Happy New Year! This injured bald eagle, Jade, resides at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, which is also home to the museums of Annie Oakley & Buffalo Bill, Cody Firearms, Draper Natural History, Plains Indian & Whitney Western Art. While showmanship seems a bit silly to me, I love stories of exploration and adventure. My favorite museum was the Plains Indian, but there are enough exhibits to interest folks for days. While not an affiliated park or world heritage site, this is an exceptional place to visit in the American West.
I’m feeling like a caged bird this winter, resting up at home and trying to figure out my next steps. Where can I go next? Great Lakes? Northeast? Florida? Alaska? Looking back, I visited over 1/2 of the US parks in 2022, including these favorites. Last year, I visited another 1/4 of the parks, including more favorites, and finished four regions: DC, Mid-Atlantic, Southwest and Rocky Mountain. Many of the remaining US parks are either difficult, expensive or impossible to reach in my electric car, so expect fewer US park visits this year and more world heritage sites.
Every Monday I plan to post one visit to a world heritage, national park, or similarly important site. Doing so will require me to revisit every region, to go beyond the reach of superchargers, to cross borders and even travel by small boat. On Thursdays, I plan to post more eclectically on zero carbon travel, the climate crisis and related topics.
So, here are my top 3 New Year’s resolutions.
Complete visits to American Concentration Camps
Visit World Heritage Sites in Mexico and Canada
Complete the North Atlantic & Midwest regions
Logistical challenges will undoubtedly upset some of my plans, but every visit is a new adventure. Thanks for reading, wish me luck and I wish you a Happy New Year!
As we prepare to cross into a new year, take a moment to think about the high ground that divides the west from the east. Rivers, agriculture, ports and cities all are shaped and developed by changing elevation across the land. Watersheds support different species and define much of our history. Colonial America is set east of the Appalachians, along rivers like the Savannah, Susquehanna and Hudson that flow into the Atlantic, while the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers flow down the western slopes on their way to the Mississippi and Gulf of Mexico. But from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, all of the Americas are divided by one great line of mountains and high elevations.
In the US, the 3,100 mile Forest Service managed trail starts at the New Mexico border, runs up near the Gila Cliff Dwellings, through El Malpais, cuts up west above Taos into Colorado, winds high through the Rockies, near Camp Hale, reaching its highest point at 14,270 feet on Gray’s Peak and then crosses through Rocky Mountain park (see photo). Here are the headwaters of both the North Platte River that flows east to the Mississippi and the Colorado River that flows west to the Sea of Cortez.
The trail continues north into Wyoming, where it crosses the Pioneer trails, through Yellowstone, where it crosses the Lewis & Clark trail, near the headwaters of both the Snake River which flows west to the Pacific and the Missouri River which flows east to the Mississippi. The mountainous divide continues up into Idaho and Montana, above Big Hole and Grant-Kohrs, connects with the Pacific Northwest trail and crosses through Glacier to Waterton in Canada. In Glacier, the epic trail summits Triple Divide Peak, which marks the hydrological apex of North America, where the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic watersheds meet. Hope you have a happy new year!
General Sherman, the Giant Sequoia above, is the largest living single organism on earth. Over half of the largest trees on earth are in this park and in neighboring Sequoia National Monument, Sequoia National Forest and Kings Canyon. This park is my favorite for giant trees. For millions of years, these magnificent trees thrived here, near the southern end of the Sierra Nevada—‘jagged, snowy’—mountains. The taller, thinner coastal redwoods mainly live closer to the Pacific where cool ocean breezes bring fog, protecting them.
But in a small fraction of one Giant Sequoia’s 3,000 year lifespan, humans have burned so much carbon into the atmosphere that the mountains here no longer hold snow all year, serving the immovable trees an eviction notice. Just in 2020-2021, between 13% and 19% of the world’s Giant Sequoias were burned to death in consecutive huge wildfires here. These trees evolved to survive fire, and, until recently, mature Giant Sequoias survived wildfires. The Climate Crisis has changed that, putting this species at risk of extinction in our lifetimes.
Many of the groves and much park wilderness are currently unreachable, due to post-fire erosion washing out roads, bridges and trails. Finding sections of the park unmarred by burn scars is challenging. The trees here are magnificent, but I recommend visiting Redwood to find solace. While most of our Giant Sequoias still live here for the time being, please don’t burn gas to get here. The last giant forests the loggers failed to destroy with sawmills, we are destroying with our cars and airplanes. By choosing to burn carbon, we are destroying the ecosystem these magnificent trees needed to live naturally for thousands of years. It would be too sad to visit only to say goodbye.
