With four hours of freeways
and winding mountain roads between me and San Francisco, I was
finally hiking slow and easy up the first part of Disaster Creek
Trail in California’s Carson-Iceberg Wilderness.
I’d been waiting all summer for spring to arrive in the
Sierra High Country, in a place called Paradise Valley. I’m a
photographer, so I was loaded with something like 15 pounds of
camera gear in addition to the camping equipment. I planned to
spend a long weekend capturing backlit emerald-green leaves of corn
lily and the royal hues of shooting stars and columbine.
I would lie in wait to capture sublime images of a deer feeding in
the lush mountain grasses, maybe even get lucky enough to
photograph a cinnamon-furred black bear feasting in ecstasy,
butterflies fluttering away in its path.
From the
trailhead to Paradise Valley, it’s just about all uphill, and
the last mile is the steepest. A little struggle was worth it,
though, to leave the hurly-burly of civilization, to get my spirit
recharged in the uncontrived world of nature, in a wilderness
“untrammeled by man,” as it says right there in the Wilderness
Preservation Act of 1964.
I’d almost reached my
destination when my heart sank. There they were in the dirt: the
marks of the beast, the tracks of the most feared hoofed mammal I
could ever have hoped to encounter: The cow.
I looked up
and saw that the steepest part of the trail still lay ahead, and I
considered turning back, knowing my photography plans were a bust.
It’s not that I fear cows as a danger to my life and limbs,
but to a mountain meadow, they are a proverbial whirlwind: Streams
get muddy, their banks slump, and everywhere, cow poop, especially
on the trail. I’d called the local Forest Service district
office to find out where the cattle allotments were located,
intending to avoid them, but the rangers couldn’t really tell
me where the cows were. They could be anywhere.
Having
come this far, I decided to keep going, and soon I heard cow bells.
A little farther on I came upon a clot of the well-fed ungulates,
and with a few choice words and gestures, I sent them scampering
and mooing for their lives.
Fresh cow flops flecked with
flies festooned the forest floor. The corn lilies, shooting stars
and columbine were all pounded flat. Water crossing the trail from
seeps in the mountainside created a vile soup of mud and dung to
walk through. I had reached Paradise Valley.
I pitched my
tent on a hillside above the valley, up behind some gnarled pines
where it was almost flat enough to make a good campsite. The angle
of the slope was a small price to pay to be up out of the cow
flops, and up out of those leave-no-trace cowboy campsites.
These are the campsites strewn with empty five-gallon
buckets of dishwasher detergent and motor oil (yes, dishwasher
detergent and motor oil!), Keystone Light beer cans, food and
coffee tins, a six-foot-long, two-inch-thick length of foam
sleeping pad, and a bright yellow rubber rain slicker dumped next
to a large, blackened fire ring.
Paradise Valley was
being used by people who’d come to a federally protected
wilderness area that wasn’t really a wilderness, to drink
beer that wasn’t really beer, and to appreciate the land as
little more than cattle feed.
I tried to put myself in
their position. Sitting high above the Valley of Bovine Fetor, I
imagined I would be content indeed to own all that I surveyed, the
public be damned. The bucolic, pastoral scene, complete with the
incessant clang of cowbells, was even charming in a way. It
reminded me of merry olde England or something. But this
wasn’t merry olde England. This was the Carson-Iceberg
Wilderness Area in the United States of America, where cows are
king.
I counted 32 cows and calves in the little valley
alone. There were more farther down the canyon along the edge of
the creek. The government doesn’t count a calf as a cow, but
the calves, no longer content with mother’s milk, were eating
their fair share of paradise just like mom. A cow-calf pair are
called an Animal Unit Month, or AUM — a bureaucratic chant
for a sacred cow.
I know we’re not supposed to care
about this trammeling of our most treasured public lands.
It’s a done deal, and in many cases the continuation of
grazing made wilderness politically acceptable. Old news. Cows in
your wilderness? Pack up and go home, son. The land of many uses
doesn’t include what you came for.
John
Wall is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). He lives in San
Francisco, California.
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