Category Archives: Mountains

WHAT IS A MOUNTAIN PERSON

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The question sometimes arises in mountain communities, “what is a mountain person?” Certainly, simply dwelling in the mountains or in a mountain town does not make one a ‘mountain person,’ just as residing in a city does not eliminate one’s mountain personhood, Jimmy Chin, for example, one of the world’s best known professional mountaineers and mountain photographers, lives with his wife and child in New York City. No two people will answer such a question the same, but here are a few of my own reflections and observations. Thanks are given to Chomolungma and Miyo Lungsangma that the question isn’t who is a mountain person. The answer to that can only be made by each mountain person for him or her self.
First, a mountain person is made, not born. Everyone arrives in this life a helpless hunk of flesh and blood with a brain one third the size of its parents’ and no more care for, appreciation of or love for mountains and harmonious mountain living than a Pacific bivalve mollusk. Mountain people have evolved in accordance to the demands of survival. In evolutionary terms, today’s mountain person is descended from the first amphibian creatures that finally got tired of fighting for a bit of oxygen below sea level and crawled up on land looking for more oxygen and just kept crawling toward high country without contemplating too carefully the fact that the higher you get the less oxygen there is. A mountain person, like all the other kinds, is not without contradictions but keeps on crawling, learning about the community of local humans, birds, beasts, trees, rivers, lakes, rocky mountain peaks, alpine meadows, ecosystems and water tables and, along the way, why a healthy forest and a hillside without structures on it are beautiful, and that nature’s beauty is an end in itself. It is a tradition as old as the climb from the sea to the highest peak and its journey up is not always pretty, easy, fast or chic. It’s a slow process that takes place at a mountainous pace and won’t be rushed.
It takes awhile for the most well-intentioned, dedicated mountain person to learn the value of organic respect for the priceless gifts that mountains offer those who live within, visit from time to time and gaze upon from the valley, a reverence perhaps best expressed by Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first two people to summit Mt. Everest: “It’s not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” A friend who lives in a city is fond of saying “…because I am a mountain woman” in attribution to some of her best, most transcendent experiences “…simply because of the feelings I get when I’m ‘there’ although I like to think it means I am also strong. I would think that anyone who has experienced being on a mountain, looking out on the world, would have these feelings….I love pure air even if it is thinner.”
Many years ago while living in a mountain town well-known for its mountain amenities and organic consciousness as well as social excess and shallow pretentiousness I was interviewed by a writer for a national publication. He commented that the town seemed to lack “soul.” I didn’t agree with him but acknowledged his point and replied, “Perhaps, but there are many soulful people here,” and I offered some names of people we both knew and a few he didn’t know but knew about. We concurred that those individuals in a town he viewed as soulless had soul.
A mountain person has soul.

Don’t you think?

EVOLUTION, CREATIONISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT

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Polls, like statistics, are neither definitive nor sacrosanct in helping us understand the world, but they are not without value. A series of recent polls indicate that somewhere between 28 percent and 47 percent of Americans think that the theory of evolution is a better approach to an understanding of life on earth than a belief in creationism. If the polls are close to correct, somewhere between more than half to more than two-thirds of Americans do not believe in evolution. To those of us who view creationism as something akin to a professed or real belief in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, virgin birth, the Easter Bunny, infallibility, American exceptionalism and weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, this is astonishing.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised. Other polls show that 52 percent of American teenagers believe in astrology. Among biology teachers, 34 percent think psychic powers can be used to read peoples’ thoughts, 29 percent believe we can communicate with the dead and 22 percent believe in ghosts. Biology teachers who use psychic powers to read minds, who communicate with the dead and who believe in ghosts are as astonishing as Creationists. One wonders what sort of evolutionary biology they teach their young charges.
Creationism comes in more than one flavor, but the plain species maintains that the universe, including all life and humanity, was created by God in six days sometime around 6000 years ago. The theory of evolution maintains that the universe and everything within it, including humanity, is a bit older, mysterious and complex than that simplistic description.
That a majority of Americans hold creationist beliefs about the universe, the earth and human life (and death) has both obvious and subtle religious, educational, cultural, social, political, military and personal consequences. It also has incalculable and mostly unacknowledged environmental costs. As Van Potter who coined the term ‘global bioethics’, said in reference to world survival, “To future generations, ignorance, superstition and illiteracy are the greatest barriers to a hopeful future for our descendants.”
If a majority of the people do not believe in and are, therefore, ignorant of evolution, then it follows they do not believe in and are ignorant of the tenets of biology. It is a biological environment in which we live. All of us‑‑Creationists, evolutionists, environmentalists, religious fundamentalists, Republicans, Democrats, scientists and evangelists‑‑all live (and die) in this same environment. A person who is convinced that the environment was created in a few days less than 10,000 years ago for the convenience and use of human beings is going to view things like ecology, biology and the connections between different living species differently than one for whom evolution is an on-going biological process (experiment?) in which we are all, inescapably, involved.
Laurence Moran defines evolution as “a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations.” That seems simple enough, scientifically provable (and proven) and not threatening to any but the narrowest religious perspective. But it takes more generations than creationists have, and, more to the point of the environment, the possibility of change carries with it the responsibility of change. If the earth and its environment and all its creatures, including man, are part of an interconnected evolutionary process which mysterious beginning and ending and meaning we do not (and cannot) know, then we have a responsibility to be very careful about disrupting that process and destroying its mechanisms. If, on the other hand, the earth and its environment and creatures were put here a few thousand years ago for the use and benefit of homo-sapiens, then polluted rivers, dead lakes, clear cut forests, toxic air, two-headed frogs, drought, the extinction of any species besides homo-sapiens, acid rain, denuded and eroded landscapes, nuclear and toxic waste sites so poisonous that 10,000 years will not erase their peril to all life are just part of the creation. Not to worry. As Oklahoma U.S. Senator James Inhofe says, “God is still up there, and He promised to maintain the seasons and that cold and heat would never cease as long as the earth remains…The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”
That somewhere between more than half to more than two-thirds of Americans do not believe in evolution helps explain why environmental issues are so far down the list of American voters’ concerns. To those of us who view the environment of earth as the very foundation of all life, including human life, such cavalier apathy is insane, in the same realm of human consciousness as burning women and calling them witches at the stake was insane, but, excepting the burned women themselves, having far more serious consequences.
Be that as it, according to the polls, is, the environmental movement needs to shift its focus. Using science to convince voters that the environment and the evolution of all life are in danger of being irreparably damaged by man’s technology, stupidity and greed is not sufficient. The environmental movement operates on the assumption that evolution is accepted by most Americans. At the risk of being branded witches (or worse), environmentalists need to meet the gibberish that is creationism head on and expose it as the irrational, brain-dead, fear-based, dogmatic religious superstition that it is.
The environment and human thought will benefit and show heritable changes over many generations by such a focus on evolution in action.

