People who know me well know that I love to pick a geological formation in the distance, or pick a compass direction, and strike out cross country off trail. Doing so challenges many of my wilderness skills like path-finding, compass and map reading, and reading the land; i.e. understanding what I am seeing around me, knowing which direction it is telling me to go, giving me clues as to what lies ahead and with what animals I am sharing the area.
 |
| Hemingway-Boulder Wilderness, Sun Valley, ID |
For me these are valuable, important and exciting skills. They mean a lot to me. Most of all they enable me to have marvelous adventures. Last spring I decided to challenge myself in rather deep snow in the Hemingway-Boulder wilderness (i) in the Sawtooth Mountains of south central Idaho. I was having great fun tracking bear paw prints the size of saucers. I wasn't worried about catching up with the bear. As I got up the mountain the snow finally became too deep to continue without snow shoes. I grudgingly turned back and followed the two sets of prints in the snow; the bears and mine. I stepped in my own prints to make travel easier. About a half mile or so back I realized that there were three sets of tracks; one bear, one human and one cat. You can't have adventures like this without learning the wilderness.
It was a marvelous time. Like most such adventures, which include living in Nitsitapiisinni (ii) in a snow covered forest miles from the nearest "civilization" as we were this day, much of the joy of the moment is feeling totally removed from the troubled, torment society hardly more than out of sight. Sadly I did not go long without being reminded. There, along the beautiful mountain stream I was following, partially hidden by the snow, was human trash not only spoiling the scenery but polluting an otherwise pristine stream that had carried pure, life-giving water down this valley before my ancestors climbed down from the trees.
 |
| Puerto Blanco, Organ Pipe Nat'l Park, AZ |
The desert probably offers more opportunity to get off the trail than does heavy forest. Many of my favorite places to go in the desert do not have trails. We were staying in Organ Pipe National Park near the Mexican border. I picked out a mountain peak a few miles north of Nitsitapiisinni, found it on my topo, and headed toward the summit. It didn't have a name on the map. That's one reason I picked it. No trails. I would have to figure out how to get to the top. That was a big part of the fun.
The climb was about 2,000 feet. I crossed two lower peaks, each offering a tantalizing view of my goal. The geological formations as I approached the summit were superb. The rock was definitely volcanic and looked like gigantic cinders. The view was amazing. I could see into Mexico well past the unsightly wall. I watched carrion and raptors circling high above the desert floor looking for food. I could see a road to my east, so I kept my attention in other directions and quickly got lost in the fabulous nature around me. For a while I could actually forget politicians, other nasty people, run-amuck corporations, climate change, polluted water and air and the plethora of problems created by my species.
I had come up the south side of the mountain. As I was enjoying my surroundings I noticed what seemed to be an easier route down by going north to a saddle and then back south along the western flank of the mountain.
Thanking the mountain for being such a generous host I headed north. I had not gone twenty yards when I saw a pair of mens underwear lying on a rock. At the base of the rock was a part of a tent and some trash. Most people would have blamed those horrible illegal immigrants, but people who climb the wall don't generally wear Jockey brand, have a tent and carry canned foods. They also don't go over the top of a mountain where they can easily be spotted when they can follow an easy route west of the mountain that has natural cover. No, this was just someone being a slob and not caring about the land. I see this behavior in many places and a great percentage are people out hunting, fishing or prospecting who just don't care. This is not implying that a hunter or fisher is, by nature, a care-less slob. That's just the reason some slobs are out here.
The first time that we went to Quartzsite, AZ we didn't know that that was where gold was first discovered in Arizona and that Dome Rock was the center of prospecting activity even today. I was out exploring in my usual fashion. I had noticed how many washes were filled with debris like tents, tires, and cans. When I was on top of Dome Rock I could see Nitsitapiisinni and noticed that I could follow a dry wash to within a hundred yards of home. As I walked along the wash it became deeper. In one of the deepest spots I noticed tarps and tools along with the usual collection of trash. The side of the wash was dug up. I could see a large hole under the tarp. Then I noticed that there was an old camper trailer, Class-C and pick-up truck just above me on the other side of the wash from the trash. A woman sat outside the trailer. She just looked at me. I waved and said "hello". She just looked. I asked "what are you looking for?" Since I had seen phenomenal quartz outcroppings, I assumed that they were rockhounds. Before I could say anything further a man, wearing jeans and a wife-beater, emerged from the trailer. The woman looked up at him and then back at me. "Gold," she said almost in monotone. "Well, good luck," I said waving and heading on toward home, all the time thinking 'please don't shoot me in the back. I don't want your gold mine.' I had been educated. The horrible mess and destruction I had witnessed in the area was prospecting.
This past year we joined a group called Boondockers United to go with BLM (Bureau of Land Management) officers into the Dome Rock area to spend an afternoon hauling out trash. We filled enough trash bags to load three large flatbed trailers, and that didn't count the two camps and two mines we discovered. Discouraged prospectors had just walked away from camps leaving tents, mattresses, old tires, and a mountain of trash. Both Pamela and I discovered deep mine shafts that we partially filled with trash. The BLM officer told us that they would have to get special teams to see if they could empty the shafts and then collapse the mines, but most likely they would have to treat the trash like bio-hazardous waste and backfill the shaft with rock and soil.
