Donald & Mary Curry Tresidder
The couple who ran the camps' company for nearly half a century — he promised the 1920s expansion and dreamed of ski-touring the loop; she founded Sunrise, the camp that completed today's five.
The story told so far on these pages is the Park Service's side: Mather's vision, Lewis's mandate, Russell's ground. But for sixty-eight years the High Sierra Camps were actually run by a company — the Yosemite Park & Curry Co. — and for nearly half a century that company was run by a married couple: Donald Tresidder and Mary Curry Tresidder. Two of the five camps stand where they put them.
Into the Curry family
Mary Curry was raised in Yosemite Valley — her parents, David and Jennie Curry, founded Camp Curry in 1899, when she was five. Don Tresidder, an Indiana doctor's son, reached Yosemite by accident: a washed-out rail line diverted a Southern California trip. The detour redirected his life twice — Stanford professors he met in the Valley talked him into enrolling, and he met Mary. He worked Camp Curry summers as a medical student, and in June 1920 they married amid the ruins of the original Camp Curry buildings. He finished the M.D. but never practiced; the park had him.
President of the camps' company
When the government forced Yosemite's two feuding concession companies to merge in 1925, the 31-year-old Don Tresidder emerged as president and general manager of the new Yosemite Park & Curry Co. — inheriting the two-year-old High Sierra Camps. By March 1927 the newspapers carried his promise of "extensive additions" to the hikers' camps, which he expected to be "more popular than ever before." His company built the Ahwahnee that same year, and under his presidency the camps settled into much of their modern geography — including May Lake, the camp he and Mary personally sited on the lakeshore beneath Mount Hoffmann in 1938.
The winter dream
Don was also Yosemite's great winter-sports evangelist — Badger Pass, opened under him in 1935, made the park a pioneer of California skiing. His most romantic scheme reimagined the camps themselves: a stone ski hut built at Snow Creek in 1929 was to be the first link in a Sierra hut-to-hut system "similar to those used in the European Alps," with ski tours running toward Tenaya Lake and Tuolumne Meadows — the High Sierra Camps' one-day's-walk chain, translated to snow. He sketched suggestions for it from a book of Swiss mountain-hut plans. The full alpine network never came, but the vision says everything about how completely the family imagined lives lived in the high country.
Stanford, and Mary's company
Stanford never quite let go of Don either: he chaired its Board of Trustees, then in 1943 became the university's fourth president — while still running the Curry Company. He died of a heart attack in New York on university business in January 1948, just 53. Mary assumed the company presidency and held it for twenty-two years — the last of the Currys to run the family firm. She lived in a sixth-floor suite at the Ahwahnee, wrote The Trees of Yosemite, and in 1961, as president, established Sunrise — a canvas dining tent and stone kitchen overlooking Long Meadow on the John Muir Trail. She raised the flag over it herself on July 15, 1961, as what the camps' historian called its "inspirer and financial angel," and explained the camp in her own words: "The Sunrise Camp was long a dream of mine, as I felt that the Sunrise Trail ran through such a beautiful region that it should be made more accessible to people." It was the last camp ever added: the one that completed the five-camp, 51-mile loop the park knew for the next six decades. She died in her Ahwahnee suite in October 1970; three years later the company was sold, and the Curry era ended.