 

TROPHIC CASCADES

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All of nature‑‑the environment’s cornucopia of lakes, forests, rivers, oceans, mountains, meadows, deserts and plains, and the flora and fauna of local and foreign ecosystems and you and me representing humanity, just to name a few of the interlocking parts of the natural world‑‑is affected every day by trophic cascades. It is a term and topic not without controversy, both within the scientific community and among those prone to conflating science and politics or at least the economic interests that buy politicians. Nevertheless, we are all well served by contemplating and trying to understand (and observe) trophic cascades in the world in which we live.
Author, scientist and environmentalist Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) is credited with first describing the dynamic as early as the 1930s and ‘40s in connection with his observations of wolves and the effects on the ecosystem when they were removed. Just mentioning wolves, as everyone reading this well knows, invites controversy. Perhaps if Leopold had been observing mountain pine bark beetles, sea otters, wolverines or blue green algae and their trophic cascading relationship to the changing interactions of entire ecosystems, instead of wolves, the term ‘trophic cascades’ would rest more comfortably in popular discussions and debates about the world’s environment.
Leopold literally turned ecologists’ understanding of the environment upside down. Before him, it was generally perceived that every ecosystem was regulated from the bottom up by resource availability: that is, plants at the bottom take energy from the sun; herbivores take energy from (eat) the plants and carnivores (predators) at the top take energy from (eat) the herbivores. The food chain of nature is far more complicated than this simplistic description, of course, but Leopold noted that when wolves were removed from a particular environment the deer population increased which in turn reduced the vegetation which negatively affected every part of the ecosystem connected to that vegetation. That is, all of it and its regulation worked both top down as well as bottom up. Brian Silliman and Christine Angelini of the Nature Education Knowledge Project describe it as, “When ecosystems are green, predators are often holding grazers in check, while, when they are overgrazed, predator loss or removal is often responsible for elevated grazer densities and plant loss. This tri-trophic interaction, where predators benefit plants by controlling grazer populations, is known as a trophic cascade.”
By the early 20th century the sea otter of southeast Alaska and the Aleutian Islands were hunted to near extinction for their pelts, called by one wholesale distributor “the most luxurious and exclusive fur in the world.” Sea urchin populations exploded as their primary predator the sea otter vanished, and, as a consequence, kelp beds, a staple of healthy seabed ecology in Alaska diminished drastically. In recent years sea otters have been reintroduced to the oceans around the Aleutians and “…predictable changes in the density of sea urchins, kelp, and the organisms that utilize the habitat created by healthy kelp beds, have been observed, demonstrating the potential for whole-ecosystem recovery with the reinstatement of predator populations (Estes & Duggins 1995).”
That is, trophic cascades can decimate entire ecosystems from bottom to top of the food chain and vice-versa, and they can also reverse the damage in both directions and restore ecosystems to the dynamic balance that is a healthy natural world.
Think of that.

