In the Footsteps of Timothy O’Sullivan: Rephotographing the 1869 King Survey in the Headwaters of the Bear River, Uinta Mountains

By JEFFREY S. MUNROE

Many students of nineteenth century exploration of the West are familiar with the Geologic Exploration of the 40th Parallel, which surveyed the route of the Transcontinental Railroad under the direction of Clarence King. Between 1867 and 1870 the King Survey examined the Comstock silver mine in Nevada, spent two months surveying the Great Salt Lake, and added greatly to our knowledge of the geology of the northern Great Basin. It is less widely known, however, that the King Survey also conducted a reconnaissance of the north slope of the Uinta Mountains. During this investigation, the immensely talented photographer for the King Survey, Timothy O’Sullivan, captured more than a dozen photographs of the High Uintas landscape in the headwaters of the Bear River. Today these photographs provide a unique perspective on what these pioneering explorers saw with their own eyes.

The King Survey visited the Uintas in August 1869 near the end of their third year of fieldwork. From the vicinity of Evanston, Wyoming, they traveled south, ascending the Bear River towards its source in the jagged peaks east of the modern Mirror Lake Highway. A few miles south of the Utah-Wyoming line, they followed the Stillwater Fork of the Bear River away from the Hayden Fork, passing through Christmas Meadow and up into the Middle Basin. They eventually made camp at Ryder Lake, which they called “Lake Lal,” and commenced a multi-day exploration of the Middle Basin, including the area around McPheters Lake, which they named “Lake Jan.”

King was fascinated by the glaciated landscape of the High Uintas, and after months of working at lower, drier, elevations across the Great Basin, it is easy to understand why. His letters contain lucid descriptions of the scenery merged with geologic interpretation including: “The view from one of the upper summits is varied by open, green, Alpine pastures, varied by innumerable lakes of transparent water which occupy erosion-hollows of the old glacier beds.” 1 He also presents astute observations of the evidence for former glaciation of the Uintas in his final report, concluding that “…the Uinta [glacier complex] was therefore comparable with the present Alpine system, but decidedly grander in its accumulation of snow and ice.” 2

While the Survey studied the geology of the Middle Basin and cataloged evidence of the ancient glaciers, O’Sullivan documented the subalpine and alpine landscape around Ryder and McPheters Lakes. O’Sullivan first rose to prominence as a photographer during the Civil War, working with the preeminent photographer of the period, Matthew Brady. After the war, King hired him as the official photographer of the U.S. Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel. Working with fragile glass plates and a complicated wet-collodion process, he produced spectacular landscape photographs and detailed views of scenes throughout the Great Basin. Many of his images have become icons of the West, famous for the stark manner in which they present a raw landscape, often appearing devoid of human influence. 3

In the Middle Basin, O’Sullivan’s eye was particularly drawn to the relationship between the lakes and the surrounding mountains. The majority of the photographs O’Sullivan made there show Mount Agassiz, Hayden Peak, or the ridgeline between them, along with some portion of the surface of Ryder or McPheters Lakes. 4 In many of his pictures, rocky peaks are reflected in a smooth water surface, producing a dramatic mirroring effect. As O’Sullivan circumnavigated Ryder Lake he also photographed panoramic views to the northeast across the headwaters of the Basin, including the profiles of Spread Eagle and Ostler Peaks.

O’Sullivan’s photographs from the Middle Basin are notable in that they capture the same scenic climaxes photographed by myriad visitors to the area over the ensuing decades. As the expedition’s official photographer, O’Sullivan was charged with documenting all aspects of the Survey’s observations and discoveries. Yet under the influence of such spectacular scenery he chose to record the dramatic sweep of the landscape instead of focusing on details of its geology. One could certainly argue that the two are inextricably intertwined, especially in the case of a landscape affected by alpine-style glaciation. But it remains striking how obvious the subjects of his compositions are when visiting the Middle Basin today.

Because the features O’Sullivan photographed are so recognizable, this collection provides a tremendous opportunity to envision changes in the subalpine environment over centennial timescales through “rephotography.” Specifically, by locating the positions from which O’Sullivan aimed his camera and rephotographing the scenes he captured, landscape changes can be identified over an interval of time that is long by human standards. This technique has been widely employed using photographs taken as part of the early western surveys. For instance, members of the Rephotographic Survey Project replicated dozens of O’Sullivan photographs (including at least four from the Middle Basin) in the 1970s. More recently, many O’Sullivan photographs were replicated for a second time by the Third View Project, along with a more complete documentation of the spatial and cultural context of the photopoints.5 To apply this approach in the Middle Basin, I acquired copies of fifteen O’Sullivan photographs from the National Archives and Records Administration and from the George Eastman House. These were rephotographed in July 2001, and in August 2003 and 2004, yielding fifteen photo-pairs, which are presented here, that document change and stasis in the Middle Basin landscape over more than 130 years. 6

Comparison of O’Sullivan’s photographs and the modern rephotographs allows two broad generalizations. First, although the composition of the subalpine fir and Engelmann spruce forest has remained constant, there are notably more trees on the landscape today. Almost all of the rephotographs illustrate that the forest is denser, with trees growing closer together. Krummholz, such as that seen along the shoreline of Ryder Lake in 1869, has also grown into upright mature trees over the years. In many instances, this new growth obscures the view from the former photopoint. Finally, many individual trees that feature prominently in the 1869 photographs are still alive, and tree growth has even expanded in seemingly less hospitable locations such as the ledges west of Ryder Lake and near McPheters Lake. Overall these results match those revealed by a similar rephotographic study from approximately twenty miles away in the north-central Uintas using photographs from the 1870 Hayden Survey. 7

