My great-grandaddy Lawson Brainerd seems to have lived a life of adventure from start to finish. He was born in a tiny old gold-mining town in the Sierras in 1901, lied about his age to enlist in the Navy in World War I, then went on to join the forest service. He served as a ranger in the Tahoe and Inyo National Forests until my grandmother’s birth in 1928 compelled him to settle down. After a brief stint as a homesteader, he became a park ranger, and eventually settled in Muir Woods, where (punctuated by several trips around the globe) he remained until the end.

Despite only completing an elementary school education, he was a witty, sharp, eloquent writer. Since I only knew him personally until I was seven years old, I am immensely thankful that he took the time to write his stories in a great deal of detail. Reading his memoirs as an adult, I was especially struck by his time in the Sierra Nevada as a forest ranger in the 1920s. There were no roads then, no marked trails, just the wild mountains and some scrappy lumber and sheepherding operations. He marked and constructed many trails in the high Sierra that are still in active use today.

He seems to have had a remarkable memory for topography. His memoirs have a relative dearth of specific names, but they are full of landmarks and descriptions of the landscape. At some point I started reading with a topo map in hand, trying to track where exactly each story took place. Eventually this led to the idea that I could, in theory, return to places from his stories 100 years after he was there. My hope is to juxtapose excepts from his writings with my own descriptions and pictures of the modern landscape. I wanted a way to share these adventures with the rest of the family, and this blog is a forum to do so.

I don’t have any digital pictures of grandaddy, but remarkably, a google image search found a picture of him! I believe it is from this LA Times article that ran in 1987.