The Last Empty Places

by Peter Stark

  One option was to designate pristine wild areas on federal lands as national parks, such as Yellowstone or Yosemite. But Leopold had observed firsthand what national-park status brought to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon—glaring electric signs, ticky-tacky hotels, hawkers of tourist geegaws, rotting piles of garbage, and rivulets of raw sewage.

  “To cherish we must see and fondle,”49 he later wrote about the mass tourism encouraged by national parks with their roads and hotels, “and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish.”

  About three months after that wonderful Sunday of trout fishing in the roadless, telephone-poleless solitude of the Gila headwaters, Leopold attended a meeting of foresters in Salt Lake City. It was here he first heard about an oddball young forester in Colorado whom colleagues called the “Beauty Engineer.” His real name was Arthur Carhart—the first landscape architect hired by the U.S. Forest Service. He had recently made the blasphemous proposal that a pristine wild lake, Trapper Lake in Colorado’s White River National Forest, be preserved just as it is, without roads, cottages, or other “improvements.”

  Leopold went out of his way to meet Carhart50 in Colorado, where, in their enthusiastic talk, each inspired the other to the wildlands cause and took their case to Forest Service higher-ups, Carhart arguing for the natural beauty of these pristine areas, and Leopold for their usefulness as recreation. The great boulder that lay in their path was the “wise use” dictum set down by the original head of the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot. (This was the man whom John Muir, twenty years before, had told off in a Seattle hotel lobby over the issue of sheep-grazing on federal lands, with the rebuke, “I don’t want anything more to do with you.”) Under the Pinchot philosophy, the National Forests were being managed for the “highest use” and “wise use,” which meant, first of all, a steady supply of harvested timber and grazing lands.

  Leopold’s first shove at removing that boulder came in a 1921 article in the Journal of Forestry, in which he argued that preservation of their wilderness qualities ranked as the “highest use” for certain pristine national forest lands. Instead of invoking John Muir’s lofty temples of the spirit, Leopold cast his argument for the wilderness in hard, practical, even economic, terms: It provided a certain type of recreation unavailable anywhere else, and in ever-shorter supply, especially since the arrival of the Model T and mass tourism.

  “Sporting magazines are groping toward some logical reconciliation51 between getting back to nature and preserving a little nature to get back to,” he wrote. “Lamentations over this or that favorite vacation ground being ‘spoiled by tourists’ are becoming more and more frequent.”

  He argued for a large expanse of pristine wildland in order to pursue certain types of recreation, like hunting and fishing. Here he laid out his original definition of wilderness: “[A] continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks’ pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.”

  Leopold now proposed the first wilderness area: nearly a million acres among the canyons at the headwaters of the Gila River in New Mexico.

  “It will be much easier and cheaper to preserve, by forethought,” he wrote, “than to create it after it is gone.”

  “STOP LAUGHING, you’re waking me up,” called Skyler sleepily from the next tent.

  It was 6:30 a.m. It was still dark, and the temperature hovering around twenty degrees. Amy and I were lying inside our warm sleeping bags, joking laconically about the difficulty—the glaring lack of immediate reward—of getting out of bed. Awaiting us was an early-morning wade across the frigid river. This would be followed by a hard nine miles of hiking.

  “That’s what we’re trying to do,” I called back to Skyler, as we laughed even harder, “wake you up!”

  We aimed to hike to the Gila Cliff Dwellings this day. This would entail climbing out of the Gila River’s Middle Fork canyon, hiking over a mountain ridge, dropping into the Gila’s West Fork canyon, and following it downstream until we reached the Cliff Dwellings, at the wilderness edge. We’d have to arrive by four p.m., when they officially closed the site for the day. This meant an early start and an all-day, fast pace.

  By seven o’clock I’d managed to drag myself out of the tent. Amy remained inside and stuffed our bags and rolled our pads. I fired up the stove, brewed hot chocolate and tea, and distributed them to the tents, along with a frozen granola bar for everyone to gnaw on. Molly eventually crawled out, began packing her backpack. She picked up one of her nurse’s shoes from where we’d set them near the fire to dry the previous night.

