A rusted cooking pot, an old stove top,
bits of china and pottery. Exploring in the woods around a
backcountry chalet in Montana’s Glacier National Park, we
poked through the remains of garbage–everything from glass chips
to bed springs. We prodded these remnants of the past: Historic
rubbish.
Knowing the National Park Service classifies
these dumpsites as archaeological, we carefully let our findings
be. But our search posed questions: When does garbage become
historic and thereby protected? What separates junk left to rot and
historic treasures in our national parks and wilderness areas?
Certainly, we prize broken bits of pottery left from the
Anasazis of 800 or so years ago in our southwestern sanctuaries,
because their shards provide clues to our ancient cultural history.
And we place cherished recent architectural creations — Mount
Rainier’s Paradise Inn built in 1916; Grand Canyon Lodge,
built in 1927-28; and Glacier’s Going-to-the-Sun Road,
completed in 1932 — on the Register of National Historic
Landmarks.
But in national parks and wilderness areas
where early 20th century ethics allowed garbage to be dumped in a
pile and galvanized phone wires to crisscross the mountains, the
line between historic refuse and just plain trash blurs.
“Something could have been 20 years old when it broke, then got
tossed out,” mused Chris Burke, my fellow dump-site junkie. “With
passing years, it becomes archaeology.”
According to Lon
Johnson, one of Glacier National Park’s architectural and
historical officers, “The rule of thumb is 50 years.” But just
because something is old, he said, doesn’t mean it must be
protected. Significance and integrity are also vital.
But
what about recent discards from the 20th century? In dumpsites such
as those around Granite Park Chalet in Glacier National Park,
garbage lingered until it became history. A wagon wheel from chalet
construction in 1914 rests alongside shattered plates chucked out
in the late 1960s.
In Utah’s Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monument, galvanized wire hangs
between live trees, remnants of a U.S. Forest Service phone line
used along the Mail Trail between Boulder and Escalante.
Discontinued from use in 1955, the wire was never removed. Today,
with few cairns and minimal trail markings, several miles of rusted
wire strung between trees and snaking through sagebrush serve as a
trail finder for hikers braving the challenges of the slickrock
traverse. Now, the Mail Trail with its wire has been nominated to
the National Registry of Historic Places.
Although
letting garbage become history rather than cleaning it up is less
costly, that act now collides with our current Leave No Trace
ethic. Discarded debris is still garbage. And our pristine
wilderness parks are littered with marks of human cultural history,
recent as well as ancient.
While “minimum impact”
concepts developed in the 1970s and ‘80s, Leave No Trace
wilderness ethics did not slide into our national consciousness
until the 1990s. This leaves a chunk of years in limbo, where
wilderness discards can either be cleaned up or left to become
archaeology.
Yet, cleaning up these dumpsites removes a
window into more recent human history. Collections of castoff trash
hide clues to how hikers behaved in the backcountry in the 1940s
and how they interacted with the environment in the ‘60s,
just on the cusp of the “50 year” benchmark.
A friend
from Idaho recently told me of a dilemma in the Frank Church-River
of No Return Wilderness. This summer, trail crew workers assessing
backcountry trail status stumbled across old fire camps from the
1950s and ‘60s, complete with tin can dump sites. Their
quandary? Whether to clean up the sites or leave them, considering
they would reach the magical historic age within a couple years.
Uniquely, national parks and monuments fall in a
jurisdictional quagmire. Our parks mandate protection, making
collection of anything illegal. I broke the law picking up a
corroded horseshoe in Escalante. Historical remnants left in
national parks–including scraps of wire and cattle corrals–are
protected by virtue of the fact that they are in the park. Could it
be that even the ubiquitous plastic water bottles lost along the
trail will see future protection?
This all reminds me
that at first glance our national parks seem to be bastions of
unspoiled wilderness, while in reality, our cultural leavings may
lie just out of sight, five feet off a trail. Perhaps our task is
simply ensuring that our energy bar wrappers and Ziplocs
don’t become future “archaeology” as we walk in the wilds.
Becky Lomax is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado
(hcn.org). She writes in Whitefish,
Montana.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
