Crisis

John Muir National Historic Site

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The view from the cupola of Muir’s father-in-law’s orchard estate upsets me. Between the palm trees, you can see smoke rising from the refineries in Martinez, and to the right across the street is a gas station. Muir never rode in cars, took horse carriages and preferred walking. In the house, there’s a print of the Muir Glacier in Alaska, now the Muir Inlet. He lived just long enough to lose the battle to prevent Hetch Hetchy Dam at Yosemite. Many of the giant sequoia groves at Sequoia have been destroyed by wildfires. And all his work with Teddy Roosevelt and the Sierra Club he helped found to protect millions of acres of wilderness is failing to protect nature from the man made climate crisis.

The battle for conservation will go on endlessly.
It is the universal warfare between right and wrong.

John Muir, 1896

At least he was happy in this house. Muir visited the owner, a Polish botanist who introduced varieties of fruit trees to the valley, and fell in love with his daughter, Louie. They married, settled here and inherited the orchards. They had children and also invited some of Muir’s siblings to join them, allowing John time to write. One of the oldest buildings in the area is the Martinez Adobe in the back of the property, which gave room for the Muir clan to stay and take care of the orchards. Influenced by Emerson, who he met later in life, Thoreau and Marsh, Muir continued traveling and became the most influential conservationist in the world, writing books, articles and letters to protect Yosemite, sequoia groves, glaciers and other natural wonders from human consumption. He would not forgive us for our fossil fuel pollution.

Rocky Mountain National Park

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Rocky was not what I expected. The strict timed entry system limits access to two hour windows and sells out within minutes after 5 pm the day prior, unless you reserve up to two months in advance in releases on the first of each month or unless you book a campground. The headwaters of the Colorado River are lovely, but not a huge source of water for over 40 million people downstream. The wildfires have been obviously devastating, especially in the western side of the park. The unique alpine landscape along the trail ridge road was smooth and barren, with low mats of tiny waxy hairy plants and, although I didn’t see any, only one species of bird, the Ptarmigan, tough enough to live there year round. Amid hail and high winds I failed at photography along the Trail Ridge Road over 12,000’, but the views were desolate, stormy and magnificent. Only after descending down to Upper Beaver Meadows did I manage to photograph a herd of elk and listen to the bull elk bugle.

In the line of cars, I keenly felt how masses of humans put pressure on fragile, limited nature. There were far more elk photographers and cars than elk. Even in unpleasant weather near the end of the season with controlled entry, every parking lot was full, and on the short trails I saw far more hikers than total wildlife. The best experience might be to book a summer campground at Bear Lake and try to hike into the backcountry. Park visitors love wildlife, but we’re overwhelming all the other species and increasingly encroaching on their last refuges. The towns surrounding the park are packed with galleries, gift shops and mini golf. Skiers fly into Colorado resorts and rent gas guzzling SUV’s, while the Congresswoman from western Colorado denies that the climate crisis exists. We are on the wrong path.

Lake Meredith National Recreation Area

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The Canadian River flows from the Colorado/ New Mexico border through Texas and joins the Arkansas River in eastern Oklahoma, but a dam here creates Lake Meredith. I had planned to kayak here next year, but I think I’ve decided against it. Most of the water craft are loud, fast, gas-guzzling powerboats, the lake has shrunk dramatically due to water diversion to cities, and Spring Canyon where the park service once had wildlife paddling tours is now more of a separate small pond.

When Congress sets aside these areas for recreation, there’s some effort made to protect the natural beauty, but it’s mostly done for the benefit of only one species: us. There’s a garden in this NRA for the monarch butterfly migration at the visitor center for the neighboring Alibates Flint Quarries, but it is ridiculously tiny. I can’t see how migrating birds could use the lake with all the motorboats. The lake is more of an artificial water park, rather than a wildlife refuge. On the interstates, I see signs for “wildlife parks”, which are basically zoos. But once animals are locked up in cages and fed, they are no longer wildlife.

I don’t think people understand (or care) that once the real wildlife is gone, it will be gone forever. Our government needs to prioritize saving species, due to the climate crisis, and that requires leadership to make significant changes right now. There should be a cabinet-level biologist directing policies across government to make sure we maximize the chances for species to survive. Water parks and zoos can be built anywhere with recycled water, but natural ecosystems need to be protected, especially along our western rivers.