  “Look at this! It’s frozen solid!”

  The fake white leather and foam insole had, spongelike, absorbed so much water during the previous day’s river crossings that the entire shoe had literally frozen to a block of white ice. The shoelaces sprung out rigidly in all directions like pieces of frozen white spaghetti.

  Amy’s shoes and laces were just as frozen, as were Skyler’s. With my Velcro straps and porous fabric, my uppers were slightly more flexible, but the insoles were as stiff as iced oak boards. The heavy, hard nurse’s shoes fascinated Skyler, who started throwing them around like rocks. He hurled one of the nurse’s shoes at a ponderosa tree where he and Molly had propped their walking sticks. The nurse’s shoe hit Molly’s stick, shattering it into multiple pieces.

  “Did you see that!?” he marveled.

  The previous evening around the campfire, Molly had very conscientiously calculated that we needed to leave camp by 8:30 a.m. to make the Cliff Dwellings before 4:00 p.m. This was after she’d figured out that, so far in our hike through the canyon, we’d averaged about 0.75 miles per hour. We left at nine. Just beyond camp, we came to a trail junction and took the branch that led southward out of the canyon. We’d hiked only a hundred yards or so before the trail came to a crossing of the Gila.

  This crossing looked no different from the last fifty-odd crossings we’d already made, except for the fact that, after the frigid night, the water was way, way colder and our river shoes frozen solid.

  Amy and Skyler opted to wade barefoot across the slippery, rounded stones of the bottom.

  “Will someone please give me a piggyback across?” Molly asked sweetly.

  I thought about it for a moment and looked across. I had the better shoes. She wasn’t that heavy, and it wasn’t that far.

  I removed my hiking boots and dry socks, strapped them to my pack, and—as my river socks were frozen solid—jammed my bare feet into my cheap, frozen river shoes. It was excruciating. It felt like standing barefoot on a frozen lake, and then having knobbly, frozen washcloths duct-taped around the upper part of my feet. It was then I realized I’d have to make five crossings of the river—the first one carrying my pack, going back to lug Molly piggyback, and then going back for her pack.

  I plunged in with my pack on, grunting at the cold and effort, scrambled across, dumped my pack, splashed back for Molly.

  “Get on! Get on!” I shouted.

  I sensed the nerves numbing in my feet, so they felt like they were two more frozen stones grinding over the frozen stones of the bottom. I began stumbling.

  She leaped on my back. She had experience as a ballet dancer and knew how to hold herself in a partner’s lift. Her 125 pounds on my back didn’t seem any more burdensome, and felt even more balanced, than my own pack.

  I dumped her on the far bank, scrambled back for her pack, stumbled back across, now tripping over the stones on the bottom. Reaching the dry bank, I threw myself to the ground and ripped off the Chinese ice shoes. There Skyler and Amy and I sat, among the white-frosted bushes on the frosted-grass riverbank in a little patch of sunlight that had finally slipped over the high canyon rim, rubbing our feet as the vapor rose from our wet, white skin into the chill canyon air.

  I hadn’t felt this intensity of physical discomfort for quite a long time. It had
also been quite a while since Amy and I’d had such a good laugh while lazing in bed.

  This, surely, was exactly what Aldo Leopold had in mind when he talked about the recreational benefits of wilderness.

  YOU WONDER IF A DEAL was struck. Leopold’s highest boss, U.S. Forest Service chief William Greeley, wanted Leopold elsewhere—not the Southwest. In particular, he wanted him to move to Madison, Wisconsin, to head the Forest Products Laboratory. Leopold didn’t want to go. He loved the Southwest, and his wife, Estella, was deeply committed to her family and its long history in New Mexico.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d been asked to move. There had been complaints, at least at the beginning, of his work as second-in-command of the southwestern forests—that he was too sure of himself, untactful with his staff, and not grounded enough in management details. His immediate boss, Frank Pooler, head of the Southwest Region, had proposed a transfer of Leopold to the Northern Region. Leopold wouldn’t go.

