Mount Wallace is a mountain summit located on the crest of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in northern California, United States. It is situated on the shared boundary of Kings Canyon National Park with John Muir Wilderness, and along the common border of Fresno County with Inyo County. It is west of the community of Big Pine, northwest of Mount Powell, southwest of Picture Peak, and southeast of Mount Haeckel, which is the nearest higher neighbor. Mount Wallace ranks as the 79th-highest summit in California, and the ninth-highest in the Evolution Region.

History In 1895, Sierra Club explorer Theodore S. Solomons named a group of mountains in the Sierra Nevada after exponents of Darwin's theory of evolution.Francis Peloubet Farquhar, Exploration of the Sierra Nevada, 1925, California Historical Society, page 47. These six peaks are now known collectively as the Evolution Group. Solomons wrote: "At a distance of two miles it [the wall of Mount Darwin] rises perpendicularly five or six hundred feet, forming Mt. Haeckel, and a mile beyond again rises several hundred feet higher, though not quite so sharply, forming the peak called Mt. Wallace... Next morning [July 16, 1895] we climbed Mt. Wallace."Francis P. Farquhar, Place Names of the High Sierra (1926) This mountain is named for Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist who is best known for developing the theory of evolution contemporaneously with Darwin.Peter Browning, Place Names of the Sierra Nevada From Abbot to Zumwalt, 1986, Wilderness Press, . The other five peaks were named after Charles Darwin, John Fiske, Ernst Haeckel, Herbert Spencer, and Thomas Henry Huxley.

The 1895 climb by Theodore Solomons and party was the first ascent of the summit.Alan M. Hedden and David R. Brower, A Climber's Guide to the High Sierra (1954)

Climate Mount Wallace is located in an alpine climate zone. Most weather fronts originate in the Pacific Ocean, and travel east toward the Sierra Nevada mountains. As fronts approach, they are forced upward by the peaks, causing them to drop their moisture in the form of rain or snowfall onto the range (orographic lift). Precipitation runoff from this mountain drains northeast into Bishop Creek, and west into Evolution Creek, which is a San Joaquin River tributary.

Gallery

See also

List of the major 4000-meter summits of California

References

External links Weather forecast: Mount Wallace