A rabble in arms, flushed with success and insolence.
BRITISH GENERAL IN 1776, DESCRIBING
THE NEWLY FORMED ARMY OF THE
UNITED STATES
COME WITH US up into mountains near where we live and let us show you a small patch of ground that tells a story about the impact of us hikers. In the end it’s an encouraging story, one with a happy ending. But it didn’t start out that way.
In the dwarfed, twisted, wind-wracked, deep-green forest near treeline on New Hampshire’s Mount Lafayette, right next to the lone hiking trail that cuts through to the alpine zone, there is a clearing. It is surprisingly big, perhaps 40 by 60 feet. A few paces farther, on the other side of the trail, is another clearing almost as large. Both of these clearings lie in a sheltered depression just below the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Greenleaf Hut.
What are these clearings doing here? How did they open up, amid a stunted forest that otherwise crowds in to the edge of the maintained trail so dense and close that a person finds it almost impossible to penetrate, even a few feet? Krummholz is German for twisted wood. Twisted indeed! It’s not easy to open any space at all in this twisted wood, this shrunken, tangled forest of prickly spruce and scrubby balsam fir. So how did the clearing in the Krummholz get here?
We’ve tried that question on hut visitors and passing hikers many times. The answers are varied, some ingenious, some enigmatic. A plane crashed here? Fire? Acid rain? The hut crew grows potatoes here? A helicopter pad? Moose? Indians?
Those who remember the boisterous backpacking boom of 1965–75 often guess the correct answer. Campers.
During those boom years, a swelling throng of backpackers invaded the woods. All over the country, a nature-loving generation sought escape and inspiration in mountains, along murmuring streams, amid alpine meadows, in deep coniferous glades. The statistics on backcountry recreation tell a tale of manifold increase in “use,” but the land itself told a more vivid story, a tragedy of overuse and abuse, eroded trails, flattened vegetation, polluted waters, and loss of solitude and many of the very values that that generation went to the woods to seek. Indeed, it was as if we brought civilization with us, through our numbers and our manners. “We go to the woods in part to escape,” lamented one sage observer, Bill McKibben. “But now there is nothing except us, and so there is no escaping other people.”
The impact on the wilderness environment was partly due to the increased numbers alone. But it was also a function of the style of camping. The backpacking boom was based on practices that our predecessors of the 1930s had found perfectly satisfactory. They took an ax, hacked down the trees needed for a blazing campfire, carved out balsam fir boughs to make a springy mattress, washed their dishes and themselves in the nearest stream, trenched their tents, and buried trash or tossed it in a communal trash pit at popular campsites.
These standard practices worked well when the number of wilderness recreationists was small. Nature has remarkable recuperative powers and shrugged off the impact of these early campers. But when the backpacking boom began, the backcountry could no longer absorb the impact. Where there had been one tent perhaps one weekend a month, there were now three tents competing for space every weekend, enlarging the tent site. The occupants hacked at more trees in a relentless search for firewood. That’s how those clearings in the Krummholz were born, not just on Mount Lafayette but throughout the mountains. Perhaps there had been a solitary tent site during the 1950s. But with the boom more tenters crowded in and pushed back the forest until a 40-by-60-foot space was cleared. Not just cleared of trees: Between boot traffic and constant tenting, the ground vegetation was completely worn off. The earth became so compacted that water could scarcely penetrate. Rain sheeted off, further depriving the vegetation of any chance for survival.
By 1970 we had a pretty ghastly sight: a 40-by-60-foot hole in the Krummholz, nothing but trampled, rammed-earth hardpan, a mud wallow during exceptionally rainy spells, punctuated by whacked-off tree stumps to a general height of 18 inches. Nothing growing underfoot.
This clearing was characteristic of many others, products of the backpacking boom. The hordes especially liked to camp where a stream crossed the trail; most anywhere along a trail, particularly near water; around backcountry shelters; and above treeline on that mattresslike (but extremely sensitive) alpine vegetation. On a good weekend brightly colored tents could be seen stretching up from pristine alpine lakes toward the upper slopes of rocky summits.
Things couldn’t go on like this. The mountains couldn’t take it any more. Worse, the boom was projected to keep on rising. Backcountry managers were distraught: If it’s this bad now and getting worse geometrically, where are we going to end up?
It wasn’t just numbers, of course; it was bad habits. Or, to be more precise, as well as more fair to an innocent earlier generation, it was habits that had once been perfectly appropriate, but that numbers transmogrified.
Back in the 1930s Doc Waterman guided canoe parties down the Allagash every summer, and the camping way of life of the Maine north woods in those days was the pattern that his son Guy first learned. On Girl Scout trips just a few years later, Laura was schooled in the same equipment and techniques, which she practiced faithfully over Vermont and New Hampshire hills in the 1950s.
Tents were larger and much heavier, with no sewn-in floors, and the color was invariably a kind of monotone somewhere between brown, green, and gray. Sleeping bags alone weighed about as much as an entire overnight pack does today.