  “There is an extraordinary amount of ability and originality stored up in this man,” Frank Pooler reported back to headquarters in Washington, D.C. “The FS can hardly afford to lose it. It will be my business to try to draw it out and get it properly applied.”

  Leopold hung on, managing the southwestern forests under Frank Pooler. At the same time, he spent five years observing, detailing, taking minute note of the natural processes—forest fire history, soil erosion, grazing impacts, shifting game populations—at work in these forests. The erosion problem especially puzzled him—what caused it, and caused it so profoundly? And he thought hard about how to save the wilderness qualities that remained.

  When he finally agreed to the Madison job up north, one wonders if some quid pro quo had been reached between Leopold and his Forest Service higher-ups. A mere five days after leaving his southwestern post, in May 1924, his former boss, Frank Pooler, finally approved Leopold’s plan for 755,000 acres to be preserved as a special category, “wilderness,” on the Gila National Forest in the Gila headwater canyons. There hadn’t been anything like it before. This was the nation’s first designated wilderness on Forest Service land.

  Beyond his bureaucratic maneuvering, Leopold stretched intellectually in these early years of the 1920s, making his first attempt at melding his tight scientific observations about the forest with an ethical, and even spiritual, foundation. He read the work of the Russian philosopher, mathematician, and mystic P. D. Ouspensky, a disciple of Gurdjieff, who postulated that the entire earth constituted a single living organism. Wrote Leopold in a 1923 essay, circulated among his colleagues but never published during his lifetime:

  Possibly in our intuitive perceptions, which, may be truer than our science and less impeded by words than our philosophies, we realize the indivisibility of the earth—its soil, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants, and animals, and respond to it collectively not only as a useful servant but as a living being.

  And, in this same probing though unpublished essay titled “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” he touched implicitly on the Old Testament belief that God gave to man dominion over the earth and its creatures. Leopold asked whether, in turn, humans had a moral obligation to care for the land.

  If there be, indeed, a special nobility inherent in the human race—a special cosmic value, distinctive from and superior to all other life—by what token shall it be manifest? By a society decently respectful of its own and all other life, capable of inhabiting the earth without defiling it? Or by a society like that of John Burroughs’ potato bug, which exterminated the potato, and thereby exterminated itself?

  It was fortunate that, by sheer happenstance, much of Leopold’s work occurred in the Southwest—one of North America’s baldest landscapes. Drought never lay far away. Soils were fragile and vegetation cover thin. Unlike wetter climates with richer soils, say, around Walden Pond, it took little to disrupt this landscape, and once disrupted, a long time to repair it. It was very hard to ignore the damage when an entire rich bottomland washed away into an expanse of stony rubble, such as happened along the Blue River.

  The question plagued Leopold. Why were these landscapes eroding? Exactly what caused it all of a sudden and so dramatically?

  His Forest Service colleagues largely dismissed erosion as the natural process of mountains wearing down. But Leopold began to suspect a far more complex interaction, one that turned on naturally occurring forest fires and grass fires—or lack of them—and overgrazing by cattle, and vegetation changes.

  Leopold targeted the erosion at Sapillo Creek in the Gila Forest, about twenty miles south of where we started our hike.

  “A century of fires without grazing did not spoil the Sapello, but a decade of grazing without fires ruined it.”

  His theory, in simple terms, ran like this. Leopold studied old tree trunks and saw char marks in the still living trees from many decades ago. He realized that, over the centuries, fires—set by either lightning or native hunters—regularly burned these southwestern grasslands and forestlands, clearing out the forests but letting many trees survive. When European settlers moved cattle onto the grasslands, and the Forest Service took over management of the forests around 1900, they stamped out all the fires they could, believing that fires destroyed valuable resources—timber and grass. In fact, Leopold theorized, fires had done just the opposite. They had exerted a beneficial effect on the landscape by keeping them clear of dense brush. But now brush had taken over. In the heavy downpours it couldn’t hold soil as well as grass. The invasion of brush, combined with overgrazing of grass by the settlers’ cattle, triggered the massive erosion trenches and swept-away bottomlands that he’d witnessed. Likewise, the lack of regular, low-intensity fires allowed dense thickets of yellow pine to spring up on mountainsides that before had supported trees more widely spaced. When these pine thickets finally did catch fire, they roared into major conflagrations that couldn’t be stopped.

