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"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike." -- John Muir, The Yosemite (1912)
Sierra Club's William E. Colby Memorial Library brings you this virtual exhibit of a rare photo album in our collection. The album contains original Ansel Adams prints of photos taken on the Sierra Club "high trip" of 1928.
That year, the Club's annual summer outing took members to the Canadian Rockies. They brought back memories and photographs, fifty of which were collected in this unique album and presented to trip leader, William E. Colby, as a special gift. All fifty prints were made by Ansel Adams from negatives; 34 are his own images, and 16 images are from negatives made by other photographers.
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Photo: On the Way to Drawbridge Peak. Photo by by Ansel Adams
The advice to "climb the mountains and get their good tidings" has been followed by Sierra Club members since the organization's start, and the pursuit of this goal has played a key role in shaping the Club's history.
Years before the founding of the Sierra Club, many of its future leaders and supporters were traveling the mountains of California and sharing with others the wonders they found there. John Muir was chief among these early wilderness explorers and visionaries.
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Photo: Dinnertime at the Kern River during a Sierra Club Outing (1908).