Reading The Trail

Exploring The Literature And Natural History Of The California Crest

Corey Lee Lewis

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780874176445
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

A provocative new way to read and interpret the classic works of John Muir, Mary Austin, and Gary Snyder, and to bring their ideas into the discussion of ecological values and the current environmental crisis. Lewis combines a perceptive discussion of their work and ideas with an engaging account of his own trail experiences as hiker/backpacker and volunteer trail builder, proposing that such a field-based, interdisciplinary approach to literary study and outdoors experience can enrich our appreciation for the work of nature writers.

CHAPTER ONE

Readers and Writers of the California Crest Trail

If the public will not follow a poet’s personal example they will never completely comprehend his art.

LAURENCE GOLDSTEIN,
“Wordsworth and Snyder: The Primitivist and His Problem of Self-Definition”

Dry snow whips and rolls off cornices above us, exploding into the clear blue sky in sparkling ribbons and billowing white clouds. The glare and warmth of the bright Sierra sun radiates up from the snowpack under our feet with a fierce intensity that echoes my own thoughts as we climb: “I am here! I am alive!” Our snowshoes crunch over the jumbled remains of an old avalanche, but the snowpack is set—safe and hard—after weeks of warm days and cold nights with no new snow. After cresting the barren, windswept ridge, we forge on, toward the cover of red fir and lodgepole pine. I scan the trees ahead for the familiar Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) emblem, a small metal disk in blue and white, telling us that we are still on, or in this case above, the trail. Somewhere, several feet below our snowshoes, lies a section of the Pacific Crest Trail as it winds its way from Mexico to Canada. My wife and I are snowshoeing for the day on one small portion of the 2,650-mile-long PCT, following a high ridge in the Sierra Nevada toward the Five Lakes Wilderness Area. Our two-year-old son, Hunter, rides contentedly in a pack on my back, intermittently shouting excitedly, “Tree!” and “Snow, Daddy, snow!” Occasionally, his attention turns from simple observations to urgent commands, exclaiming, “Go higher, Daddy, go higher!” With the reluctance of an overburdened pack animal, I obey, and we peak out on a small snow-covered knob.

Below and on either side of us, we can see white swaths cut through the dense green of pine and fir forests, the straight black lines of ski lifts, and the crowds of small brightly colored shapes sliding down the runs of Alpine Meadows and Squaw Valley. I begin to wonder for a moment how it is that in this age of Internet technology, fossil-fuel addiction, rapidly disappearing wildlands, and the increasing mechanization of outdoor sports that a 2,650-mile-long primitive trail, with its virtually wild trail corridor, was ever constructed and protected. Somewhere beneath the layers of time and snow lies a remarkable cultural achievement, a symbol of Americans’ desire to connect with our own homeland, to challenge ourselves, and to escape for a time from the confines of industrial civilization.

As I would soon discover, the history of the trail is both cultural and ecological and is wrapped up in a larger story—the story of a people’s search for place and the development of the U.S. environmental movement. The entire Pacific Crest Trail runs from Mexico to Canada, crossing three western states—California, Oregon, and Washington—and five distinct ecological regions. The PCT is the second of eight primitive trails that make up our National Scenic Trails System, a system that was not established by Congress until 1968. The PCT’s history is much longer, however, dating back to 1926 when Catherine Montgomery suggested to Joseph T. Hazard, author of Pacific Crest Trails, that there should be “[a] high trail winding down the heights of our western mountains with mile markers and shelter huts—like those pictures I’ll show you of the Long Trail of the Appalachian’s—from the Canadian Border to the Mexican Boundary Line!” (Schaffer et al. 2000, 1). Hazard approached a number of mountain clubs and began promoting the trail, but it was not created until 1928 when Fred W. Cleator became supervisor of recreation for Region 6 of the U.S. Forest Service and began developing a crest trail from Canada to the California border. By 1937 this section of the trail was complete. However, Region 5 (California) did not follow Cleator’s lead, and it was up to a private individual to initiate the idea in the South. In fact, the trail’s development in California would involve the work of a number of committed individuals and organizations and would span sixty-one years from the initial proposal to its final completion. Without the leadership and federal support offered by someone like Cleator, the California portion of the Pacific Crest Trail had to rely on the momentum of the developing environmental movement to gain the necessary public support and political attention to become established.

