The Irony of Ansel's Conservationism

Nobody can get in right now due to all the snow and dangerous runoff. The Middle Fork of the Kings is the deepest canyon on the continent. The South Fork, where the road ends and trails begin, is slightly less deep and far more negotiable to hikers. Quite a few areas are rarely visited. Some remote lakes might not have ever seen a human visitor. That's the way it should be. Only the Rae Lakes loop and John Muir/PCT trail get a lot of foot traffic. But two critical bridges have washed out, and certain approach highways are still a mess, and might not open at all this year; so it might be an especially quiet season deeper in.

The notion of even attempting to build any kind of road past "Roads End" in Cedar Grove would be an engineering absurdity. The more pressing need for having such areas officially preserved was to prevent any more dams in our splendid glacial canyons, as well as end destruction of high meadows from sheep and cattle. There are still plenty of open range grazing opportunities at lower less sensitive elevations. There was also the need to limit logging in what is now adjacent Sequoia NP and Sequoia NF. The biggest trees on earth were being felled to acquire a lumber too brittle for any other usage than shingles and fruit crates. And now, about 20% of the remaining groves perished in the massive fire two years ago. Nothing like that is evident in the past history of these groves, within the three or four thousand years of detectable record in their growth rings. Most of the ancient trees wear scars of ground fires over the centuries, but their bark is very thick and fire resistant. But now a kind of fire has arrived with flames so high and intense that they burned many trees from the crown down, and spread tree to tree in that manner. And these giant sequoias are very tall trees themselves. That should certainly be a wake-up call that the climate is no longer as usual.

Where you evidently hiked was affected by an extreme fire about a decade ago, but much further down the ridge westward. Nothing above timberline, or even beyond the entrance to Cedar Grove burned. But historic structures where the winding road down into there first reaches the River itself were wiped out, along with brushy hillsides both north and south, clear over to the edge of the North Fork of the Kings at mid elevations. Big cyclic fires occur in the brush naturally, especially due to lighting, in about 40 year cycles. The last relatively natural one was in the 1960's. But even that was tiny compared to the one a decade ago.

A remarkable incident occurred during that big fire. A woman in her early 70's was with a group backpacking a section of the North Fork of the Kings. She got disoriented by the smoke, separated from her company, and took a wrong turn that led into a remote basin, where she stumbled into a ravine and broke her hip. It's a big area, and even search parties and helicopters couldn't see much of anything due to constant smoke. She only had a little daypack with a sweater in it, but heard a trickle of water, and spent two days crawling on her belly to get to it. There she stayed, eating ants and bugs and grass for another ten days, until she was finally spotted. She was taken out by helicopter and made a fully recovery.

I figure that we could stand to set aside more undisturbed ecosystems, not particularly as human playgrounds, but as reference standards. The true value of such things is not always easily understood until they're gone. Such areas might not generate much in the way of revenues, but on the other hand, are tax revenues needed for access roads that aren't built, and for facilities which don't exist?

Humans are part of the ecosystem, of course. But I think we've altered the environment so profoundly and so quickly (in geologic terms) that our very well-being is at risk. Ironically, in the context of a relatively brief human lifetime, we accept what we experience as an eternal "normal", while regarding historical accounts of past abundance as fairy tales: The passenger pigeon, atlantic cod, lobsters, bluefin tuna, sardines from Monterey Bay ($19), etc!

Today, much of America subsists on a smallish number of foodstuffs, much from fast-food joints.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/03/health/fast-food-consumption-cdc-study/index.html

In many ways, I think the future envisioned in 1973's "Soylent Green" has crept up on us.

4season said:

The true value of such things is not always easily understood until they're gone.

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Or if you prefer:
"Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone"

I spent the 80s 'managing' part of a small wilderness in NW California, working for the US Forest Service. Which means trying to limit to impact of humans on the wilderness as it was then...after being heavily impacted by cattle and sheep grazing in the past. Still a wilderness due to a lack of water and a lack of minerals worth mining, and being remote enough to stave off logging until the area was declared wilderness.

It took the best part of my 10 years there to bring our 150 miles of trails up to standard, gather and pack out the worse of the old hunter camps' trash and abandoned equipment, re-sign all the trail junctions, and to set up a seasonal maintenance schedule to keep it that way on a limited budget. With the collaspe of that budget and several major fires, that area is more like a wilderness than when I left in 1990...probably more wild than when I first started working there in 1979. So it goes.

