Celebrating completing the Silver State!
Great Basin NP, Lake Mead NRA and Tule Springs Fossil Beds NM are above. 1/2 of Lake Mead NRA is in Arizona, but I spent more time kayaking on the Nevada side and hiking near Spirit Mountain. A small piece of Death Valley NP extends into Nevada, and sections of the California, Old Spanish and Pony Express NHTs cross the state. Great Basin NHA extends into Utah around Topaz. Enjoy!
Daniel Romero marched with César Chávez back in the day, so when a nationwide protest against recent cuts to the national parks & US forest service popped up today at noon, of course, he came wearing his ‘¡Si, Se Puede!’ T-shirt. He knows from experience that predicting turnout is a fool’s game, but instead of the expected 3, there were around 20, even at a very small park in a rural area best known for a loop of track for trains to change elevation to traverse the Tehachapi pass. Another was Fernando Chávez, a grandson of César, who discussed the need for solidarity, coalition building, and activism at the base of the old oak tree next to Martyr’s Garden, where his grandparents lie at rest. “We’ve been protesting forever”, said Romero. “Even though we are sometimes excluded, we have always tried to support each others’ causes”, said Chávez, recounting how spontaneous protests recently broke out after a particularly brutal local raid by ICE. Romero listed the unions that marched with them, describing diverse families and even weddings during the boycott and strike.
This was an early park visit for me, as it’s local. Unlike my quiet visit 3 years ago, folks here today were sad, angry and surprised by the chaotic decisions to cut 1,000 NPS staff and 10% of the USFS. One employee here had just transferred from New Mexico when his job was axed by Elon Musk. Many of those affected were young, promising staffers, full of optimism. Supposedly he is scrambling to get the transfer reversed to stay employed. While there may be some cost savings, in the long run, the work these folks do protects and adds a lot of value to our country, so cutting when hiring is needed is counterproductive. I felt the need to apologize for still driving a Tesla, but folks understood, knowing others who are now trying to unload theirs. I’m keeping mine, as the climate crisis is going to get worse, despite efforts to delete the word climate from government documents.
I know Saturdays are supposed to alternate state photos, so I’ll add another and a video below. But I thought you might like this real time update from a very appropriate park for a protest, with people whose lives were defined by the proud history of protesting in America. Next week will return with another western state. Thanks for reading!
National Heritage Areas are run by local communities, with technical support and limited federal funding, so they’re not official park units. They’re certainly worth visiting, and they include some of my favorite places in the USA. Each has its own unique character, some preserve history, some culture and some nature, and together they showcase the tapestry of our country. I’ve visited the four NHAs in the Western Region by EV, so here’s a quick summary for you to explore.
The Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area in Arizona is part of the Gadsden Purchase of 1854. The NHA includes Saguaro National Park, Tumacácori National Historical Park—a small, but exceptionally beautiful place above—, San Xavier del Bac Mission, the Tucson Presidio Museum, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, Native American tribal lands, and many other parks, preserves, ranches and gardens. The Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail begins in the Santa Cruz Valley south of Tucson, at the Nogales Mexico border crossing.
Yuma Crossing National Heritage Area, in Arizona just across the Colorado River from California, is only a few blocks from Mexico, and it still carries some of that old frontier atmosphere. Yuma Territorial Prison, a state park, is a good place to start, and it figures in many of the old western tales of Tombstone and Hollywood. Be sure to visit the riverside parks, where 400 acres of wetlands have been restored, turning back time to before the Spanish came up river almost 500 years ago. The crossing is also part of the Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail.
And the same trail ends up in San Francisco, where I used to live and work. One of my favorite escapes from that city was to explore the Delta, a huge area of farmlands, levees, and artificial islands upriver from the Bay. Built by Chinese laborers—later denied residency or citizenship—, the agricultural and boating area is sparsely populated, compared to the large cities nearby. My favorite town is Locke, which still has many old buildings used by Chinese laborers and merchants from over 100 years ago. It was one of the last towns of its kind, fortunately avoiding many of the “mysterious” fires that burned out other Chinese immigrant communities. While visiting John Muir’s home and Port Chicago, I took the opportunity to get lost there again, visiting Isleton and small harbors known only to locals. Fortunately, the entire area is part of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta National Heritage Area, including more civilized spots in Walnut Grove and Benicia California.
The last NHA in the Western Region is Great Basin National Heritage Area. While most folks think of Great Basin National Park, the Great Basin Desert is actually a huge geologic area, including a piece of southeastern Oregon, bits of California, the western half of Utah and almost all of Nevada. (Utah is part of the Rocky Mountain Region, but as most of the NHA is in Nevada, I count it here). So, anyone who’s followed the Pony Express or driven America’s loneliest road, Highway 50, knows the area. To call it sparsely populated is an understatement: one of the most populous places around is Eureka, Nevada, population 414. There is a remarkably undisturbed drugstore museum in McGill, and there’s a hot spring in Duckwater (pop 228). Topaz is in the Basin, as is part of the epic Pahvant-Valley Heritage Trail, one of the Mormon pioneer trails beyond the capability of my electric car. One of the trail stops is Hole-in-the-Rock in Glen Canyon, across from Rainbow Bridge. Good place to visit if you can get there and like solitude.