  The erosion problem in the Southwest represented to Aldo Leopold, in some ways, what the Galápagos Islands did to Darwin—a baseline for an understanding of the natural world. He’d observed it closely over years. He understood its complexity. It allowed him to draw conclusions about the larger natural world at a pivotal moment when scientists were reconceptualizing the larger natural world.

  The term ecology had been coined back in 1860 by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, from oikos—Greek for “home”—and logos, or knowledge, referring to the interrelationship between an animal species and its home range, or “home knowledge.” In the 1920s the study of these relationships blossomed. In 1920 a German freshwater biologist, August Thienemann, realized that, in lakes, food energy passes up through various “levels” of plant species, then up to levels of animal species.

  A year later, in 1921, a young Oxford undergraduate in zoology, Charles Elton, tagged along on Julian Huxley’s expedition to the Arctic archipelago of Spitsbergen and studied its animal populations over the next several years. As the Southwest did for Leopold, the baldness of the Arctic landscape threw into dramatic relief the interaction among species, their environment, and their food sources. In 1927, at the age of only twenty-seven, Elton published his landmark work, Animal Ecology, in which he developed the concept of “food chains,” “ecological niches,” and “pyramids of numbers.” Three years later he postulated, provocatively, that all natural systems, instead of being static and fixed, were dynamic and ever-changing.

  “The balance of nature,” Elton wrote, “does not exist and perhaps never has existed.”

  You might compare this new perspective brought by Elton and others to looking at a painting—a Rembrandt, say. Instead of seeing only the power and beauty of the Rembrandt itself, you understand why Rembrandt chose that particular subject, how his style was shaped by several centuries of Western painters before him and by all that was going on around him in the Amsterdam of 1650—his patrons, his religion, his society, his health, his bankruptcy—and how his painting in turn shaped ot
her painters, and even influenced the social climate of his time.

  In 1935, another British scientist, Arthur Tansley, put a name to any given sphere where all this mingling occurred—this interrelationship of various species of plants and animals, soil and climate, food energy and ecological niches.

  He called it an “ecosystem.” Today, the study of ecosystems is what we know as “ecology.”

  Aldo Leopold absorbed these ideas introduced by Elton (whom he befriended in 1931 at a biological conference) and Tansley and other ecologists. The difference was, Leopold continually struggled to reach beyond ecological science’s moral neutrality. What Aldo Leopold sought was an ethical dimension to ecology. He strived for some kind of moral guidance to direct the human relationship with the land.

  AFTER THE FRIGID, early-morning river crossing, we put on our dry socks and hiking boots in the little patch of frosty sunlight, hefted our backpacks, and started up from the canyon bottom to its rim—1,140 vertical feet overhead. The trail switchbacked up through a notch in the canyon wall, up steep slopes of open ponderosa pines. I noticed that, sometime in the last few years, a forest fire had rushed up these steep slopes in a V starting from the Meadows below. It had cleared out the underbrush, opened the forest, charred to black the thick bark of the ponderosas, which are adapted to withstand these kinds of low-intensity fires. I wondered what had ignited it. A runaway campfire? A “prescribed” burning? Lightning? It looked healthier than the cluttered, overly thick unburned forest.

  “My feet are finally warm,” Amy said after half a mile of climbing through the shady forest.

  We stripped off a layer of clothing, hats, and gloves, and kept going.

  After an hour, the river looked very small and winding, and the Meadows a small open patch way down among the maze of cliffs. In an hour and a quarter we topped out, on a broad ridgetop in sun-and-shade glades of piñon pine and juniper. We dropped our packs, wolfed down trail mix, and sucked water from our bottles. After five minutes’ rest, we kept going. We were determined to reach the Gila Cliff Dwellings before they closed.