This is Why

In something that is strange to me--because I can't understand why it's even posed--people often ask me why I spend so much time going to see wilderness, hiking mountains, camping, backpacking, and kayaking rivers.

So...this is why:

The Earth as we have known it, as it was when She gave birth to us, is dying. We are rapidly killing off the ecosystems from which we came, and on which all life on Earth depends. Humans despoil everything they covet. Forests are felled. Rivers are dammed and diverted. Mountains are carved down, valleys filled in, aquifers poisoned. The animals who are our companions are slaughtered and eaten, or killed and stripped of their skins, or merely murdered for sport. There are people who would shoot dead the last rhinoceros just so they can consume its horn; or kill the final tiger to eat its bones.

For most of my life--for I am a reader--I have known that at some point humans would finish devouring the Earth. After all, we gnaw away at the very crust of the planet and grind mountains into toxic heaps to get at what makes a tiny few of us wealthy. But now, in my old age, I realize that I am watching the extinction of entire ecosystems before my own mortal coil is wound down. I may actually live to see the last tigers go, and witness the final days of the last elephant.

This is why I go into the wilderness. I want to see these places now, while they still--even if only vaguely--resemble the state they were in before we crushed them beneath our heels.

A few years ago I set out to witness the virgin groves of giant hemlock trees in our southern forests. Because I knew that an invasive pest was consuming them and that our government would not do anything to stop it. So much more politically expedient to buy billion-dollar weapons than to preserve forests. And I was right. Those forests are all dead, now. Those hemlocks are ghostly trunks of bleaching wood, no longer green, no more to shelter animals who once lived among their branches.

The only thing that gives me any reason to feel positive about what we are doing is that I know that we are also not immune to extinction. Only those with the utmost hubris deny it (although they are many). But as we feast on our own home to make a dollar we will discover that we are going to go down with the ship into which we fired so many holes.

And when we are gone, the things we leave in our wake will evolve. They will spread out and radiate and refill those ecological niches that we left bare. Evolution will do its job. Given time, a rat can become a tiger. Given tens of thousands of years, a pigeon can become an eagle. Common guppies will turn into sharks. Deer, or something like deer will one day roam the places we had spoiled.

As for us...we'll be gone forever. We had our chance and we wrecked it. No trips to Mars. No colonies in space. No brotherhood of all.

But there will be peace.

Once mountains in West Virginia. Now a toxic wasteland.

Recovery From Exploitation

Stuarts Knob is a minor summit even in the relatively low-profile hills around it. The only reason I even noticed it is that it's obvious from the lakeside below the cabin where my wife and I stayed in Fairy Stone State Park this month.

It's an attractive enough little mountain, but at less than 1400 feet above sea level it's really just an Appalachian foothill to the much higher summits just a few miles to the west. But I got out the park trail map and noted that there were a couple of trails that take you almost to the top and decided to hike up there and see what it was like.

What I found was a series of well maintained trails that were dotted with historical markers and discovered that the area had been ecologically raped and exploited in the recent past. Go back less than 100 years and you'd hardly have recognized the profile of this little mountaintop. It underwent a long period (in human terms) of exploitation that denuded it of trees and forest cover and then was heavily mined for the rich iron deposits that lay actually on its flanks and then below its surface. By the late 1800s the forests were utterly gone, and by 1920 the iron deposits had played out. Even the town that once lay at its foot vanished once the capitalists and industrialists had had their way with the place.

By the 1930s the land had been allowed to lay as the humans had left it. Enter the Civilian Conservation Corps who chose it as a spot to begin the effort at rehabilitation and the site of a new state park of Virginia. Erosion was mitigated, mines were sealed up, trails were laid down, trees were encouraged to regenerate.