While not a national park site, I just had to stop to see the legendary Gunfight at OK Corral. The shootout was so quick I only got this photo of the aftermath. As mass shootings go now, I doubt this one from 1881 would make the news today. Now mass shooters kill more in one hour than any old west gunslinger did in their lives.
This Arizona town—named after a silver claim wrongly thought hopeless—is not far from a Butterfield Stage stop, and it has restored horse-drawn stagecoaches that take folks around the historic center of town. Boot Hill cemetery is another famous site here, but there are loads of historic saloons, re-enactments, museums, shops and more.
The “world’s largest rose tree” is in a courtyard near the courthouse, and it’s amazing how large plants can get if we let them grow. Nellie Cashman ran a string of successful businesses here before moving on to the Klondike. Three Mexican Revolutionaries were convicted in the old county courthouse here, along with the Bisbee Massacre gang. And Geronimo had his famous photo taken by the photographer who had a studio above.
West of town is the San Pedro Riparian conservation area, which protects nature and both Native American and Spanish sites. Further west on the other side of Apache Peak is Las Cienegas—the marshes—conservation area, which is a beautiful protected grassy lowland in a historic ranching area. Since many tourists fly around burning carbon these days, they miss these distinct and fascinating features of the old west.
Here are my visits to all parks in Arizona.
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.
Here are my visits to all parks in California.
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. Both the North Fork of the Kern and two forks of the Kings River are designated wild and scenic here.
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.
Harvey Broome, founder of the Wilderness Society
Our drive, our ruggedness, our unquenchable optimism and zeal and elan
go back to the challenges of the untrammeled wilderness.”
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 Coastal Redwood—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.
—Treebeard
Creatures I had known from nut or acorn.
They had voices of their own.”
Here are my visits to all parks in California.
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 River running through Yosemite Valley and the headwaters of the Tuolumne River running through the meadows designated wild & scenic; 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.
Here are my visits to all parks in California.
This boiling mud pot in the Sulphur Works area is so close to the road that the shoulder has collapsed. There’s a parking area a minute walk away and the views include many other steamy volcanic features, rough landscapes broken by eruptions and snow in July. The trail to the larger Bumpass Hell area was blocked by snow from the parking lot. I didn’t care, since I’ve been there before with my kids, before the fire. We stayed at Drakesbad Guest Ranch with their amazing natural hot spring pool where we swam and floated under the Milky Way, one of my fondest memories of any national park.
In 2021, the 1 million acre Dixie Fire severely burned 70% of this Northern California park, mostly the wilderness area. With Mount Lassen over 10,000 feet, many of the trees in the park grow extremely slowly, so the fire damage will be visible for up to a century, assuming we don’t have another fire before the forest can recover. Like much of the park, Drakesbad Ranch is still closed, although most buildings were saved. The devastation is terrible to see.
The park newsletter does not mention the Climate Crisis in a complete denial of reality, but it did congratulate itself for ‘30 years of fuel reduction that decreased burn severity’. We now live in the Pyrocene Epoch, the Age of Fire, where man has created conditions for multiple million acre fires each year, when the most beautiful places can be destroyed in a few hours. Once we imagined our parks would be there for future generations to enjoy. Now we wonder if they will still be there for our next vacation.
Here are my visits to all parks in California.
The 220’ three-tiered Whiskeytown Falls were a local secret known only to loggers and a few others until rediscovered by the park service staff in 2004. The ‘strenuous’ trail opened in 2006, and, since the shaded trail is in the 3% of the park not completely burned by the 230,000 acre Carr Fire in 2018, I decided to hike it earlier this summer, rather than broil on the water in my kayak.
But then these folks from Cal-Fire Bully Choop & Sugar Pine CC #9 passed me on my way up. Rather than complain, I gave them a bit of applause and thanked them for their heroism. They were taking turns cooling off in the 50° water. Of course, it’s not fair to expect these young people to risk their lives to protect our forests and property from the Climate Crisis we are all guilty of making worse, so they deserve our thanks all the more.
Shasta, Trinity and Whiskeytown Lakes are all National Recreation Areas in the Shasta Trinity National Forest, with the first two managed by the US Forest Service and the latter by the National Park Service. Shasta is the largest, and you may have driven over it on I-5 in northern California. Whiskeytown is the smallest, but all three suffer from lower snowpacks and longer droughts due to climate change.
At the Whiskeytown visitor center, I noticed that they are using an underwater curtain to block the warm surface water from continuing downstream from the dam. This innovation helps keep the water temperature low enough for Chinook salmon eggs and fry in the Sacramento River. I’m not sure how long it will work given the Climate Crisis, but it’s the least we can do after damming Clear Creek. Maybe we could ban gas-powered boats too?
I was disappointed to read the park newsletter with three long articles about the fire and zero mention of the Climate Crisis. I expect my tax dollars to be used more wisely. Denying the crisis only gives us less time to act.
Here are my visits to all parks in California.