Reports of a two ton boulder of pure copper lying in a river bank on the Keweenaw peninsula of the upper peninsula of Michigan were dismissed as tall tales, until proven by a geologist in 1840. The boulder wound up at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, a huge mining boom rush erupted, and the closest port town was named after the geologist, Houghton. Most of the small mines failed, but eventually a large consolidated firm found and mined the largest pure copper lode in the world.
Technically the copper was “rediscovered” (or stolen) as the Native Americans here had been mining it for at least 7,000 years and traded it as far as Effigy Mounds, Hopewell, and other prehistoric sites around the country—so don’t accept the common misconception that Europeans introduced metal work to this continent. However, European immigrants did expand the mines here to an astounding scale. The deepest part of the Quincy Mine above is over 9,000 feet below ground, which is over 6 times deeper than the Empire State Building is high, with huge rooms left behind after the copper seam was excavated (see photo), and 92 levels mostly flooded after the mine closed in 1945 due to competition from western mines.
The huge equipment includes many rare and once record-breaking pieces of industrial machinery, and the Quincy Mine tour is fascinating and essential to understand miners’ lives. Be sure to get a big Cornish Pasty at Roys in Houghton. There are some museums and a visitor center in Calumet, including a magnificent old theater with lovely murals, but since most of those tours are only in the afternoon, it may be smarter to tour the mine in the morning. There are a couple dozen interesting sites on the Keweenaw peninsula, but for me the most haunting exhibit was the description of the Italian Hall disaster at Christmas in 1913.
While capitalists are allowed to organize freely under the law, labor was not. Thousands of copper miners went on strike, and the mine owners hired ruthless, violent strikebreakers. Someone—an anti-unionist according to eight witness who later testified to Congress—yelled ‘fire’ into a crowded Christmas party on the second floor of the Italian Hall in Calumet. There was no fire, but 59 children and 14 adults died. Woody Guthrie explained what happened below.
“The copper boss’ thugs stuck their heads in the door, One of them yelled and he screamed, “there’s a fire” A lady she hollered, “there’s no such a thing. Keep on with your party, there’s no such thing.”
A few people rushed and it was only a few, “It’s just the thugs and the scabs fooling you, “ A man grabbed his daughter and carried her down, But the thugs held the door and he could not get out.
And then others followed, a hundred or more, But most everybody remained on the floor, The gun thugs they laughed at their murderous joke, While the children were smothered on the stairs by the door.”
John Muir loved the view from Panoramic Point above, as did Stephen Mather, the first national parks director. I visited the park years ago with my family, and the scenery was stunning. But the view was less inspiring when I visited this summer. Smoke from a wildfire shrouds the view of Kings Canyon in the distance. You can hardly see the lake in the photo above. Behind me stand acres of dead trees burned in the huge wildfires of the past few years, and the main road into the heart of Kings Canyon wilderness was still closed this summer due to fire damage. If Muir & Mather visited now, they would be as heartbroken as I.
Experts employed at this California park have long argued influentially in favor of more fires, have implemented prescribed burns in forests across the west, and they chose to let the wildfire above burn itself out. Their dogma blamed past firefighters for causing today’s wildfires. Even though park rangers are not allowed to smoke, leave campfires unattended, burn out shelters in trees, or use fire to hunt, this park’s scientists used to argue that we needed those ‘Native American burn practices’ for forest health, even though these forests evolved without humans. Too many forest rangers and climate change deniers use this illogical nonsense to ignore and dismiss the danger of carbon.
This year 46 million acres of wilderness forests burned in Canada in roadless wilderness areas consistently ignored by firefighters in the past. How could these wildfires have been caused by past ‘fire suppression’? The dogma is wrong. After the unprecedented recent wildfires, park scientists here have belatedly begun to recognize the predominant threat of climate change, far worse than any prior suppression errors.
When Muir & Mather described the area, they did not remark on seeing any large areas of burned trees, made no note about any fires that regularly demolish many thousands or even a million acres every few years, and they did not write about the supposed benefits of Native Americans regularly setting fires while pelt hunting. Instead, they were inspired by the beauty of huge swaths of living forests and pledged to protect them forever. Scheduled fires, tree density limits, species removal, reseeding, and other human intervention are not what Stephen Mather had in mind when he called such places ‘untrammeled wilderness’. Muir would have harsh words against the ~$250 million annual timber sales in the forests he and Teddy Roosevelt protected.