Today, walking the slopes of this hill you would be hard pressed to understand the extent of the destruction that had once laid waste to its environs. Beneath the canopy of a vast hardwood forest you can find places where colliers had once felled and carbonized the trees to make charcoal. One can spot the massive grooves where the earth was moved in vast amounts in the practice of surface mining to get at the iron almost at the top of the ground. And there are sealed mine entrances to mark the places where men and machines once combined to shear out the guts of the little mountain.

Mother Nature can recover if she is allowed to heal. But only if.

Stuarts Knob as it appeared from the lakeside below our cabin.

This was the location of a collier site. Where men would take the trees they'd felled and slowly bake them, transforming the wood into charcoal which would be sold for 5 cents per bushel.

The mountain was covered in these deep "grooves", the result of early surface mining where the readily available iron ore was taken from the hill. When this played out the traditional shaft mining began.

A GoPro video I made at the summit of Stuarts Knob.

The entrance to one of the mine shafts, now sealed.

Sun rising over the summit.

The nice system of trails. Thanks, Civilian Conservation Corps!

Another Train Ride!

Carole had researched another rail trip that runs from Blue Ridge Georgia to McKaysville Georgia/Copper Hill Tennessee. It's a short trip, as such go; only about one hour each way with a couple of hours layover at the northern destination before returning to Blue Ridge. We both enjoy these outings which give you a good idea of what it was like to ride the rails back in the day.

The town of Blue Ridge has changed much since I was a kid. These days it's an exceptional tourist destination and the town has blossomed in many ways. It seems to be doing well with lots of cool stores and no empty buildings with plenty of customers. I can't say the same for McKaysville which did have some cool stores, but not so many as Blue Ridge.

When I was a teenager, McKaysville/Copper Hill was an ecological wasteland. Union Carbide, easily one of the most vile corporate entities on the planet, operated mines there at the Georgia/Tennessee border that raped the land and polluted the water and air. They actually vented acid directly into the atmosphere in those days and one could stand on the mountaintops in the Cohuttas and look north to see a vast, dead, brown scab-like terrain where the company operated, wrecking Mother Earth.

These days, at least vegetation has returned to the area, although I can't say with any certainty if it's healthy or if the water table is still polluted. But at least it doesn't look like Satan's asshole any more.

We enjoyed the trip and I can recommend it. There are things to see and do at either end of the ride and the trip itself is fun with some interesting scenery bordering the river.

The town of Blue Ridge, Georgia. We had a good time here.

More shops.

This is the car we rode in.

The conductor. This guy really played the part.

Our car. Very comfortable. Nice and air conditioned.

The conductor stopped and let us take this photo. What a great guy.

McKaysville, Georgia. Just down the street is the Tennessee border where you can walk into the village of Copper Hill.

One of the engines. There was actually an engine at either end of the train. One pulled us to McKaysville, then the other one pulled us to Blue Ridge.

Carole, just as we were leaving to return to Blue Ridge.

North Georgia was once a major part of the Cherokee Nation. Almost everything they built has been removed or buried by the Europeans who took it all from them. However, there are five of these fish traps on the river between the Tennessee border and Blue Ridge. The natives constructed these V-shaped funnels in the river. They would chase fish from the deeper, wider section toward the tip of the "V" where they would catch them in the shallows in baskets.

I took this video to show an old iron bridge the train takes on its journey. Toward the end of the video you can hear this horrid little kid screaming. He had the worst parents. Ever. Total freaking assholes. The kid would start screaming and the parents reactions were to give him exactly what he wanted to make him stop. This only made him start screaming again a few seconds later when he decided he wanted something else. This went on and on. When they saw how much it was irritating everyone else, they moved to a separate compartment where no one could hear the little bastard. A message to his parents: SCREW YOU, ASSHOLES!

What the Future Holds

For years, we've been fed scenes like this of what the future of human habitation will look like:

However, if we survive the coming extinction event, what few humans remain will have something more like this (if they're lucky):

We've Wrecked It All

Well, I'm convinced (and have been for some time) that we've finally ecologically wrecked the globe. There are far too many humans on this planet consuming far too much of its resources for the natural world to recover. Whatever hope I had that things could ever get better for Mother Earth were dashed years ago.

