Sierra Nevada

Meaning

"Sierra" means a saw (the kind you cut with) and by extension, a jagged range of mountains; "Nevada" means snowy. So, "snow-covered jagged mountain range." So named apparently after a range in southern Spain in 1776 by Padre Pedro Font, cartographer for Juan Bautista de Anza. Font also coined the place name "Palo Alto," (tall tree), which was later used for the city, after a redwood there.

Savvy speakers will be careful not to say "Sierra Nevada Mountains" ("mountains" is redundant) or "Sierra Nevadas" ("Sierra" is already plural).

Around a hundred years after Font called them Sierra Nevada (looking at them from a hundred miles away), John Muir wrote this:


 * ...after ten years spent in the heart of it, rejoicing and wondering, bathing in its glorious floods of light, seeing the sunbursts of morning among the icy peaks, the noonday radiance on the trees and rocks and snow, the flush of the alpenglow, and a thousand dashing waterfalls with their marvelous abundance of irised spray, it still seems to me above all others the Range of Light, the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain-chains I have ever seen.

Ansel Adams later used "Range of Light" in conjunction with his photographs of Yosemite.