Uncertain Path: A Search for the Future of National Parks

by William C. Tweed

Overview

In this provocative walking meditation, writer and former park ranger William Tweed takes us to California’s spectacular High Sierra to discover a new vision for our national parks as they approach their 100th anniversary. Tweed, who worked among the Sierra Nevada’s big peaks and big trees for more than thirty years, has now hiked more than 200 miles along California’s John Muir Trail in a personal search for answers: How do we address the climate change we are seeing even now—in melting glaciers in Glacier National Park, changing rainy seasons on Mt Rainer, and more fire in the West’s iconic parks. Should we intervene where we can to preserve biodiversity? Should the parks merely become ecosystem museums that exhibit famous landscapes and species? Asking how we can make these magnificent parks relevant for the next generation, Tweed, through his journey, ultimately shows why we must do just that.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520947306
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	10/06/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	248
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

William Tweed, Chief Park Naturalist at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks before he retired in 2006, is the author, with Lauren Davis, of Death Valley and the Northern Mojave, A Visitor’s Guide and, with Lary M. Dilsaver, of Challenge of the Big Trees: A Resource History of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.

Read an Excerpt

Uncertain Path

A Search for the Future of National Parks

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By William C. Tweed

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-94730-6

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CHAPTER 1

South from Yosemite

I may be surrounded by wilderness, but the line of cars in front of me stands nearly as motionless as the scenery. One hundred yards ahead, on the exact crest of the Sierra Nevada, a guide from a large tour bus is negotiating business details with a park ranger who occupies a small wooden toll station in the middle of the highway. The rest of us wait. We ignore the scenery. Instead, we watch the bus, looking for some sign that it has finished its business and is ready to move on into Yosemite National Park. Exhaust fumes from a dozen waiting vehicles mingle with the low morning light. Finally, the guide reenters the bus, and the door seals shut. With a belch of diesel smoke, the coach lumbers down the highway into the park, its passengers safely protected within its air-conditioned, tinted-window confines. I pull up to the Tioga Pass entrance station. "Welcome to Yosemite National Park," voices the ranger when I show my national park pass. "May I please see some identification?"

A few minutes later, my wife and I are circling in the wilderness permit office parking lot at Tuolumne Meadows, looking for a space. On this mid-August Sunday, vehicles fill every defined slot as well as all the easy places to double-park. On our second circuit of the lot, our luck improves. Another hiker, his business with the permit office completed, pulls out. Like Christmas shoppers, we grab the space before any of the several other circling cars do so. Inside the wilderness permit office, a plywood building with the ambience and layout of a car rental office, we wait our turn. When it comes, I produce my reservation form—this does feel like renting a car—and listen as the young ranger behind the desk explains wilderness to me. I've been hiking in these mountains for forty years, and have issued thousands of these permits myself to eager hikers, but I listen patiently as she speaks. I must keep all my food in a bear canister, she explains, and I will do grievous harm to the environment if I burn used toilet paper rather than hauling it out. I lay out my planned itinerary. She has obviously never heard of my destination far to the south in Sequoia National Park. Her computer does no better. It has no code for the Crescent Meadow Trailhead and prints out my destination as "unspecified." After the form is printed, the ranger adds "Crescent Meadow" by hand. I wait for her to instruct me to initial various parts of the form—I'm still in car rental mode—but all she asks of me is my signature at the bottom of the form. She countersigns, staples an additional rules sheet to the already rule-burdened permit form, and hands it to me. "Have a good hike," she intones mechanically, and then she looks past me. "Next," she says.

I've chosen the parking lot of the Tuolumne Meadows High Sierra Camp as my wilderness portal. Four long rows of cars occupy a hundred yards of asphalt. We spy the John Muir Trail sign in a corner of the lot. Out of the car comes my pack. It's heavy—nearly fifty pounds—but I've spent too many years as a ranger to trust the wilderness. It's an occupational hazard. I think back to numerous official conversations with newspaper reporters in which I explained what had gone wrong with other people's wilderness adventures. Those conversations shadowed me as I prepared my own pack for this trip.