Trails have disappearing from non-use, under brush fields of whitethorn, or cris-crossed with burnt trunks. Trees that were blazed (traditional candle stick) to mark the trails have fallen with age or from fire. The oak trail signs installed on trees or wood posts have been burnt, or finally removed by a curious bear. Spring boxes which we unofficially maintained (un-tested water source) in the wilderness have collasped and are more difficult to find.

My last backpack into those mountains (about 2018) I traveled by remembering the landscape and reconizing where a trail should go. In the color photo (early 80s), I am on Mikey, with Joe on lead. The tallest mountain behind me is Shell Mountain, where the B&W image was taken 25 years or so later.

Vaughn said:

I spent the 80s 'managing' part of a small wilderness in NW California, working for the US Forest Service. Which means trying to limit to impact of humans on the wilderness as it was then...after being heavily impacted by cattle and sheep grazing in the past. Still a wilderness due to a lack of water and a lack of minerals worth mining, and being remote enough to stave off logging until the area was declared wilderness.

It took the best part of my 10 years there to bring our 150 miles of trails up to standard, gather and pack out the worse of the old hunter camps' trash and abandoned equipment, re-sign all the trail junctions, and to set up a seasonal maintenance schedule to keep it that way on a limited budget. With the collaspe of that budget and several major fires, that area is more like a wilderness than when I left in 1990...probably more wild than when I first started working there in 1979. So it goes.

Trails have disappearing from non-use, under brush fields of whitethorn, or cris-crossed with burnt trunks. Trees that were blazed (traditional candle stick) to mark the trails have fallen with age or from fire. The oak trail signs installed on trees or wood posts have been burnt, or finally removed by a curious bear. Spring boxes which we unofficially maintained (un-tested water source) in the wilderness have collasped and are more difficult to find.

My last backpack into those mountains I traveled by remembering the landscape and reconizing where a trail should go. In the color photo, I am on Mikey, with Joe on lead. The tallest mountain behind me is Shell Mountain, where the B&W image was taken 25 years or so later.

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That’s wonderful. Thanks Vaughn.

John Muir would retch if he saw Yosemite today.
Houses, Stores, Hotel, Cabins and Tents.
And oh yeah................ Yosemite Valley has its own smog
Face it, modern man has been nothing but a cancer on this planet.

DREW WILEY said:

bluechromis - the kind of hikers one often finds in very well known parks areas like Yosemite Valley or Yellowstone or even the Muir Trail (the "Freeway") in the high Sierra, are often quite different from more experienced and dedicated hikers. They're often far more naive, unprepared, and unrealistically obsessed with getting to a certain sight at a certain time, regardless of the weather or risk. They'll want a picture of themselves at the brink of Nevada Fall, for example, when there's a big sign right there, Stay out of the creek; if you slip, YOU WILL DIE. Likewise, there are road signs all along portions of the road through Yellowstone clearly warning against approaching bison or grizzlies, yet people keep doing it, and bad things happen. Might as well carry a red cape and walk up to an angry barnyard bull pawing the dirt. Naive yes, but also just plain disobedient to official signs with clear diagrams on them. But people seem to assume National Parks are theme parks, and ignore common sense implications of lightning, flooding, avalanches, wildfires, rattlesnakes and so forth, as if Park status somehow magically eliminates those. They see someone else doing something stupid, and follow suit.

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Drew, I have seen people do incredibly stupid things at Yellowstone, though none were backcountry hikers. So I agree with you to that extent. At a campground I stayed at, a huge bull bison would sleep in the middle of the loop, making for a nervous trip to the toilets around it in the middle of the night. One day I came back to the campground to find flashing lights of ranger enforcement cars in the campground. It turns out that some young jerks thought it was a good idea to throw firecrackers at the bull bison. They wound up getting gored. I was worried that the bull would get destroyed and was relieved that the rangers said the blame was on the humans, not the bison. All the problematic humans were young white males.

