Ken first visited Yosemite at the age of 7 while on a cross-country camping trip with his family to California from his home in Chicago. This seminal trip opened his eyes to the wonders of the West to which his family moved a few years later. As a young teen, he began mountaineering in Yosemite with his father and brother and, as he grew older, he continued rock-climbing here accomplishing some early ascents of some of Yosemite’s big walls as well as some first ascents in the Yosemite Valley and the Sierra high country. As a student of bio-geography at UCLA, he was active in the Bruin Mountaineers where he met Ira. In graduate school there, he wrote his thesis on the dynamics of meadows and forests in the Yosemite high country.
After completing his master’s degree, he spent a summer on a climbing expedition to Afghanistan. Then he spent several years designing/teaching/guiding various environmental field study programs for U.C.S.C. in Yosemite, the Grand Canyon region, and the Hawaiian Islands. These backpacking field studies programs lasted up to two months long and consisted of organizing and guiding the classes on extended backpacks through each of those three regions. At that time, he and Ira owned a homestead near Mariposa. Later, he moved to Hawaii where he married, built a house and a native plant nursery, raised a daughter, and taught forestry-related classes at Hawaii Community College. He’s recently returned to Mariposa to renew his connections to the Yosemite area.