In recent weeks, I've joked with friends that this trip will either make me a good deal younger or significantly older. In the past, I've always been able to count on growing stronger (and younger) on the trail. I'm hoping for the same this time, but doubts remain. I cinch down the pack's shoulder and waist belts and pick up my walking stick. My wife takes my picture by the trail sign, strolls with me for a few hundred yards to the Dana Fork bridge, and we say our goodbyes. I turn onto the John Muir Trail and walk southward.

An important question returns to me within the first mile—what am I doing here? A friend asked me this very question a few days earlier, and, to my surprise, I told him that I intended to make a pilgrimage. Later, I tried to figure out where that had come from. Was I really making a sacred journey? The more I thought about it, the more the idea worked. For many Americans, national parks and wilderness areas are sacred. The ideas that support them possess the power and importance of religion. I am going into the wilderness to reconsider those ideas and seek perspective. In that regard, at least, I am a pilgrim.

I think back to the events that started me down this path. The story started more than four decades ago in my undergraduate college years. I remember the night clearly. Cold rain fell outside the library at the University of the Pacific in California's Great Central Valley. A history student there, I had spent much of that particular evening searching out assigned readings in various historical journals, and now, putting off the inevitable cold, wet walk back to my dormitory, I was simply wandering through the massive maze of stacks that held the collected issues of various periodicals. Now and then, something would look interesting, and I'd pull it off the shelf for a moment of curious browsing. The back issues of the Sierra Club Bulletin caught my eye. I knew this title as a modern, slick-paper magazine and didn't recognize the volumes before me, which consisted of a long series of tan-covered paperback books, each running to a hundred pages or more. I pulled one off the shelf. A new world opened.

In the succeeding weeks, spending time in the old Bulletins became my nightly dessert, my reward for finishing up whatever I needed to do that evening. It didn't take long to understand the basic dimensions of what I had found. From its founding in the early 1890s until the opening years of the 1960s, the Sierra Club had dedicated one issue of the Bulletin each year to a literary summary of things of interest to the club's members. During most of those seventy years, this had meant what was going on in the Sierra Nevada. The stories fascinated me. I read reports of exploring parties in the 1890s; of early outings to Tuolumne Meadows, the Kings Canyon, and the Kern River by surprisingly large groups; and of women in long skirts and hobnail boots climbing summits still ranked as difficult. Names came into focus: John Muir, Theodore Solomons, J.N. Le Conte.

This history captured me because, like so many Californians of my generation, I had already begun to flirt with the Sierra Nevada and the world of outdoor adventure. Between my junior and senior years of high school, as a casual lark, I had talked a friend into joining me in a foot crossing of the southern Sierra. With five-dollar packs from an army surplus store and sleeping bags so thin we could see through their seams, we innocently hiked across the highest mountains in the forty-eight states. Captured by what I had seen, I wrangled a job the following summer hauling visitor luggage around in a wheelbarrow at a lodge in Sequoia National Park's Giant Forest. I discovered that I liked the outdoor, people-oriented work, and for the next few years I returned to Giant Forest each summer. For a seasonal student job, it paid well. The hotel company gave me almost nothing, but a good porter could collect a quarter per suitcase in tips. More important, I enjoyed being in the mountains. Every day off found me exploring a new trail. Eventually I discovered, as did so many other young people in those years, that the mission of protecting and preserving national parks was something I could believe in.

At first, I was content simply to explore this new and exciting landscape, but soon I began to develop a curiosity about it. How, I wondered, had these amazing places come to be explored and preserved? Once I discovered the early issues of the Sierra Club Bulletin, my curiosity about the Sierra began to generate answers.

It would take another decade for me to realize it, but I had found the twin poles around which I would construct my adult life—the intellectual discipline of history and the world of national parks and wilderness. The first provided me with a perspective for analyzing and understanding the human world; in the second I discovered a mission and body of knowledge that held my interest. As the years progressed, I found a way to combine the two when I joined the National Park Service, first as a seasonal ranger, then as a historian, and finally as a full-time park ranger whose duties included being both a naturalist and a park historian. Eventually, I would spend twenty-eight years on the permanent staff of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, working in a variety of fields, including park planning and public affairs. For the final decade of my Park Service career, I served as the chief park naturalist for the two parks, interpreting their complex natural and human history to the public.