On a local scale, forest health is influenced by numerous factors, including insects, disease, fire, and management decisions, and all of these have undoubtedly affected the subalpine forest of the Middle Basin in the past. However, the similarity of the changes noted in this study, and those revealed by rephotography of the Hayden Survey images, suggests that an agent capable of more widespread synchronous impacts is responsible. In the case of high-elevation forests, the upper limit of tree growth is ontrolled primarily by growing season temperature, and therefore climate change is the most likely candidate behind the differences noted in the rephotographs. Considered this way, the denser forest growing at higher elevations in the modern images suggests that summers have become warmer, allowing trees that were established in 1869 to persist, trees in formerly marginal settings to flourish, and new trees to germinate in previously inhospitable sites. The modern forest also contains fewer dead trees, suggesting that overall growing conditions are less rigorous today. These changes are understandable when one considers that O’Sullivan visited the Uintas not long after the culmination of the Little Ice Age, an interval of climatic cooling that led to glacier expansion and treeline depression nearly worldwide.8 Thus, at least some of the forest changes can be attributed to the natural warming that followed the Little Ice Age maximum ca. 1850. The abundance of young trees in some of the rephotographs, however, indicates that the climatic amelioration has accelerated in recent decades, likely in response to the accumulation of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. 9

In contrast to the dramatic changes in the forest of the Middle Basin, physical aspects of the landscape around Ryder and McPheters Lakes have remained strikingly constant. Snowbanks appear in the same places, and several rephotographs reveal that conspicuous boulders remain in similar positions on the talus despite the passage of more than a century.At first this seems an unexpected result because a visit to the Middle Basin can easily yield the impression that this is a fairly active landscape; minor rockfall events are heard frequently during the summer, and the impressive amounts of snow that accumulate on the higher slopes encourage avalanching that could be expected to effectively modify the piles of scree. Upon reflection the message of this apparent contradiction becomes clear: even when the evidence is obvious, geologic changes remain difficult to grasp in the context of a human timeframe. Rocks steadily erode through processes that act too slowly for their effects to be appreciated in decades or centuries. Mount Agassiz and the other mountains surrounding the Middle Basin may be lower today than in 1869, and blocks on the talus may have shifted ever so slightly in response to minor rockfall.Yet most landscape changes occur through dramatic, infrequent events, and the more efficacious events are those that occur less frequently. Such events may still be encompassed within a uniformatarian framework if the time scale is long enough, but if one of these events occurs in a human lifetime it is considered “catastrophic” or “unprecedented,” with our choice of words revealing how tightly our comprehension of natural events is bound to our restricted human time frame. Rephotography offers a unique opportunity to transcend this limitation and to expand our appreciation of both time and rates of landscape change.

Jeffrey S. Munroe is professor of geology at Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont.

1 R.A Bartlett, Great Surveys of the American West (Norman:University of Oklahoma Press,1962),178.

2 C.King,Systematic Geology,Vol.I in the Report of the Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel (Washington D.C.:U.S.Government Printing Office,1878).

3 An excellent critique of O’Sullivan’s photography is provided by Joel Snyder “Aesthetics and documentation:remarks concerning critical approaches to the photographs of Timothy H.O’Sullivan”in Peter Walch and Thomas Barrow ed., Perspectives on Photography (Albuquerque:University of New Mexico Press, 1986).For further discussion of O’Sullivan’s photography see William L.Fox, View Finder:Mark Klett, Photography,and the Reinvention of Landscape (Albuquerque:University of New Mexico Press,2001).

4 Louis Agassiz was a Swiss geologist who compiled evidence from the Alps for his theory of Ice Ages proposed in his masterwork Etudes sur les glaciers,published in 1840.In 1847 he accepted a professorship at Harvard University.Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden led the Hayden Survey that explored the Western United States (including the northern Uintas) throughout the 1870s.

5 M. Klett, E. Manchester, J. Verburg, G. Bushaw, and R. Dingus, Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press,1979).M. Klett, K. Bajakian, W.L. Fox, M. Marshall, T. Ueshina, and B. Wolfe Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephotographic Survey of the American West (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press,2004).

6 To facilitate comparison between the paired photographs,I obtained 300 dpi .jpg files of photographs from the George Eastman House [www.eastmanhouse.org/] and scanned copies of the National Archives photographs (printed at 8x10 in) on a flatbed scanner.For the modern photographs,I used either a) digital images taken with a wide-angle lens (for photographs with a portrait orientation),b) scanned negatives (with scratches and dust removed manually in Corel PhotoPaint),or c) scanned negatives combined into a panorama view with Panorama-Maker (for photographs with an extremely wide field-ofview).All of the digital image files were scaled to publication size and resampled to 400 dpi.Financial support from Middlebury College and the American Alpine Club and field assistance from D.Berkman,E. Carson,and C.Rodgers are greatly appreciated.

7 J.S.Munroe,“Estimates of Little Ice Age climate inferred through historical rephotography,northern Uinta Mountains,U.S.A,” Arctic,Antarctic and Alpine Research 35 (2003):489-98.

8 A thorough discussion of the Little Ice Age is provided by Grove,Jean M., The Little Ice Age (New York:Routledge,1990).

9 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report,2007.