Untrammeled

Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Gaza, with conflict unfolding in so many places, first-hand reporting has never mattered more. NPR+ supporters power that work. They make it possible for our journalists to go where news is happening. And supporters get perks for NPR podcasts, things like bonus episodes, archive access, and more. You can sign up at plus.npr.org. My best friend Holly and I have been hiking in the wilderness together for 20 years. We got everything back there. You got my pack everywhere, you got the rain fly, let's go. Where's the trail? I don't know. I don't know. Every summer we go in a backpacking trip somewhere in the west. California's Sierra Nevada, the Olympic mountains in Washington, the Wind River Range in Wyoming. Look at how the rain on the bus is listening in the sunlight. Like the weather. This is so pretty. I love being in wilderness. It's my happy place. Away from roads, the pressures of daily life, the only things to think about are hiking and eating. You need help with those mangoes. I'll take you for your snack. And just getting to be in a beautiful place where humans and our stuff aren't the dominant features. Oh, my man. Official wilderness is an area protected from development set aside by the government to be a place where humans are just visitors. And even though I love visiting these capital W designated wilderness areas, the concept of wilderness itself has always bugged me because it could be seen as erasing the history of indigenous peoples who were forcibly removed from the land so it could be protected. And it can create this idea that humans are separate from nature. In the last 10 years, Holly and I have noticed a lot of changes to wilderness. There was the year it was so smokey from fires, we couldn't see the mountains that were right in front of us. The year it was such a big winter, we couldn't get over mountain passes because of all the snow hanging on into the summer. The next year there was a little snow that the creeks had dried up and we had to carry drinking water for miles. There was the time we got to a view and looking out across the forest, it seemed every third tree was brown instead of green, killed by beetles that are spreading because of drought and a lack of fire. It's not just physical changes, I've seen more people on the trail. I bring my phone now to take pictures, but also I've had cell service in some places miles from a road. Some of the changes I've seen are really good, like how the internet is helping more people learn about wilderness and get outside. But good or bad, the meaning of wilderness is changing. The definition is being tested. If it isn't a place to unplug in a land untouched by humans, and if it never was, what does that mean for these physical places we call wilderness? And what does that mean for us as humans? If there's no place outside our impact, no separation between humans and this thing we call nature. I'm Marissa Ortega-Welch and this is How Wild, a podcast about wilderness, how it's changing, and what that says about us as humans. In the next six episodes, we're going to be hiking through wilderness areas around the west. If you've never been to wilderness, if you're not a hiker, don't worry, I'm a former wilderness guide trained in backcountry first aid, I'm good at reading maps. If you've backpacked a lot, get ready, because we might be unpacking some of the assumptions you've brought with you. That's what I've been doing myself the last few years. So lace up your boots, bring extra water, and don't forget snacks, because the first place we're going is on a hike that I've been warned many times is hard. This is episode one, untrammeled. We're the trail ends, the official trail is down here, and then we start on these zig-zags going up. We're in California Sequoia National Park, and we're headed off trail to a remote rugged corner, which is kind of the whole point. And I can actually pull out a map. This is the person I'm relying on not to get us lost. And then we say your name and your title. Yeah, this is Andrew Bishop. I'm the restoration ecologist at Sequoia and King Scandian National Park. I'm excited. Okay. Yeah, see you here. And nervous. Didn't mention rattlesnots. Oh. We should be aware that it's a lower elevation part of the hike. There's a good potential for rattlesnots. Plus, there's poison oak and these annoying flies that keep getting in our face. The sunglasses are helping for the face flies. Oh, good. Just for the record. I wouldn't be putting up with all this if I wasn't getting to see something today that not a lot of people have seen. It's 2022, and we're heading to board camp, the name of a grove of giant sequoias that burned two years before in the castle fire. Giant sequoias, the biggest trees on earth, only live here in California. And nearly half are found in Sequoia, King's Canyon National Parks. Since 2020, severe fires burned up to a fifth of the world's giant sequoias. Some scientists are worried that we could face a future with no giant sequoias in Sequoia National Park. The National Park wants to replant giant sequoias in the wilderness. Other people say that goes against the very definition of wilderness. The debate is really around the question, what is natural and how much should humans intervene? That's why we're here today. Almost as soon as we leave the trailhead, we're in what's called the John Krebs wilderness. Well, I'm curious if we'll see a wilderness. I'd like to say