High Sierra Comeback
Trail remarkably healthy after warnings, strict controls on camping and hiking

by Carl T. Hall
San Francisco Chronicle, May 28, 2001

When the young John Muir spent his famous first summer in the Sierra Nevada, he took with him 2,000 hungry sheep – "hooved locusts," as he would later call them, destroying all in their path.
And so the pattern was set.

At the top of California, a lovely landscape forever in danger of being loved to death, people nearly always bring trouble.

After the shepherds came the road builders, the pack trains, the loggers, the developers, the hydroelectric projects, the resorts, the nature lovers, the anglers, the backpackers.

They all brought trouble, to varying degrees, including eroded stream banks, trampled meadows, loss of animal habitat, air and water pollution, traffic, litter.

By the end of the 1980s, the mounting list of problems confronting the Sierra Nevada raised alarms that one of the most beautiful mountain ecosystems in the world was in danger of collapse.

Today marks the unofficial start of the 2001 summer season in Muir’s beloved Sierra high country. Mountain passes are freshly cleared, runoff from melting snow fills the streams, and visitors are once again returning to the same glacier-shaped granitic landscapes that captivated him.

But now, for the first time in years, the pattern seems to have changed - and surprisingly, it's changed for the better.

The High Sierra landscape is every bit as lovely as it was in Muir’s day, and nearly all the people who make it up that high, 10,000 feet or more above sea level, go out of their way to leave trouble down below.

To get a first-hand look, two Chronicle reporters spent much of last summer hiking the entire 212-mile John Muir Trail, from Yosemite Valley to the summit of Mt. Whitney, and interviewing Sierra experts, including mountain residents, ecologists, wilderness rangers and historians.

The consensus among the experts matched what could be seen every day along the trail, considered the premier wilderness footpath in the West: The Sierra Nevada high country seems surprisingly healthy.
Some veteran observers say the area is in better shape than it has been in decades.

"Magnificent, unspoiled, terrific, wild," said The Chronicle's Carl Nolte, 67, whose through-hike of the Muir Trail capped 37 years of annual Sierra expeditions. "It’s as if God just finished working on it."

Camping and hiking permits are tightly controlled to reduce human waste problems and overcrowding. Grazing pack stock are kept out of fragile meadows until the land is deemed dry enough to handle the strain.

Thanks to incessant warnings and better backcountry food-handling methods, even problems with the resident black bear, a frequent unwanted dinner guest at Sierra campsites, are starting to diminish: Yosemite reports 50 percent fewer bear incidents last year versus 1998 in the popular tourist areas, and it claims bear behavior in the park "continues to improve dramatically." There are still a lot of problems with bear encounters in the wilderness areas but at least the problems aren't getting worse.

Some biologists argue that reduced fish-stocking and other steps can restore threatened amphibians, at least in some areas.

"We’re finally starting to get a handle on some of these issues," said Roland Knapp, a research biologist who has devoted much of his career to studying the decline of the Sierra's native frogs.

Trash is rarely seen. Nearly all the land is under federal protection. Trails are being cut back, erased in some sections, narrowed or rerouted to avoid damage to sensitive wetlands.

"People are finally learning how to go light on the land," said Rob Hayden, a 20-year veteran backcountry ranger for the National Park Service in Kings Canyon National Park.

He spoke on a warm, sunny day in late summer at a 9000-foot elevation, barely a month before the first snows of autumn blanketed the rugged Le Conte Canyon, Hayden’s territory, along the Middle Fork of the Kings River.
From a dozen to 100 people were passing through daily on the Muir Trail, one of the most scenic mountain backcountry routes in the world.
Stretches of the Muir Trail are among the most heavily traveled trails in the Sierra Nevada; it is disparagingly known to many hikers as the "John Muir Throughway."

There has been a big increase lately in backcountry visitation, particularly in the ranks of long-distance through-hikers attempting the "JMT, " as the Muir Trail is popularly known, and the "PCT," the grueling Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, which includes much of the JMT in its 2,300- mile length.

But the hikers are different now. Typically, the new high-country Sierra visitor represents another breed of outdoor enthusiast, distinguished by environmental awareness, ultralight gear and minimal-impact camping. Some hikers carry as little as 20 pounds in tiny packs, cruising through the alpine granite and over 12,000-foot-high passes in running shoes, like ultra-marathon runners.

Many try to follow in the footsteps of "stealth" hiking guru and PCT guidebook author Ray Jardine, who advocates 20- to 30-mile daily distances and a leave-no-trace camping style. Nearly everyone uses lightweight gas stoves to cook, partly because campfires are banned in higher elevations, where fuel tends to be scarce anyway.

"It's a healthy trend," Hayden said. "People are spread out. I see hundreds of people a year and the place seems to be handling it really well. You just don't see any big messes anymore."

-- -- --
The Muir Trail offers a first-hand look - via 11 steep mountain passes and nearly 50,000 cumulative feet of elevation gain - at the defining element of physical California.

But it’s more than that.

The Sierra of the Muir Trail lends structure to both the physical and historical landscape of California. It shapes our history as much as it does our deserts and daily weather.

A hundred and fifty years ago, the High Sierra were the gateway to the gold fields whose crossing helped to define the spirit of the frontier.
Now, it’s famous as one of the world’s most beautiful mountain regions, a remarkably wild color poster for a state crowded with 33 million people.

It wasn’t completely mapped until the 1890s. The 100-year history of exploration that followed is full of colorful characters including Stanford's only mountain-climbing president and the immortal mountaineer Norman Clyde, a tough-guy schoolteacher reputed to have lugged cast-iron skillets wherever he went, and he went nearly everywhere in the High Sierra.

