Pacific Creat Trail - Day 107 - Barker Pass

Richardson Lake is just outside the northern border of Desolation Wilderness, and the first place you can legally camp without a hard sided bear canister, which makes it a popular camping spot for northbound PCT hikers who shipped their bear canisters home from South Lake Tahoe. The bears in the area have figured all of this out and multiple PCT hikers we know had bears take their food bags while camping near Richardson Lake. It’s all a pretty obvious and predictable policy failure - bears don’t adhere to wilderness boundaries, and are more than happy to eat easy meals brought to their doorstep by people.

The Pacific Crest Trail Association recommends carrying a hard sided bear canister for the entirety of the trail, but almost no one carries one outside of legally mandated boundaries as the canisters are heavy and unwieldy.

I’m not sure what exactly a perfect solution looks like - extending the required bear canister boundaries to the entirety of bear territory? Preventing camping at certain locations known for frequent human-bear interactions? Killing off all the bears?

Animals are way smarter than we give them credit for. That designing solutions to prevent bears eating people food presents a challenging problem is due to a significant overlap of intelligence between the smartest bears and the dumbest people. Mandating hard sided bear canisters in bear territory and actually enforcing existing regulations (we‘ve seven zero ranger presence outside of Kings Canyon and Yosemite National Parks) would be a good place to start.

Somehow this reads as an oxymoron. The entire landmass that comprises the western United States was effectively wilderness just 170 years ago, and now you need to apply for and be granted a piece of paper to enter what’s left of it. Brilliant.

120ish years ago in My First Summer in the Sierra John Muir expressed sentiments acknowledging the adverse affects of grazing, mining, and development while finding some measure of consolation in the vastness of areas up-to-that-point untouched by humanity. I wonder what he’d say today.

On through the forest ever higher we go, a cloud of dust dimming the way, thousands of feet trampling leaves and flowers, but in this mighty wilderness they seem but a feeble band, and a thousand gardens will escape their blighting touch. They cannot hurt the trees, though some of the seedlings suffer, and should the woolly locusts be greatly multiplied, as on account of dollar value they are likely to be, then the forests, too, may in time be destroyed. Only the sky will then be safe, though hid from view by dust and smoke, incense of a bad sacrifice. Poor, helpless, hungry sheep, in great part misbegotten,
without good right to be, semi-manufactured, made less by God than man, born out of time and place, yet their voices are strangely human and call out one’s pity.

The entire Lake Tahoe watershed should be protected public wilderness.

Mark Twain famously started a forest fire on the eastern shore of Lake Tahoe in the 1860s after leaving a cooking fire unattended near a place where he and a friend had cut down trees to stake their claim to a particularly desirable piece of Tahoe shoreline. That was only ~160 years ago. Unwinding the strip malls, casinos, and gaudy homes built upon a place that easily clears the threshold for natural beauty and environmental importance to be a National Park should be something we strive for. Somehow even communicating the idea that nobody should live in the Lake Tahoe watershed feels heretical in modern day America, but I fully believe that we should return it to unmarred beauty. No homes, no boats, no casinos, no golf courses, no septic systems, no fences.

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine', and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

Jean Jacques Rousseau - 1754

Rousseau, also known for effectively inventing the ideas implemented by the United States Constitution.