Public lands come in a lot of shapes and sizes. They attract different kinds of visitors by permitting different usage, either legally or functionally. Often “wilderness” areas, as legally defined in the US since the 1960’s, are the most restrictive, forbidding even wheeled devices (as “mechanical transport”), having special consequences for public lands staff and mountain bikers, as discussed earlier this year on 99% Invisible.
When I visit National Parks and Monuments, I try to purchase a commemorative lapel pin. It’s one of the few souvenirs I regularly purchase — some people collect spoons, shotglasses, etc, whereas I collect lapel pins, and ONLY from public lands visitor centers. It’s kind of dumb but I’ve been doing it for a while. I rarely purchase anything else from visitor’s centers and I feel like it’s an opportunity to give them a bit more much needed funding.
Okay that’s not the whole truth: I tend to buy books relevant to the cultural or natural history of the park, on these travels I’ve been purchasing postcards to send, and I often buy maps because they’re useful and also I’ve got a mild sexual fascination with cartography. Contour lines. Damn.
Nevertheless, the other day I discovered I’d collected eight pins on this trip. Five weeks, 80% or so spent in states without any national public lands, or helping out on a farm. It seems like a lot. And I look back on my time in these places and it feels like a dishonest amount. Let’s summarize:
Rocky Mountain National Park
Camped in a car campground one night, choking on the exhaust of gasoline generators, worried that idiots starting fires in the high wind would burn our tent/park down. Backpacked about ten miles over the next three days, up a mountain, over a ridge and up a river, sleeping two nights in the back country. Saw so much bear poop. Slept so little thanks to the strong winds that whipped off the peaks and down into the surrounding valleys and canyons.
Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve
Climbed up a couple of the smaller sand dunes with a board and sandboarded down them. Mad fun. Never made it into the preserve due to rental-constraints on our time and looming thunder storms. They — the storms and the preserve — beckoned to us while we stood on the stand dunes, but we ignored their call to adhere to the timetables of man.
Bandelier National Monument
Did the Main Pueblo Loop which is some two miles. We got to see the lengthy ruins of a Pueblo settlement between a river and sheer canyon cliff. Archaeology is not really my taste, but they maintained residences high in the cliffs with views of the surrounding canyons simultaneously relaxing and enticing. We unfortunately never made it back to venture into the back country.
Valles Caldera National Preserve
Walked the Coyote Call trail, a loop of about 2.5 miles. It looked out over the caldera, a calm prairie nearly two miles high, surrounded by the tree-studded lips of the volcano. Putting a few footsteps' lie to my claim about the last monument, I found the trail connected to the high country of Bandelier, but turned back toward the car after a wistful glance.
White Sands National Park
Did two rather short hikes, totalling no more than 3 miles and drove around the dune loops. Walking barefoot on the white sands, cooler than they should have been under the hot sun, we followed a set of trail signs that were scorched to illegibility, but ought to have told us about the wildlife that was hiding away in the area awaiting sunset.
Guadalupe Mountains National Park
Hiked a little over a mile on a nature trail, and spent a night at a car campground. The nature trail informed us about many of the local plants, including several of which left long wounds in their eagerness to greet us. Cooking dinner at camp, we met a skunk who seemed a bit befuddled that his normal path was occupied by such gargantuan hairless creatures, and shortly ventured into the cacti seeking an alternative route.
Carlsbad Caverns National Park
Watched the bats leave the cave one evening, and hiked down the natural entrance into the main cavern the following morning to look at stalagmites. The bats swirled out of the natural entrance in a vortex, disrupting the cave swallow’s twilight return to their nests, and ventured then north in clumping murmurations. The cave itself was by far the largest I’d ever spelunked — if I can call walking paved paths with signage and handrails “spelunking” — with drapes in excess of five feet long, stalactites easily a foot in diameter, and various formations the likes of which I’d never seen.