THE PURITY OF SNOW ROADS DRIVEN

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Take it Slow
Make this your mantra: ice and snow, take it slow. When snow is covering the road, reduce your speed, accelerate slowly and steer gently. Keeping your speed down will help prevent spinouts and keep your vehicle safe on the road.
Don’t Rely on Technology
Your vehicle may be equipped with all-wheel drive, electronic stability control and anti-lock brakes, but no technology can guarantee your safety on icy roads. Safety devices are designed to enhance safe driving techniques, not compensate for a lack of them.
Two of ten snow road driving tips offered by an auto insurance company in 2012.

Ice and snow, take it slow.
Don’t rely on technology.
The basics never change.

Most of us fortunate enough to live in and/or spend significant amounts of time in snow country are familiar with the pleasures, terrors, skills and mechanical demands of driving in snow. Those who take it slow will better appreciate the landscape of snow opened up to man’s incursions, for better or worse, by those snow roads. Those for whom safe driving techniques are a form of respect and attention to the present moment of moving through snow, not an inconvenient impediment to the final destination, the impressive goal or the self’s delusion of separateness from and control of the landscape (not to be confused with self-control), have more freedom to see and in some small way be formed by the persistent whiteness of snow layered upon all the dramatic and subtle shapes and forms of the land.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, wrote, “The earth teaches us more about ourselves than all the books in the world, because it is resistant to us. Self-discovery comes when man measures himself against an obstacle. To attain it, he needs an implement…..” He also wrote, “Through all the centuries, in truth, the roads have deceived us.”
But we are mostly deceived through our own doing, our own lack of attention, our own failure to care, or, at least, to care enough. In the case of snow covered roads, we are deceived by moving too fast to be able to perceive the functional beauty of the snow driven roads and the landscape through which they weave. The earth can teach us nothing when we move too quickly across its surface, and we take that ignorance off the road and into our homes, offices, governments and personal lives. Relying on technology institutionalizes that ignorance.
Think of that.
Driving the snow covered roads of America is a metaphor for modern life in our country. Ice and snow, take it slow. Don’t rely on technology. The basics never change and they can never be institutionalized.
At this writing I am within a few weeks of my 74th birthday and I tend to think more about basics than I did in other, yes, speedier years. The bard himself, Shakespeare, used snow as a metaphor for purity, and it is worth considering that how we are with snow roads driven, with snow itself, with hands on the gently steered wheel in a white-out blizzard at night on an unknown side road leading to a fabled mountain lodge where awaits the best companionship, food, ambience and backcountry skiing in the known world, is a reflection of our own purity in that world and of what efforts and consciousness we might possess to attain (regain?) that purity. Those efforts include the goal, impressive or not, of reaching the lodge without psychic or physical injury to oneself or to another; and the consciousness that we drive no snow road or any other alone.
Like most drivers of snow covered roads, my earliest memories of the pure white roads of America (in my case, Lake Tahoe) were in the company of my parents. My mother hated to drive, dreaded the road and would only drive in snow if she perceived no alternative. I was a junior ski racer in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before I was old enough to drive, and my parents, usually my father, drove me to the races around the west. By that time of his life Father had wrecked a couple of automobiles with impatience and inattention (and, I suspect, a bourbon or two too many), and he spared no effort to make sure it did not happen again. We spent many days and into the nights taking it slow on the blizzard obscured snowy roads of the Sierra Nevada. Dad’s ethic that getting to the race and back home safely was at least as significant and adventurous as the race itself was, alas, lost on my inattentive, impatient, goal oriented young competitive mind. Eventually (keeping it slow) Dad’s wisdom emerged from the fog of my own delusions into the (relative) clarity of the basics and I recognized the wisdom of his awareness in action.
I particularly remember one epic early 50s journey back from the North shore of Tahoe to our home at Zephyr Cove in a raging Sierra blizzard. The hour and a half drive took three times as long and we never saw another car outside our 1941 Plymouth coupe. Halfway home modern technology failed us. The chain on the left rear tire broke, came off and, by the time we had stopped and searched for it, disappeared in the snow of the incompletely plowed road near Spooner’s Summit junction. For the rest of the drive home Father, with intense concentration despite a frightened and vocally hysterical wife and a silent but equally terrified son staring into the abyss of the canyon above Glenbrook, kept it slow and gently steered the right rear wheel as close to the edge of the road as possible, the least slippery path in his judgment. It appeared to be inches but was probably feet to the edge of the canyon which dropped to infinity behind the blizzard, and Mom berated him the whole way to stay more in the center of the road, away from what Dad determined was the less slippery edge where the remaining chain would have maximum traction. Eventually we arrived home and, while the storm continued, we built a fire and Mom cooked dinner and Dad relaxed and I listened to the radio and there was a purity to the comfort, safety and attention to detail in action that I have always associated with taking it slow on ice and snow.
At the other end of the purity spectrum of snow roads driven is this: On March 6, 2011, Janne Laitinen of Finland, gently steered an automobile to a world ice driving record of 206.05 mph on the black ice of the Gulf of Bothnia in Finland.
Think of that.
And then think of the safe driving techniques, the gentle steering, the attention to detail, the finesse required to safely slow down and bring to a stop a vehicle traveling 200 mph on a gulf of black ice. And then think of the purity of the comfort, safety and satisfaction of dinner that night before the fire. Remember it as a metaphor for modern life on earth the next time you are taking it slow on the ice and snow roads of a world where the basics never change.
And remember it as a metaphor of a metaphor of snow as purity in this time when the snows of childhood are vanishing into the denials of human caused global climate change. Both the denials and the global climate changes are metaphors for impurity, and they are real.
Think of that.

