“Most often we think of the natural world as an economic resource, or as a place of recreation after a wearisome period of work, or as something of passing interest for its beauty on an autumn day when the radiant colors of the oak and maple leaves give us a moment of joy. All these attitudes are quite legitimate, yet in them all there is what might be called a certain trivializing attitude. If we were truly moved by the beauty of the world about us, we would honor the earth in a profound way. We would understand immediately and turn away with a certain horror from all those activities that violate the integrity of the planet.
“That we have not done so reveals that a disturbance exists at a more basic level of consciousness and on a greater order of magnitude than we dare to admit to ourselves or even think about. This unprecedented pathology is not merely in those more immediate forms of economic activity that have done such damage; it is even more deeply imbedded in our cultural traditions, in our religious traditions, in our very language, in our entire value system.”
Thomas Berry

Just before his untimely death from tubercular meningitis American novelist Thomas Wolfe finished his last work, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” about a writer who has written a successful novel about his home town. When he returns to his town the writer finds its citizens full of hatred, resentment, rejection and scorn towards him for what he has revealed to the world and to themselves about themselves. In response, the writer becomes a wanderer in search of a home to replace the one to which he cannot return. The novel, a great one in my opinion, is required reading for the disaffected of America. The phrase “You can’t go home again,” has become part of the lexicon of cliché (or wisdom, depending), such as “You can’t go to the same party twice,” and “You can’t step in the same river twice,” by which we orient ourselves and understand a hurriedly changing world.
That you can’t go home again is a primordial tragedy, one not to be confused with foolish and futile though sometimes enjoyable efforts to reclaim the past. Whether this elemental disaster is part of the human condition or unique to the past hundred years is a useful query. So is whether the spirit of reclaiming the past is mournful or celebratory. Both are valuable questions for another time and place; but they are entirely different matters.
Such thoughts wandered more than usual through my disaffected brain after I took my first climbing trip to Yosemite Valley in several years in the spring of 2004. I first arrived in the Yosemite climbing scene in the spring of 1968, and spent a considerable amount of time there for the next six or seven years. I missed by a few years the height of the golden years of Yosemite climbing, but I certainly inhaled deeply of its mellow yellow years. I climbed hard and thoroughly enjoyed what was (and is) some of the best rock climbing on earth. I found a suitable niche and immersed myself in what was (and is) the free-form, eclectic, high-energy, social experiment revolving around that scene. It was a great time of life for many reasons, among them the irreplaceable good fortune of being able to live for long periods of time in the midst of the beauty of the Yosemite Valley, to climb each day with the finest of climbing partners and comrades, and to return at night to the simple and Spartan existence (some would say decadence) that characterized climbers’ lives in Camp 4. It was a paradise of sorts for disaffected Americans who had wandered or been driven into climbing, populated by few who ever made it into the mainstream. Even those who would later become wealthy and well known in American society have a tenuous hold in the mainstream.
If we were truly moved by the beauty of the world about us, we would honor the earth in a profound way. We would understand immediately and turn away with a certain horror from all those activities that violate the integrity of the planet.
If we are not truly moved by the unrivaled beauty of the Yosemite, then what possible means do we have to honor the earth? More, if we are not truly moved, what are we, truly?
That we (Homo sapiens) embrace rather than turn away in horror from those activities that violate the integrity of the earth is self-evident.
If we were truly moved we would understand immediately, but we aren’t and we don’t and our profound confusion, ignorance and stupidity are as clear in Yosemite as the air of California is not. The Yosemite I found that spring is a growing monument to what Berry terms a trivializing attitude mankind has towards the integrity of the planet. As a species, we suffer from a pathology not shared by any other creature on earth. It affects all the creatures and all the places of the earth, the formerly inspirational ones like Yosemite as well as the always corrupting ones like the freeways of Los Angeles, the stale waters of Lake Powell, the toxic brew of the Berkley Pit of Butte, Montana, the air of Mexico City and Beijing, the clear cut logging wounds of Oregon and Washington and British Columbia and Brazil and Costa Rica and elsewhere and the radiated grounds of Hanford, Washington, among others.
