The Sierra Echo - Sierra Club - Angeles Chapter

Barbee and Rich 2007 SPS Banquet
Submitted by Jerry Keating
As part of the paperwork for the old-timers series, there
are capsules about many of the vintage climbers. One
reads as follows: “Rich Gnagy joined the club in early 1956
after starting his climbing career with the Rock Climbing
Section. He did nine HPS peaks in early 1956 before getting
his first SPS peak, Alta, on July 1, 1956, on a scheduled
trip. By year’s end, he’d climbed 13 SPS listed peaks
with 10 of them done on scheduled trips. By May of 1957,
he appeared as John Robinson’s assistant leader on an SPS
Olancha Peak trip. All of this occurred before he moved
from the Los
Angeles area to
Sacramento.”
L-R, Frank Bressel, Barbara Lilley, Gordon MacLeod, Mary Motheral,
Rich Gnagy, Ret Moore & Jerry Keating on Dome Rock 09/13/08,
with The Needles & the Kern Plateau as the backdrop. Olancha Pk
appears on the extreme right skyline. Bressel & Lilley are founding
members of the SPS. Lilley, MacLeod, Motheral, Gnagy, Moore &
Keating are SPS list finishers. Photo by Ralph Wright.
Rich (below) and Burl Parkinson (above)
on the high point of Mt. Brewer on August
31, 1958, during an SPS climb. (Burl and
a fellow SPSer were killed on Boundary
Peak less than a year later.)
Head shot of Rich
taken in early August
1970 at Finger
Lake on the S. Fork
of Big Pine Creek.
Rich, Barbara Lilley
and I (Jerry Keating)
were on an
independent trip,
and Rich climbed
Disappointment
the next day.
Rich (with me)
on 9/10/2011,
at Lupine
Campground
during the
SPS old-timers
trip. Rich
had climbed
Fresno Dome that day & went on to do the Goat Mtn.
above Bass Lake the following day, the final part of the
SPS trip. This may have been Rich’s final scheduled
trip with the SPS.
The Sierra Echo