I feel like your response is trying to refute something I never meant to say, that we are talking past each other. Two different surveys found that backcountry hikers in Yellowstone were overwhelmingly white and highly educated. While it doesn't always work that way, generally, greater education correlates with higher income. According to the surveys, there were modest numbers of women hikers and microscopic numbers of non-whites. It was overwhelmingly young, white, highly educated types. This was not a modest statistical trend that might be an artifact but a massive tendency. It may be, as you say, that hikers in less popular areas are less blockheaded and irresponsible. But is it likely that the overall demographic characteristics are vastly different, that there are far greater numbers of blacks, women, Hispanics, etc. in those areas? No.

Access to roadless wild areas is not very inclusive, is mostly a narrow spectrum of the U.S. population regardless of how diligent or irresponsible they are in hiking. My point is that the long-term preservation of wild areas has little hope, if only a small portion of the population values preserving it. One has only to look at the policies of recent federal administrations to see the threats to wild areas. But appreciation of nature doesn't happen automatically, it has to be nurtured. To solve the problem of saving wild areas, we must both increase the valuation of wild areas in the general population as well as devise policies to appreciate natural areas less destructively.

Vaughn said:

I spent the 80s 'managing' part of a small wilderness in NW California, working for the US Forest Service. Which means trying to limit to impact of humans on the wilderness as it was then...after being heavily impacted by cattle and sheep grazing in the past. Still a wilderness due to a lack of water and a lack of minerals worth mining, and being remote enough to stave off logging until the area was declared wilderness.

It took the best part of my 10 years there to bring our 150 miles of trails up to standard, gather and pack out the worse of the old hunter camps' trash and abandoned equipment, re-sign all the trail junctions, and to set up a seasonal maintenance schedule to keep it that way on a limited budget. With the collaspe of that budget and several major fires, that area is more like a wilderness than when I left in 1990...probably more wild than when I first started working there in 1979. So it goes.

Trails have disappearing from non-use, under brush fields of whitethorn, or cris-crossed with burnt trunks. Trees that were blazed (traditional candle stick) to mark the trails have fallen with age or from fire. The oak trail signs installed on trees or wood posts have been burnt, or finally removed by a curious bear. Spring boxes which we unofficially maintained (un-tested water source) in the wilderness have collasped and are more difficult to find.

My last backpack into those mountains (about 2018) I traveled by remembering the landscape and reconizing where a trail should go. In the color photo (early 80s), I am on Mikey, with Joe on lead. The tallest mountain behind me is Shell Mountain, where the B&W image was taken 25 years or so later.

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Like Vaughn, I've spent long months living in the bush.

Right after graduating high school in 1978 I spent three months living alone in a one room cabin on a remote island on BC's central coast, working as a river guardian for the Fisheries Department counting salmon in nearby rivers. I went into Bella Bella (23 Km one way by small boat) once a week for food.

In the early 1990's my wife & I spent 6 months sea kayaking the coast of BC, and I've spent lots of time hiking/camping alone in the Coast Mountains on BC's north coast.

On our sea kayaking trip (done in three 2 month sections) it took about 3 weeks of being 'out there' with no contact with other people before all the baggage of modern life dropped away, my senses started to really open up, and I became attuned to the rhythm of it all.

Campgrounds are not the place my wife & I go to experience Nature...it's because we're on a road trip or saving money while visiting our daughter in Kelowna and we can't justify spending heaps of money on a hotel.

Vaughn - nice to hear you still have your bush sense, and can find your way around without trails

It is easy to be pessimistic about the overuse of wild areas. But I am going to try to have some optimism. In the history of the world, it has been a fairly short amount of time that people have made a concerted effort to both conserve natural areas and allow some degree of access to them for recreation. Yes, historically, there were protected royal hunting grounds, etc., but that's not quite the same.

Wild plants and animals vary in how much human contact they tolerate. I went to a presentation about the restoration of Bald Eagles post-DDT in Michigan. They said in the early stages of recovery, experts believed that eagles were intolerant of contact with humans and required vast amounts of unpopulated territory to be comfortable and breed. But as eagle populations increased, they found they were totally wrong, the eagles were very adaptable if not being poisoned and able to thrive near populated areas. With other plants and animals, it is the other way around.

