Theodore Solomons

1870-1947

Theodore Solomons - Kings Canyon, 1895
Upon Solomons' completion of a route from Yosemite to Kings Canyon which later became the John Muir Trail.

A charter member of the Sierra Club, Theodore Solomons is known as "The Pioneer of the John Muir Trail."

Theodore S. Solomons met Muir several times, and later wrote an article: Muir of the Nineties, in Yosemite Nature Notes, Volume xv , No. 5, May 1936.
Solomons was the first to photograph the Tuolumne Canyon and such summits as Banner Peak and Mount Ritter. He named, the great peaks of the Evolution Range, which he chose to name after conspicuous figures associated with evolutionary thinking, whom he considered "at one in their devotion to the sublime in Nature": Darwin, Fiske, Haeckel, Huxley, Spencer, and Wallace. A previously unnamed peak (13,034 ft/3,973 m) close to Muir Pass was named Mt. Solomons in 1968.
Most importantly, Solomons, working on behalf of the Sierra Club, Solomons had the vision for, and surveyed and mapped the major portion of the high mountain route that was to become the famed John Muir Trail of the High Sierra.

In Muir of the Nineties, Solomons wrote of his acquaintance with Muir: "Muir was exceedingly generous in his encouragement of us younger mountaineers.... He gave to us much time, and was patient with our fool questions. No doubt I asked him many during my several visits to the Martinez ranch where the lover of pure wildness in nature made himself content for the most of each year with the quite tame pursuits of the fruit grower...."

For more information, see Shirley Sargent, Solomons of the Sierra: the Pioneer of the John Muir Trail ( Yosemite: Flying Spur Press, 1989).