JIM HERRINGTON

RIP Glen Dawson, 103 years old.

Glen was the very first person I photographed when I began my documentation of early/mid 20th Century climbers 15 years ago. Glen started climbing in the 1920s and his most well known climb was the first ascent of the East Face of Mt. Whitney, which he climbed in 1931 with Norman Clyde, Jules Eichorn and Robert Underhill.

My intentions then where not as, err, lofty, as they later became. At that time I simply wanted to meet and photograph a few of the early Sierra Nevada (California) climbers, the Sierra being my home range and favorite place to climb. Also, the Sierra Nevada, aside from featuring the best granite in the world to clamber upon and having hundreds of square miles of beautiful backcountry in which to do it, has a history that is rife with characters and stories that always interested me. Lon Chaney Sr. had a fishing cabin on the east side of the range. Assorted poets, writers, artists and photographers figure prominently there though the years, from Jack Kerouac to Gary Snyder, Ansel Adams, Albert Bierstadt, Chiura Obata, the list goes on. Not to mention at least one great Twilight Zone episode was filmed there, along with a thousand movies. The Owens Valley, lying underneath the eastern escarpment of the Sierra, is one of the most used film locations in the world.

My project has since grown bigger than I imagined it would at the time. I just got a book deal and the series now involves climbers from all over the world. But here is the first of my climber portraits, of Glen Dawson, at the time a mere 88 years old. Incidentally it was taken in the backyard of the house in Pasadena that he’d lived in for 57 years. The day I photographed him was the day he was moving out and into a nursing home - not for himself but for his wife who needed to go there. Glen was fit as a fiddle then but didn’t want to be separated from her so together they went. When I finished photographing him we all left and he locked up the house for good.

Glen’s father Ernest opened Dawson’s Book Shop in Los Angeles in 1905 and it’s become the oldest continuously operating bookshop in LA. Glen was involved with it for many years.

Here’s a nice obituary about him that tells more about his climbing exploits and other high points, worth reading:

http://gripped.com/news/legendary-american-climber-glen-dawson-lives-to-103/

Photo © Jim Herrington