OCR Text |
Show 489. shake one's head in sorrow, as one does when reading a letter he wrote in 1912 which advocated not just trails, but roads, all across the wilds of Yosemite. Muir should have known better. And so should the members of the Club who followed him. Worrying so much about the access which was necessary not just for creating but for saving the Park, they forgot about the mountains themselves. Muir's belief that there were certain places which would remain "natural reserves," his opinion that certain places would remain inviolate because men could not touch them, that is flatly contradicted by a plan Muir approved to blast a trail up Tenaya Canyon. Had he forgotten his Milton? Didn't he remember who invented explosives and why? Had his fellow Club members missed completely what his earlier writings argued? Indeed, the issue of access can scarcely be separated from the Sierra Club's increasing commitment to development and its focus on the National Parks in the first decade of the twentieth century. To render accessible came to mean render comfortable for Stephen Mather. And Mather learned at least some of his attitudes on Sierra Club Outings. It was not a fine distinction to see that Muir's idea of a wilderness experience - as following a pathless way, as following Nature's own highways into her own reserves - that idea is in direct contradiction to the Mather plan for improved access and accommodations. By the mid-1950's the Sierra Club came to oppose the unrestricted building of roads by the Park Service under Wirth's Mission '66, but by then it was already too late. |