Foes Mount Attack : The Making of a Park--Nevada Style

A light mist curls around the crags and cliffs of the south Snake Mountains, bathing one ridge after another in whiteness before drifting on. The aspen form iridescent rivers of orange, lime green and red through the pine-covered canyons. Below, a landscape of low, wide mounds falls gently to an open desert floor of sage and cactus.

The setting would seem to be the stuff that national parks are made of: diverse and unblemished scenery, fresh air and miles of hiking trails. But one man’s splendor is another man’s curse. As the history of this lonely stretch of mountains on the Utah border proves, the making of a national park is a lot more than a beauty contest.

Gearing Up for Battle

For the fourth time in this century, Congress is on the brink of declaring this rugged corner of Nevada the Great Basin National Park. And the effort has rekindled a battle whose intensity rivals the recently successful fight to keep an MX missile launching system out of here.

“I sometimes think our people are in the same position that Afghanistan people were in when the Russians rolled through,” said George Swallow, 76, who has a mining claim on some of the land under consideration for the park and staunchly opposes its creation.

Resistance is ingrained because the park appears to threaten the ways of life for some who live here. Men who have hunted, trapped, ridden horses, run cattle, parked their trailers where they chose for years upon years cannot abide the thought of federal uniforms, federal fences, federal rules.

Economic, Political Roles

Economics and politics have traditionally stalled attempts to add some spectacular sites to today’s select list of 48 national parks, just as they have elevated some less-deserving sites to that special status.

Beyond beauty, a park must represent a “true, accurate, essentially unspoiled example of natural history,” according to National Park Service policy. In addition to those natural attractions, most successful candidates for national park status have also had the support of state and local officials, plus the endorsement of a unified congressional delegation.

Cost is crucial, too, so land not already owned by the federal government is generally off-limits. Historically, some parks have made the list primarily because they had an influential owner willing to donate them. Areas often have single promoters, such as Yosemite’s John Muir, who bring them the designation of national park.

Here in Nevada, the proposed Great Basin National Park meets almost all the tests. The rugged, remote terrain is already designated a “scenic area” inside a national forest. The park is supported by most Nevadans, and the state’s senators and congressmen also want it, although they disagree on the proper size. At least two men, a retired newspaper editor and a geography professor who wrote his doctoral thesis on the site, have crusaded for the park for years.

This time, the park proposal has its best chance ever of success. The U.S. Senate and House have passed separate bills to carve out a park from the Wheeler Peak Scenic Area, and the last official stumbling block appears to be the dispute over the park’s size. Even if Congress ends its current session without an agreement, most residents here and conservationists around the country believe the park is an eventual certainty.

“People are just getting tired of fighting over it,” said Ferrel Hansen, 34, executive vice president of the White Pine Chamber of Commerce.

Unique Ecosystem

Since the 1920s, conservationists and national park officials have promoted this east-central Nevada mountain range as an outstanding example of the Great Basin, a unique ecosystem still unrepresented in the national park system.

The Great Basin, a collection of wide basins and rugged mountain ranges, stretches over 189,000 square miles in an inverted triangle that covers parts of Oregon and Idaho, western Utah, most of Nevada and part of southeastern California. Streams from the mountains either die at the desert floor or enter sinks or lakes, including the Great Salt Lake, with no outlets to the sea. Salt grass and cactus cover the Wild West terrain in the flatlands, and spruce and pine forests adorn the mountains.

For all this natural splendor, ranching and mining interests defeated all previous congressional attempts to create a park here. And the latest renewal of the park proposal turned neighbor against neighbor. “Friends and neighbors were hating each other,” Hansen said in the Chamber of Commerce office in Ely. “You could cut the tension on Main Street with a knife.”

But now the interests that blocked the park in the past have lost much of their clout. Most of the region’s mines are inactive. A mineral company that dominated the economy shut its doors and moved away three years ago. Although cattle and sheep ranchers still command notice, they are fewer in number.

Seek to Draw Tourists

The park’s champions hit a sensitive nerve in this state by complaining that outsiders think of Nevada only as a glitzy Las Vegas in a brown desert or as a nuclear weapons testing site. Business interests hope a national park will draw tourists who will decide to play the slot machines or stay in nearby hotels when they tire of camping.