DESKTOP REMINDERS

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Every person is well-served by continuous reminders of the consistent and larger story within the various and variable smaller stories that we all tell and hear. Such ethical/intellectual prompts help keep the story rooted in reality and the story teller entrenched in the awareness that humans have always lived by stories and that those stories help shape the world. On the tiny desk in my office on which I write are three such reminders, two poems and a platform. Their size and significance are too large for this small space, but I encourage the reader to track them down for contemplation and, if inspired, action.
The first plank in The Deep Ecology Platform reads, “The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth; intrinsic value; inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.”
Thich Nhat Hanh’s poem, “Please call Me By My True Name” includes,
“I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons
to Uganda.”
And in “…Not Man Apart…” Robinson Jeffers writes,
“In the white of the fire…how can I express the excellence
…I have found, that has no color but clearness;”
These are reminders that everything is connected in the natural (real) world, that the material well-being of the ‘developed’ nations is built upon the poverty of what the Cold War termed “Third World Countries” but modern PC labels “Less Developed Countries,” and that the task of the story teller is to continue to express life’s inexpressible excellence that has no color but clearness.
My desktop reminders are not random.
Deep Ecology is a term (and now a foundation) introduced in 1973 by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess to differentiate between two different but not necessarily incompatible forms of environmentalism—deep ecology, which involves deep questioning, addresses root causes and calls for changes in basic values and practices of industrial civilization’s “business as usual,” and shallow ecology (think Sierra Club), which favors short term often technological fixes to the earth’s human caused environmental crises. That is, the shallow environmentalism of recycling, fuel efficient automobiles, organic farming and other worthy practices are beneficial but do not go far enough or sufficiently include values independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.
Thich Nhat Hanh is likely the best known Buddhist alive besides HH Dalai Lama. He was born in Viet Nam in 1926 and now lives in France. He is a Zen master, writer and poet and a world leader in peace activism. When war came to his native country he founded the engaged Buddhism movement which encouraged both laymen and monks to apply the personal insights of meditation practice to the larger social, political, environmental and economic and injustice issues of the world. Martin Luther King called him “An Apostle of peace and nonviolence.” Thich Nhat Hanh is a constant reminder that we are all connected to and part of both the starving child in Africa and the profiteering merchant of deadly weapons which, in turn, are connected to each other.
Robinson Jeffers is one of America’s great poets and was rightfully recognized as such during the 1920s and 30s, including being on the cover of “Time” magazine in 1932. He was always controversial and expanded both the form and content of American literature in the tradition of Walt Whitman. He studied medicine, forestry and literature and graduated from college at the age of 18 by which time he had determined that poetry was his passion. Jeffers developed a philosophy which he termed “inhumanism.” He explained it as “…a shifting of emphasis from man to not man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence… It offers a reasonable detachment as a rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy.” His work fell out of favor in the popular media during the 1940s in large part because of his opposition to America’s entry into WWII. One of his books included a publisher’s warning about the potentially “unpatriotic” poems found inside. In 1965, three years after Jeffers died, the Sierra Club, at the time under David Brower, published a book of photos of the Big Sur coast interspersed with Jeffers’ poetry. The book’s title “Not Man Apart” is from these Jeffers lines:
“…the greatest beauty is organic wholeness
the wholeness of life and things.
the divine beauty of the universe.
Love that, not man apart from that…”
That’s the best reminder of all.

YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN AFTER PARADISE IS LOST

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“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.