we're entering the designated wilderness. Yeah, well, let's pause if we do. I love those signs. It's like, nothing says wilderness like a sign. The fact that we're in an area designated as capital W. wilderness is really important. Wilderness areas are the most protected public lands in the US. Maybe you've been to Yosemite Valley. You drove there or took the bus to see Yosemite Falls. Maybe you've just seen pictures. It's beautiful, but the valley isn't technically wilderness. If you headed out on the trail away from the roads within a few miles, you'd enter into a designated wilderness zone. Starting in the 19 teens, as tourists flocked to national parks and forests, roads and buildings were built to accommodate them. Environmentalists got worried that the land that was supposed to be protected was getting developed. So they came up with an idea for setting aside some areas from development, an extra level of protection, as what they called wilderness. A wilderness is an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. And in 1964, the president signed into law the Wilderness Act. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this act an area of undeveloped federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed, so as to preserve its natural conditions. This is a very happy and historic occasion for all who are of the great American outdoors, and that needless to say includes me. More recently, land managers broke down the Wilderness Act into five measurable qualities of wilderness character. Untrammeled, undeveloped, natural, with opportunities for solitude and primitive, unconfined recreation, and other features of value. Today, wilderness managers work hard to make sure they're meeting these standards. They do surveys to make sure people are experiencing enough solitude. They only put in trail signs if absolutely necessary, so as to not take away from the primitive recreation experience. I hear land managers talk a lot about the idea of restraint. They only intervene if absolutely necessary. Generally speaking, ecologists like my guide Andrew can only do restoration work in wilderness if the damage they're trying to restore was directly caused by humans, so like pulling out invasive plants introduced by pack horses, or restoring a meadow that was impacted by an old trail. The Koya National Park is a fascinating example in a growing debate. How much should people intervene to restore wilderness? Because with climate change, every part of the planet is affected by humans, even wilderness. We'll kind of go around the back a little bit and over a ridge that you can't quite see from here, and that's where bored camp is. A couple miles into our hike, Andrew and I stopped to look up the steep canyon where we're headed. You can see burned trees. I see a bunch of, I mean, I think I'm just seeing skeletons of trees up there, right? Yeah, this fire just ripped up that. You're going to imagine that's where we really saw ice of air. fire in the castle fire. The strategy for over the last hundred years has been to put out wildfires in California to protect homes and timber. Right in this valley, fire crews extinguished dozens of lightning fires over the years. But fire is important. Without it, smaller trees and shrubs grow unchecked, like matchsticks waiting to be lit. All that fuel on the ground plus a hotter and drier climate means California's fires now burn hotter, faster and bigger. Like the castle fire, it was started by lightning in August of 2020 and burned for months. In the moment of the fire, it's very hard to know what you're going to find afterwards. This is Kristi Brigham, Chief of Resource Management and Science at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. As the fire kept spreading, she checked on the Sequoia groves, the way you might check on a loved one after an emergency. It's smoking, you don't know what's happening. So we were getting these different reports. I was calling people who had connections and like, has anybody seen this grow over that grove? As a biologist, Kristi knows that giant Sequoia's need fire. The heat from the flames below triggers the cones to open and drop their seeds. And the fire clears the ground of underbrush and creates soft mineral soil, perfect growing conditions. But Kristi could sense that something different might be going on here. And then she got signs confirming her fear, downwind in the town of Three Rivers. Large chunks of Sequoia needles were falling on the ground in Three Rivers. So those were indications when the fire was burning that the fire was destroying a lot of Sequoias. She knew this meant that the fire was burning hot enough to reach the needles of the world's biggest trees. As soon as winter was over, Kristi assembled a crew to hike out to the board camp grove, which was in itself a journey because none of us had been there before. The group climbed over burned down logs and bushwacked through Shaparell to survey the fires effects. It was terrible. It was really, it was like the surface of the moon. There was nothing alive. The fire had in fact reached the seed cones in the tops of the giant Sequoias and killed off most trees entirely. So at that point, we thought we're going to have to come back out here. There may not be Sequoia seedlings here because of the way the fire burned. That's when Kristi and her team started to plan. Board camp wasn't the only Sequoia grove that burned, and because most of the fire occurred in a wilderness area, the team