“Surrounding states are loaded with (national) parks,” said Rep. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who is running for the Senate on the Nov. 4 ballot. “Why doesn’t Nevada have one? We’re as good as California. Our state is as pretty as California. It’s as pretty as Utah.”

Reid said he has scored political points statewide since a 174,000-acre park was included in a wilderness bill that he introduced last fall. State, county and local government organizations lined up behind the park plan, and local newspapers generally supported it. The town of Ely, 65 miles west of the park site but arguably close enough to be a tourist center, is so desperate for jobs for its 4,600 residents that it has lobbied hard not only for the park but also for a prison.

The opposition to the park is centered here in Baker, where many of the 50 residents, living in trailers and cabins just outside the park site, fear that the park would shove them off their ranches and deprive them of their livelihood. The park’s opponents organized themselves into the Free Enterprise Associates, which claims a membership of 200 ranchers, miners and other mountainside dwellers who cringe at the prospect of a government gate and uniformed rangers.

Raffle Off a Gold Nugget

To raise money, they raffled off a gold nugget, 698 pounds of beef and “a chance to harvest a trophy mountain lion” on the proposed park site. Some members began boycotting local businesses whose owners were known to support the park.

“Why should I give my business to someone who is trying to cut my throat?” asked rancher Owen Gonder, 44, who grazes his cattle on what would become parkland.

Fur trapper Bill Ilchik, 37, also makes a living off the park site. He traps bobcats, coyotes and foxes that live around Wheeler Peak, the 13,063-foot mountain that is the region’s centerpiece, and he doubts that his business would benefit from the arrival of park visitors.

“If they saw an animal in the trap on their way to the park, they would interfere,” said Ilchik, drinking a cup of coffee at Baker’s Outlaw Cafe. “They would say that, since the animal might go into the park, I couldn’t catch it. Just the harassment factor would push me off there.”

For generations, Baker’s residents have used the proposed park site to shoot mountain lions, pick pine nuts, chop Christmas trees and graze cows. Many are riled at the notion that they may be charged a fee to go onto the mountain and fear what they call the “do’s and don’ts” of government.

They point to Lehman Caves National Monument, a one-square-mile patch within the proposed park boundaries, as an example of what is wrong with the National Park Service, which is part of the Interior Department. At the monument’s entrance are two signs. One says: “Harvesting Pine Nuts Prohibited.” The other shows a gun with a diagonal stripe through it.

Hands Out Recipes

By contrast, the rest of the park site is now managed by the U.S. Forest Service, which is part of the Agriculture Department. The Forest Service not only permits hunting but hands out recipes describing how to roast or steam the pine nuts.

To give their campaign a professional touch, the Free Enterprise Associates in late January invited a representative of the California-based National Inholders Assn. to town. The organization, a national lobby designed to protect private property within federal lands, warned the local communities that their very liberty was at stake. Slides and films showed armed rangers attaching condemnation placards to private homes and work crews bulldozing and torching dwellings on other national park properties.

The park promoters counterattacked. They invited members of national environmental lobbies to town to reassure the residents.

In Washington, meanwhile, the House in April approved a 174,000-acre park even though Rep. Barbara F. Vucanovich, the Republican who represents the district, sympathized with the opponents. Prospects were unclear in the Republican-controlled Senate: Sen. Chic Hecht (R-Nev.) sided with the opponents but Sen. Paul Laxalt (R-Nev.), who is toying with the idea of running for President, is the dominant force within the state Republican Party, and he wants to leave the state a national park when he retires from office this year.

So the Republicans devised their own version of a park. Its boundaries would be carefully tailored to exclude most of the mining claims and much of the grazing land. And it would cover only a 44,000-acre slice of the mountains, making it far smaller than most national parks; Yosemite, for example, is about 800,000 acres. Laxalt, a close friend of President Reagan, received reluctant Administration support for the 44,000-acre plan.

Last July, seven of the park’s opponents, including two ranchers, packed their bags and flew to Washington. As desert dwellers in cowboy boots and Western suits, they took unkindly to the sticky humidity of a Washington summer. They complained about the high prices. And, when they ascended the steps of the Capitol, they found they were not entirely welcome.

