There was frost on the tent once we woke up at 5am. As we climbed back to the tripod site, the landscape felt familiar. All the uncertainty of the darkness disappeared like shadows in a nightmare.
Now I saw the view as Adams had seen it. Although I wasn’t sure yet, I suspected he was heading towards Elizabeth Pass when he was suddenly startled by the sight of Horn Peak cutting into the blue sky. As the sun rose behind me, a black curtain of shadow slid down the cliff. The wonder I felt discovering the height at sunset, hidden at the highest of the canyon after many miles of invisibility, should have been accentuated for Adams by the right position of the moon.
Date
After returning home, I sent the photos to Dr. Olson, who went to work.
“Knowing the date and time of the trendy starfield image,” he explained in an email, “we identified the constellations and calculated the altitudes (height above the horizon) and azimuths (compass directions) of most of the visible stars.”
Once the team identified the region of sky contained in Adams’ photograph, they used “the planetarium’s computer programs to go looking the Twenties sky,” Dr. Olson wrote. The search originally revealed 4 possible dates. Using evidence from documents within the Ansel Adams Archives and lunar libration, a phenomenon that Dr. Olson says “affects the visibility of lunar surface features,” they narrowed down the probabilities. They concluded that Adams shot “High Country Crags and Moon, Sunrise, Kings Canyon” at 6:47 a.m. on August 6, 1936.
That day High Trip Sierra Club was coming to an end. Louise Hewlett, that 12 months’s chronicler, wrote, “Leaving Elizabeth Pass was like closing the door to the High Country – for one more 12 months, a minimum of from then on, we made our way along improved trails towards our start line – towards cars, roads, houses.” Also, Adams consistently moved forward from the Sierra Club towards home, but additionally towards recent heights in his profession.