knew they'd have to take special considerations. Now the wilderness act asks land managers to not trample the land unless absolutely necessary. And trample is kind of a beautiful poetic old timey word so people might not know what that means. A trample is a device used to shackle a horse's gate. So to be untrammeled means to be unchackled, unrestrained, free. But what it's been generally interpreted to mean within the wilderness act context is that we're supposed to let nature take its course. Humans aren't supposed to hinder or interfere with natural processes. Another one of the qualities of wilderness character is that the area is to remain natural. To have a place that's allowed to change and evolve and undergo that it's natural evolution. But that is really not what we're seeing with wildfire in California and with these impacts to these Sequoia groves. Kristi and other scientists agree that even though this fire was started by a natural cause lightning, the severity of the fire was a result of human causes. They're driven by 100 years of fire suppression which were poor decisions that we made as managers and made worse by climate change driven hotter drought. That's why scientists feel that they should try and restore the groves by replanting Sequoia trees from seeds from surviving cones. Which sets up this sort of catch 22. Of the burning down of these thousand year old fire resilient trees wasn't natural and the park wants to restore the groves, it might need to do a little bit of trampling. That's after a quick break. Okay, back to the hike I took with Andrew in 2022. So on our way to the board camp grove at a creek and a small grove of living Sequoias, we run into the tree climbers. This is Stine, Christianson. So Stine is the leader of this wonderful outfit in the cone collecting. This is the crew. They've been camping out here for days and respectfully they look like it. Stine's shirt sleeve is ripped and his socks are mismatched. We have the flies about there. The park contracted Stine and his team of tree climbers to spend the summer climbing giants of Sequoias and collecting seed cones from living trees. We can, we can show you what we do. One of the climbers, Justin Marble, is going to harvest some cones from one last tree. He pulls on a climbing harness and attaches himself to a rope that's already been set up. I have a foot ascender and a knee ascender, so it allows me to basically walk up the rope. I give him my extra audio recorder, which he puts in his pants pocket. You want to go? Justin starts pulling himself up the rope and he's moving fast. Pretty soon I can't see him. He disappears into the canopy. Finally to the first branch. I'm working upwards. There he is. He's picking right here. Alright, I'm headed down. Stay clear. Yeah, even going closer. I can show you what I got. If you can break these apart, you can kind of see. There you go. That's what they look like. Oh yeah, there's a little more male flakes. Sequoia trees, despite their world record size, have tiny seeds smaller than oatmeal flakes. For the past few days, Justin, Stine and the rest of the crew have been climbing trees in the board camp grove where I'm headed next. Only about 40 trees survived the fire there, not necessarily enough to sustain a grove. And so the crew climbed them to collect some of their cones. I think we have it right here. Stine opens up a big military canvas backpack. Here's fresh Sequoia cones. Fresh Sequoia cones, yes. Just collected yesterday from board camp. Now we're headed out with them and we'll process these cones, get the seed out and grow the seedlings. And then if everything goes well, we'll get them planted back there. When he says if everything goes well, he means if the park's proposal to replant Sequoia's here undergoes an environmental analysis and the park doesn't get sued. See, their plan has some opponents and it turns out, Stine just met one of them a few days ago. When we got here, we were camped at the Southport campground and there was a fellow there that came over and asked a little bit about us and where we were going and turns out that he was with wilderness watch. René Vos? Yes. Yes. Guess who hiked out with us. OK, I know René Vos because he's been a vocal critic of the park's plan. The night before in my motel room, I was reading an article by him about why the park shouldn't replant Chiant Sequoia's here. And now it turns out he and Stine were hiking together a few days ago. And you know, I struck up with some interesting conversations with these guys and these guys are all die hard environmentalists. So we had something in common. This is René Vos. He's a natural resource attorney and on the board of wilderness watch, a national organization that advocates for wilderness protection. He just happened to come check out the project area a few days ago. René says the replanting work with all the boots on the ground and equipment required will have a huge impact on the groves. Plus the park plans to lower materials using helicopters. So that means cutting down a bunch of trees. But René's main issue with the proposal is he believes planting trees in a wilderness is a violation of the wilderness act. We don't need gardening in a wilderness, we need wilderness to be left alone for its own devices. René says for park managers to go in and restore after this fire, as tragic as the loss of the Sequoia's may be, sets a dangerous precedent of imposing our human beliefs about what this area should naturally