If Muir & Mather could return, they would notice that the whole forested range has changed dramatically, the air and ground are drier, the temperature is unseasonably hot, the rivers and creeks are dry, and that the snow is gone from the mountaintops. They would be dismayed by the decline of once abundant wildlife. Muir, who never rode in cars, preferring horses or hiking, would see the lines of buses, RVs and cars burning gasoline, and he would shout ‘STOP’!
In the future, doubtless people will be horrified to learn that in the face of climate change fueled wildfires, we chose to burn our remaining forests ourselves, releasing even more carbon into the air. It’s like using leeches to cure people, even though they make the patient weaker. Or like destroying the village to save it.
Forest science must face the future, not misrepresent the past. We need national policies to limit carbon pollution, not taxpayer-funded ‘prescribed burns’ that increase carbon pollution. If new conditions require fire breaks or dead trees need to be removed, then why can’t trees be cut down and buried with sand, instead of being burned? If certain types of trees will no longer survive in the future hotter climate, then we shouldn’t be paying people to plant seedlings for more of the same trees in the same places that burned down two years ago. We need to charge visitors in gas-burning vehicles a carbon surcharge to encourage people to switch to electric vehicles (and to mitigate some of the damage they do).
We ended wilderness. Our carbon pollution is trammeling every species on earth. We have precious little time remaining to figure out how to save species before they go extinct forever.
“Without wilderness, we will eventually lose the capacity to understand America. Our drive, our ruggedness, our unquenchable optimism and zeal and elan go back to the challenges of the untrammeled wilderness.”
From 1858 to 1861 John Butterfield operated the fastest and most reliable stagecoach route west via the Oxbow Route that bent from the central Mississippi River deep along the Mexican border and up California to San Francisco, before the Civil War put him out of business. The trip took 25 days (or less) and carried mail, passengers and freight. The current parks along that route are below.
From 1860-1861, express mail was carried by young riders—including a young ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody—who would stop only briefly to switch ponies along the way. That trip took 10 days along the pioneer trail, but the completion of the transcontinental telegraph line later in 1861 put them out of business. Due to the simple nature of the operation, almost all of the original trail and stations are gone, but a few remain. I’ve visited stops and roughly driven the length of the trail by EV, and I recommend the following sites to enthusiasts.
After Yosemite’s magnificent waterfalls, stunning vistas and valleys, Redwood is quieter, with more solitude and an intimate closeness with the trees: less spectacle and more spiritual. This World Heritage Site is a marvelous place to get lost alone among giants, to reminisce as if traversing the great forests of Middle Earth. One of the young hikers strode in full Frodo costume, looking for Ents. As some of the trees living here predate all but the earliest human history, you can’t blame him for getting into the spirit. When Frodo first entered Lothlórien to seek Galadriel’s help, he spent his first night in a treehouse in a giant Mallorn tree. “He felt a delight in the wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself.”
My favorite park for tall trees, the redwood forest is real and huge, so plan on hiking. The photo above is near Trillium Falls on a highly recommended 3 miles hike in the National Park from Elk Meadow near the south end of the park. I also walked from the Prairie Creek visitor center up to Big Tree—a Giant Sequoia—in the Prairie Creek State Park on the Knapp trail returning on the Cathedral trail on the other side of the scenic drive. There are several ways to do the 3 mile loop, as well as plenty of shorter or longer hikes from many trailheads, flat or up onto ridges or down to the coast. There are also tide pools, fresh water lagoons, beaches, mountains, camping, elk (I saw 12) and more. Best of all, it was 30 degrees cooler than inland in July. The coastal redwood forest is lush and beautiful, safe for now.
“Many of these trees were my friends. Creatures I had known from nut or acorn. They had voices of their own.”
The first recorded pioneers to take the trail with wagons were the Whitmans in 1836, who settled in Washington 11 years before the massacre. In 1841, the Whitmans were followed by the Bidwell-Bartleson party, which split midway and settled in both Oregon and in California, after a harrowing journey. In 1843, a thousand pioneers made it to Oregon, finding a safer path through southern Idaho. In 1846, the Donner party got caught in early, heavy snow near Lake Tahoe and engaged in cannibalism before being rescued. That same year Brigham Young led 500 Mormons to Salt Lake City, leaving from Nauvoo, Illinois, two years after a mob broke into jail and killed Joseph Smith.
