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Show 495. The comfort was s i g n i f i c a n t , and required that the Club pack the participants into the Base Camp a t Tuolumne, that it provide a "commissary department" to prepare food for the campers, and Colby pointed out t h a t a group outing would also offer considerable monetary savings to p a r t i c i p a n t s . But the real virtue of the communal outing was in i t s p o s s i b i l i ty as an educational t o o l . The n i n e t y - s i x people who came to Tuolumne Meadows t h a t summer l i s t e n e d to William Dudley's talks on forestry, C. Hart Merriam's lectures on birds and animals, Theodore H i t t l e ' s h i s t o r y of Yosemite, and Muir himself spoke on a wide range of subjects. Colby prepared the members for t h i s kind of education by recommending that they read beforehand, LeConte' s Rambles and Muir's Mountains of California. When I f i r s t arrived in Tuolumne Meadows, over fifty years l a t e r , the r e c r e a t i o n a l atmosphere was very similar. During my two-week stay in a Park Service campground, I listened to campfire t a l k s by men l i k e Carl Sharsmith and Allan Shields. I followed Park N a t u r a l i s t s , as they were then called, on hikes up Mount Dana and Mount Conness, and had I been a l i t t l e older I could have followed Carl Sharsmith to the summit of Mount L y e l l . Like the Sierra Club's Outings, the Yosemite N a t u r a l i s t s ' Program led large numbers of campers on these hikes, and l i k e the p a r t i c i p a n t s of the Sierra Club Outings, the people in the Tuolumne Meadows campground in the nineteen f i f t i e s f e l t a sense of community. We were a ll being educated in the "proper kind of i n t e r e s t " in the Parks. |