look like, rather than letting nature take its course. It could open the door for land managers across the country to be able to intervene in wilderness. But I have to ask René, given climate change, can humans afford not to intervene? Coenational Park may no longer have sequins, and Joshua Tree National Park may no longer have Joshua trees. And that is-- - The way to the National Park is probably not going to have glaciers. One of these days, for example, I mean, we can't create-- we can't intervene on that one, right? (laughs) But, you know, it is-- Yeah, where do we draw the line? I mean, climate change is affecting every ecosystem. We can't go down the line and try to fix the ecosystems that are caused by climate change. The climate is going to continue changing unless we solve the climate crisis. (upbeat music) - It's hard to talk about why I love wilderness without sounding really cheesy. But if you haven't been to a wilderness yourself, maybe you've gotten the chance on a dark night away from any cities to see a clear, starry sky. I don't know about you, but for me, looking at the layers of stars behind stars puts my own life and all of human existence into perspective. I know, cheesy. Being in wilderness for me is like that feeling times infinity, standing on top of a mountain and seeing a valley in each direction that rises up to another mountain, and knowing behind that, there's another valley leading up to another mountain, and another valley, and another mountain, and knowing that there isn't a road or city for miles, that it's just animals and plants and fungi and insects living their lives. Seeing an ancient glacier, making eye contact with a fox as it runs through the forest, watching finches eat seeds on snow after a long winter. It makes me aware of how vast and powerful and old and precarious and fleeting therewith is. It gets me thinking beyond my own individual lifetime and stretches my idea of size and timescale. Plus, it's also damn beautiful. And so I appreciate Renee's argument that wilderness areas should be places that are left alone from human intervention where natural systems can dominate, even after a devastating fire. Because isn't it a sort of hubris to think that humans can know what's best here? Especially when humans are the ones causing the current changes. What is wilderness? Here's St. Christianson, the head of the tree climbing crew again. Historically, when you go on this trail that you're going on to board camp wilderness, there's a trail that was built in 1909. There are cows, grasses that were spread by cows that are not native. There's micro pollution. There's Fresno right down there. And I think wilderness act is fine, but you've got this world that is much more cosmopolitan with its problems. Renee Voss and wilderness watch the biologists and the tree climbers all have the same goal of being good stewards for this place. But the disagreement is about what stewardship should look like. When you see board camp, the fire effect is so extreme with granite exploding and giant trees burned down, it looks like a bomb hit it. It doesn't look like a natural fire. So yeah, I think you'll really see something that nobody has seen. Stine and his crew hike out with the cones they've collected. While Andrew and I continue our hike up the ridge to board camp. Thank you, you're the in touch. We're following an old grass-covered trail that the park no longer maintains. So you can see people have gone that way, but this to me is very clearly a switchback. And now I'm like doubting it and so they said it, but I think. We stop our climb to take in the view down Valley. Oh my gosh, you can see where we came from. Finally, we finish our climb. This is one of my favorite parts of any hike. When you leave behind one view and a new one is revealed. From up here on the ridge line, we get our first look down the other side into the burned board camp grove. As an environmental journalist in California, seeing a burned forest doesn't really shock me anymore. I've been reconditioned to think about most burns as generally a healthy thing for a forest. Fires can help forest regenerate and the land needs more fires, not fewer. But what's striking about this view is not just that every tree has burned, but there are these massive trees that have lost their tops and are completely hollow so you can see down into them. I feel like I'm looking into humongous blackened chimneys, not trees. Those are the burned shells of the oldest giant Sequoias here. Wow, it's, I don't know, striking. Oh, nothing much to add. Just as a sad scene. After the fire, scientists surveyed this grove. They say they didn't find enough living adult trees or seedlings to indicate that the grove will grow back on its own. They predict that without intervention, it will convert into a different habitat. One of shrubs and oak trees instead of Sequoias. And I have a really hard time looking at a tree like that, thousand or more years old and thinking, yes, so what? That's because of what humans did. A year later, another fire called the KNP Complex burned through the parks, killing more Sequoias. In total, six Sequoia groves burned so severely the loss of trees was unprecedented. Here's Sequoia and King's Canyon National Parks Chief of Resource Management, Kristi Bergenm again. These are very challenging times. We've never seen fires like this before. And it has taken a lot of really intense conversations, a lot of field work, a lot of philosophical probing, a