Previously, they had established several food caches along their planned route, which began at Onion Valley and ended at Tuolumne Meadows.

[4] From October 9 to 12, 1939, a Sierra Club climbing team including Brower, along with Bestor Robinson, Raffi Bedayn, and John Dyer, completed the first ascent of Shiprock, the erosional remnant of the throat of a volcano with nearly vertical walls on the Navajo reservation in northwestern New Mexico.

[9] Brower was named the first executive director of the Sierra Club in 1952, and joined the fight against the Echo Park Dam in Utah's Dinosaur National Monument.

Conservationists successfully lobbied Congress to delete Echo Park Dam from the Colorado River Storage Project in 1955, and the Sierra Club received much of the credit.

Brower published two new titles a year in the series, but they began to lose money for the organization after 1964, though many claim they were the primary cause of the Club's extraordinary growth and rise to national prominence.

Brower and the Sierra Club also led a major battle to stop the Bureau of Reclamation from building two dams that would flood portions of the Grand Canyon.

In 1964, Brower organized a dory river expedition led by Martin Litton with Philip Hyde and author Francois Leydet.

In June 1966, the Club placed full-page ads in the New York Times and the Washington Post asking: "Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?"

Another conflict grew over the Club's position on the Diablo Canyon Power Plant planned for construction by Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) near San Luis Obispo, California.

Brower had come to believe that nuclear power was a dangerous mistake at any location, and he publicly voiced his opposition to Diablo Canyon, in defiance of the Club's official policy.

Brower was charged with financial recklessness and insubordination by two of his former close friends, photographer Ansel Adams and board president Richard Leonard.

[clarification needed] FOE also benefited from the publicity generated by a series of articles in The New Yorker by John McPhee, later published as Encounters with the Archdruid, which recounted Brower's confrontations with a geologist and mining engineer, a resort developer, and Floyd Dominy, the director of the Bureau of Reclamation.

Brower also started a publications program at FOE, which had initial success with The Environmental Handbook in the wake of Earth Day, but then began to lose money.

Although Brower's background was in the wilderness preservation wing of the conservation movement, he quickly led FOE to take on many of the issues raised by the new environmentalists.

FOE campaigned against the Alaska pipeline, the supersonic transport airplane (SST), nuclear power, and the use of the defoliant Agent Orange in the Vietnam War.

After FOE moved its headquarters to Washington, D.C., in 1986, Brower developed Earth Island as a loosely structured incubator for innovative projects in ecology and social justice.

Although he chaired the board of directors, Brower stayed in the background as co-directors David Philips and John Knox ran the organization.

Groups formed under Earth Island's umbrella include the Rainforest Action Network, the Environmental Project on Central America (EPOCA), and many others.