The people behind the camps
The camps were never just canvas and granite. A visionary imagined them, a superintendent revived them, a naturalist chose their ground, an operator couple built the loop, one man hosted it all for forty years — and one man still keeps it standing. Six stories, one century.
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Stephen Mather
1867–1930First director, National Park Service
The borax millionaire who built the Park Service — and whose 1916 vision of a backcountry within reach of ordinary travelers set the High Sierra Camps in motion.
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W. B. Lewis
1884–1930Yosemite's first NPS superintendent
"Dusty" Lewis revived the camps in 1923 and wrote down, in his own plain words, what they were for.
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Carl P. Russell
1894–1967Park naturalist, later superintendent
His 1923 backcountry survey chose the ground the camps stand on; he went on to write the definitive hundred-year history of Yosemite.
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Donald & Mary Curry Tresidder
1894–1948 · 1893–1970Yosemite Park & Curry Co.
The couple who ran the camps' company for nearly half a century — they sited May Lake together, and Mary founded Sunrise, the camp that completed today's loop.
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Nic Fiore
1920–2009High Sierra Camps director, 1963–2004
The French-Canadian ski instructor who directed all five camps every summer for four decades — for a generation of backcountry travelers, he was the High Sierra Camps.
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Gary Finnestad
1980s–todayHead of backcountry maintenance
Forty years in the park, most of them keeping the camps themselves alive — the maintenance chief whose name is on the map between Vogelsang and Merced Lake: Gary's Shortcut, Gary's Pools.
Read their storyHow the stories fit together
These six biographies are threads of one narrative — a century of the High Sierra Camps, from Mather's 1916 vision to the uncertain present. The history page weaves them together.