On a cloudless California mid-May late afternoon we drove into Yosemite Valley from Crane Flat, as we had done so often in other times. I had not climbed in Yosemite for some 15 years, and the last time was with Galen Rowell. On that occasion, we had been unable to secure a place to camp in the valley, and, along with Galen’s wife and partner, Barbara Cushman Rowell, we had stayed in Mariposa, commuting each day up to the valley to climb. In my enthusiasm to climb, I hadn’t given adequate thought to the significance of a Yosemite Valley with no room for another camp site. That had never been my experience. Each morning we drove up from Mariposa, climbed, and returned in the evening. The climbing was great and to ride in an automobile driven by Galen was a completely absorbing adventure that made it difficult to notice anything beyond the next curve in the road. Being a passenger of Galen’s usually felt like being on lead at the limit of your abilities with the last protection 25 feet below your feet, except you didn’t get to make the moves. Galen did. That is, Galen’s passengers didn’t tend to notice scenery, much less landscape and environmental subtleties. For whatever reasons, I didn’t really see Yosemite on that trip.
On this last trip, as my friend Jeannie and I drove down into the valley on the Crane Flat road, my excitement to be again in one of my favorite places was tempered with nostalgic memories of Galen and Barbara, who had been killed two years ago, and colored with less melancholy reminiscences of people, climbs and events of another time. The awareness that you can’t go home again makes that home more poignant and, perhaps, meaningful in the present moment. Both Jeannie and I had climbed in Yosemite but never together, and we were pleased enough to arrive in “the valley” that we sloughed off our residual irritation and frustration with the congestion, traffic, exhaust fumes, haze and inattentive driving practices of the tourists encountered along Highway 49 as it passes through the chic and celebrated towns that serve as monuments and trendy consumer outlets to California’s gold mining history—Coloma, Placerville, El Dorado, Sutter Creek, Mokulumne Hill, Angels Camp and Chinese Camp. Naturally, our annoyance with California crowds was in no way alleviated by the awareness that we were as complicit as any, a part of the crowd, jockeying for position in pursuit of our own missions of overriding importance, emitting our share of carbon dioxide and angst to the stew of global warming air with each mile we drove. Irony should be a required subject in the public education of every citizen.
On both sides of the road the signs of the devastating fires of a few years ago were evident, as were the regenerative powers of nature. The blackened husks of fir and pine and cedar, standing and fallen, were a stark contrast to the carpet of green rising like Lazarus from the ashes of yesterday’s infernos. Forest fires are as natural and necessary as the turning of the seasons, and that we choose to fight rather than adapt to them is one of many symptoms of the pathology to which Berry refers. The green that springs from fire’s ash is the greenest of them all.
Yosemite classic climbing areas appeared: Reed’s Pinnacle above the road, the Cookie somewhere below, the Rostrum across the lower canyon, and then after Highway 120 meets the valley floor, the main Yosemite rock features come into view, the Cathedral Rocks, Sentinel, El Capitan, Half Dome. There is no sight quite like it in the world I know. A rock climber could spend several lives there without exploring it all, and some climbers have done and are doing just that. More than 130 years ago John Muir described Yosemite: “The most extravagant description I might give of this view to any one who has not seen similar landscapes with his own eyes would not so much as hint its grandeur and the spiritual glow that covered it………..The level bottom seemed to be dressed like a garden—sunny meadows here and there, and groves of pine and oak; the river of Mercy sweeping in majesty through the midst of them and flashing back the sunbeams. The great Tissiack, or Half-Dome, rising at the upper end of the valley to a height of nearly a mile, is nobly proportioned and life-like, the most impressive of all the rocks, holding the eye in devout admiration, calling it back again and again from falls and meadows, or even the mountains beyond—marvelous cliffs, marvelous in sheer dizzy depth and sculpture, types of endurance. Thousands of years have they stood in the sky exposed to rain, snow, frost, earthquake and avalanche, yet they still wear the bloom of youth.”