Visit your National Parks. See them before they're ruined.

So my advice to those of you who give a damn is the same advice I've been giving for some time now:

Go out and see the wilderness!

It's not all gone, just yet. There are places that appear to be relatively untouched, so if you want to experience what looks to be unspoiled wilderness, then you still have a small window of opportunity to do so.

For while longer the water is still pure.

Go to one of our great National Parks near you, or to some far away. Just now you can still hike and camp in forests and on river banks and mountain peaks and in canyons where the green things still grow and the wild things still roam. We'll have this for a short time, anyway.

And there are hundreds of wilderness areas all over our nation where you can go to find genuine solitude. I've been to many places where the only unnatural thing that can break the murmur of the woods is the faraway gravelly scratch of a jet flying high in the sky. And sometimes you can get lucky and such a thing won't  happen.

Smoky Mountain elk...for now.

Your kids likely won't  know what that's like, I'm afraid to say. At the rate things are unraveling, I doubt there will be anything like what we now have available to them or to their children. Our wild megafauna are dropping away like dominoes, one after the other. In a little while there will be no grizzly bears, no wolverines, no wolves; elephants will not roam the plains of Africa, and lions will be only a memory. Whales are going to vanish one by one until we have only their images in books.

The big trees are going, going....

Our forests are going to strangle in drought and heat and succumb to hoards of invasive insect pests. Our wetlands will dry up and burn. The birds we take for granted will fade away and come no more to roost in trees that remain or go to nest along lakes that will be fouled forever.

So now, while we still have a few places left; while we still share the globe with some of our wild companions--go out and see them. They'll be leaving soon, and they'll never come back.

They're fading fast. You'd better hurry to say goodbye...

Skies of Blue

Today is my birthday. I am 55 years old!


The previous two days we had a cold front move through. The cool air squeezed all of the humidity out of the atmosphere Monday night and I was lulled to sleep by the sound of thunder and the drum of rain against the bedroom windows. And so when I awoke on Tuesday the sky was cobalt blue and the air was cool and dry. I don't think it cracked much over 80 degrees that day. Walking was a wonder.

Blue Sky over Montana, two years ago.

And I was able to look up at that blue sky for two solid days. And that's the point--the sky was blue. And I don't mean clear, but blue. Most people I talk to don't understand that our sky is supposed to be blue. Some of them even think that metallic gray photochemical haze that we live with is "blue". It isn't. For two days we had the kind of sky Mother Nature intended us to have. Before we wrecked the Heavens with smog.

But when I go back to work tomorrow I'll be dealing with triple-digit temperatures, and I can guarantee that the sky will not be blue, no matter the cloud cover. The sky will be a metallic gray, and few will acknowledge that something is terribly amiss.

What passes for "blue sky" here in the eastern USA.

A Secluded Beach

Sometimes you have to wonder about the answers.

A couple of years ago Carole and I ended up driving to a very secluded spot on the Gulf Coast in Florida called Shired Island Beach. The whole area was very strange and beautiful. Miles and miles and miles from any major town, there is only one small village nearby and to get to it from Shired Island Beach you have to drive a long and circuitous route. As the crow flies, it's not that far, but you cannot see or hear it from the beach area. Even in a direct line it's several miles away.


The county there operates a bit of a park/campground at the beach. There are shelters at the campsites with picnic tables and even hookups for your RVs. We kept wondering why very few people were using the facilities. It seemed like it should be more popular.


It was only later, after researching the place on the Internet, that I learned that the water there is considered unfit for recreation. Apparently the area is quite contaminated, mainly with human fecal matter and the accompanying microorganisms that one would expect.


Gone are our plans to some day take the Casita to the campground to enjoy a couple of days. Unless, of course, the cause of the contamination is found and fixed.


I ain't gonna hold my breath waiting for that to happen.