With the overcrowding of wild areas, the worst problems are concentrated in fairly small areas. The iconic, picture postcard scenic areas like Yosemite Valley and Arches National Park are hit hardest. But the national parks are a small part of federal lands that could be considered wild to some degree. There are large areas that are little used. Vaughn pointed out that far from being overused, there are areas that are underused and the trails have fallen into disrepair. If the recreational usage of natural areas could be more dispersed, based on a scientific understanding of the level of use a given area could tolerate, it might mitigate the problems.

bluechromis said:

It is easy to be pessimistic about the overuse of wild areas. But I am going to try to have some optimism.

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I'm optimistic when I realize we do have the ideas, means and ressources it will take in order to fix things.

I become pessimistic when I start wondering if we have the courage—socially and politically—to take the decisions needed in order to fix things.

bluechromis said:

If the recreational usage of natural areas could be more dispersed, based on a scientific understanding of the level of use a given area could tolerate, it might mitigate the problems.

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In stating what should be obvious, here’s a headline from our local news:

“Custer Gallatin National Forest warning of animal activity in forest”​

One thing for sure: not the time to go hiking in the SE US.

I watched the movie Cocaine Bear last night, and may never set foot in the bush again.

CMoore said:

John Muir would retch if he saw Yosemite today.
Houses, Stores, Hotel, Cabins and Tents.
And oh yeah................ Yosemite Valley has its own smog
Face it, modern man has been nothing but a cancer on this planet.

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But there are no volunteers to leave.

Last Chance Canyon in the high desert north of Los Angeles was being used for offroading. The Sierra Club wanted it restrict it for hiking only, because of the raptor nesting season 6 months out of the years, reference post #51. The offroad groups did not agree, enter the petitions, hearings, the lawyers, et al. The final agreement worked out between the two groups and the BLM was that for 6 months a year hiking, camping and offroading coexisted and for six months a year during the raptor breeding period no one other than approved researchers were allowed in the area. This is the only example of the two groups working it out without lawyers or the BLM and then taking it to the BLM and the BLM held its hearing and agree.

CMoore - John Muir not only worked for a hotel, but ran the lumber mill near Yosemite Falls which turned the trees of the Valley into more tourist infrastructure! It was WORSE than today. The contradiction was not lost upon him. But it did give him the location and geographic placement to explore the high country in summer, which then was overgrazed by sheep in the meadows. Yosemite itself had cattle herds for sake of meat and milk to the tourists. But don't believe everything Muir wrote. In that era, adventure authors tended to embellish stories. John Muir's mansion is just a short drive from me, and the NP staff there are well aware of his proclivities as an author, and an author who got rich in that manner. But he had already had a taste of wilderness in Appalachia, and inevitably became a strong eloquent advocate of preservation instead of commercialized exploitation of Yosemite, which was a State Park before becoming a larger National Park, but barely supervised in its earlier phase. The private concessionaires pretty much did anything they pleased.

The fact is, just a handful of National Parks like Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Great Smokies, generate a significant budget surplus; and that trickles down the less popular parks, and alleviates at least some of the tax subsidizing of those. So there's a conflict of interest : just how much overuse to allow for sake of the overall Park System. Yosemite Valley is the sacrificial cow to the masses, while most of its high country pays official homage to Wilderness status instead.

bluechromis - things are changing. Although I have attempted to stay off major trails like the JMT/PST much of my life, it is impossible not to use them to a certain extent going from Point A to B.
And in recent years I've noticed a distinct demographic shift. I'm seeing all kind of "minorities", ethnic groups, and nationalities in the high country, and it has NOTHING to do with income and education status. It never did. All the REI types were late to the game, even the S. Clubbers. I obviously can't speak for your own observations. But I literally grew up with cowboys and Indians;
and many of those spent entire summers in the high Sierra. Indians obviously did it for millennia. And the definition of a cowboy was a cowboy. Didn't matter if they were white, black, Chinese, or American Indian. If they had cattle poop on their boots and a well-stained hat, they considered themselves equals (doesn't mean they looked on non-cowboy minorities the same way; they didn't).

Of course, there was a bit of resentment when "official" first ascents of peaks got routinely attributed in the "official" record books just to Club members, back when locals including myself had been on certain summits already before, and had left stone cairns to prove it; sometimes horses had literally been ridden up some of them decades before, and in numerous case, one arrived at a presumably unscaled summit to find obsidian chips and broken points from ancient hunters going clear back into the Ice Age. Reminds me of an older guy who claimed to invent Sierra "trail running" in his youth. I told him that claim more properly belonged to someone running from a cave bear 18,000 years ago.

