Since I live in Chaffee
County, Colo., home to an even-dozen 14,000-foot peaks, I’m used to
encountering what we call “peak-baggers” — people bent on
climbing all 54 “Fourteeners” in Colorado — often in the
shortest time possible. In recent years, the baggers have become so
numerous that old trails have to be rebuilt or rerouted to handle
foot traffic that was ripping up alpine meadows and tundra.
Recently, a review book arrived in my office, and it
makes me wonder whether our wilderness areas are getting the same
treatment — that is, they are not places to appreciate on
their own merits, but as marks on a checklist.
The book
is Wild Colorado: A Guide to 51 Roadless Recreation Areas
Including the Black Canyon of the Gunnison and the Great Sand
Dunes. Doubtless there are many others like it. This one
delivers what its cover promises, and provides details about
trailheads, relevant maps and more.
But while providing
that information, it raises a bigger question: Why help people go
to the isolated places that are most enjoyable if lots of people
are there at the same time? The argument for Western guidebooks,
whether they concern wilderness, ghost towns or waterfalls, is that
by encouraging people to visit, they create a larger constituency
for preservation. This was made explicit in the introduction to a
guidebook, Waterfalls of Colorado, that came out more than a decade
ago: “The only way Colorado’s precious natural lands, its
wildernesses, its wetlands, will be preserved is if the people in
the places where the money is care enough to pay to preserve them.”
The counter-argument is that without the increased visits inspired
by guidebooks, there’s much less need for protection.
That dilemma appears in some of Wild Colorado’s descriptions of
wilderness areas, which point out that solitude is already hard to
find in most wilderness areas near populated areas. Won’t peace and
quiet become even harder to find if lots of people buy and use this
book?
That is, solitude-seekers might read that a given
locale “is not a high-use area and thus provides good opportunities
for solitude” or that “there are plenty of opportunities for
solitude because this area sees little use.” And thus informed by
the guidebook, they head for those places, thereby destroying the
solitude they sought.
We used to make fun of those pickup
campers or camping trailers whose backs were adorned with decals
from Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon and sundry other national
parks that the drivers had presumably visited, and wanted to boast
about. With this approach to wilderness, there ought to be a
similar market for sew-on embroidered emblems for each wilderness
locale. Put them on vests, jackets, or packs, and hikers could size
each other up immediately to determine relative superiority.
Soon, of course, it wouldn’t be enough just to have
visited each wilderness; someone will claim to have visited all 51
in less than 20 days, and the race would be on to get that down to
under a fortnight, just as there are speed records for the 470-mile
Colorado Trail — 5 days, 14 hours, and 55 minutes — and
climbing every single one of the Fourteeners — 10 days, 20
hours, 26 minutes.
After all, in modern America, what’s
the point of going somewhere unless you can brag on it, and do it
faster than lesser people? The whole notion of engaging our terrain
for its own sake, whether it’s official wilderness or not, starts
to seem as quaint as hand-cranked ice cream, or the Bill of Rights.
Ed Quillen is a contributor to Writers on the
Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia,
Colorado (hcn.org). He is a writer and curmudgeon in Salida,
Colorado.
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