Camping without a campfire would have been unthinkable. We all carried an ax or hatchet or both (depending on the trip), and one of the first jobs on reaching camp was to scout the area for a judicious mixture of the right hardwoods plus a little softwood for kindling.
Thirsty? Drink out of any stream.
Dirty? Grab the soap, strip, and plunge into the nearest stream—yes, the same one you drank out of, but maybe downstream a little.
For a comfortable night’s sleep, we learned to cut fir branches and arrange them just right. In case of rain, we’d dig a small ditch around the uphill side of the tent.
In today’s environmentally concerned world, we shudder to recall some of those camping habits. Yet for their time, there was nothing wrong with this way of living in the woods. We want to emphasize that point: In that quieter time, the backcountry was so big and resilient that a handful of campers could live according to the old ethic without scarring the land permanently. It was the right way to do things in its time. It is not that we have become more virtuous—rather, we have become more numerous, by manifold, and so we have been forced to change.
In those old days you could run the Allagash and the lakes around it for six weeks and see maybe two or three other parties, together with the lonely fire warden on Allagash Mountain, who talked to himself unless you were there to talk to, and old Frank, whose team toted your gear across the carry between Mud Pond and Umbazooksus Lake on mud-rutted roads. There were miles of true wilderness with no one else around, so it really was OK to take deadwood and even some live, wash in the streams, cut bough beds. It was sound woodsmanship. But in the wake of the backpacking boom of the 1960s and 1970s, it was a way of life that could not continue.
Consider an incident that we often recall when we think about the changing camping scene.
July 7, 1966. One of us and two teenage sons were climbing Mount Moosilauke. This is a big, slumbering giant of a mountain with a massive rounded top, not at all a picture-book summit like Chocorua or the Matterhorn. Though among the 10 highest in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, it stands way off by itself to the southwest, as if dropped there after all the other peaks were finished.
The three of us had been hiking for two weeks straight and were feeling in fine shape as we raced up the rough trail to the summit in late afternoon. On our way down, just below the summit, we passed two Boy Scouts. Exchanging the usual trailside courtesies, we asked where they were headed.
“Beaver Brook Shelter,” said one of them.
Now this news was of passing interest, since we too planned to spend the night at that shelter, which lay at the foot of the trail, almost 3,000 feet below.
Gingerly we asked, “How many in your party?”
“Fourteen.”
Well, there’s about room for six in that shelter, crowding it some, and it looked like rain. So we decided we’d better pour it on if we wanted a place under the roof. Being in the shape we were in, and large Scout groups traveling at the pace they do, we had no trouble passing them in bunches of twos and threes until, well before the end of the trail, we had counted 14 and could let up our pace a little.
When the first Scouts got down to Beaver Brook Shelter, they found our three sleeping bags rolled out. We were models of woods manners in offering them what was left of the shelter space. However, their leader cheerfully assured us: “That’s OK. We’ll go camp a little way off toward the pond.”
So we had a nice quiet evening alone in the shelter after all. But just before dark it began to rain, and conscience began to prod us into wondering how the Scouts were making out. What we found is a scene that sticks in memory: a beehive of activity, centering around an enormous jerry-built lean-to, large enough to sleep 14 underneath, with long, fresh-cut poles (some up to 6 inches in diameter) lashed together and covered with a thick matting of fresh-cut evergreen branches. The Scouts had it almost completed when we got there, and they had a roaring campfire stocked with plenty of wood. The entire area was trampled thoroughly with the milling and scuffling of 13 eager Scouts. The crowning touch was that their leader was idly sitting by the fire, whittling—a sure sign that the troop had performed this ritual many times before, thus requiring no direction.
Just multiply that troop of 14 by several hundred other Scouting outfits, summer camps, outdoor clubs, and college outing clubs—then multiply by the number of years that has passed since 1966—and then try to imagine what would be left of the woods, had that pattern continued unchecked.
In the next chapter we’ll get to the happy ending, but let’s pause first to consider the array of formidable and diverse allies that supported the worst tactics of this lug-soled army. Camping reform was up against some entrenched philosophical underpinnings that it’s a miracle were ever overcome. These antagonists included—and to a degree still include—the frontier tradition, democratic ideals, modern education theories, urban renewal, ideas of personal freedom, motherhood, the sociability of clubs, the mystique of the old campfire, the lug sole, and the black fly. That’s an opposing lineup powerful enough to awe the most dedicated reformer.
1. The frontier tradition. Too many hikers had, and still have, an image of going out to “conquer” the wilderness rather than live with it or as part of it. David Langlois, a Vermont camp director whom we’ll be talking more about later, cautions: “We try to remember that we’re spending a night, not founding a settlement.”
2. Democratic ideals. A lot of people think that if the woods are good for some of us, then everyone should have an opportunity to experience this blessing. You can be labeled an elitist if you see anything wrong with getting everybody in the entire city of Boston to tramp through the most beautiful sections of New England’s woods. What would be left of the beauty when this had come to pass?