And older hikers and stock riders have always gone into the mountains until they were simply no longer able. I've encountered plenty of them. And now I'm in the same category myself, necessarily tailoring my destination goals much more conservatively than before, but still realistically allowing me my own little slices of solitude, along with serious photographic opportunities.

Hopefully, someone will locate and resurrect a shot of that trailhead sign in Montana which tells one how to distinguish black bear activity from that of grizzlies. Part of it went something like this:
Black bear droppings typically have traces of berries and marmot fur. Grizzly droppings contain wedding rings and smell like pepper spray.

Sirius Glass said:

But there are no volunteers to leave.

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No doubt, i can understand that. Tahoe is also a "pit" compared to what it was 50 years ago.
But relative to Fresno CA, they are gorgeous places with lots to offer.

DREW WILEY said:

CMoore - John Muir not only worked for a hotel, but ran the lumber mill near Yosemite Falls which turned the trees of the Valley into more tourist infrastructure! It was WORSE than today. The contradiction was not lost upon him. But it did give him the location and geographic placement to explore the high country in summer, which then was overgrazed by sheep in the meadows. Yosemite itself had cattle herds for sake of meat and milk to the tourists. But don't believe everything Muir wrote. In that era, adventure authors tended to embellish stories. John Muir's mansion is just a short drive from me, and the NP staff there are well aware of his proclivities as an author, and an author who got rich in that manner. But he had already had a taste of wilderness in Appalachia, and inevitably became a strong eloquent advocate of preservation instead of commercialized exploitation of Yosemite, which was a State Park before becoming a larger National Park, but barely supervised in its earlier phase. The private concessionaires pretty much did anything they pleased.

The fact is, just a handful of National Parks like Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Great Smokies, generate a significant budget surplus; and that trickles down the less popular parks, and alleviates at least some of the tax subsidizing of those. So there's a conflict of interest : just how much overuse to allow for sake of the overall Park System. Yosemite Valley is the sacrificial cow to the masses, while most of its high country pays official homage to Wilderness status instead.

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I am not saying there was no industry or exploitation of the land even back then. But i am sure even Muir and others of the time had no idea what was coming.

Not sure where i read it, some kind of AA interview.?
Even circa 1930, AA was concerned with the number of people that were starting to come to Yosemite. He was worried it be be ruined.
When he first went their, he had to take a train and then............ walk, wagon or bus to The Valley.?
You could not drive there directly.
Is the way of the world. I realize that.

Was it Tom Wolfe that said..... You can never go home again.
I went back to where i grew up for the first time in 30 years.
It was shocking..!!!
The population was the same, 25k, but it was all different and much more swank. The place of my childhood was gone. We all have fond memories of the way things were.

I wish i could remember the video i saw. Probably 20 years ago.
The granddaughter of one of the Georgia Pacific Paper owners was looking at old photos. She saw her Mom as a young girl in a beautiful picnic setting in a forest. She told her Mom it was beautiful.
Do you remember where this was. Can we go there she asked her Mom.
Her Mom answered no...... we logged it out.
C'est La Vie

Sorry, but is any of this about photography?

Arthurwg said:

Sorry, but is any of this about photography?

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This is the title of the thread

The Irony of Ansel's Conservationism​

So it is about a photographer and not his "photography".
Make sense.?

Arthurwg said:

Sorry, but is any of this about photography?

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It is about a common theme in "West Coast Photography" and in the photographic work of others.

Photography in northwestern Scotland this past month was very interesting. A landscape where all its forests and other life was scrapped off by the ice, with life returning only to have most of its forests removed again for buildings, heat, mines, ships, war, and grazing sheep. Replaced in some areas with plantations of exotic trees...Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and some Scottish pine in straight lines...often planted up to an artificial tree line. And also some re-wilding, and some remnants of the older forests.

And signs of the weight of habitation and history. Not wilderness, but definitely having the qualities of wildness. Following a faint trail on a solo mid-night walk on the moors --no flashlight, but with a full moon above. Very cool. I exposed a few rolls of 120 B&W with the Rolleicord (the first 4 rolls on reels for developing tonight)...it would take some time and film to start to get a grasp of the Scottish light and landscape. A 5x7 would be what I would like to use.