Joe Griggs, 48, who lives at the boundary of the would-be park, told of a meeting with an aide to Sen. Hecht. “I got the distinct impression that he didn’t believe anything we were saying,” Griggs said. “His attitude was kind of long-suffering. He was very happy to have us in his office because we weren’t off causing trouble someplace else. But there wasn’t much to talk about.”

With the help of Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), the group wangled a private meeting with Interior Secretary Donald P. Hodel. “Oh boy, it was something in Hodel’s office,” Griggs said. “It was like an indoor national park.”

The park opponents said they liked Hodel even though he told them he would testify before a Senate committee that week in favor of a 44,000-acre park. “It was pretty obvious that Secretary Hodel himself is not in favor of this park,” Griggs said. “He would rather not see it . . . . The Administration had told him to go along with it.”

Smiles and Frowns

Booked at the same motel as Griggs were some park promoters, who had traveled from Nevada to do their own lobbying. “We were smiling and they were frowning,” park supporter Hansen recalled.

On Sept. 17, the Senate Energy Committee approved a 44,000-acre park along with language to permit grazing within its boundaries and provide about $800,000 to run the park in its first year. The House bill carries a $1-million price tag and leaves the issue of grazing to the discretion of the secretary of the Interior.

At the Outlaw Cafe that evening, the concessions in the Senate bill offered little reassurance. On the evening news, Gonder, one of the ranchers who had gone to Washington to protest the park, appeared sitting on his horse in the park site. He had hauled the animal into the site that day for the filming. The bar customers watched him in silence.

Then the newscast showed Al Hendricks, superintendent of Lehman Caves National Monument, defending the park proposal. Julius Gregson, 65, a retired fur farmer and ranch hand who was seated at the bar, snorted loudly: “Old Al Hendricks had to get his ugly face in there, didn’t he?” Others in the bar snickered.

Since the park proposal’s resurrection, Hendricks has been a favorite target of the anti-park forces. One staunch park opponent accused Hendricks of being “sneaky.” But others defend him, saying the criticism stems from the fact that he is from “back East” and people “back East” play things close to the vest.

‘Life Zones’

On paved roads leading to Wheeler Peak, visitors pass through several “life zones,” from the desert floor to alpine lakes and trout streams. Beneath the peak is a small glacier. Gurgling underground streams are heard but not seen. There is a forest of twisted, ancient bristlecone pines, some of them dead for hundreds of years, others believed to be among the oldest living things on Earth. The Forest Service has marked the trees with plaques. One proclaims: “Born: 100 B.C. Died: 1400 A.D.”

Many of the trails are overgrown and hard to find and some are sprinkled with cow dung. Grass and other vegetation at some picnic sites have been trampled and chewed to nubs. But there is little litter, and a day’s hike can be made in perfect solitude.

About 50,000 visitors came here last year. Park promoters estimate that a national park would bring in 500,000 visitors a year as park goers from California make a loop on their way to Utah parks. But the estimate is viewed around here with wide skepticism, if not ridicule. The nearest main road is Highway 50, recently dubbed by Life magazine the “loneliest road in America.”

Among the skeptics is forest ranger Paul Demeule, 43, who administers the scenic area.

“We encourage people to come now,” he said. “But the minute they see that desert, they turn around. You can’t make them come.”

During the winter, it gets so lonely out here that days pass when no car travels by the Outlaw Cafe on Baker’s main road. Chuck and Reita Berger, who own the cafe, are among the few Baker dwellers who support a park. “We’re a dying town,” lamented Chuck Berger, 54. “That’s all there is to it. Young people all leave and the old people die.”

Have No Illusions

The Bergers have no illusions that a park would bring hordes of money-spending tourists. And they cannot be certain that a compromise over the park’s size will even be reached this year. The Senate approved the park bill Tuesday night. A key House committee agreed Friday to scale back the proposed park to 109,000 acres, as negotiations with the Senate continue.

A spokesman for Reid charged that Hecht is refusing to compromise on the park size because he doesn’t want to give the Democratic senatorial candidate “a feather in his cap.” Hecht himself is not up for reelection until 1988.

But the Bergers have their dreams. This summer, they put a fast-food trailer called “The Whistle Stop” on the isolated road leading to what would be the new park headquarters. By next summer, they hope to be doing a brisk business in ice cream cones and hamburgers.