Big Bend National Park
Hiked the window trail and to St. Elena Canyon, for a total of perhaps five miles, and two nights in the Chisos Basin car campground. The window trail was completely dry, allowing us to walk directly up to the edge of the waterfall and look straight down to where the creek should have pooled. St. Elena Canyon was suitably well hyped and delivered more than I had even expected. It was a place where the park service seemed to have failed, and only social trails originating from a climb up a steep, sandy embankment some fifty yards up-creek from where the park service claimed hikers should enter, were the only viable means of entry. Staring down the 150-foot cave walls flanking the Rio Grande, Mexico to my left, the US to my right, I thought about how truly mad “national boundaries” really are. How could a wall have ever been successfully built here?
Sounds like a lot of fun, so let’s zoom in on Big Bend to ruin it: I hiked five miles. But I drove some 200 miles within the park alone. In an earlier entry I said I couldn’t “throw out the baby with the bath water” in regards to cars, but now I’m not so sure. I’d have never made it to Big Bend without a vehicle. It is one of the most remote National Parks in the lower 48. From the entrance to Panther Junction is some forty miles, to Chisos Basin from there is another 20. Panther Junction to St. Elena Canyon is about 43 miles. These numbers make a car seem pretty desirable. But these numbers obscure something: the ocotillo, agave and sotol; the javelinas, rattlesnakes and tarantulas; the buttes, mountains and canyons; petroglyphs and settlement ruins. These are just the things I missed on the way between trail heads, visitor centers and campgrounds.
The car made it so convenient, so easy to travel between the farthest reaches of the park. But in exploring the extremities, I overlooked everything else. In trying to fit in so many highlights, I prevented myself the pleasure of being pleasantly surprised. I took no opportunity to commune with nature, in such a rush to see the sights. I tallied off a check list of instagram bucketlist experiences made for me by others, curated by tradition and popularity rather than the call of my spirit. Have I been doing this all wrong?
Abbey and misanthropy
In my mild malaise I made the anxiety-amplifying decision to pick up a copy of Abbey’s Desert Solitaire on the way out of Big Bend. I’d read it before and knew he’d written at length in it about the troubles of public lands, from the perspective of both an employee of the parks system and a lover of the land. I thought it would give me some ideas to chew on and perhaps some quotes to spice up my eventual public lands article. This one. Here’s a quote:
A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles
Perhaps this sounds familiar. Perhaps this should have sounded familiar the first time I read the book, having read that very quote several years earlier in a hostel guest book! How about this one:
The automobile, which began as a transportation convenience, has become a bloody tyrant (50,000 lives a year)
That number, claimed in a book published in 1968, is quite close to the number I referenced just a few weeks ago about 2022! You can look at fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled or per 100,000 people, and see that there are more of us traveling farther more often and deduce that vehicular travel is actually 2-5x safer than it was fifty years ago. But that’s still 50k dead per year. Why is it that after a couple days driving through Nebraska I could come to a different conclusion about these two ideas than I did a month later in Western Texas?
An innovation only possible in America
It may be a valid case of American exceptionalism that private vehicles could never have arisen to such national importance, let alone global prominence via the exportation of cultural values through the most powerful industrial media in the world, without the special circumstances of America: it’s twentieth century industrial strength, vast conquered landscape, and myths of rugged individualism. Historical photos adorn the walls of many park visitor centers showing far more cars than would ever seem could fit in the existing lots. An absolute mob of people crowding to crawl the caves and lay by the lakes. And this, in the days before instagram made it a necessity to adorn one’s life with beauty.
In my readings and travels, an idea I’ve seen so often repeated, attributed to Wallace Stegner, is that the National Parks are America’s greatest idea. It casts a poor light on my motherland, but it’s accurate: only in a country whose dream is to ward off neighbors with white picket fences could the idea of lands forcibly depopulated for the sake of achieving a myth of untrammeled spaces held in mutual trust be formulated. This is where you go to be alone with a bunch of others being alone. This is where you go to hide in your camper van, oriented away from the other recreational vehicles towards a pleasant tree or, if you arrived early enough to stake it out, a cliff top vista or beach, to pretend none but you and perhaps your obnoxious children occupy this tract of untouched earth whose picnic tables and fire rings sprouted from the earth by obviously natural consequence.