The John Muir Trail (JMT), which forms a considerable portion of the PCT as it passes through California, was already in existence years before the longer trail was proposed and, in fact, can trace its origins all the way back to 1884 when Theodore S. Solomons—the “father” of the JMT—was fourteen years old and first hit upon the idea. For the establishment of the PCT, however—a much longer trail, passing through both private and public property administered by various local, state, and federal agencies—significant shifts in American environmental values were necessary.

The most significant of these shifts in environmental values occurred between 1890 and the turn of the century. It was during this period that Frederick Jackson Turner officially declared the American frontier “closed” in his influential work The Significance of the Frontier in American History and American attitudes toward the frontier began to shift from conquest to nostalgia. As the “open” frontier of the West came to a close, and the expansionism of the lumber and mineral strikes from earlier in the century faded, Americans slowly began to experience limits to the natural abundance of the West, as well as a sense of longing for recently mythologized historical times. It was during this period that Americans, especially easterners, began devouring the works of regional western writers like Mary Austin and John Muir. And in 1892, when Muir founded the Sierra Club as “a defense association” to watch over and protect American wilderness, a small but vocal minority of Americans had come to recognize that wilderness, itself, might be in danger (Cohen 1984, 280).

The early 1900s saw the formation of a number of “boys’ clubs” for the purpose of exposing young men and boys to the joys and character-building rigors of primitive outdoor experience. Popular nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton and British founder of the Boy Scouts Sir Robert S. S. Baden-Powell both contributed significantly to this early outdoor movement. In 1913, American fascination with the wilderness enjoyed a boost from the popular press, which began carrying the story of Joe Knowles, who allegedly survived alone and unaided in the wilderness, without clothes or tools, for a period of two months, in a highly publicized and partially fictional adventure. The Boston Post headline read, “Naked He Plunges into Maine Woods to Live Alone Two Months” (Nash 1967, 141). Knowles kept up his notoriety through a series of dispatches written on birch bark, detailing how he was surviving in the wilderness. Although Knowles’s account later proved to be primarily fictitious, when he emerged from the Maine woods in October 1913 he was swept up in a wave of enthusiasm for the values of wilderness experience and primitive living.

At this same time, the proper use of the West’s public lands received national attention as preservationists led by John Muir and conservationists led by Gifford Pinchot joined the battle over the fate of California’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. The split between these two camps, best summarized by the men themselves, exemplified a larger philosophical division in the country. In 1912, Muir wrote, “These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the Mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar” (1962, 202). A year later, Pinchot argued in response: “As to my attitude regarding the proposed use of Hetch Hetchy by the city of San Francisco . . . I am fully persuaded that . . . the injury . . . by substituting a lake for the present swampy floor of the valley . . . is altogether unimportant compared with the benefits to be derived from its use as a reservoir” (Nash 1967, 161). The question about Hetch Hetchy, and by extension the rest of our public lands, was whether they should be managed solely as storehouses of natural resources designed to give the greatest economic good to the greatest number of people or whether they had an inherent ecological, spiritual, and recreational value that transcended their immediate economic worth. That question would come to be answered in a number of different ways over the years; however, a shift from the former attitude toward the latter was slowly beginning to occur within the American environmental imagination.

In 1921, Benton McKaye began his successful campaign to establish the Appalachian Trail along the crest of the eastern mountains from Maine to Georgia. McKaye, like Seton and Baden-Powell, recognized the value of primitive outdoor recreation and sought to make recreational opportunities available to all Americans as a counterforce to the increasing urbanization and industrialization of the time. McKaye was not alone in his insistence that Americans needed opportunities for recreating in unspoiled primitive areas. During the 1920s and 1930s, a number of influential environmental thinkers surfaced within the U.S. Forest Service, helping to shape both public perception and federal policy toward recognizing the values of wilderness. At the same time that Fred Cleator was working on the Oregon and Washington sections of the PCT, Arthur C. Carhart, Aldo Leopold, and Robert Marshall were persuasively shifting public lands policy from resource extraction toward landscape protection.

