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Chapter Seven: The Right Way into the Wilderness For most of the first four decades of the twentieth century, the Sierra Club encouraged and developed new and more sophisticated techniques for wilderness recreation. In the 1930s Club members began to discuss the right uses for this technology. For instance, David Brower criticized skiers who "admired their apparel, while the peaks went unnoticed . . . Now men ski superbly," he wrote, "but what have they lost?" Ski resorts were, after all, practice slopes for something better. In a similar vein, Ansel Adams warned that "the mountains are more to us than a mere proving ground of strength and alert skill. Rock climbing should be considered a thrilling means to a more important end." This matter of recreational philosophy was rooted in the beliefs of Muir, who distinguished sharply between conquest and true recreation, and the technical and spiritual. The purpose of climbing mountains, Muir had argued, was not simply to become a great athlete, but to "get their good tidings," and to gain insight from the experience. This discussion of recreational philosophy affected the Club's outings program. By the late 1930s the High Trip had grown so large that many members desired smaller, more intimate groups, and they responded enthusiastically to the idea of new types of outings. Under the auspices of Richard Leonard, who became chair of the Outing Committee in 1936, outings were diversified. First came the Burro Trips in 1938, begun by Joel Hildebrand's son, Milton. These permitted a more leisurely experience for families with small children, and allowed participants more complete self-reliance. On Knapsack Trips, begun by David Brower in the same year, participants carried their own food and equipment, were most independent, and were easier on the mountain environment. Two years later Oliver Kehrlein organized Base Camps; participants traveled to one place, where they stayed for two weeks and were cared for by a professional staff, in the High Trip tradition. Yet the High Trip remained the central Club occasion. It was, as Brower remembers, "the best source of the conservation warrior." There were also environmental reasons for the Club to begin its transition away from the large High Trips toward smaller, more diversified outings. During the era of the Colby High Trips it was the general view that nobody else was in the wilderness. As that became less true in the 1930s and after World War II, the Club became concerned that its large groups were disturbing the other visitors to the mountains. Before the war, the National Park Service began to study deterioration of Sierra mountain meadows as a result of the use of pack stock. And in 1947 Richard Leonard coauthored the article "Protecting Mountain Meadows" with Lowell Sumner, an influential Park Service biologist. Although this article pointed out that the Club had been careful with pack stock, and was not "loving the mountains to death," the writing was on the wall. Large parties using many pack animals would increasingly become a problem, even in the spacious backcountry of the Sierra. As a corollary to this concern over the impacts of backcountry recreation, the Club became increasingly concerned with federal management of wildlands. Club Director and professional wilderness packer Norman "Ike" Livermore, Jr., proposed that the Club conduct a wilderness conference to bring together administrators and users of California's wild country. Held in 1949, the conference was attended by about 100 federal and state land managers, outing leaders, and professional outfitters and guides. Its success led to the biennial Wilderness Conferences, which continued for more than two decades and greatly influenced conservation policy. As wilderness recreation expanded in the postwar years, so did the potential for development to mar wildlands to an extent little imagined a few years earlier. One result of this was that many members became concerned that Club purposes had not kept up with changes in the Sierra. To these members, the phrase in the Club's statement of purpose that read "to . . . render accessible the mountain regions" seemed fitting to the horse-and-buggy era in which the High Trips had been started, but inappropriate to a time when engineers were planning roads throughout the mountains and hikers could be encountered in every wildland. Even if only by trail, increased access implied not only crowding in the mountains and deterioration of the wilderness experience, as the Bulletin noted in an article called "Yosemite's Fatal Beauty," but also the potential deterioration of the environment itself. It was at this point that the so-called "Young Turks," such people as David Brower, Richard Leonard, Ansel Adams, Charlotte Mauk, Harold Bradley, and others began to challenge the philosophy of William Colby, who believed that the more visitors to the Sierra, the better. Colby argued that the Club had faithfully followed Muir's ideas both when it advocated new trails and when it participated in the planning of new or improved roads. Now, the Young Turks argued, the emphasis of the Club needed to shift; it was no longer so difficult to reach the backcountry, and technology had eased the burden of wilderness travel. This argument was first raised in opposition to proposed new roads into Kings Canyon National Park and the "improvement" of the Tioga Road in Yosemite National Park. In 1951 the Board of Directors recommended that the Club's statement of purpose be revised from "explore, enjoy and render accessible . . ." to "explore, enjoy and preserve the Sierra Nevada and other scenic resources of the United States." Soon after, this change was approved by the membership. Because conservation, education, and recreation were linked, this change in Club purpose was reflected in the nature of the Club's outings over the next decades. Outings weren't curtailed, but they were controlled. The High Trip continued, yet increased attention was paid to "minimum impact" camping. Going Light--With Backpack or Burro, edited by Brower, was published by the Club in 1951. Individual Club outings grew smaller, more self-reliant, and more varied during the 1950s and 1960s, while the total number of people participating in the outings increased dramatically. As the Club's conservation interests extended beyond California, outings were scheduled to wilderness areas of national importance, such as the North Cascades in Washington, the Sawtooths in Idaho, and the Wind River Range in Wyoming. In a particularly important development, when Dinosaur National Monument was threatened by federal plans to build a dam at Echo Park in the early 1950s, David Brower and Harold Bradley urged the Outing Committee to plan a river trip to Dinosaur's spectacular canyons. With the development of flat-bottomed inflatable rafts, large numbers of people could be transported by a few experienced boatmen. Three one-week trips were scheduled by Outings Chairman Stewart Kimball, each taking 65 people down the Yampa and Green canyons, the heart of the monument. Families with small children went on these expeditions, demonstrating that, with precautions, rafting could be a safe and universal recreational experience. More important, though only 13,000 people visited the monument in 1950, with fewer than 50 rafting the rivers, in 1954 nearly 71,000 visitors appeared and more than 900 floated down the canyons. These river trips took influential people to this endangered wildland, allowing them to see the monument in a way that was not otherwise available, and might never again be possible if Echo Park Dam were built. This was the traditional Club strategy with regard to outings--utilizing new technologies while encouraging appropriate recreational use in a threatened wilderness. Outings had their effect, as Muir had argued, when travelers came back from the wilderness ready to fight for its preservation. David Brower has called this the "place no one knew" strategy. There is nobody to protect a place nobody knows. More outings would be organized for the wild rivers of the Colorado Plateau of Utah, and in the Grand Canyon in the 1960s to build opposition to dams that were planned there. A river-touring section began in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the coming decades saw increased national interest in enjoying and preserving rivers all across the continent. Even in a changing environment, where quotas frequently must be used to limit recreational impacts, and in a Sierra Club with priorities that have come to include protecting clean air, soil, and water as well as wilderness, the original philosophy of outings continues. It has been clearly stated in On The Loose, a book written by young members Terry and Renny Russell, published by the Sierra Club in 1967: Not to escape from but to escape to: not to forget but to remember. We've been taking care of ourselves in places where it really matters. The next step is to take care of the places that really matter. 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