“….the spiritual glow that covered it.”
“….the bloom of youth.”
How things change. Signs of Yosemite’s transformation during the past 30 years are inescapable and clear. Tens of thousands of years of rain, snow, frost, earthquake and avalanche, to say nothing of hundreds of years of the Ahwahnee Indians burning the valley floor from time to time to regenerate it, changed Yosemite Valley far less than a hundred and fifty years of the trivializing attitude of modern man. John Muir would have a hard time recognizing Yosemite today. Only a National Park Service booster or a flack for Yosemite concessionaires would be crass and inexact enough to describe Yosemite as covered in a spiritual glow or exhibiting the bloom of youth. Muir was neither mindless booster nor servile flack, but the Yosemite experience which touched Muir so deeply and which he described so movingly and extravagantly is no longer available to modern man. And the sad if salient reality is that Muir, like the rest of us, inadvertently (at least for most of us) contributed to Yosemite’s demise, and we continue to do so.
Yosemite is a microcosm/metaphor for life on earth.
The first and most obvious thing one notices on the valley floor of Yosemite after a several year absence, the river of Mercy continuing to run through its core, is the traffic. Automobiles controlled by several wildly different pilot systems—auto, agro, bozo, spaceo, mano-a-mano, retro, macho, dumbo and weirdo—clog the one road, stopping unexpectedly whenever a distraction short circuits the pilot system. It is California, after all, where automobiles rule, and ours contributes its fair share to the congestion and smog of the golden state, diluting clarity of vision, filling lungs with toxins. This black carbon smog is not limited to California, of course, nor is its underlying cause of overpopulation of the planet; but, according to Veerabhadran Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, a brown cloud of dust, pollution and chemicals is absorbing solar radiation and scattering sunlight before it reaches earth. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Sierra Nevada of California, including Yosemite, which produces its own share of pollution but is also downwind from the air pollution capital of California, Los Angeles. The clarity of Yosemite’s once pristine air and vistas are now gone, a fact and metaphor of modern life I find particularly disturbing. A dirty haze covers Yosemite, some of it caused not by automobiles but by controlled burns still smoldering and pumping smoke into the already corrupted air. The photos of Ansel Adams are images from another world. Even Ansel couldn’t take those wonderful photographs now. A sign at Fern Springs warns against drinking the water. We used to fill all our water bottles at Fern Springs, considering it the best drinking water in the valley. So far as I know, no one in our circles ever got sick from Fern Springs water, but the sign is there for a reason and I believe it.
Our friend Helen has a camp site for us, but she has not yet checked in via cell phone and we do not know where to go and have some spare time. We drive around the valley in bumper to bumper traffic to Camp 4. I am curious about my old haunt. A few years ago Camp 4 was slated to be shut down and turned into housing. The climbing community, led by Tom Frost and Dick Duane, reacted and fought and lobbied and sued and managed to give Camp 4 Federal Historical status. As a result, it is still a walk in camp for Yosemite climbers, and all climbers are pleased. The parking area is packed, but we find a place and take a sentimental lap around Camp 4. Most of the citizens of Camp 4 are 30 to 40 years my junior and easily recognizable as climber dirt bags for a day or a season or three seasons or a lifetime, depending. Neither of us knows any of them. One gray haired fellow with the look of many hard moves and uncomfortable bivouacs is a couple decades older than anyone around him. He looks vaguely familiar but I cannot place him. We exchange nods and smiles of recognition and the kinship of age but do not speak. We watch a young lad practicing with astonishing skill on a slack line hung between two trees. Groups of climbers are telling climbing stories, complete with acting out the moves of the crux. Others are bouldering. A couple of parties are already in progress. A couple is setting up their tent. There are lots of tents. There are more men than women, and the boys are hanging around every camp where the girls are. A forlorn looking climber with still taped hands is sitting in a chair beside his pack and rope, drinking a beer, staring at without seeing a point in the distance. Even after 30 years, many aspects of Camp 4 are familiar, easily recognizable, almost like going home.
