Surprising to most is the fact that before Mt. Whitney was a part of Sequoia National Park, even before it was part of the Inyo and Sequoia national forests, the region was set aside as a military preserve. For almost a quarter century, Mt. Whitney and its surrounding terrain fell within the boundaries of the Mt. Whitney Military Reservation. How that now long-forgotten place came to exist, and what happened to it, is worth remembering.
The Langley Expedition of 1881 explored the potential of using the Whitney area, with its very high altitude and unusually dry atmosphere, for scientific purposes. Langley’s interests focused primarily on the measurement of solar energy, but his team also collected metrological data. At that time, very little weather data had yet been collected at very high altitudes, and Langley took advantage of his access to the summit of Mt. Whitney to capture at least a bit of information.
Throughout his expedition, Langley enjoyed support from the United States Army, including the participation of Captain Otho E. Michaelis, an ordnance officer on temporary assignment with the Signal Corps. A decade earlier, seeing the need for a program of nation-wide weather measurement, President Ulysses S. Grant had issued an executive order instructing the Army Signal Corps to begin collecting weather data throughout the United States. This was the mission that brought Captain Michaelis to Mt. Whitney.
Michaelis found the summit of Mt. Whitney an exposed and inhospitable place, and he collected little data, but the seed had been planted that the mountain’s extensive summit plateau presented an opportunity for further research. Langley’s final report reinforced the point, suggesting that studies continue on the summit of the Sierra’s highest summit.
Someone in the Signal Corps took this message to heart, and after due consideration the army acted, creating the Mt. Whitney Military reservation by executive order on September 20, 1883. The new reserve contained 84,480 acres, an area of about 132 square miles, and included the high peaks from Williamson on the north to modern Mt. Langley (then called Sheep Mountain) on the south. On the east side of the mountain, the reservation extended down almost to the outskirts of the town of Lone Pine.
And what did the Signal Corps do with this new research site? For the next twenty years, exactly nothing. The army placed no one on the ground and spent no time managing the area. The only significance of the reserve was that its lands remained outside the Sierra Forest Reserve when that protected area was defined in 1893.
Not until 1903 did the army finally notice the existence of the Mt. Whitney Military Reservation. That summer, the army assigned Captain Charles Young as the officer in charge at Sequoia and General Grant National Parks, and this most ambitious and capable of all the early cavalry officers to oversee the parks read the maps and discovered the presence of the military reservation a few dozen miles to the east of the national parks. Young, who seemed to have almost preternatural energy, was soon drawn to the long-neglected reservation.
By this time, the trail Langley had roughed out to the summit back in 1881 had largely disappeared, but tourist interest in the mountain was growing. Responding to this challenge late in the summer of 1903, Young diverted a portion of his command to the Mt. Whitney Military Reservation and began improving trails.
His primary improvement was the cutting through of a new and much shorter trail to the west base of the mountain, the route that is now known as (old) Army Pass. Prior to the opening of this cutoff, anyone traveling to the Crabtree area from Lone Pine crossed over Cottonwood Pass, and traveled south all the way to Tunnel Meadow on the South Fork of the Kern River before turning north and climbing to Siberian Pass and Rock Creek. Young’s new Army Pass route cut at least twenty miles off the old route, and not incidentally, opened up a new part of the military reservation to stock travel.
After Young, military interest in the area rapidly waned. The Signal Corps, for whom the reserve had been created, had no particular interest in managing the reservation, but another new organization did. In February 1905, responding to strong encouragement from President Theodore Roosevelt, Congress transferred responsibility for management of the federal forest reserve system from the General land Office of the Department of the Interior to the Forestry Bureau in the Department of Agriculture. A month later, this newly empowered USDA agency renamed itself the United States Forest Service.
Founding Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot immediately went to work to strengthen his new bureau, and one of his interests was in cleaning up anomalous public land designations. Pinchot soon discovered the Mt. Whitney Military Reservation and also the fact that it held no specific significance to the army. Pinchot put his staff to work, and the following year, 1906, the War Department abandoned the reservation and its lands became a part of the Sierra Forest Reserve, soon to be reorganized as the Sequoia and Inyo national forests.
Through the lens of hindsight, the significance of the Mt. Whitney Military Reservation appears minor. During its twenty-three-year existence, it attracted little attention and accomplishment nothing towards its original mission of meteorological research. It remains, however, the first part of the southern Sierra to be withdrawn from potential public sale and one of the building blocks out of which modern Sequoia National Park eventually emerged.
© Wm. Tweed