The Final Word on Yosemite

Early afternoon, Wednesday. I expect the saints of Yosemite are down in Los Angeles by now, preparing to make their case that a great treasure has been corrupted by profiteers and trampled by ignorant invaders, that total ruin is but a few more motel units away.

The first in a weeklong series of public hearings on a plan for the park’s immediate future is to begin in a few hours, and it will attract all the important players--the environmental advocates, park service baiters and woolly gadflies who watch over Yosemite as if it belonged to them, and to no one else. I am not among them. I am here, seated beneath a crooked pine tree several thousand feet above the Yosemite Valley floor.

Lined up before me are the great granite statues: El Capitan, Sentinel Rock, Half Dome, Cloud’s Rest, all bathed in a tawny winter light and decorated with slashes of snow and spears of ice. I hear only the whistle of soft wind rushing through branches and crevices. The air is sharp, biting high up in the nose. In the distance, the High Sierra spreads out beneath a sky so blue it suggests space.

I could go on, but to little purpose. Anyone who has witnessed this magical display will not have forgotten it; anyone who has missed it can’t be made to grasp the wonder with prose. Let’s just say it is quite a view.

The politics of Yosemite confuse me. Is it the Japanese or Disney who were out to buy the joint? Is it the pizza parlor that violates nature, or the photo stand? What I do know is that, in the 140 years since we yanked Yosemite away from the natives, there have been continual clashes between those who would leave the place untouched and those who would milk it for money. These struggles between extremists have value, resulting in a middle course that attempts to balance preservation and public consumption, a neat trick.

Back in the 1870s, the protectors fretted about a hustler who operated a private ferry across the Merced River, about kids who hawked tarantula nests to tourists, about the chopping down of sugar pines for lumber. Today, the worried talk is about a National Park Service proposal to replace rustic tent cabins with a few motels and eliminate some of the less natural amusements, like the skating rink and beauty parlor. The self-canonized saints suspect a sellout to the demons of commercialism. One went so far as to call the plan “a death sentence for Yosemite.”

Interestingly, this latest Yosemite fury, like most Yosemite furies, centers on the valley floor, which is akin to framing a debate about the space program around the shape of launch pads. There is one reason to come to Yosemite, and it is not to eat pizza or get a permanent. The valley meadows and river are lovely, but what separates this place from any other pretty woods, what draws the crowds and evokes the magic, is the unmatched splendor of the rocks above.

Down in the valley, winter or summer, you can overload quickly on the ringing of cash registers, the bellyaching of busboys, the belch of buses. Much of the valley is a mess, but a mess easily escaped. It’s simply a matter of gazing upward: Focus on El Capitan or Half Dome, and the surrounding tumult dissolves. Better, take a short drive and a medium hike and find a perch above it all, alone with the rocks and the wind.

I came to this spot on cross-country skis, or at least I tried. For three miles, I lurched, tumbled and skidded along before finally abandoning my Nordic pretensions and removing the skis. I hiked the rest of the way, plunging through the snow with all the grace of a Clydesdale, soaked with sweat and powdered with snow.

“It was worth it, wasn’t it?” the mother in a family of four that beat me here asked when I stumbled at last to the end of the trail.

Yes, it was.

That family is gone now. And I am all alone. Two crows dance in the sky a few feet away, so close, so quiet, I can hear their wings flap. I stare across at the rocks. The rocks stare back at me. I peer over the ledge into the valley and can detect not a trace of human activity. I try to imagine how the testimony will unfold tonight down in Los Angeles, but all the rhetoric seems a glacial age away, irrelevant.

I can’t predict how this latest round will turn out, but I doubt it will matter much over the long haul. To believe that our words and our plans and even our plumbing can alter the wonder of Yosemite in any lasting way takes no small amount of arrogance. Our lease here is short term, a frantic microsecond against millennia of nature’s patient sculpting, and this I will predict: Long after the motels are ground to dust, the roads returned to grass and the saints silenced, the great rocks still will be here, untouched, magical, the last word.