Barely is enough, but almost doesn’t count.
Other aspects, much like the black carbon smog substituting for air in California, are overridingly unrecognizable. The ground of Camp 4 has been trodden into a lifeless hardpan that is the antithesis of spiritual glow or the bloom of youth. It obviously would be and has been and will be again a mud bog in a hard rain. Lots of tents, lots of people, not much room between them. I estimated that 10 times more climbers inhabited Camp 4 than in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It is an overcrowded if logical extension of the rest of Yosemite, but unless we connect with Helen it is the only available camping in the valley. I told Jeannie that even if we have to drive to Wawona or Mariposa each night, I do not want to stay in Camp 4. She agrees. Fortunately, when we get back to the car there is a message from Helen with directions to a camp site among the Winnebagos, generators and the rollout Astroturf patios under fold up awnings. And, in the interest of full disclosure, we were happy to have it. We set up camp, cooked dinner, ate, talked into the night and slept in our tents in comfort. A bear wandered through camp in the night looking for the one camper there will always be who neglects to put food in the steel bear proof boxes abundantly scattered throughout the valley. Bear found no such neglect in our neighborhood that night, but he left a large pile of bear shit next to one of the tents just to say hello.
The next morning, after coffee and muffins in the chill haze, we went to the base of El Capitan for the day’s projects. There were scant places to park along the road near El Cap, but we found one and had soon made the short hike up to the rock. Just as we arrived at the base we encountered a climbing acquaintance of Helen’s helping his partner down the path. His partner had (obviously) badly broken his ankle in a fall several hundred feet up the Salathe Wall, and they had spent the past few hours getting down. We dropped our packs and spent the next 45 minutes helping carry the wounded rock warrior to their car. We were tired and our backs were sore by the time we finally got back to the rock and racked up and ready to climb. We began with the classic La Cosita, right, which was, as always, hard, strenuous, beautiful and very, very polished from thousands of ascents. The fine granite of Yosemite’s most trafficked free climbs is worn as smooth by hands and feet and the placement of gear as glaciers and rivers have polished rock throughout the Sierra Nevada. But the slippery cracks of Yosemite climbing were polished in far less time than it took the glaciers and rivers.
At the end of the day I was belaying Helen as she struggled with the off width moves at the top of Sacherer Cracker. The sun was behind El Cap and it was cold. Jeannie suddenly said, “Dick, don’t look now, but there’s a bear about ten feet behind you.” Sure enough, there he was, a large, brown coated somehow unhealthy and goofy looking bear scoping out our packs for food content. Since I was occupied and Helen did not want my attention distracted, even by bears, I told Jeannie to throw rocks at him but not to hit him. She did and bear scampered away a few yards. She threw some more stones and bear vanished only to appear a few minutes later, waiting to make his move. Jeannie threw rocks and shouted, “Go away, bear.” I belayed and shivered. Helen, among the coolest, quietest climbers on a hard lead I’ve ever known, silently struggled and sweated. Bear was patient, persistent and wary, but he kept appearing every few minutes until, shortly before we left, he vanished as quietly as he had appeared. Tommy Caldwell and partner walked by, coming down from fixing some pitches on the Dihedral. I recognized Caldwell from magazine photos and we talked about the bear and the problem of bears at the base of El Cap. They left. I thought of his famous Asian mis-adventure and of the ultimate climber’s nightmare of being shot at while on a wall, a prospect which puts a certain perspective on the ‘problem’ of bears, even grizzly bears. Give me a grizzly with his natural disposition and hunger and turf over the lunacy of a fundamentalist (not all of them Islamic) with (or even without) a weapon, any day.
