Sierra Nevada.
Orland “Bart” Bartholomew’s aim was photography, however, not glory, as he stood atop Mount Whitney on Jan. 10, 1929, making him the first known person to make a recorded winter climb of the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states.
He later wrote one article about his winter journey of 1928 and 1929 for a Sierra Club bulletin, and then his adventure journals and photos sat on a shelf for decades.
The magnificence of what he did would become more widely known and celebrated in the 1970s after author Gene Rose heard of the story and tracked down his son, Phil, to write a book about the journey, “High Odyssey,” after Orland died.
Phil Bartholomew, who turns 84 years old in April, is still filled with awe and excitement about what his father accomplished all those years ago.
He was a true “mountain man – I really look up to him for that,” Phil said Monday from his Oakhurst home, a few days before the 90th anniversary of his father reaching Mount Whitney’s summit.
Orland turned 30 years old on the trip. He did the snowy trek in the early days of mountaineering with primitive outdoor equipment. Each night for more than three months, he built a shelter with a canvas bag supported by his skis or tree branches, and fell asleep wrapped in down. He built fires for warmth and ate stashes of canned food that he hid in trees along his route the previous summer.
As cold as it was, Orland was already well-acclimated to the harshness of a high Sierra winter. He previously worked as a surveyor, measuring snowpack and stream flows for Southern California Edison.
“There was no question in his mind if he could successfully make the trip,” Phil said, “because he had been living this kind of life for several years.”
Photography had become a hobby. He’d never seen photos of the high Sierra peaks he loved covered in snow, so he decided to take some. With this in mind, Mount Whitney became an essential stop.
Orland caught a ride to his start point, near Lone Pine in the Eastern Sierra, on Christmas Day, 1928. The journey north, which followed the length of the Sierra, ended April 3, 1929, in Yosemite Valley.
“I’ve always liked stories about one man against the wilderness, and this is really a story that illustrates that,” said his son, a retired fishery biologist with California Department of Fish and Wildlife, formerly known as Fish and Game.
There were many challenges along the way. One of the greatest was Harrison Pass, where Orland spent hours cutting steps out of ice with an ax to crawl his way to safety. In another instance, he fell through snow and ice into a creek during a winter storm. To get dry, he built a fire in a frying pan inside his shelter. One of his food caches was also stolen. He fortunately got enough food to last another couple weeks from a man traveling via dogsled to bring supplies to workers at Minaret Mine.
And there was the challenge of skiing with a pack weighing 68 pounds, on average. He left that at his base camp the day he climbed Mount Whitney, around 14,500 feet in elevation.
The mountain, first climbed in 1873, continues to attract adventurers from around the world.
Phil describes his dad, who retired as a forest guard for Sierra National Forest, as “an outstanding example of man’s will to do the impossible – and that pretty much sums it up.”
“I never heard him complain about anything. No matter how difficult anything was, he just did it.”
Orland lived in Big Creek, Huntington Lake and Clovis before he died in 1957. He and his wife, Roberta, are buried in a cemetery in Tollhouse.
Four skiers retraced his winter route across the Sierra in 1999 and used the journey to campaign for an unnamed Sierra peak being called Mount Bartholomew.
Another fan of Orland succeeded in getting a peak named after him last year near Huntington Lake, but the Bartholomew family is still hopeful their desired mountain, a higher summit in the Ritter Range of the Ansel Adams Wilderness, will receive the honor. That one is located in one of Orland’s favorite areas.
Phil still hopes that will happen.
“That would be a fitting completion to an amazing mountain story.”
Carmen George: 559-441-6386, @CarmenGeorge
This story was originally published January 9, 2019 at 12:38 PM with the headline "‘Man’s will to do the impossible.’ Mount Whitney’s first winter climb was 90 years ago."
