Disneyland on the Mountain (book review)

Since GG completed his tome on the Sierra, a few books have come out that fill out some of the history GG had focused on. This is the second one on Mineral King GG has become aware of (after Dawn at Mineral King Valley). While Dawn at Mineral King Valley was tightly focused on the legal action, this book looks more broadly. This is partially possible because the Disney archives have become accessible, and in part because the authors are looking beyond the usual protagonists.

The Mineral King story has often been told in a one-sided manner. The Disney side pretty much wanted to forget it ever happened (as GG noted in his book, an NPS employee who had sought to buy the main parcel from Disney was greeted with a company seeming to not know anything about the purchase), so the volumes on Disney skipped Mineral King or left it as a small sidelight to an otherwise successful career. The cabin residents in Mineral King were sidelined in the stories written from the Sierra Club side, maybe in part because the Club and the cabin owners would disagree after the valley was put into Sequoia. This book helps to overcome those slights.

The basic story remains the same: Walk wanted to build a ski area, the Secretary of the Interior and then the Sierra Club managed to delay final approval until an environmental study was required, and during that tine the politics had turned against the development. Here we get to see a few players usually sidelined in other recounting of the story. There is more from the Disney side about the motivations and plans as well as the other Disney employees brought in on the project. There is a bit more from the Forest Service side (though that seems still to be a bit underreported). We learn more here about Disney’s abortive attempts to build their resort at Independence Lake when Mineral King was stalled. Probably one of the more interesting additions is the discussion of how Disney’s plans influenced the development of Vail’s resort; Disneyphiles often lament that Disney never got to build this dream development, but it sounds a lot like Vail was following in his footsteps.

The book avoids taking sides, alternating the enthusiasm from Walt and his associates with the reverence of those familiar with the valley. The authors have striven to write a more informal and energetic style than many of the previous entries on Mineral King, so it is a welcome addition and likely will find an audience utterly unaware of Mineral King’s history.

AS GG is, well, a grump, there are some things that were a bit annoying. There is a bizarre statement that the Little Kern River flowed through the Mineral King game reserve past Florence Peak and by Farewell Gap (as written, it might be saying that a foldout map at the time showed this); this is followed by giving Muir credit for Sequoia National Park (Muir was little involved with Sequoia, instead focused on Yosemite). Elsewhere there is the aside that the valley was initially developed in the Gold Rush; GG has never seen a hint that miners headed into that valley in the 1850s, and even if some did, they certainly did not file claims or spark any development. In general, the pre-Disney history of the valley is pretty shaky…but that is really because it occupies only a few paragraphs.

There were a couple of directions the book didn’t take that might have been interesting. Having brought the cabin “owners” in (technically they leased the land but owned the structure), it would have been interesting to delve more into the recriminations between the cabin owners and the Park Service and, possibly, the Sierra Club rather than . The Park Service claimed that the cabin owners were well aware of the term in the final legislation that would require them to relinquish their lease once the lease holder died; the cabin owners GG has spoken with were just as adamant that this clause was inserted without their knowledge and was not discussed when the cabin owners testified to Congress. GG first encountered this disconnect when taking an archeologist to confirm seismometer sites would be OK in 1993; the archeologist pooh-poohed cabin owner claims that the cabins were historic. She noted that the original miner’s cabins were in terrible shape once the summer recreational community moved in and so what materials were still present were so reworked as to not be historic. The cabin owners clearly abandoned claims that the cabins were from the 1870s and hit upon a different tact: the community at Mineral King was itself of historic merit. This led to the Mineral King Historic District in 2003 and the cabin owners regained the rights to their leases with legislation in 2004 (GG missed that last wrinkle; he had thought the 2003 designation did the trick).

Anyways, Disneyland on the Mountain is a welcome addition to the Sierra shelf in GG’s library…