Grizzly bears were once plentiful in California, and the grizzly (Ursus arctos horribilis) is on the state flag. The Golden Bears of California are named for the grizzly. However, as a difficult neighbor for the anthropocentric and those unable or unwilling or too ignorant to honor the earth in a profound way (all of mankind, it would seem), the grizzly was exterminated from California by 1922. The last grizzly known to have been killed in Yosemite was in 1895. The more amenable to human encroachment upon the land black bear (Ursus americanus) has remained. For many years black bear/human encounters and conflicts, though not unknown, were manageable, in some part because the Yosemite garbage dump provided a substitute for the reduced food supply in the bears’ shrinking natural habitat. Then in the late 1960s the dump was shut down and Yosemite’s garbage was trucked out of the valley. The bears of Yosemite lost the food source to which they had become habituated. Naturally, as they had when their first and natural source of food was cut off, they went to the next best option: the plethora of food items brought into Yosemite by hikers, climbers, back packers, campers and drive through gawkers, easily gathered in many forms and wrappings on camp tables and in tents, backpacks, cars, vans, ice coolers, garbage cans, haul bags, and, in a few rare and particularly pathologically unconscious instances, the hands of tourists mistaking Ursus americanus for Ursus Theodorus. The intelligence and ingenuity exhibited by Yosemite bears in extracting sustenance from the aforementioned food containers are amazing and the stuff of legends; and, naturally, bear/human conflicts and confrontations became daily and sometimes destructive occurrences. As always, in the long run, bear lost.
By the early 1970s the Park Service reported it was responding to “rogue” (those suspected of being repeat food thief offenders) bears by trapping, drugging and “relocating” This seemed both humane and practical. Then, in the early 1970s, climber Chris Vandiver was searching out new climbing areas below the Crane Flat road when he stumbled onto the graveyard of rogue bears. He found the rotting carcasses of dozens of bears the Park Service had killed before furtively dumping their bodies off a cliff from the Crane Flat Road. Vandiver told Galen Rowell about it and Galen photographed and wrote it up, embarrassing the Park Service but forcing them to seek other solutions to the “bear problem.” While the Park Service’s assertion that it was “relocating” the bears was, from one pint of view, correct, the impression it fostered was misleading, dishonest and disgusting, while at the same time giving its flack men the illusion of deniability.
“We would understand immediately and turn away with a certain horror from all those activities that violate the integrity of the planet”.
To say nothing of the integrity of the people who relocated the bears as well as the mouthpieces who covered for them. Having the ability to find deniability in the undeniable bamboozling of the citizenry, to say nothing of hiding the graveyards of bears and other creatures, including honorable soldiers in caskets, seems to be a requisite for long-term government employment.
To their credit, the Park Service has since installed hundreds of steel bear proof storage containers and garbage deposits all over Yosemite Valley, causing bears to work harder for their supper but giving both bears and people a better chance to live together. So far as we can tell, the Park Service is no longer relocating large numbers of bears, rogue or otherwise, at least not in Yosemite. But a few years ago Yosemite big wall climbers began stashing supplies overnight at the base of multi-day climbs to save time on the first day of climbing. It didn’t take bear long to sniff out the new food location and to begin foraging along the base of Yosemite’s walls for the unwatched backpack or haul bag. Though climbers and campers have for the most part learned, pickings are relatively if randomly good, as evidenced by the bears that walk through camp in the night and scavenge along the base of the walls favored by climbers. During our time there, Jeannie and Helen did the south face of Washington’s column. They took a haul bag with climbing and sleeping gear but devoid of food up the fourth class ledges to the base of the climb, returning the next afternoon to spend the night before starting the climb early the following morning. They found a bear had scrambled up the fourth class ledges, ripped open their haul bag and devoured a tube of sun block cream, scattering their gear and ripping a few things in the process. They also found dozens of abandoned plastic water bottles and abundant garbage left by climbers. When they returned to Dinner Ledge after their climb, they cleaned up as many discarded plastic containers as they could carry. What they could not bring with them is the unyielding stench of urine that pervades Dinner Ledge and other ledges pissed upon by generations of Yosemite climbers. While most (but certainly not all) of my climbing friends have always practiced the ethic of hauling out our garbage and even the garbage of others when possible, more than 30 years ago I too pissed upon Dinner Ledge and other ledges of Yosemite. Everybody did. Everybody still does. What else is a climber to do? Many climbers could do a better job of picking up after themselves than they do, but the sheer numbers of climbers have turned Yosemite into what one waggish friend described (accurately, in my mind) as “the world’s largest urban outdoor climbing gym.” It is a fact that man is turning more and more of the planet into an urban landscape, and a good argument can be made that the values of urbanity itself violates the integrity of the planet.
