North Palisade (summit)

 mountain, summit, mountaineering

Elevation 14,242 feet. (4341 m)
Yellow outline traces the 14,000 foot elevation contour.
North Palisade is California’s fourth highest mountain.
It was mapped and named in 1864 by a party of Josiah Whitney’s first California Geological Survey.
It was renamed Dusy’s Peak in 1879 for Frank Dusy, a rancher and early Sierra photographer who explored the Palisade region while moving his stock. Sixteen years later, it was changed to honor David Starr Jordan, Stanford University’s first president.
When Jordan was given another mountain, it went back to Dusy until 1903, when Joseph N. LeConte, son of a geologist and Sierra Club co-founder, and two others scaled the peak for the first time.
LeConte was awe-struck. “I have called the peak merely the North Palisade,” he wrote to an admirer of Dusy. “Put Dusy’s name on some less imposing mass, and give us a name to be handed down through all time.”
In the decades to follow, North Palisade would become a crucible for the nascent sport of mountaineering in America, a place where techniques and equipment were invented and reputations made.
In July 2008 U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer introduced a bill to change the name of North Palisade to Brower-Palisade.
David Brower (1912-2000) was an accomplished mountaineer and was one of a small clique of men who explored California’s rooftop in the early 20th century. He pioneered a route up North Palisade and made the first winter ascent.
As the Sierra Club’s first executive director, Brower transformed what was an adult version of the Boy Scouts into a well-funded national political force. He fought against dams that would have flooded the Grand Canyon and Dinosaur National Monument. He advocated for wilderness on dozens of fronts, including what became Redwood National Park and Point Reyes National Seashore.
Uncompromising and combative, Brower split with the Sierra Club several times and formed new organizations, Friends of the Earth and the Earth Island Institute.
Since 1890 the obscure U.S. Board on Geographic Names has been charged with maintaining a standardized nomenclature of place names used by the federal government. Every peak, island, gulch, lake, river, pass, hollow, swamp and ditch falls under its jurisdiction.
The board’s guidelines are voluminous and fastidious. Name changes are discouraged – especially those of high mountain peaks. Preference is given to “present-day local usage whenever possible.”
Only Congress can supersede the board’s authority, but it rarely does.
At the time of this tagging, the Brower Palisade bill remains in a Senate committee.
It also remains very controversial.
The Committee for Brower Palisade includes several prominent mountaineers, among them Yvon Chouinard (founder of the Patagonia outdoor clothing company) and author Steve Roper, but the board of the state’s largest climbing club (the Sierra Peaks section of the Sierrs Club) has turned its collective thumbs down.

Close up view of the North Palisade summit is from Starlight peak, about 100 meters to the northwest.

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