BATH — Under open skies in the high country of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, Stuart Weiss discovered something he couldn’t find anywhere else.

“I began to find another part of me that I never knew existed,” Weiss said in his Bath apartment, “ and that was the artist and the photographer.”

He was 40 then. After 13 years of carousing and courting women in Manhattan, Weiss left his job working with his father at a printing company.

He was making good money, driving nice cars and meeting similarly suited people in the city he said “had it — and still does,” but that all faded.

“I was a good looking guy and I was meeting women and it was amazing, but that wasn’t doing me any good inside,” Weiss said. “So, that all changed. I stopped meeting beautiful women, but I started a life for myself.”

Discovery

“Above the forest is a world of glacier-polished scoured granite where, in those days, a great pleasure was to dip your Sierra cup into a crystal clear creek and drink the ice cold, delicious waters,” Weiss wrote in a 2005 article in California Explorer, an outdoor photography and backpacking magazine he founded in 1978.

Recently, the Bath resident made available shots from his decades of photographing the

American West on a website at stuartweissphotography.com, including scenes from the Sierras.

It was in those mountains that Weiss came alive. Upon moving to San Francisco with his 13-year-old son in 1973, he had seen them only in the books of photographer Eliot Porter.

With the same curiosity that drove him, at age 10, to photograph Lionel trains in the basement of his childhood home in New Rochelle, N.Y., Weiss took his camera to the mountains on weekends, developing the idea that there might be an audience for his exploration of the rocky terrain.

The idea continued to grow through being fired from his printing job and through a marketing job with the backpacking company Trailwise, which ended when the company relocated to the Midwest.

Weiss didn’t want to become a flatlander. The hills called to him.

Photography

At 10 years old, Weiss was developing photos in an attic darkroom. But the mechanical aspects of the craft, he said, have never been his strong suit.

In Arches National Park, Weiss left open the camera shutter for an all-night exposure, using no tripods or extra equipment. It was that way with all of his photographs, many of which adorn the walls of his apartment, documenting travels throughout the West, spanning altitudes from mountaintops to red, silty chasms in Utah and Arizona.

In a rare early photo, shot in the winter in Southhampton, Long Island — before Weiss left New York — a shore fisherman casts out into the frigid waters.

That shot in summer, Weiss said, would be crap.

Still, it wasn’t until years later that his whole world became shaped by his photography. And it still is.

“I have in my head at least two outstanding photographs, but they both need a lot of snow,” Weiss said. “And two other factors that I won’t give away.”

Weiss is developing less film these days, but his daily walks around downtown Bath with his golden retriever Winsome are filled with images — a habit he picked up scanning his environment for photographs.

“As an outdoor photographer, it never goes away,” Weiss said. “And that’s a joy because nature and architecture and all of those things take on another meaning.”

Getting started

What Weiss continued to discover on his excursions in Northern California he resolved to share.

While he lived in Berkeley, Calif., in the 1970s, companies like Sierra Designs were getting their start in Quonset huts on the waterfront and the backpacking hobby gained in popularity. Weiss felt encouraged.

The magazine, he decided, would be named the California Explorer.

Jack Gilbert, one of the founders of North Face, was one of the first advertisers, giving Weiss $1,000 for future ads.

Weiss had never written, photographed or published professionally, so he began learning.

“I learned over time,” Weiss said. “It took years. I learned how to become a writer — a good writer — an expert photographer and publisher and marketer.”

At 40, things were taking off, but it was hard work.

“It was more work than I’d ever done in my life,” Weiss said. “It was incredibly hard work.”

Scouring distribution lists for outdoor and environmental organizations and publications, Weiss began to spend thousands on direct mailings that he hoped would pay off.

Eventually, they did.

With more than 10,000 subscribers, Weiss began to settle into the work, buying a small yellow house in Tahoe City, Calif.

Weiss’ winding explorations through the West simply became the long way home after settling there.

That small cottage home was “a castle” after weeks on the trail, and a four-wheeldrive Volkswagen camper became a way station for him and his second golden retriever, Polar.

“That’s one of the happy things that I learned, too,” Weiss said. “It’s that you don’t need much.”

Mistakes

After amassing thousands of subscribers and publishing freelance work in magazines like Outdoors and newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, Weiss grew tired of working six days a week to put out the California Explorer.

Along with work stress, Weiss’ hips began to strain against the difficulty of hiking the wilderness that he loved.

The last backpacking trip he took was through the Sawtooth mountain range in Idaho.

“As soon as I buckled on my hip belt, there was sharp pain,” Weiss recounted in a 2005 issue of California Explorer.

Seven miles in, there was rain. Setting up a tent, his back went out. It was his last backpacking trip.

“From then on, day hikes only,” Weiss wrote.

As magazine work, too, became more difficult, Weiss got cold feet. That feeling, he said, set off the worst mistake of his life.

“I sold my wonderful, comfortable home and bought a crummy motor home,” with the idea that he would travel the country, Weiss said. “Three weeks before it happened, I knew it was a terrible, terrible mistake, and it was.”

For years, Weiss said, “ I was a lost person roaming the country in a stinking rotten motor home with a golden retriever.”

The romantic idea of traveling the country in search of adventure was nothing without a home.

“It was only wonderful when I had that little house to come home to,” Weiss said.

Solitude

Being alone on the trail for weeks at a time never bothered Weiss. In fact, he preferred it.

“The more I did it, the more I just preferred solitude,” Weiss said. “A lot of people don’t want to be by themselves — I’ve found it nice.”

In his explorations, Weiss studied geology, biology and various topographic maps to navigate his way with a compass and altimeter in hand.

“It was a whole new world than the one that I was used to,” Weiss said. “There are different challenges. Once you go back there, your challenges are all unique for the most part — unique from everyone else that you know and you’re doing things that people don’t know anything about.”

In the Escalante River in Utah, Weiss sank up to his thighs in quicksand. Along the secluded Lost Coast in California, Weiss’ dog Polar rolled on a dead sheep and carried the terrible funk along for two days on the trail.

While they proved daunting on the trail, those challenges became a big part of what Weiss relished.

“When I found out that I was fairly smart, I learned a lot of things,” Weiss said. “All of those things led me to answer most of the questions of life — religion, or the lack of it, I should say — why I’m here and where I’m going to go when I die.”

About the last question, the 78-year-old Weiss is very specific.

“My remains will be mixed with soil and I will be planted with a mountain hemlock tree near Tioga Pass in Yosemite National Park,” Weiss said. “That’s where I want me to end up — with a tree, in the high country. That’s as good of a connection as I can think of.”

dfishell@timesrecord.com

 

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