Seven Billion Gorillas in the Garden (but don’t talk about them)

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There are many advocacy groups that have an influence on the American west and elsewhere. Each of them has its adherents and critics, and some of them actually contribute to the benefit or harm of the planet and its inhabitants. That is, at some level they are effective. Among the groups that come to (my) mind are: Sierra Club, Wise Use Movement, Smart Growth, National Rifle Association, Idaho Rivers United, The Aluminum Association, Greater Yellowstone Coalition, Wyoming State Snowmobile Association, Planned Parenthood, National Right to Life Committee, Snake River Alliance and the Pacific Logging Congress. There are others too numerous to mention, and every person could easily make a different list.
I oppose the tenets of half the groups listed and am in favor of most of those of the other half, but all of them neglect what Professor Chris Rapley, Director of the British Antarctic Survey, terms the “Cinderella” issue of the environmental debate, so called because its implications are so controversial that no one is comfortable raising it. The issue is that more than 7 billion evolved descendants of gorillas who we call human beings live on planet earth; About 50 million new people arrive each year. The U.S. is the fastest growing industrialized country on earth, expanding at a rate of 58,000 additional people a week or about 3 million a year. The earth, the original mythic Garden of Eden with its finite and diminishing resources, is not expanding and cannot support this many people.
This is neither new nor difficult to access or process information. It’s just that, like sex in a Puritan society, homosexuality in a macho/red neck one, or the lies of the majority of world leaders and their corporate masters in every country in polite ones, it’s a distressing topic that raises so many other issues that it’s easier to pretend it isn’t there. This, of course, as the pop adage has it, is like ignoring the 500 pound Silverback gorilla sitting on the kitchen table.
Thomas Malthus, among the first to address the obvious, wrote in 1798, “It is an obvious truth, which has been taken notice of by many writers, that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence; but no writer that the Author recollects has inquired particularly into the means by which this level is effected: and it is a view of these means which forms, to his mind, the strongest obstacle in the way to any very great future improvement of society. He hopes it will appear that, in the discussion of this interesting subject, he is actuated solely by a love of truth, and not by any prejudices against any particular set of men, or of opinions. He professes to have read some of the speculations on the future improvement of society in a temper very different from a wish to find them visionary, but he has not acquired that command over his understanding which would enable him to believe what he wishes, without evidence, or to refuse his assent to what might be unpleasing, when accompanied with evidence.”
When Malthus wrote those words there were about one billion humans on earth, just over 5 million of them in America. In 1950 there were two and a half billion of us. In about 40 years it is expected that nine and a half billion humans will live on earth. That is several billion more than “the level of the means of subsistence.”
The phrase “Don’t Californicate Colorado” was popularized at one time by Coloradoans who got there first. Similar sentiments are expressed every day (with understandable reason) in Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon and Arizona, among others. The Minuteman Project and the Yuma Patrol are civilian groups devoted to keeping Latin Americans from illegally entering the U.S. Such “gated” community/state/nation solutions to over population cannot and do not work.
Rapley estimates that over the long haul the earth can reasonably support between 2 and 3 billion people at what he calls “a good standard of living.” He means that the 500 pound Silverback gorilla really weighs 1500 pounds and is moving down the table to see if there’s any food at the other end. All the sound and fury of the advocacy and activist groups mentioned are the sounds of the table breaking.
Meanwhile, as mentioned, 76 million new people arrive at the breaking breakfast table every year.

Zen Lunatics

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“Poets on the Peaks” by John Suiter is a very cool book. Buy it. Read it. Let its story sink in, slowly, with appreciation, like watching a mountain at sunup. It is a scholarly book about the connections between people, places, cultures (and culture), politics, religion, scholarship, wilderness, mountains, rivers, poetry, literature, ecology, community, environment and revelation. It is full of information, insight, inspiration, history and wisdom. As the back cover reads, “….it tells how the solitary mountain adventures of three young men helped to form the literary, spiritual, and environmental values of a generation.”
“Poets on the Peaks” does that and much more. Those three young men, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac and Philip Whalen worked as fire lookouts in the North Cascades in the early 1950s. Snyder was the leader, the pioneer, the guide, the only one of the three with a mountaineering background and the temperament and training to flourish in a solitary, isolated environment surrounded by wilderness. It was Snyder who convinced his two literary friends to take jobs as fire lookouts. First Whelan, then Kerouac. All three were (Snyder and Whelan still are) serious Zen practitioners, and Snyder quoted the Zen lunatic Han Shan a thousand years earlier: “Who can leap the world’s ties/And sit with me among the white clouds?” Suiter writes, “Gary could, Whelan could; and so should Jack.” An experienced and accomplished northwest mountaineer by the time he was 20, Snyder and his young friends climbed “….to develop a fresh mountaineering mind set that was totally opposed to the notion of conquest.” He writes, “I and the circle I climbed with were extremely critical of what we saw as the hostile, jock Occidental mind-set that thought to climb a mountain was to conquer it….I always thought of mountaineering not as a matter of conquering the mountain, but as a matter of self-knowledge.”
This is not the sort of writing about mountains that tends to make it into Climbing Magazine or The American Alpine Club Journal, but it did help form the core values of a particular generation of mountaineers, backpackers, writers and readers that, in turn, has influenced the generations to follow. Still, climbers of all attitudes and intentions will be charmed to find Fred Beckey, of all people, popping up in the text somewhat the way he has popped up in the mountains of the world for the past 70 years. This book has too many layers to explore here, but the top one is the effect the solitary fire lookout experience had on the thinking and work of these three major American writers. There are several other layers in “Poets on the Peaks,” all of them fascinating, well-researched and eloquently described. Suiter had access to “scores of previously unpublished letters and journals” as well as recent interviews with Snyder and Whelan and others, giving a fresh perspective and quality and a deeper dimension to a story of great significance to American literature and thought, and to members of America’s “rucksack revolution.”
Anyone who has read Kerouac’s “The Dharma Bums” will remember the character Japhy Ryder who is based on the person of Gary Snyder, and remember, too, the climb up MatterhornPeak in the Sierra described in the book. It is one of the most memorable climbs in American literature. The actual climb which Kerouac used as the basis for what he wrote cemented the friendship/brotherhood between him and Snyder. Kerouac’s alcoholic withdrawal from Snyder, Buddhism, the West and the zest for life that had driven his best work and best times is presented here in his own sad, fascinating words.
The Evil Axis of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee makes an appearance, as it must, in this record of the connections between politics and the life of the mind. Snyder was blackballed by McCarthy and the HUAC as not patriotic enough to work any longer as a fire lookout for the U.S. government. Such jingoistic stupidity would be humorous but for the serious impact it had on Snyder’s life. Unfortunately, such stupidity is still alive and well and active in American life, like a cobra living under the front porch.
Snyder made poetry out of such viciousness:

“I never was more broke & down
got fired that day by the usa
(the District Ranger up at Packwood
thought the wobblies had been dead for
forty years
but the FBI smelled treason
–my red beard)”

Suiter writes, “In the end, his blacklisting from the Forest Service had not been a huge catastrophe for Snyder. Unquestionably his rights had been egregiously violated—as were those of many thousands others—but in Zen fashion Gary managed to make the latest obstacle part of his journey.”
Each of the three made the Cascade experience a part of their own literary, spiritual and personal journey. In the spring following his first season as a fire lookout, Whalen found the experience running through his work. Suiter writes, “….Philip began thinking of the mountains again. A sharp memory of the Avalanche Lilies on Sourdough boring up through the thin snowdrifts above Riprap Creek the year before touched off a short naturalistic poem with a twist:

‘Now and then they ask me
To write something for them
And I do’”

It seems to me that John Suiter had a sharp memory of Snyder, Whalen and Kerouac in the Cascades boring up through their fine body of literature, and they asked him to write something for them, and he did. And it is good.

Wildlife Oxymoronics

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     “The enemies of the wild are the abundant and ever-multiplying forms of human control…..Many forms of control are dangerous to the wild, from cadastral maps, bureaucracy, statistics, surveillance, biotechnology, and nanotechnology to social engineering and scientific management…..to the mass production of game species, an intellectual move that laid the foundations of modern wildlife management (an oxymoron).”
Jack Turner