Over time, however, the world that I found intellectually so congenial began to fragment. As any historian can tell you, change is inescapable. Yet, I discovered, what the public wanted the National Park Service to do was to prevent change—to keep things the same forever. And as park rangers, we promised them exactly that—a guaranteed island of stability in a world of disorienting change.

Individually, few of us doubt that the twenty-first century will bring profound change to both human society and the natural environment. Yet even as the daily newspapers bring us face-to-face with such issues, we continue to believe that our national parks and wilderness areas will exist as exceptions to these inescapable trends. In my last years with the Park Service, this problem plagued me profoundly. Even as I told the public about the agency's efforts to preserve the parks "unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations," I knew that the future would not be nearly as simple as I promised.

Now, burdened with a fifty-pound pack and a head full of questions, I am setting out on a personal journey of rediscovery. My primary task in the weeks ahead will be to explore the question of what the twenty-first century's powerful currents of change will mean for national parks and wilderness. I want to investigate what will happen to these special landscapes and ecosystems. Even more important, I need to consider the impact of biological changes on the venerable intellectual concepts that sustain parks and wilderness.

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By early afternoon I've moved into another world. The trail miles slip by easily as I ascend the Lyell Fork of the Tuolumne River. Actually, ascend may be too ambitious a word for my progress. In the first half dozen miles, I've hardly gained enough altitude to cross a contour line on the topographic map. As I walk, Lyell Canyon surrounds me with gentle grandeur. Pleistocene-era glaciers rounded and smoothed this canyon to near-perfect proportions. Although the maps call it a canyon, the word is too harsh for this gentle landscape. The Lyell Fork occupies a sunny, open valley surrounded by polished granite. Open meadowland frames the river. Within the confines of this greensward of lush sedge, the Lyell Fork meanders gently. Beyond the meadow's edge, elegant concave slopes rise through thin subalpine forest to barren ridges that still display patches of last winter's snow. I'm walking through a giant Hudson-River-school diorama, a landscape that could easily have been conjured up to meet the aesthetic demands of nineteenth-century painters like Bierstadt, Moran, or Californian William Keith.

I may be in wilderness, but people surround me. Day-hikers, many of them fishing, explore the meadows. Several groups of backpackers pass me, saying hello as they march by. While I lunch in the shade of a lodgepole pine, a group of young people wearing matching safety helmets ride by on horseback followed by a string of mules carrying their baggage. Everyone looks happy and at peace as they pursue their activities under a cloudless Sierra Nevada sky.

Our political system has given this landscape the highest degree of protection our legal structure allows. The graceful sweep of Lyell Canyon falls within both a national park and a designated wilderness. Lyell Canyon achieved national park status in 1890, a full quarter-century before the National Park Service Organic Act of 1916 created the National Park Service. Congress had recognized the importance of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of the giant sequoias as early as 1864, when it acted to transfer these two scenic tracts of land to the State of California for use as a public park. In the late 1880s, a group made up mostly of Bay Area residents and led by John Muir initiated a campaign to create a large federal park to surround the two small units of the state reservation. This successful effort called for preservation of the new park's resources "in their natural condition." Two decades later, the act of 1916 raised the bar for the management of Lyell Canyon and the surrounding region by establishing the goal of keeping them "unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."

In 1984, nearly a century after President Benjamin Harrison signed the Yosemite National Park Act, President Ronald Reagan enacted the California Wilderness Act. Section 106 of that far-reaching legislation declared that 677,000 acres of Yosemite National Park, including Lyell Canyon, would henceforth be managed as a "designated wilderness." This designation placed Lyell Canyon under the provisions of the Wilderness Act of 1964, a visionary piece of legislation that defined wilderness as "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor who does not remain."

Around me, I see the results of these legislative initiatives. On this summer afternoon, several hundred people enjoy Lyell Canyon as a national park wilderness. Without doubt this landscape has all the attributes they seek. It has no road, only a narrow trail suitable for walking or passage by horse and mule. Regulations ensure that the trail remains closed to mechanized vehicles of all sorts, even bicycles. As a result, "traffic" in Lyell Canyon—and there is a fair amount—moves quietly, at a pedestrian pace. Aside from the trail and a few directional signs at junctions, the canyon includes within its confines no human-made structures. We left those behind at Tuolumne Meadows, when we turned our backs on that busy place with its accommodations, gas station, market, campground, and ranger station.