3. Modern education theories. Spearheaded by the highly successful Outward Bound program, many camps and school courses now see it as their mission to get every kid in the region to experience “survival” and “challenge” (ever-popular buzzwords) in the remote backcountry.
4. Urban renewal. The warm-hearted theory is abroad that every underprivileged child can gain a new lease on life if exposed to the great outdoors.
5. Ideas of personal freedom. We are strongly in favor of as much freedom in the hills as can possibly be maintained in this day and age. But we sense that many hikers use personal freedom as a license for irresponsible habits in the backcountry. Of what value is the freedom to take a bath (with soap) in any mountain cascade you come to if the result is a polluted water supply for the party that’s camping downstream?
6. Motherhood. How’s that again? We’re simply referring to the underlying fact of population growth. That is, after all, what got us into this mess to begin with. Fundamentally it’s a problem of simply too many people.
7. The sociability of clubs. Nothing destroys the illusion of wilderness faster than running into a party of 20 or 30 people traveling together. Camp groups are among the worst offenders. Most clean-camping advocates urge limiting group size, many clubs have at least put an end to group discounts on club facilities, and others request that parties be limited to 10. Yet club traditions die hard, and many hiking clubs, schools, and camp groups still schedule mass ventures, with large mobs of sociable hikers blasting along the trail, making a mockery of everyone’s hopes for a feeling of wilderness solitude.
8. The mystique of the old campfire. One of the most deeply entrenched camping notions is that you’re just not doing it right unless you build a blazing fire. This emotional subject deserves separate discussion (see chapter 11). Suffice it to raise here a question that the Appalachian Mountain Club posed once in a poster: “What if we all built fires?”
9. The lug sole. Actually, one of the biggest impacts of the backpacking boom is in the scuffling up of groundcover by that obsolescent status symbol, the lug sole. That’s why many clean-camping advocates urge everybody either to wear lighter shoes or at least to take a pair of moccasins or sneakers to change into after reaching campsite.
10. The black fly. Even this pesky insect has its impact. How’s that? Because camping in hammocks does far less damage to the woods than tenting—but if you tried to sleep in the early hammocks during black fly season, you came to realize that your dedication to clean camping had its price. We understand camping hammocks now come equipped with built-in netting.
All of these obstacles to camping reform made it hard for the last generation to reform, and they still linger today. But if we all go on abusing the wilds, we’re going to wreak environmental havoc on the mountains and, with it, restrictions and rules that will spoil it for everyone.
We greet the reform attitudes and practices as mixed blessings. Sometimes we’re sad to see the change from those old days. Often we yearn for the yesterday when you could hike all day and never see another person. Our personal tastes run to the drab, old canvas wall tents rather than the sleek, nylon, international orange lightweights. We love to wield an ax—and do so plenty, but at home in our own woodlot, on a carefully planned sustained-yield basis, not on overrun, overused hiking country. Who is there that does not respond to the warm conviviality of the campfire? Sometimes we truly feel we were born too late—the golden age of camping lies buried in the good old days.
Sometimes we’re more optimistic and feel good about the new era—to see that people are capable of adapting their exploitive ways, trying to soften the weight of their impact, conserving a natural world that renews and enriches the human spirit.
They say that an optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds, and a pessimist fears that’s the case. This dichotomy applies to attitudes about the changing camping scene. Pessimist or optimist, we have to acknowledge that it is changing.
In the 1840s and 1850s, Henry David Thoreau visited the Maine woods. As we read his narratives, we recognize many of the spots he visited. He too walked the carry from Umbazooksus Lake to Mud Pond, and it was just as mud-rutted then as it was when we were there in 1946. The interesting point is that in many ways there was less change in Maine’s north woods during the entire century from Thoreau’s first trip in 1846 to ours in 1946 than there was in the 30 years from 1946 to 1976. The opening of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway to vacationers, the new roads, the seaplanes, the big camp groups—all have completely altered the scene. Well, not completely. Some things don’t change. The loon still sounds his enigmatic laugh and you can still experience today what Thoreau wrote about:
It is a country full of evergreen trees, of mossy silver birches and watery maples, the ground dotted with insipid small red berries, and strewn with damp and moss-grown rocks—a forest resounding at rare intervals with the note of the chickadee, the blue jay, and the woodpecker, the scream of the fish-hawk and the eagle, the laugh of the loon, and the whistle of ducks along the solitary streams.
Years ago, when the onslaught of the tourists began hitting the Alps and the English hills, the great Scottish climber Norman Collie wrote:
Civilization has stretched out its hand and changed it all, and though those who knew the old days are somewhat sad that the old order has changed, yielding place to new, yet the new order is good, and the land of the great woods, lakes, mountains, and rushing rivers is still mysterious enough to please anyone who has eyes to see, and can understand.