Wildlife management is an oxymoron, one of many, including serious fun, common sense, fighting for peace and Creation Science that modern civilization blithely uses to obscure reality and the personal and public costs and consequences of its out of control, obsessive, even psychotic need to control the uncontrollable and understand the unknowable. A couple of years ago western wildlife oxymoronics were showcased when the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services and/or the Idaho Department of Fish and Game hired a helicopter for an undisclosed sum of taxpayers dollars. The helicopter was installed with an undisclosed number of “aerial gunners” who were paid an undisclosed amount of taxpayer dollars to fly around north-central Idaho on a mission to shoot and kill wolves from the air “…in an effort to protect elk herds.”
After an undisclosed number of hours of flying time the aerial gunners managed to kill five wolves. Idaho Department of Fish and Game Deputy Director Jim Unsworth announced that the hunt was being suspended indefinitely because it was “inefficient and expensive.” He said the wolves are in thick timber which makes them difficult to shoot from the air. Unsworth told the Lewiston Tribune, “The elk and deer are on green-up down low and the wolves are there with them. They are in that lower-elevation, big-timber kind of stuff. We can find the packs, but you can’t find the wolves to do anything from a control standpoint.”
‘From a control standpoint’ is an interesting phrase. If ‘you’ can’t find the wolves to do anything then there is no point of control to stand on. Maybe ‘you’ who can’t find the wolves should check in with ‘we’ who can find the packs where the wolves, by definition and practice, hang out. Every report, justification or rationale for killing wolves that I’ve seen is always filled with interesting phrases, some oxymoronic, others just colorful, opaque, incomplete, misleading and, on occasion, unreal, and they always raise more questions than they answer. Even people like myself who view the term ‘wildlife management’ as an oxymoron and are not in favor of shooting wolves, especially at taxpayer expense, appreciate and ponder such colorful language as “The elk and deer are on green-up down low and the wolves are there with them. They are in that lower-elevation big timber kind of stuff.”
One obvious question: didn’t the Idaho Department of Fish and Game know the wolves they couldn’t find were in that lower-elevation big timber kind of stuff? If not, why not? Isn’t it the job of Fish and Game in their oxymoronic role of managing wildlife to know that wolves favor that big timber kind of stuff and that to a healthy wolf’s ears the sound of a helicopter is as loud as its inefficiency and expense to the taxpayer, from a control standpoint? For those people who enjoy the thrill of killing defenseless wildlife from the air, it must have been a great hooah experience at taxpayer’s expense, but, as is so often the case from a control standpoint those hooah moments are inefficient and expensive.
It’s simply not true that “…you can’t find the wolves to do anything from a control standpoint.” At least five wolves were found and killed, and, from a control standpoint, it would be an interesting and revealing exercise in accountability to determine the cost of killing each wolf.
The contention that the inefficient and expensive wolf killings were carried out “…in an effort to protect the elk herds,” is, at best, incomplete, and, at worst, misleading. Wolves and elk existed as wild creatures for thousands of years on this continent in an unmanaged natural (and wild) balance between predator and prey in which elk herds are kept healthy by wolves dining on the old, the weak, the lame and the slow. Without human ‘management’ they would continue with their wild, natural dynamic. Everyone who has looked into it, or even thought a bit about it, knows that the biggest dangers to elk are loss of habitat due to human encroachment on their natural territory and hunting of elk by those same humans.
Most of the elk habitat loss is due to real estate development and the public lands welfare sheep and cattle ranching industry which each year loses a miniscule number of their flocks and herds to wolves. And hunting is a big business. Killing wolves on taxpayer dollars is not done to protect elk herds from being killed by wolves, but, rather, to eliminate competition for killing those elk herds so that the wolves’ fellow predator, man, will have more elk to kill. It is also done to placate the strong political lobby of the cattle and sheep industry.
Aerial gunners in helicopters or ground troops on foot (or on 4 wheelers, or trucks) are not killing wolves at government expense to protect elk or any other wildlife. They are the hired guns of industry. Those amateur sportsmen who kill wolves for sport turn the word sport into an oxymoron.