It really is a shame since the parks, as noted by Abbey in his polemic, are for people. In my essays about this trip I’ve been perpetuating a fallacy. I post landscape photos that have no humans. The reason I’ve kept them unpeopled is that I wish to respect the privacy of others, but the pictures I post here are not the pictures I like to take — in fact most of the scenery photos have not been snapped by me but my partner, who feels differently about photography than I do. I prefer to capture a landscape’s mutilators red-handed.
Climate change
Since I was a kid I’ve been bombarded with messages that the world was ending, the ozone was depleting, the forests and jungles being plundered. I never had any major doubts about climate change, perhaps in a nod to Planck’s Principle. The eponymous glaciers of Glacier National Park will be soon depleted. The rivers around which so many desert parks are based will dry up and leave the land barren and even less accessible. Vast numbers of flora and fauna taking refuge in these public lands will be lost. These are the messages with which I’ve been inculcated for decades. Maybe my absurd, frantic, gotta-see-it-all behavior could be explained by such.
At the Panther Junction visitor’s center, I came across a resonant book. I bought Desert Solitaire instead, as I said, but the book got me thinking. The hook was a family’s year long quest to see the most endangered national parks before they’re gone. Sounds somewhat familiar. I don’t think I’ll ever be back to some of these areas again, and I want to see these parks before I’m gone. Is this informing my approach? And to what other areas could this lens be applied to understand my behavior, or my generation’s behavior?
Dan Carlin has an episode of his Hardcore History podcast where he describes the titular concept of “logical insanity.” He’s discussing the decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan at the close of World War 2, but he applies this concept elsewhere. It’s part of what I like about the podcast more generally, because no matter what era or concept he’s covering, he spends a lot of time discussing the psychology and sociology under which people who make these historical decisions were operating. Often times, so goes the idea of logical insanity, we are experiencing such mad conditions that, as rationally as our decisions proceed from these bases, they cannot be understood outside of such insanity.
It makes me think this is how I and my peers are operating. Cars, airplanes, meat, and so on make us feel guilty, and yet we jet off across the country or world at every possible opportunity. Are we blinded by privilege; scared of never being able to see what’s out there before it disappears or before being deprived of our access to mobility by legislative decree or logistical circumstances; spurred on by the need to live up to the lives our peers lead thanks to social media? It’s probably all of them. Each pressure intersects and amplifies. The madness intensifies. We make decisions completely at odds with our values.
Is it too late?
The past is the past. We can only learn from it. But what do we learn? History can be twisted and warped to create whatever meaning we want. Everything eventually comes back to nihilism or relativism. And yet I’m upset. A nihilist wouldn’t have this problem, because there wouldn’t be any friction between shifting values. There would be no meaning one way or the other. But it has meaning for me. Understanding takes time and introspection, but I know why I felt this way. I didn’t want to return to the cities. I had seen all that I had failed to see. I came to these parks knowing little to nothing, and left having learned how little I knew.
There’s another chapter in Desert Solitaire, one of my favorites, in fact, entitled Havasu, and it details Abbey’s trip to California. Stopped over briefly in Arizona, he learns of Havasu and says he has to check it out, he’ll BRB. His friends offer to wait a bit, and he’s gone for several weeks (and of course they did not wait that long). This is what I wished I were doing. I’m shooting all over the damn place with a checklist of things to do. I just want to meander. Occasionally disappear like Abbey did. Live not according to the schedules and agendas of others, but the whims and needs of my own and mine.
Maybe this is all I really want. To love, as Abbey says, space more than I am obsessed with time.
