Mt. Starr King

Sat, Sep 11, 1999

With: Tom Burd

Monty Blankenship

Etymology

Story

Photos / Slideshow

Maps: 1 2

Profile

later climbed Fri, Jun 23, 2000

Mt. Starr King (9,092 ft.)

Named by Whitney Survey in 1864

"The dome was named during the Civil War for Thomas Starr King (1824-1864), a Unitarian minister of San Francisco, who was influential in keeping California in the Union. The mountain was known as South Dome before Starr King's name became attached to it. The northeast peak of Mount Diablo [Contra Costa Co.], now labeled North Peak, had been named Mount King by Whitney when he, accompanied by King and others, ascended the mountain on May 7, 1862.
- Erwin Gudde, California Place Names

"On Saturday night [June 22, 1861] at ten o'clock a flag was raised on T. Starr King's church. He is very strong for the Union, and this was a surprise for him on his return from up country. A crowd was in the streets as he returned from the steamer. He mounted the steps, made a most brilliant impromptu speech, and then ran up the flag with his own hand to a staff fifty feet above the building. It was a beautiful flag, and as it floated out on the breeze that wafted in from the Pacific, in the clear moonlight, the hurrahs rent the air -- it was a beautiful and patriotic scene.

Sunday I went to hear him preach. He is a most brillian orator, his language strong and beautiful. He is almost worshiped here, and is exerting a greater intellectual influence in the state than any other two men."
- William Brewer, Up and Down California

"'Mount Starr King,' Whitney declared 'is the most symmetrical and beautiful of all the dome-shaped masses around the Yosemite. Its summit is absolutely inaccessible.' Once again Whitney was wrong, for in 1876 George Bailey, the same who had been with Muir on Mount Whitney the year before, together with a young lawyer named Schuyler, conquered it, 'with the exception of a few branches of spirey needles, the last of Yosemite's inaccessibles.'¹⁸

18. Muir, San Francisco Evening Bulletin, September 6, 1876. Even the 'Spirey needles' were ultimately climbed."
- Francis P. Farquhar, History of the Sierra Nevada