Capulin Volcano National Monument

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I don’t always plan my schedule well enough. I made it to this park about 30 minutes before closing, but just after they closed the volcano road to the top, which is why I took this photo from near the visitor center. Sometimes parks will let you drive out before sunset on your own after the visitor center closes, but apparently the volcano road is narrow and restricted to hikers for the last couple hours of daylight. I should have checked the hours more carefully, and I should have planned an extra day or two on this leg of my trip. I actually had to postpone two planned stops until next time in order to get back on track. I think volcanoes remind me of devastation more than renewal, so I tend to de-prioritize them when planning. Oh well, sometimes we need to admit our mistakes, so we can do better in the future, if we still have time. There’s a broader lesson in that.

Fort Union National Monument

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Not much remains of the largest Union fort in the west. But there’s plenty of history here. This was a critical supply base to keep the Confederacy from expanding into the southwest. Some of the Navajo who were driven from their homes during the Long Walk were imprisoned here. Here was the largest and most advanced hospital in the west. Soldiers and cavalry guarded both branches of the Santa Fe trail from here, once trading and migration routes for Natives, then for settlers whose wagon ruts can still be seen in the earth, then for the mail, and finally for the railroad, which still bears the name in the logo BNSF.

On the drive out to the site, a pronghorn stood in the road and stared at me, perhaps not frightened by my relatively quiet and zero emission electric car. Although I didn’t get a photo, I got a careful look at it and confirmed its identity with the park volunteer. Turns out they’re not antelope but related to giraffe. Again, everything I learned about the west, where “the antelope play” was wrong. There aren’t any antelope in North America. The pronghorn are the last survivors of human hunting among similar species in North America, due to their speed. Humans are increasingly lethal to all other species, and by changing our climate so quickly, we will make most species on earth extinct within a few decades. I wonder what our ancestors who traveled this trail would say if they could see how quickly we are devastating the planet.

Valles Caldera National Preserve

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Like much of the west, wildfires have burned large areas in and near the preserve. I didn’t see any wildlife, so we’re obviously failing at the “preserve”. As we irreparably damage the environment with climate pollution, the snowpack diminishes and living things die. Many people enjoy seeing national parks that focus on geologic wonders, culture and historic sites. But it is the wildlife that draws me most. Even besides the massive carbon burning that dooms most life on earth, we destroy habitats and hunt species to extinction.

As I drive across the country, I pass through forests I know will burn, I cross rivers and valleys that have been sucked dry, and I know that no matter how unseasonably hot it is, it will only get worse for the rest of my life. Once maybe we could have pretended that we wanted to live in harmony with nature, but now that the climate crisis is upon us and we’re still not doing anything about it, we should at least be honest enough to admit what we’ve done wrong and that collectively we’re too short-sighted, corrupt, selfish, ignorant and stupid to do anything about it in time. What makes me most sad is to listen to people who claim to care about nature, while they drive around in a big rig that is contributing to mass extinctions.

Chaco Culture National Historical Park

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This site, one of my favorites for native ruins, is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There are numerous pueblos located in the park, and the largest one pictured is actually missing a few rooms due to a rockslide from the cliff above. These great houses were several stories tall, including storerooms for trade and many ceremonial kivas. Due to the well preserved nature of the site, it’s easier to get a sense of the scale of human activity a thousand years or so ago. At other more degraded sites, you’re really looking at the small basement room foundations. Here, you can see that some of the rooms above were much larger with windows and wider passages. The road out here is miles of washboard dirt, which helps reduce human impact.

There’s an interesting display at the visitor center showing several of the other great builder civilizations around the world at the time Chaco thrived. For me the comparison that comes to mind is Rapa Nui, or Easter Island. They were also a civilization of great travelers and explorers who build large stone markers and then move on to other locations. Manmade ecological collapse contributed to the rapid population declines at these sites. Chaco no doubt boomed when it improved its agricultural yields by building a vast network of canals, but natural systems have natural limits that can break when pushed too far. Obviously, when the natural limits are pushed too far globally, the problem is that there will be nowhere to move that’s unaffected. And the crisis part of climate change is that we won’t have enough time to respond. For those unable to think more than a year or two into the future, it’s worth looking back over centuries since Chaco’s population collapsed due to over exploitation. We may think of ourselves as advanced, but we’re not (and won’t be) if we can’t avoid the coming climate catastrophe we created.