| "Two. I've seen 30
to a hundred cows on sections nearby. But the BLM picks on me because that's
the only section I lease from them; most of my cattle are on private
land. "I was here 20 years before there was a BLM," Ausmuss said. "My family homesteaded in this area when it was thought of as wasteland. Now I'm supposed to move out for some idiots from the city? It used to be that only people really interested in this area would come here, but the BLM encouraged more of them with campgrounds and brochures. They destroyed a beautiful, pristine area when they built those campgrounds. They were burning trees for a week-there was a pall over the whole valley. They destroyed a windmill at Hole-in-the-Wall by putting the shivs on wrong, and that well at Mid Hills is broken two thirds of the time. I've had to provide water to passersby, hauling it 2,000 feet from Kelso. So I thought I might get some cooperation from the BLM if I put a pipeline in-but instead they wouldn't let me dig on my own land. "The Sierra Clubbers are sincere, but they live in a fantasy world," Ausmuss continued. "They're against every kind of progress and electrical development-dams, nuclear, wind, coal, solar. They're against beef production because they get their steaks from Safeway. I won't say grazing hasn't done any damage, but if it's as bad as the Sierra Club says it is, how do they find this such a pristine environment?" Before I'd begun this desert trip, I had talked to Robert Stebbins, a noted 73-year-old biologist (and S.7 advocate) from the University of California at Berkeley. He explained that because no biotic records existed before white settlement, nobody can really say how grazing has affected the desert. Stebbins's guess, however, is that cattle have replaced populations of pronghorn antelope, bighorn sheep, and other mammals. "When the vegetation goes, you lose the animals, too," Stebbins said. "The original system was like a finely tuned watch: the altered system is far less interesting. The East Mojave is a big area that's still relatively undisturbed-and we need some large areas that are inviolate. Little, tiny reserves probably aren't viable over the long haul." The East Mojave does contain the best grazing land in the California desert, but the entire 25-million-acre California Desert Conservation Area produces only 0.3 percent of the states beef. It would indeed be bad luck for Ausmuss were his ranch bought out by the Park Service, but in social terms it would be a relatively small price to pay for enhanced ecological diversity. I asked Ausmuss if he didn't think such a sacrifice might come under the heading of "progress." He summed up the history of Western civilization when he answered that, to him, progress meant commercial production. "I'm a conservationist, too." Ausmuss said. "I've lived here my whole life. I don't |
want to see the
desert destroyed. I want it the way it's always been." Or, more accurately, the way it's been for the last 61 years. My last stop in the desert was Death Valley. As I reentered that stupendous basin, I marveled anew at the tortured landscape, the polychromatic rock. At the visitors' center I met the park superintendent, a friendly, portly, soft-spoken man named Ed Rothfuss. He told me that the primary effect of changing the valley from a national monument to a national park would be an increase in work for his sign-maker -few other operations would alter. The history of monuments that have become parks portends an initial jump in visitation, followed by a return to the trend that existed before the change. How national-park status would affect visitation at a little-known area such as the East Mojave is unclear, but Rothfuss said he thought that the area "could absorb a lot of people with no impact whatsoever." The trick would be a tough management policy that limits the number of visitors at popular sites. Mojave National Park would be about the same size as Death Valley, requiring $2.5 million per year in federal money. Rothfuss showed me figures indicating that desert parks tend to get short shrift from the Park Service. Death Valley, for example, receives $1.26 per acre, whereas Yosemite gets $14.08 and Shenandoah $25.30. Making Saline Valley part of a national park "would be one of the most controversial issues facing the Park Service," said Rothfuss. "Nudity isn't consistent with our policies, but we might be able to find a compromise. It'd be easy to say we'll just go in and clean it out, but I wouldn't want to say that. It's really up to the public. How do they want the area managed? The BLM's mandate is to use the resource: ours is to preserve it as a living museum-a vignette of primitive America." Of course, the gap between this mission and reality is evident in our parks, where overcrowding, excessive development, and alteration of ecosystems are well-known. Since its inception, the Park Service has been bothered by its dual mandate: to "conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wildlife therein" and "to provide for the public enjoyment of the same." The goals of the Park Service's two constituencies, recreationists and environmentalists, often fail to overlap: and now, as visitation to the country's 341 national parks and monuments approaches 300 million people per year, most Park Service money goes toward visitor safety and protection. In 1987, only 6 percent of the Park Service budget went to protect natural resources. On the other hand, Death Valley's $1.26 is three times what the BLM spends on each acre of the California desert; and under the Park Service, shenanigans such as those at the Ostrenger and Rattlesnake mines wouldn't be permitted. Although I personally prefer |
the wide-open
feeling of BLM land to the asphalt paths of Yosemite. I don't like a lot of
what goes on there. Both the BLM and the Park Service are reputedly learning
from their mistakes, but even a fully funded, preservation-oriented BLM would
be but a neophyte at programs that the Park Service has been refining for 70
years. A more enlightened National Park Service, however, would leave Saline
Valley alone and make the East Mojave into a new-style primitive park-one with
limited access and facilities, controlled visitation, and a cornucopia of
natural information. After leaving Rothfuss at the visitors' center, I drove south through Death Valley to catch the last light. On Artist's Drive I got stuck behind a Winnebago, so I pulled over and explored a canyon that, for all its visitors, seemed spotless. At dark I made my way up the nearest four-wheel-drive road that permitted backcountry camping. As I ate dinner on the alluvial fan, the moon rose and lit up the great white floor of the basin. I laid out my sleeping bag in a wash and saw nobody else all night. Nor did I see any cigarette butts, Styrofoam plates, soft-drink cans, or shotgun shells. As I fell asleep. I realized with some astonishment that, in all my travels through the desert, Death Valley National-Park?-was the cleanest place I'd found. David Darlington wrote about hiking the Sierra Nevada in the April issue ("Backcountry Yosemite").
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