Book Review of Missing in the Minarets

Missing in the Minarets: The Search for Walter A. Starr, Jr. by William Alsup, Yosemite Association, $24.95

By Joan Hamilton
Sierra Magazine - Sept./Oct., 2002

In August 1933, when a prominent young lawyer named Walter A. Starr Jr. Failed to show up after a solo trip to the mountains, his law partner went to the Sierra Club for help. Club president Francis Farquhar dropped everything to assemble a world-class rescue team. A day later he was combing the range in a two-seater airplane while handpicked alpinists were scouring the rocky ground near an abandoned tent on the east side of the Sierra.

The climbers included the crusty old king of Sierra first ascents, Norman Clyde, and two youngsters who had just returned from a Sierra Club High Trip, Jules Eichorn and Glen Dawson. All three would make indelible marks in mountaineering history.

A former trial lawyer who is now a federal judge, author William Alsup intended the disappearance of Starr to be one chapter in a broader-ranging book about the Sierra Nevada's popular Minaret region. But when he dug into historical accounts, he found puzzling contradictions. So he devoted his sleuthing skills to unraveling the mystery of Starr's untimely death.

His book sheds new light on this fascinating old story, while providing today's climbers and backpackers with panoramic black-and-white photos and a detailed history of climbing in the spikily scenic Minarets.

Alsup's insights will no doubt send backpacking buffs back to their battered copies of the book Starr had almost finished when he met his demise. Posthumously published, Starr's Guide to the John Muir Trail and the High Sierra Region is still in print 70 years later, counseling us to "glory and dream" in the paradise of these "defiant mountains."