lot of conversations with tribal partners about what, what does it mean to be a steward? Wilderness Land Managers and Scientists are starting to think differently about their role as stewards based on a rethinking of the past and what's coming in the future. We're proposing that we made decisions that resulted in incineration of thousand-year-old trees and rather than just let them disappear to plant seedlings and give those trees a chance to continue to adapt and grow and evolve in the face of climate changes that are going to occur in the next 100 to 1000 years. The year after my hike, park staff and the tree climbing crew went back to the board camp with seedlings they grew from the cones they collected. They replanted Sequoias and other conifer trees in the burned down grove. Renee's group, Wilderness Watch, and three other nonprofits sued the park. The litigation is still ongoing, so the park didn't provide new comments. But they did continue to plant. This debate makes my head spin. Is intervening the right thing to do to restore wilderness from climate and fire impacts that humans caused? Or will intervening mean accepting that there are no longer places on the planet free of human impacts? Has that ever really existed, though? Luckily, I know just the person to call with this question. There's no such thing as wilderness people. There isn't. There's no such thing as the wild, not the earth. This is Rosalyn LePierre. She's the professor of environmental history at the University of Illinois in her Banish campaign and a member of the Black Feet Nation and Matisse. And if she sounds a little short, maybe it's because she's used to teaching 18-year-olds or maybe it's because she feels like we should all know this history by now. These lands have always been in use. As settlers moved west in the 1800s, they didn't find pristine wilderness empty of humans. They found hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples who were living on the land. And the US federal government killed or forcibly removed them to create our national parks and forests and other public lands. The places that we set aside and we claim them, we as in the United States of America, claim them as kind of these natural landscapes. They are not untouched, but they're actually the exact opposite. They are places that indigenous people have utilized, changed, altered, etc. for thousands of years. In the Sierra Foot Hills near Borde Camp Grove, the Yokeuts, Western Mono, and other tribes lived on and managed the land, including regularly burning it to encourage certain plants to grow, attract animals and open up habitat. So, yeah, so the folks who are having this argument about, you know, people are doing this, you know, kind of restoration process incorrectly. They don't understand that the restoration process has been going on for 30,000 years. Roslyn would be the first to admit. She's not the only one to point this out. One person in the 90s, a historian named William Cronin, wrote an essay called The Trouble with Wilderness that sort of kick-started this conversation, critiquing the concept of wilderness for erasing the indigenous history of the land and creating this idea that any land could be untouched, pristine. It's an essay I read while I was falling in love with hiking in capital W wilderness areas. It's just surprising to me that I even continue to have conversations like this, because we've been having having this conversation for a very long time. It's the conversation that I'm thinking about when I stand up on the ridge line, looking down at the burned out trunks of these massive ancient trees. And it's a conversation I've had in my head for years as I've hiked in wilderness. Every time I notice a change, more fires, more smoke, more dead trees. Not just the physical changes, but more people on the trail, bringing with us our smartphones. The ideas about wilderness have changed as society has changed. Ideas like natural and solitude and primitive recreation, those are words that mean different things to different people, words whose meanings change over time. A lot of these words are loaded and in tension with each other. What does primitive recreation mean in the era of smartphones? What does natural mean in the era of climate change? And what does wilderness mean given the indigenous history of these lands? If our ideas about wilderness have changed, the little W concept of wilderness has changed. What do we do about these capital W wilderness areas? That's what we're gonna be exploring in this podcast. Over the next six episodes, we're going to examine each of the words associated with wilderness, understand their history, how they're changing, and we're gonna consider other ways for thinking about wilderness. The next episode, we're going to the nation's first wilderness to hear the story of how it and the idea of capital W designated wilderness came to be. (upbeat music) How Wild is created and executive produced by me, Marissa Ortega Welch. It's edited by Lisa Moore House, additional editing and sound design by Gabe Graben, project management by Shrine Avel. It's produced in partnership with KALW public media and distributed by NPR and made possible with support from California humanities, a partner of the NEH. This podcast is produced in Oakland, California on the unseated ancestral homeland of the Alonie. Learn more about the indigenous communities where you live at native-land.ca. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]