One day I hiked up to Half Dome via Vernal and Nevada Falls and Little Yosemite Valley, a six and a half hour round trip workout and somewhat of a sentimental journey for me. It was an astonishing experience as hundreds of people clogged the trail as far as Vernal Fall, dozens as far as Nevada Fall. The last time I’d hiked that trail I’d encountered perhaps twenty people all day. Not until Little Yosemite was the hike anything other than a passage through an urban landscape. The Mist Trail below the falls was reminiscent of walking up one of San Francisco’s hills on a drizzly day, except the trail was more crowded than the streets of that fair city. Indeed, the entire trail is paved to the falls, as it must be to handle such traffic. There were several groups of teen-age students accompanied by teachers. One hugely overweight young man was struggling mightily if unhappily up the stone steps. His friends were cheering him on to persevere and it was not clear that he would be able to do so. The support of the fat boy’s friends was commendable and encouraging, but it occurred to me that one manifestation of the pathology to which Thomas Berry refers is the overabundance of young people in our society for whom walking uphill for a couple of miles on a fine spring California day is agony instead of pleasure, a major accomplishment instead of a ritual of healthy living. It is a safe bet that that young man in the bloom of youth did not notice a like bloom on the landscape around him.
I was happy to reach Little Yosemite simply because it was the first remotely non-urban experience I’d had since driving into Yosemite Valley more than a week earlier. The previous sentence was written in full awareness that the automobile itself is an integral part of modern man’s urban value system. Like everyone reading this, I am a modern man and part of the problem, and if there is a solution short of the not out of the question extinction of mankind part of the solution. There were only a few hikers in Little Yosemite, but I was surprised to see a Park Service log cabin that had appeared since I had last been there. I wandered along at my own pace and took in the great south face of Half Dome and reminisced about my friends Galen Rowell and Warren Harding, both now dead, and of their fine first ascent of the south face and of their epic rescue off that face on their first storm bound attempt. The air was hazy, but it was wonderful to feel something of the spiritual glow that infused John Muir’s Yosemite and which I missed with pangs of homesickness. I stopped to eat lunch on a boulder before heading up the trail to the east shoulder below the cable to the summit. I passed only one other hiker coming down, but when I got beneath the cable I was treated to a surprising sight: some 15 or 20 people were strung out along the cable, both ascending and descending. The cable was not yet up and was lying against the rock, so hikers were forced to bend over to hold on as they went up, or, with more difficulty, came down. As is the case in all endeavors, some were having an easier time than others. One gentleman seemed to have panicked half way up the cable and was spread out on the rock with a two hand death grip on the cable and both feet off the rock. People both ascending and descending were stopped, trying to help the hapless hiker. He didn’t move for some 10 minutes before being coaxed/aided to retreat back down the cable. I watched the Half Dome cable summit scene for awhile before deciding that it was too crowded for my mood that day. I had been there before and perhaps would again, but I turned around and went back down to the valley.
We climbed the superb rock of Yosemite a few more days. Three of our more hard core friends from Jackson Hole drove straight through from Wyoming, slept for seven hours, and in the next three days climbed three different routes on El Capitan and then drove non-stop back to Jackson. We were impressed. On our last day we climbed the moderate, classic Nutcracker Suite, a route I’d done many times. We had a hard time finding a place to park because a television commercial was being filmed and vans, equipment trucks, cameramen, actors, actresses, grips, directors and the entire scene that sells consumerism to America had taken over the area. We unloaded our climbing gear and walked through a very urban atmosphere to Manure Pile Buttress. We had a fine time on Nutcracker. The polishing of the route was noticeable, not surprising as we were one of five parties on the route at the same time, two Italians in front of us, two Germans behind, all good fellows and fine conversationalists on the belays, which were, to say the least, crowded.