Finally, in 1932, Clinton C. Clarke of Pasadena, California, proposed, in The Pacific Crest Trailway, “to the United States Forest Service and National Park Services the project of a continuous wilderness trail across the United States from Canada to Mexico.” The plan, according to Clarke, was “to build a trail along the summit divides of the mountain ranges of these states, traversing the best scenic areas and maintaining an absolute wilderness character” (Schaffer et al. 2000, 1). Thanks to McKaye’s work with the Appalachian Trail and already shifting attitudes toward the environment, the stage was set for the completion of Clarke’s dream. It would take another sixty-one years to come to fruition, but finally, just before the century turned again, in 1993, California would complete its own section of the grand Mexico-to-Canada Pacific Crest Trail.

THREE CALIFORNIA ICONS

Throughout this long history of cultural change, the works of western writers reflected and directed the development of Americans’ dawning environmental consciousness. As urbanization and outdoor recreation grew, so too did the number of works of western environmental literature, as well as Americans’ appetite for consuming them.

Of the many authors who aided in this cultural transformation, writing about and in the California landscapes the PCT passes through, three stand out as veritable icons of environmental literature: Mary Austin, John Muir, and Gary Snyder. Much like the trail itself, the body of their work stands as a symbol par excellence of the American environmental movement and our cultural imagination as it has been played out within our literature and upon our land. Each of these authors lived in, and wrote about, a different ecological region, corresponding directly to the three distinct ecoregions the PCT passes through as it bisects California lengthwise. In addition, both the literary work and the activist efforts of these three writers have been responsible for engendering a greater environmental sensitivity in the American public and protecting a number of the now preserved wilderness areas and national parks through which the PCT passes.

Mary Austin (1868–1934)

The harsh beauty and vast stillness of southern California’s arid lands were most memorably brought to America’s attention through the work of a tough pioneering woman named Mary Hunter Austin. As a single mother and self-supporting woman in the frontier regions of the American Southwest during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Austin was anything but conventional. An inveterate traveler, she roamed a rugged and unsettled country when the only means of transportation was by stagecoach, horseback, or on foot. Austin’s travels and interests brought her in close contact with the Paiute and Shoshone who still lived in the area, the Basque and Mexican sheepherders who ran flocks in the high country, and the many luckless pocket hunters who roamed the borderless lands of California and Nevada in search of valuable ore. In addition, traveling through and camping in the wild regions of the Southwest taught her much about the desert’s nonhuman inhabitants, the “wild creatures,” “hill folk,” and “little people,” as she called them, who still populate southern California’s wildlands.

James Ruppert notes that the early 1900s enjoyed “a revitalization of the arts through a return to American materials, the American landscape, and aboriginal American arts”; leading this revolution, he argues, was Mary Hunter Austin (1983, 376). Austin’s contribution to western environmental literature and the southwestern landscape has indeed been great. In her sixty-six years of life, she published thirty-four books and plays and an extensive assortment of articles, gained the ear of a number of important literary and political figures, and opposed the diversion of life-sustaining waters from the Owens Valley to the city of Los Angeles.

Mary Hunter was married, at the age of twenty-two, to Stafford Wallace Austin, a young man who soon proved incapable of supporting his new bride. By the early 1890s Mary and Stafford had settled in the Owens Valley, on the eastern face of the Sierra Nevada and the western edge of the Mojave Desert, and she had begun publishing stories in the Overland Monthly about her beloved Southwest and those who inhabited it.

Austin’s first and most widely read book, The Land of Little Rain, was published in 1903 and is among one of her most comprehensive and insightful explorations of the arid lands, diverse wildlife, and unique cultures of the southern California region. The next three years saw her publish in succession The Basket Woman: A Book of Fanciful Tales for Children, Isidro, and The Flock. In these works she displays her anthropological interest in native cultures and her love of the southern California coastal region. Lost Borders, published in 1909, returned Austin and her readers to the arid deserts of her heart, and California: The Land of the Sun, published in 1914, continued to explore the region in print for what had become a sizable American audience. Along with her autobiography, Earth Horizon (1932), which oscillates interestingly between first- and third-person prose, Austin’s work represents one of the first, and most comprehensive, studies in literary natural history of the American Southwest.

