Dilemma
We stopped at a pullout on our way out of the Yosemite Valley so that I could get a rare photo of the open meadow. History books say the entire valley used to be meadow, that the Ahwahnechee people who lived in the valley until the tourists kicked them out frequently burned the valley floor to keep the landscape open and maintain a population of oak. That stopped when the tourists came, and for much of the last century the valley floor has been conifer forest.
There is a sign just behind where I was standing that marks this as the place where, in May of 1903, John Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt camped together and talked about the wilderness. The wide meadows of the Ahwahneechee would still have spread out before them, offering views of the granite walls that wrapped around them as they talked. A lot happened because of that night. That conversation led to most of the conservation and preservation we enjoy today. Most national parks and national forests exist solely because of what that conversation started.
Which only emphasizes the irony of Yosemite and the dilemma it embodies. Muir and Roosevelt would never recognize this valley now full of trees and covered with pavement, roads and sidewalks and parking lots. They built their Gatlinburg or their Bar Harbor inside the valley, and people pile on and shove themselves into the lodges and visitor centers. They spread out through the woods and turn the forest floor to tent city, so that parts of the valley resemble a camp at a NASCAR race or a music festival more than anything wild. The wildness Muir shared with Roosevelt has been driven from Yosemite. The valley has been protected to death.
And this leads to a dilemma. How do you change that? What stops it? As I ponder this, I am reminded of a book I read some years back written by a man who in his youth had migrated to Alaska. He'd found some perfect piece of wild land so beautiful he just had to be a part of it, so he carved out some piece of it for himself and made it his home. And then he spent the next 30 years condemning those who followed him. These were people who shared his exact experience, who felt Alaska's draw just as much as he did and reacted in the exact same way, and who deserved no more condemnation than the author did himself. I can't pretend I was not among the mass of tourists who flooded into the valley on this particular day, and I can't pretend that others didn't complain as much about my existence as I complained about theirs. But I can make a decision not to be a part of it again. Yosemite is a beautiful place sadly inundated beneath a rising tide of humanity, and I think I've seen it for the last time.
Dilemma
We stopped at a pullout on our way out of the Yosemite Valley so that I could get a rare photo of the open meadow. History books say the entire valley used to be meadow, that the Ahwahnechee people who lived in the valley until the tourists kicked them out frequently burned the valley floor to keep the landscape open and maintain a population of oak. That stopped when the tourists came, and for much of the last century the valley floor has been conifer forest.
There is a sign just behind where I was standing that marks this as the place where, in May of 1903, John Muir and President Theodore Roosevelt camped together and talked about the wilderness. The wide meadows of the Ahwahneechee would still have spread out before them, offering views of the granite walls that wrapped around them as they talked. A lot happened because of that night. That conversation led to most of the conservation and preservation we enjoy today. Most national parks and national forests exist solely because of what that conversation started.
Which only emphasizes the irony of Yosemite and the dilemma it embodies. Muir and Roosevelt would never recognize this valley now full of trees and covered with pavement, roads and sidewalks and parking lots. They built their Gatlinburg or their Bar Harbor inside the valley, and people pile on and shove themselves into the lodges and visitor centers. They spread out through the woods and turn the forest floor to tent city, so that parts of the valley resemble a camp at a NASCAR race or a music festival more than anything wild. The wildness Muir shared with Roosevelt has been driven from Yosemite. The valley has been protected to death.
And this leads to a dilemma. How do you change that? What stops it? As I ponder this, I am reminded of a book I read some years back written by a man who in his youth had migrated to Alaska. He'd found some perfect piece of wild land so beautiful he just had to be a part of it, so he carved out some piece of it for himself and made it his home. And then he spent the next 30 years condemning those who followed him. These were people who shared his exact experience, who felt Alaska's draw just as much as he did and reacted in the exact same way, and who deserved no more condemnation than the author did himself. I can't pretend I was not among the mass of tourists who flooded into the valley on this particular day, and I can't pretend that others didn't complain as much about my existence as I complained about theirs. But I can make a decision not to be a part of it again. Yosemite is a beautiful place sadly inundated beneath a rising tide of humanity, and I think I've seen it for the last time.