Me and Ed: Remembering a man I never met but felt I knew

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In late January 1963 I was in Sun Valley, Idaho. A recent college graduate, I was a 24 year old ski racer who didn’t seem to quite fit into mainstream America. Through a friendship with Ron Funk, who cared even less about the fit than me, I found myself committed to one of the more audacious ski adventures of my life, running the Diamond Sun down Sun Valley’s Bald Mountain. As I wrote in The Straight Course, “The Diamond Sun may be the most difficult standard race in the world. It is the fastest I know of and starts on top of Bald Mountain and finishes at the Wood River 2 3/5 miles below. The route is any way possible down Ridge, Rock Garden, Canyon and River Run.” The Diamond Sun had been run only twice since WWII and is fast, dangerous and scary, and I was appropriately cognizant of this reality.
I mean, the night before the race I was scared shitless, filled with doubts about myself and whether I had what it takes and, more, whether it mattered that I address those personal doubts and questions. In order to relax and take my mind off such heavy toil, my friend Mike Brunetto and I went to the movie showing in Ketchum that night. The film, Lonely Are the Brave with Kirk Douglas and Walter Matthau, is, in my view, the best work Douglas ever did and is one of my all time favorite films. Among other things, it touches on the integrity of personal freedom and the freedom of personal integrity and the price one might pay for them.
At any rate, the film touched and inspired me and added a sliver of resolve to my scared shitless mind and spirit. The next morning we ran the Diamond Sun and everything went flawlessly for me. I set a new record (which still stands as the race hasn’t been run since) of 2:21.0 for the 2 3/5 mile course. A fine memory of a good time, and I always thought of Lonely Are the Brave as an integral part of it. More important, the race gave me the confidence I needed to go to Chile the following summer with the intention of setting a world record for speed on skis.  We went to Chile and set a record and that experience changed my life in myriad ways including better self-knowledge and the doors that open with a world record on the resume that would remain closed without it. The expanded awareness of my own human capabilities helped form much of my life and activities, including the writing, and, more important, the same commitment to writing as a path in life as dangerous and scary as the Diamond Sun, though slower of pace. Some of the doors that opened I probably shouldn’t have walked through, but self-knowledge is a process, not an accomplishment.
A few years later (1971) I began writing for Skier’s Gazette which a year later became Mountain Gazette and which eventually led to my work being published elsewhere. Mountain Gazette was as crucial to my writing as the Diamond Sun had been to my skiing.
By the early ‘70s I had read Desert Solitaire a couple of times and knew that Ed Abbey was a great writer and, in some ways, the spokesman of our times. I read his occasional pieces in MG and was impressed when then editor Mike Moore told me that Abbey sent his contributions in accompanied by a check to help out the struggling publication. Since MG paid me for my work I was grateful to Abbey for more than his fine writing, vision and personal integrity. When MG published my long essay/memoir Night Driving in 1975 it took up most of the issue except for a wonderful Abbey piece about desert driving, and I was thrilled to see my name with his on the cover. Good stuff.
That same year Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang was published. It is a very good novel that resonated with a large segment of America that didn’t quite fit into the mainstream and it nurtured all but the most pesticide sprayed imaginations. After I read it I gave it away as Christmas gifts. I was living between Truckee and Squaw Valley at the time and my neighbors, two New Jersey hippies whose son went to school with my son Jason, were among the recipients. A spacey friend of theirs was visiting from the east coast that winter and one snowstorm morning I went over to my neighbors’ home for a coffee. The spacey friend’s grin wouldn’t leave his face as he thanked me for giving The Monkey Wrench Gang to his hosts, and then he told me about his previous day. He had spent most of the day and into the night reading Abbey’s paean to the purposeful destruction of eyesores and pavement and machines that destroy the earth. He finished the book at 1 a.m. and was inspired to immediate action. Perhaps other, less literary influences were at play as well, but despite the late hour and the storm he hopped on a bicycle with a huge bow saw and rode the 3 or 4 miles to the freeway near Truckee and, under the cover of darkness and the storm, spent a couple of hours dropping a huge, offensive-looking, wood-supported billboard advertising one of the local ski areas. Then he rode the bicycle back home. He had taken Hayduke’s credo to heart (and action): “My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don’t know anything else worth saving.”
The dropping of the eyesore billboard was the first eco-revolutionary act that I knew of in the Tahoe area, and though I was only one of a few who knew who had done it, I was only one of many who were amused, informed and inspired by it. Life went on and I read more Abbey and rightly thought of him as a giant literary and environmental and thereby societal influence of our time.
And then, some 20 years after the Diamond Sun, I was browsing in a book store and came across an Ed Abbey novel I didn’t know about entitled The Brave Cowboy. A quick glance showed that it was the basis of the film Lonely Are the Brave. The novel is really good. I was and am amazed that I hadn’t put the two together, but knowledge, self and otherwise, is a process, not an accomplishment. A bit of research expanded my awareness that Dalton Trumbo had written the screenplay for the film, and if ever a Hollywood writer type could be a soul-brother to Ed Abbey it was Dalton Trumbo.
I was bemused and informed and once again reminded of the ever present connections and influences, known and unknown, that permeate all our lives, and I promptly wrote Abbey a letter of praise and thanks for his contribution to my life. He graciously answered and reiterated the worth and power of the written word and encouraged me to continue writing. We agreed to meet up sometime, somewhere in the southwest desert, but it never happened and so like most of his fans I have the easy privilege of remembering and thinking of him through the greatness of his work, unencumbered by the rough edges of his person and the inevitable objections I have to some of his ideas.
Ed Abbey died in March 1989. As he requested, Abbey was buried illegally in a spot in the Cabeza Prieta desert of Arizona known only to his friends who buried him, Doug Peacock, Jack Loeffler, Tom Cartwright and Steve Prescott. It is reported that a large quantity of beer and hard booze accompanied the burial, some of it poured on the grave to help Ed on his way. In May of that year a public memorial for Abbey was held near Arches National Monument outside Moab, Utah. The day before the service a friend and I climbed Castleton Tower in Castle Valley. It was May 19, my son Jason’s 18th birthday and I sat on top thinking that both Jason and Ed Abbey would have enjoyed the view from there. The next day we attended the memorial which was wonderful, moving and appropriate. Barry Lopez, Ann Zwinger, Doug Peacock and Dave Foreman were among those who gave beautiful eulogizes for Ed that day. Wendell Berry, who never met Abbey, recited a poem, calling him to Berry’s native Kentucky:

The old oak wears new leaves.
It stands for many lives.
Within its veil of green
A singer sings unseen.
Again the living come
To light, and are at home.
And Edward Abbey’s gone…

I think of that dead friend
Here where he never came
Except by thought and name:
I praise the joyous rage
That justified his page
He would have like this place
Where spring returns with solace
Of bloom in a dark time,
Larkspur and columbine.
The flute song of the thrush
Sounds in the underbrush.

But for me the most moving, astonishing speaker at Abbey’s service on May 20, 1989 was a woman whose name I had never heard and whose work I had never read. Her name was Terry Tempest Williams and she spoke of her long hikes and talks with Ed in the Utah desert and of the importance of friendships and connections and the environment. Terry ended her talk by whipping out some post cards and waving them like a baton, intoning “Keep in touch. Keep in touch. Keep in touch. Keep in touch.” With friends, with connections, with the environment. I was so impressed with Terry that I tracked down her work and have kept up on it ever since. As mentioned, knowledge is a process, not an accomplishment. As are awareness, friends, connections, the environment, work, life, the joyous rage, staying in touch. Thanks, Ed, for that and much more.