The story of Bill Tuttle tells us about how things were done in the backcountry of Sequoia National Park in the days before helicopters and modern communications.
In the summer of 1946, twenty-seven-year-old Tuttle set out on a John Muir Trail hike with his brother Mark and friend Sam Siegel. All three thought they were entitled to a bit of wilderness escape. They had served as naval officers in the Pacific and had just been mustered out of the service in San Francisco. After several years of war, a hike in the High Sierra undoubtedly sounded attractive.
During the month of August, the three, all of whom had hiked in the Sierra before the war, worked their way southward along the Muir Trail and eventually found themselves in the Wallace Creek area, where they left the trail and set up a camp at Wallace Lake.
The next day, Bill and Sam set out to climb Mt. Carillon, which they succeeded in doing. On the way back down, Bill announced that he also wanted to try Mt. Russell, and the two parted. Sam waited near Tulainyo Lake for the other climber to return. Finally, as darkness approached and Bill still had not come down from Mt. Russell, a worried Sam scrambled back down to camp at Wallace Lake.
Sam and Mark Tuttle spent a restless night waiting for their missing partner to return, and when he had still not showed up by dawn, they initiated a search. The two spent the morning looking over the northern slopes of the peak, and finding nothing, they decided that it was time to call in assistance.
Returning to camp at Wallace Lake, Mark remained there while Sam jogged down some four miles to the John Muir Trail. From there, still moving as fast as he could, Siegel continued down Wallace Creek on the High Sierra Trail. By 3:30 pm he had arrived at Junction Meadow. He had traveled nearly eight miles in the past two hours and dropped 3,000 vertical feet.
At Junction Meadow, Sam Spiegel opened the emergency telephone box and rang up the two-long-two-short signal for the Kern Canyon Ranger Station, located almost twenty trail miles to the south. Ranger Gordon Wallace answered the call.
Wallace heard Siegel’s story and immediately went to work. Using the park’s backcountry phone system, the ranger called the Forest Service in Lone Pine and had them initiate a search to see if Bill Tuttle had somehow made his way to Whitney Portal or Lone Pine. Also present at the Kern Station was seasonal ranger Richard Hester, who worked for Wallace at the summer post then known as the “Mt. Whitney Ranger Station.” (Today we call the station Crabtree Meadow.)
Once the Forest Service confirmed that Bill Tuttle did not seem to have come out at Whitney Portal, Wallace sent Hester toward Wallace Lake. The ranger rode all night and arrived at the camp the following morning after a twenty-six mile horseback trip. Confirming that Tuttle was still missing, Hester initiated his own search effort to find the missing climber.
Siegel accompanied Hester up to where Tuttle had last been seen, and the ranger started up the mountain. Finding tracks, Hester confirmed that Tuttle had made his way initially to Russell’s eastern summit. The mountain’s western summit is a bit higher, however, and Tuttle’s tracks headed in that direction. There, Hester found evidence that Tuttle had made it to this summit as well. His tracks then started down the extremely precipitous northern side of the peak.
Using his field glasses to scan the rocks, Hester eventually sighted Tuttle’s body. The young naval officer had fallen at least six hundred feet. Later that afternoon, Hester and Siegel made it to the badly battered remains, placing them in the climber’s own sleeping bag but leaving them, for the moment, where they had landed.
Meanwhile, ranger Wallace had by now also made the twenty-six mile ride to Wallace Lake, arriving late in the afternoon. Hester briefed him, and the next morning, the two rangers took a mule up the rugged mountain, getting it to within a few hundred yards of the body. With the help of some other campers, they recovered Tuttle’s remains and tied them to the mule. By the end of the day, the entire party, now functioning as a funeral cortege, had moved on to the Mt. Whitney (Crabtree Meadow) Ranger Station.
The next morning, the proper disposition of Tuttle’s remains became the question. Wallace, taking into account the condition the body and what further damage it would suffer if it were to be packed all the way to the desert floor of the Owens Valley, suggested interment on site, and Mark Tuttle concurred. This is where his brother would like to remain, the younger man concluded.
Using the single-wire telephone, Mark Tuttle broke the news of his brother’s death to their father and received family permission to bury him in the mountains. Wallace then called park superintendent John White, who agreed with the plan and called the national headquarters office to get the required authorizations. Amazingly, all this proceeded quickly, and by lunchtime, permission to bury Tuttle had been granted. Wallace and Hester spent the afternoon digging a grave a few hundred yards from the ranger station.
Late that same day, with ranger Gordon Wallace saying the prayers, they buried Bill Tuttle, a young man who had survived the Pacific War but not the High Sierra. He is still there.
William Penn Tuttle
August 24, 1946
© Wm. Tweed