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Show 524. Pate Valley, pictographs on the granite suggested i t s sacred significance. Although white men had seen i t in agricultural terms, i t had f i n a l l y been preserved as the wild Yosemite, a part of the wild half of Yosemite National Park. It was, as Muir would argue, a part of the natural pathway to Tuolumne Meadows, and thus i t offered a human path toward the fountain peaks. The purpose of a Park, Muir thought, was to allow humans to follow such ways toward enlightenment. In t h i s sense it was an important c u l t u r a l resource: "Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man." When men had decided to create National Parks, Muir thought, they had consecrated these places as inviolate temples. Thus men were damning themselves when they dammed Hetch Hetchy. They were denying t h e i r own s p i r i t u a l selves. The whole idea behind Yosemite Park, an idea so long in taking shape, was to hold i n v i o l a t e the whole watersheds of the Merced and Tuolumne Rivers. To violate that precedent was to damage the idea of a National Park as more than a collection of scenic f e a t u r e s . So i t was that the principle of a National Park as an ecological whole was also at stake. Worse, Yosemite had already been "improved." Hetch Hetchy should not suffer the same f a t e . That had been perhaps the most important contribution Muir had made to public policy: the idea that National Parks contain both wild and pastoral ecological systems. But on the deepest l e v e l , the issue was between the |