There are 12,000-foot peaks named for Berkeley professors, and there are rogue bears that can smell a Tootsie Roll a mile away. There are salty-dog rangers and irascible packers, famously stubborn mules, howling coyotes and insect-eating plants, remnants of ancient volcanoes and glaciers, geological mysteries and clues to the origins of the planet.

All of it is presided over by the memory of Muir himself, the original environmentalist and spiritual founder of the modern environmental movement, who loved America's largest and best-looking mountain range as did no one else.

"Every step and jump on these blessed mountains is full of fine lessons," Muir once wrote. "Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever. . . . For my part, I should like to stay here all winter, or all my life, or even all eternity."

Which, in a way, he did. And on the trail named for him, the people keep coming.

It’s another planet compared with the scene at the northern terminus of the Muir Trail, in the heart of Yosemite Valley, where the Park Service now struggles to find an acceptable way to reduce congestion in one of the nation's most popular tourist meccas.

But long-distance Muir Trail hikers quickly leave the valley and the big crowds behind, heading seemingly straight up from Happy Isles, past the clogged side trails to Clouds Rest and Half Dome, through Tuolumne Meadows and out of Yosemite park along the placid Lyell Fork of the Tuolumne.

Here, the omnivorous, clever bears, always hungry, remain the source of much trouble for anyone foolish enough to think they can be easily outwitted. None of the traditional methods of backcountry food storage - hanging food from branches, for example - works anymore in Yosemite or the Lyell Canyon.

But there are now portable food canisters for rent, for $3 a trip, no matter how long the trip takes.

So far, no bear has been able to open the cans, and the veteran camp-plunderers typically don't even try anymore.

While hikers continue to lose their food to bears - bear scat along the Muir Trail often shows the evidence of this human carelessness in the form of undigested candy wrappers and cellophane - one can also see evidence that the strict controls, frequent warnings and availability of lockers and canisters are starting to have some effect.

Near the Sunrise Creek in Yosemite, two bear cubs clambered about as their mother, 20 yards away, kept watch, calmly peeling the bark from a downed tree trunk, licking up the grubs.

It was a bear acting like a bear - a wild animal, eating the food it was meant to eat.

That’s considered a rare sight nowadays, almost as rare as spotting a mountain lion or bighorn sheep, but the Park Service reports more and more such sightings, thanks partly to the efforts of rangers like Keith Andrews, who was "working bear" - rangerspeak for the nightly bear-patrol duty - in Tuolumne Meadows one day.

He paused in his rounds long enough to swab on some mosquito repellent and explain how to set up a proper camp in the backcountry, using canisters and an alarm system of cooking utensils.

"There’s really no excuse for losing your food to a bear," he said.
-- -- --
Muir’s misadventures with a flock of sheep he shepherded through the high country helped transform him into one of history’s most ferocious champions of the notion that beautiful places should be preserved.
That battle is hardly over.

It’s particularly fierce in the middle elevations of the Sierra country, up to about 8,000 feet or so, where there are still roads and small towns.
In the view of many of those trying to carry on the John Muir legacy, these wooded mountain slopes laced with rivers are threatened by encroaching development, clear-cutting and air pollution. Their watersheds are teeming with transplanted fish but nearly devoid of native amphibians.

"Much of the Sierra Nevada ecosystem is really in great disarray," said Barbara Boyle, a senior regional representative of the Sierra Club, ticking off a half-dozen running battles with federal wilderness managers, timber interests, developers and off-road vehicle enthusiasts.

Bighorn sheep are nearly extinct throughout much of the range, and the spotted owl is declining by 7 percent to 10 percent a year in the ancient forests on the west flank. Fast-spreading star thistle and Scotch broom are crowding out native plants.

And yet it’s still possible to get above it all. For many people, that’s the lure of the High Sierra.

Julie Vogel, a costume designer for the movie industry, hiked the Muir Trail alone in 1996, and returned four years later to the family-owned Vermilion Valley Resort at Lake Thomas Edison, one of her favorite resting spots along the way, which this year begins offering fishing trips by helicopter from Fresno.

"It gives you a sense of accomplishment, and also humility," she said. "You realize how nature is so much bigger than you are."

Many people cover the full 212-miles of the John Muir Trail in a single summer through-hike, which takes lots of careful planning to arrange permits and supplies. But you can get a taste of the trail at either end or at access points along the way. For a head start:

-- Pacific Crest Trail Association, www.pcta.org/jmt, has basic details on the JMT, links for permits and food-resupply points.

-- Yosemite National Park, (209) 372-0200 or www.nps.gov/yose/, is at the northern end of the Muir Trail and offers some of the most stunning scenery at the trail’s lower elevations.

-- Sequoia/Kings Canyon National Parks, (559) 565-3341, www.nps.gov/seki at the southern end, includes the highest peaks and some of the most difficult, remote terrain.

-- One of the most hospitable hiker way stations is the Vermilion Valley Resort at Edison Lake (www.edisonlake.com, or 559-259-4000 in season). Other possible destinations on or near the JMT include the Muir Trail Ranch (www. muirtrailranch.com, or (209) 966-3195 in season) and Reds Meadow at Devil's Postpile National Monument (contact the Forest Service's Mammoth Lake Visitor Center, (760) 924-5500, or go to www.r5.fs.fed.us/inyo).

-- Mount Whitney, at the trail’s southern end, is one of the most crowded hiking destinations in the Sierra. A lottery held annually to reserve permits is over for this season, but some dates may be available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Call 760-873-2483 Monday through Friday, 1 to 5 p.m., for open dates and permit information.

Quotas are in effect from May 15 to Oct. 31, including for day use, at Mt. Whitney. You must hike in 11 miles from Whitney Portal, near the town of Lone Pine, to reach the trailhead. Details, map and application forms are on
the Web at www.r5.fs.fed.us/inyo or by calling (760) 873-2408.