There were motor vehicle roads into Yosemite Valley by the time AA arrived, and it was already a famous destination due to prior photographers such a Watkins, Muybridge, and Fiske. Watkins worked under the sponsorship of the railroads promoting Western tourism. I remember looking at a lot of Watkins' little stereo photos stored in our attic, along with a red velvet lined antique Stereopticon. Those were once abundant, and today are worth only a tiny fraction of what his classic large albumen prints are.

My own babysitter as an infant had been the first white woman to ever enter Yosemite Valley, when she was a little girl. And once the tourist potential there was realized, the first order of business was to kick out the Ahwahnee Indians, since their own preferred summertime costume was zero. I've seen tintypes attesting to that fact.

I grew up on the edge of the next great canyon to the south, the San Joaquin, with a view of peaks higher than any in Yos NP, and with a remote dome even bigger than Half Dome. And I remember my dad driving over an earlier rendition of the Tioga Pass grade steering with his knees while loading his pipe, and then us ending up at Mono Lake, which was then high enough that the underwater tufa towers were not yet exposed.

Much of the history of photography itself is inseparable from the natural and human history of the area. Heck, if you get ahold of a well-known picture book from the 70's, Almost Ancestors - Earliest Photographs of California Indians, I personally knew three individuals pictured in that. Of course, they were quite young when their pictures were taken, and at least middle aged when I was little. I even rode the school bus with the son of one of them. And I knew a few ancient Indians who were fully mature before they ever even saw a white person. Indians women and their grandchildren were still harvesting acorns from our own yard, and cooking them in baskets, and then those grandchildren of about my own age continuing to come visit us as long as they lived.

One of the last died of a heart attack trying to evacuate from a catastrophic forest fire less than two years ago. My sister visited his widow just this past month. And his mother was a famous basket maker with many examples of her work in the Smithsonian collection. When his brother drowned long ago, it was an aboriginal style funeral with a long wailing line that I'll never forget. But one does not take photos of that kind of thing.

And as for the landscapes - I was embedded in that kind of light. I didn't need Ansel Adams to teach me about it. In fact, I was exhibiting my own work before I ever even saw an actual print of his. But I am appreciative of his own sensitivity and poetic handling of it. No, he certainly didn't hit a home run every time. But those who think it was all just about "Romanticism" or the post-Frontier, or environmental activism, or income from tourism, miss the point entirely. Books are fine. But immerse yourself in the light long enough, and you'll intuitively understand the inseparable connection between those seemingly other aspects we've been discussing and the essence of wilderness photography, which is impossible without a sense of wilderness itself. You can't avoid wanting to save it, for what it is in itself, even though someone like me is basically apolitical.

CMoore said:

Even circa 1930, AA was concerned with the number of people that were starting to come to Yosemite. He was worried it be be ruined.
When he first went their, he had to take a train and then............ walk, wagon or bus to The Valley.?

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He may have been concerned about everyone else, but he didn’t seem to mind using access roads himself once they were available. Therein lies the irony, I guess.

snusmumriken said:

He may have been concerned about everyone else, but he didn’t seem to mind using access roads himself once they were available. Therein lies the irony, I guess.

View attachment 342430

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We are probably all guilty of it at one time or another.?

Maybe you live near some beautiful apple orchards, or acres of cattle grazing, or in a little valley with beautiful hills all around.
But then, somebody sells the orchards, or the grazing land and they start building homes. Perhaps the beautiful hills surrounding your valley start birthing homes because they offer such gorgeous views to the valley below.
You complain that these new homes are a bummer, ugly, ruining your lifestyle. But you do not consider that, 40 years prior, people said the same about your home being built.

CMoore said:

We are probably all guilty of it at one time or another.?

Maybe you live near some beautiful apple orchards, or acres of cattle grazing, or in a little valley with beautiful hills all around.
But then, somebody sells the orchards, or the grazing land and they start building homes. Perhaps the beautiful hills surrounding your valley start birthing homes because they offer such gorgeous views to the valley below.
You complain that these new homes are a bummer, ugly, ruining your lifestyle. But you do not consider that, 40 years prior, people said the same about your home being built.

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Yes, absolutely right. If only everyone else would stay away. But that’s the irony.