After the climb we left Yosemite. It was late afternoon. During the week we were in Yosemite Tioga Pass was opened and we took that route east. As I guided my gas guzzling van up the Crane Flat road towards Tioga I reflected on Yosemite Valley today. The National Park Service in Yosemite and elsewhere has a mandate to “provide for the enjoyment of the visitor” and, at the same time, “leave the park unimpaired for future generations.” Enjoyment is a personal, subjective matter, and one man’s enjoyment is another man’s agony. I question whether the Park Service can or even should be asked to provide for the enjoyment of visitors, especially if, as is the case, in the process the park becomes impaired. And there is no question that Yosemite Valley, like the other National Parks, is impaired. The two metaphors that stick in my mind about Yosemite today are the television commercial crew and equipment and the opaque air that even Ansel Adams could not have seen through to clarity. And, of course, the crowds, which are not a metaphor but, rather, the state of planet earth and both cause and effect of the disturbance at a basic level of consciousness to which Berry refers. It is not the Park Service’s fault that Yosemite has become a polluted, crowded, urban traffic jam, or that snowmobiles inundate Yellowstone, or that the air in the Smoky Mountains is among the worst in America. It is the fault of man’s collective trivializing attitude toward the earth. Climbers are as much to blame for Yosemite’s degradation as the Winnebago crowd, the tour bus circuit, the Park Service itself, the concessionaires, the oil/automobile industries and the spineless members of the U.S. Congress for whom the environment and National Parks are only another business opportunity for their campaign contributors. I do not know what it will take to heal Yosemite, but each of us, climber and non-climber alike can do something—-learn to leave no trace, carry out trash and feces, don’t join the crowd, turn away in horror from that which violates integrity, monitor the trivializing attitude, get involved. Write a letter. Phone a Congressman. Get pissed. Such small intentions may not take care of the problem, which is humungous, but they will benefit the practitioner, who is sacred. Personally, I favor more drastic measures. Yosemite will not be healed until all the roads into the valley are closed, all vehicles banned, all houses and lodges and restaurants and permanent tents removed. Let people who want to see the Yosemite walk into the valley, climbers included. To those who level the charge of elitism to such ideas, I reply that the idea that the wonders of the world are worth some effort to see and to keep unimpaired, and the notion that they are available to everyone with the skill and strength to sit in a seat, step on a gas pedal, steer an automobile and pay for a tank of gas is one that trivializes the planet and makes of it an economic resource and place of recreation, empty of spiritual glow.
Let them walk.
Let us all walk.
Let Yosemite have a rest. Give the earth a rest. But even banning automobiles in Yosemite is a stop-gap measure, one that should be put in place. It is man’s trivializing attitude toward the very nature which sustains him that needs changing. Banning cars in Yosemite may give him some time to make those changes and learn to turn away with a certain horror from all those activities that violate the integrity of the planet.
Such thoughts bubbled away in my brain even as I guided the van along the Tioga road. I talked to Jeannie about the week in Yosemite and of what we had experienced and about the crowds. We had had some fine climbing, a good time in one of our favorite spots which we were leaving with both satisfying and unsettling memories and impressions. We talked about how the earth and all its creatures are suffering from man’s blind cleverness. We enjoyed the talk and the drive and each other’s company and the memories we shared.
A few miles before reaching Tuolumne Meadows a medium size very black bear burst out of the trees on the right and ran across the road in front of us. This bear was beautiful and healthy and fast and on a mission to somewhere. It was a thrilling sight, but around his neck was a bright blue radio collar, and no bear can ever go home again with a collar around its neck.