At Glacier we live right by the trailhead for one of our favorite hikes - Avalanche Lake. It is a marvelous hike following a rushing, cascading mountain stream with magnificent falls and gorges, through a dense cedar and hemlock forest which is the last of the rainforest this far east. You climb up a narrow valley between three mountains; Cannon, Bearhat and Brown. It culminates in a beautiful cirque with a lake and waterfalls all around you. The chances of seeing bears and deer are quite good. The five mile round trip Avalanche Lake Trail is one of the most popular in the park. We hike it often and each time we carry a trash bag to pick up the trash and litter dropped by thoughtless visitors. Trash and litter are not only unsightly but pollutants and dangerous for the wildlife. People laugh when we tell them that human feces and little boys peeing against a tree are some of the top animal attractants. It actually isn't a laughing matter. One of the reasons we started carrying trash bags is that Pamela ended up carrying a dirty nappie (baby diaper) for three miles because some family didn't care.
Grandson, Kieran, has spent anywhere from a couple of weeks to over a month with us while we're working as volunteers at Glacier National Park. Our primary job is as campground hosts, which means managing a campground, helping visitors be safe and have a good time while abiding by the rules. I also did some work doing trail patrol to run interference so visitors don't bother the animals and protect delicate sub-alpine and alpine vegetation from human trampling. Kieran quickly became a valuable help accumulating many volunteer hours. By thirteen years old he was the person that thoughtless visitors were glad couldn't give them an educational coupon (what we call citations and tickets). He always enjoyed going up the mountain climbers access to Mount Oberlin because we frequently got caught in the snow. How many Alabama boys can tell his classmates that he spent July in a snow storm? We had been up on Mt Oberlin and were headed back toward the visitor center. We were still a couple of miles up when we saw visitors below. It was a group of twenty people. Several things made the scenario strange but the biggest thing was that we were on a climber's access trail. It isn't even on a park map and, while not closed to the general public, not encouraged. That means that they were being led by someone who knows the park. Suddenly the group left the trail and walked through a sub-alpine meadow, along a stream to look over a steep escarpment at Oberlin Bend several hundred feet below. Kieran was fuming as he hurried toward the place where the group left the trail. From a spot on the side of the mountain above them I called for them to return to the trail. I have never had any problem making myself heard. That's a polite way to say I have a really big mouth. By the time we got the group back on the trail, Kieran was livid. He did, however, let me do the talking. I found out that the group was being led by a paid guide. That person was suppose to have a permit and definitely not be breaking serious rules. The guide became defensive. It had to have been embarrassing being caught breaking the rules, so the guide tried to say they didn't hurt anything. That was all Kieran could handle. He was polite but he proceeded to explain the results of the Glacier trampling study and how this was sub-alpine vegetation which means that it takes up to a hundred years to recover from one of their foot prints. I didn't make the group go back. It was not the visitor's fault. They had paid to be guided and I figured that, having been publicly corrected by a thirteen-year-old boy, that guide was going to go by the book from then on. I was right. Kieran laughed the rest of the way down the mountain and for days thereafter about, as they were proceeding up the trail, hearing the guide admonishing the group to watch their step.
I know that there are people; whether family, friends, acquaintances or others; who get annoyed when I refer to homo sapiens as an invasive species. I know it isn't an easy thing to accept since we can't quit being homo sapiens, but facts do not lie. Invasive species are destructive to their surroundings. We are unbelievably destructive. Invasive species are generally not a problem in the area to which they are indigenous because when on home turf the species has natural controls - environment, predators, etc. - to control them. If we had stayed in northeastern Africa where we were indigenous we probably would be extinct by now but moving into new areas and losing the natural means by which the population and danger of our species was controlled turned us invasive. The only difference between homo sapiens as invasive and other species that become an invasive species because they have been moved, often by humans, to a location where they are not indigenous, is that the other invasive species do not knowingly destroy. An invasive fish does not kill the indigenous species on purpose but as a result of their own efforts to survive. We know that we are destroying other species and the environment and we do not do it to survive. We do it for comfort or pleasure. In general, we really don't care about the world around us unless it is making us richer or more comfortable.
We are an insidious invasive species. We try to deny it, but we know the truth. Now what is needed is to do something about it.
FOOTNOTES:
(i) Hemingway-Boulder Wilderness is a recently designated wilderness area in the Sawtooth National Forest near Sun Valley, ID. We stayed in a campground on forest service road 137. We were alone since it was snowing. We had actually come to this area to avoid heavy rain, wind, etc., that was crossing the path we had planned. We figured we'd rather be out in the snow. This is typical of our nomadic life-style that I love so much.
(ii) Nitsitapiisinni, nick-named Sinni, is the name of our twenty-foot camper trailer in which we live. The name means "our way of life" in the Blackfeet language.
No comments:
Post a Comment