Austin’s rhythmic prose introduces readers to many of the species, geographical features, and ecological processes one encounters when hiking the sandy southern portion of the PCT. Both Austin’s work and the PCT explore a vast, sparsely populated land of desert dwellers who have learned to live with a lot of space and little water. From dry lake playas and barren ocher-colored hills to creosote, shade-scale, and sagebrush scrub communities, up to Joshua-tree and pinyon-juniper woodlands, Austin’s books and the southern PCT carry readers and hikers through a diverse landscape with the power to inspire awe or exact death. In her books, and along the trail, one may encounter such unique creatures as the kangaroo rat, which goes its whole life without drinking a sip of water, or the pinyon jay, whose evolution is so closely tied with the pinyon pine forest that its beak, unlike that of other jays, is specially designed to extract the nutrient-rich seeds from the pinyon cones. Or the solitary traveler might lie quietly on the sand, staring at the innumerable stars and listening in awe to the high-pitched yelps and howls of coyotes in the night.

John Muir (1838–1914)

As one travels northward on the trail, the pinyon and juniper give way to ponderosa and Jeffrey pine, the southern Sierra Nevada rise still higher, and the red, brown, and gold of ore-laced andesitic rocks give way to the grays and whites of high Sierra snow and granite. Manzanita and squaw carpet dot the forest floor, as sugar pine and sequoia soar overhead in grand cathedral-like grace. In the distance, the hulking shapes of glacially cut granite domes shrug off the skirting trees growing around their bases and stand naked and solid under the everlasting sky. From the high Sierra Nevada to the Yosemite Valley floor, this is John Muir’s country. And running right through the middle of it, following a granite-blasted, switchbacking, and carefully constructed route, lies the central portion of California’s Pacific Crest Trail.

As with Austin, the central importance of the western landscape in Muir’s life and work has been widely acknowledged. The two contemporaries have often been compared as defenders of wild nature and pioneers in the field of literary natural history. Ann Zwinger argues:

Both Muir and Austin are the first truly western nature writers. They delineate the personality of pine and spruce, describe the delicious sibilance of sand, portray the palatial grandeur of glaciers, divine the cut of the wind and the shocking immensity of the sky that it swirls out of. . . . Their writing, their point of view, their dedication to the mountains and deserts of the West, has sustained western nature writers from their day forward. (1994, x)

In addition to sustaining future writers, it should also be noted that Austin’s and Muir’s work has inspired millions of readers to explore, enjoy, and protect California’s wildlands and natural areas.

John Muir first saw the Sierra in 1868, after completing a thousand-mile botanical expedition from Indiana to Florida on foot. He came to California to convalesce from a bout of malaria contracted during that trip. Muir spent the summers of 1868 and 1869 in the high Sierra Nevada country above Yosemite Valley, herding sheep, botanizing, and developing his theories of glaciation. These experiences were later collapsed into a single season and published in 1911 as My First Summer in the Sierra.

In 1871, at the urging of fellow botanist and friend Jeanne Carr, Muir published his first essay about the Sierra Nevada, a piece in which he first argued his theory that the Sierra were carved by glaciers and in which he announced his discovery of a living glacier in the high Sierra. Initially scoffed at by professional geologists, Muir’s theories were later corroborated by the scientific community.

In 1892, Muir founded the Sierra Club and two years later published his first collection of essays, The Mountains of California. Recognized by many as the “father” of our national park system and of the modern American environmental movement, Muir and his writings and ramblings in the Sierra Nevada have left an indelible mark on our history and our public lands. In 1901 he published Our National Parks, a collection of sketches first printed in the Atlantic Monthly. In the preface of that book Muir states: “I have done the best I could to show for the beauty, grandeur, and all-embracing usefulness of our wild mountain forest reservations and parks, with a view to inciting the people to come and enjoy them, and get them into their hearts, so that at length their preservation and right use might be made sure” (1916d, vii). In 1912, Muir published another book focusing on his beloved mountains, The Yosemite, and in 1918 and 1950, respectively, Steep Trails and Studies in the Sierra were posthumously published.

Muir was an extremely influential environmental writer and activist, keeping company with such important figures as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Theodore Roosevelt and consistently ...