Nature appreciation began early here. John Muir, still in his first years in California, visited the ice fields at the head of the canyon in 1871. The following year, seeking to prove that those snowy expanses were indeed part of a glacier, he drove stakes into the ice so that he could measure its suspected downhill movement. When he came back a few weeks later, the stakes had moved; the Lyell Fork of the Tuolumne River did indeed flow from what Muir liked to call a glacial fountain.

In 1881–1882, a mining company constructed a wagon road to Tuolumne Meadows, and the adjoining Lyell Canyon area soon gained a reputation as a rewarding destination for those seeking a High Sierra experience. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Sierra Club, then a small San Francisco Bay Area mountaineering club, had begun to organize an annual outing for its members. The event rotated among a number of Sierra locations, but repeatedly the annual outing centered on a base camp at Tuolumne Meadows, a location that allowed hundreds to appreciate the exquisite beauty of the Lyell Fork and its headwaters glacier. Muir so treasured Lyell Canyon that he purchased a William Keith painting depicting this quintessential Sierra landscape. Keith's view of Lyell Canyon used the Lyell Fork and its meadowlands to frame a view of Mount Lyell and its glacier. Muir cherished the painting and displayed it in his Martinez home until his death. His heirs still own it today.

In 1915, less than a year after the death of Muir, the Sierra Club successfully lobbied the California Legislature for a memorial to the club's founding president. As specified in the resulting legislation, the "John Muir Trail" would begin in Yosemite Valley, climb to Tuolumne Meadows, then turn south and ascend Lyell Canyon on its way to the Kings River country and Mount Whitney. It would take nearly a quarter century to complete the entire 212-mile route, but the Lyell Canyon section of the Muir Trail opened immediately. Existing trails made the canyon easy to access, and those who loved the Sierra already knew the landscape.

More than ninety years have now passed since the designation of the Muir Trail, and multiple generations have come to count Lyell Canyon as one of the defining High Sierra landscapes. Much more than places like Yosemite Valley and Tuolumne Meadows, it has achieved the ultimate national park goal: it appears not to have changed. A 1915 Sierra Club visitor to Lyell Canyon suddenly transported forward nine decades might be shocked by the skimpy hiking attire of modern women (and men too for that matter) and fascinated by backpackers using superlightweight equipment. But that same time-transported visitor would not only recognize and appreciate the visually unblemished landscape but also understand the motivations that still bring visitors to the canyon.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Uncertain Path by William C. Tweed. Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword
Introduction

1. South from Yosemite
2. Kings Canyon National Park
3. Sequoia National Park
4. National Parks in the Twenty-first Century

Notes
References
Acknowledgments
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Elegant and thoughtful . . .. A welcome — and long overdue — call for a fundamental redefinition of the National Park Service's core mission and management goals."—High Country News

"This is a must-read for anyone who loves national parks."—Fresno Bee

"Tweed plays the role of tour guide perfectly. . . exercising his considerable knowledge about wilderness and its remarkable role in park history."—National Parks Traveler

"Anyone who has an interest in the physical future and relevancy of our National Park System to our changing society should read this book. "—A Park Ranger's Life Blog

Editorial Reviews

This is a must-read for anyone who loves national parks.

Fresno Bee

Anyone who has an interest in the physical future and relevancy of our National Park System to our changing society should read this book. “

A Park Ranger’s Life Blog

"I strongly encourage this interested in the future of parks and wilderness to add this jewel of a book to their libraries."

George Wright Journal

Tweed plays the role of tour guide perfectly. . . exercising his considerable knowledge about wilderness and its remarkable role in park history.

National Parks Traveler

Elegant and thoughtful . . .. A welcome — and long overdue — call for a fundamental redefinition of the National Park Service's core mission and management goals.

High Country News

Anyone who has an interest in the physical future and relevancy of our National Park System to our changing society should read this book. “

A Park Ranger’s Life Blog

Anyone who has an interest in the physical future and relevancy of our National Park System to our changing society should read this book. “

A Park Ranger's Life Blog