Gold was discovered near Sacramento in January 1848, and then Mexico ceded the state in February after the Mexican-American War ended. So, there was a flood of migrants to the mountains in California. To be clear, ox-driven wagons were used for gear. Pioneers walked. Many miners did not have wagons. And most Mormons pushed their carts by hand. Cholera and other diseases spread rapidly on the trail. Many of the pioneers were economic migrants or seeking freedom from persecution, and some did not have legal rights to settle where they did. As we celebrate our pioneer heritage, let’s not close the door on today’s migrants.
All three trails were heavily traveled in the 1850s and 1860s, and all passed through Scotts Bluff—see photo above & read how coffee saved lives—and Fort Laramie. The Mormon trail ends at Salt Lake. The Oregon trail goes past Hagerman Fossil Beds in Idaho and on to Fort Vancouver in Washington. The California trail breaks into different routes in Wyoming, with some passing through City of Rocks in Idaho, before the trail joins together to cross central Nevada. And then, the route depends on the destination: some north through Lassen to Whiskeytown, some through Carson City Nevada to Sacramento, and others south near Yosemite to the central valley.
Naturally, the trails only cover the most common routes, and there are pioneer trails all over the west, including some carved into cliffs. But all three main historic trails were used heavily, in both directions, until the railroad was completed in 1869. Our history includes many changes and challenges in transportation. Today, the Climate Crisis demands that we switch to electric vehicles. Compared to the pioneer stories, that should be easy.
In 1859 John Muir built a Sugar Pine cabin some yards from the spot above and lived in the Valley for 2 years. Sugar Pines can live 500 years, so the decades John Muir spent saving this valley are just a fraction of their long lives. Muir saved Yosemite, lost neighboring Hetch Hetchy to a dam, and influenced Teddy Roosevelt who ended up protecting 150 million acres of forests nationally. Now the park is a World Heritage Site, with the Merced Wild & Scenic River running through Yosemite Valley, and it’s my favorite park for waterfalls. But in the near future, the crown jewel of John Muir’s legacy may still be lost forever.
Some species of trees still living here evolved in the Jurassic, long before the Chicxulub asteroid wiped out most dinosaurs and millions of years before humans arrived. Millenia ago, natives started fires for hunting and agriculture, and over a century ago, the timber industry clear cut forests throughout the Sierra Nevadas. But humans now present a threat bigger than any logging or dam. Now the threat is carbon pollution, which dwarfs all others, even logging. Fires burn hotter, more frequently and many times larger, because we have changed our planet’s climate dramatically—and it’s still getting worse. Species here, despite evolving 1000 times earlier than humans, are now threatened with extinction by our vehicle exhaust.
10 years ago, the 250,000+ acre Rim Fire burned over 10% of Yosemite, killing many Sugar Pines and Sequoias that had survived fires for centuries or millennia. At the time, it was the second largest fire in California history. Now it doesn’t even make the top ten. I visited the park with my family before that fire, and the park was undamaged. Now, the park is still beautiful, but it is still scarred badly, with many areas still closed.
Yosemite Falls should not be so glorious in the photo above taken in July. The snow should still be on the mountain tops, melting slowly over many months. Instead, every decade is warmer than the last and the rate of temperature rise in increasing. The Lyell Glacier that Muir saw in Yosemite has lost over 95% of its mass, no longer moves and will be gone in a few years. Man has messed up the climate, and many of the species, including the largest trees, can no longer live here safely. And it’s not the fault of Smoky Bear telling people to put out their campfires, it’s the fault of people who continue to drive gas powered vehicles. And yet the park is full of them, blithely surveying the damage they contributed to and continue to cause. If I were in charge of the park service, I would convert the shuttle buses to electric and ban all fossil fuel vehicles.
The Forest Service managed trail runs through Glacier in Montana, just below the Canadian border to the north end of Lake Roosevelt in Washington, to Lake Ross, through the north part of the North Cascades, past Ebey’s Landing (see photo) near where it connects to Port Townsend by ferry, and through Olympic to the Pacific. I’ve hiked short sections and roughly driven the length of this 1,200 mile, wild, rugged and beautiful trail.
Zero Carbon Travel 