Hiking Trails Blogs

This is a little known masterpiece directed by Akira Kurosawa, who made so many it’s easy to lose count. It’s about a company of Russian troops exploring the far reaches of the Siberian tundra in the part of Russia Sarah Palin can see from her back porch. One night this Chinese guy walks up to their campfire, makes himself at home and all but volunteers to join up with the Russians on their surveying mission. His name is Dersu Uzala, and he is among a vanishing breed of Siberian mountain men who live entirely in tune with their surroundings.

Here’s a video of that scene:

Dersu always knows when there’s a tiger in the neighborhood. He insists on leaving food and firewood in an old lean-to so the next travelers who find it might have something to keep them alive.

In one pivotal section of the film, he and the Russian commander get lost near nightfall on a broad expanse of tundra. He knows they have only one chance for survival: chop down as much of the tall grass around them and pile it high for insulation. Great stuff.

PBS is airing all the episodes of Ken Burns’ opus online for the next few days. Watching the first two makes me wonder how John Muir did not simply go insane. Remember, he lived in the Bay Area. And those of you who’ve hiked the Santa Cruz mountains, try to imagine those wooded hills blasted by clear-cutting.

Here’s a guy who walked through Yosemite before commerce had a good crack at the place. At the end of his life, as development has seemed to have eaten up everything around him, the crowning indignity occurs: they put a dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley (a place so abundantly scenic that it’s still one of the prettiest places in America with a 35-fathom flood in the middle of it — if you leave the dam out of your snapshots).

Granted, Burns and company produced this series for full emotional impact. I can’t count the times I felt that dewy-eyed rush of emotion you get when reminded of the things you adore. And then I think of poor old Mr. Muir: he was about 100 times more fanatical about nature than I am. Must’ve said a lot of prayers.

Of course Muir had it easy compared to the folks our ancestors kicked off these lands. I’m not sure why I can never stop my brain from saying “fine, but what about those Indians we stole it from?” I know it’s an artifact of history, how things were done at one time, Manifest Destiny and all that. Like so many Americans I have a little bit of Indian blood in me, but not enough to explain why 100 years after the fact it still pisses me off. I get the same way when I think of all the people who got their last names from the white people who once owned them.

My excuse: if you’re going to hold your moral center together, some wrongs can’t be made right just because the central players have all died.

(OK, 14,947th digression complete.)

So, the merits of the series? Yes, it’s sappy and tear-jerking at times, but if you tune out the violins and tune in on the story, it is a fascinating portrayal of what happens when humans arrive at a new land that is essentially theirs for the taking. Those who went west had little more than their instincts to guide them. There wasn’t much of a historical template beyond the strong taking what they wanted from the weak. Most right-thinking people of their time saw a mountain range as a pain-in-the-ass impediment to their arriving in California early enough to avoid the Donner Party’s fate.

It only took about 40 years between the Gold Rush and the official closing of the frontier in about 1890 for people to start seriously pondering the logical outcome of paving everything for profit. People like Muir rhapsodized about the High Sierra in magazines read by Eastern elites, and pretty soon this word called “conservation” started showing up in polite conversations.

And so in effect it’s American history as if told by park rangers. You get many of the same players — presidents, pundits, controversies, etc. — but in the context of how their actions affected folks who enjoy walking in the woods. Makes it must viewing for folks of our ilk.

We’re trying an experiment at our house in which we have no television (we can watch Netflix movies on demand, but that’s it).

This means no chance for me to share my incisive insights (which is more difficult than you might imagine, as my family shares a genetic quirk in which some of us lack certain upper incisors … this is all I will ever reveal about my teeth, I promise!)

So please plug in some comments and let me know how it’s going. I felt like I got the idea after viewing a bunch of videos last week, but I’m interested in everybody else’s thoughts. Of course the cynics might complain that there is nothing remotely controversial about the splendor of our national parks and our collective wisdom in having built them, so PBS doesn’t exactly earn Silver Stars for distinguished bravery in airing this series. (Generally, though, the cynics need to get a life).

Anyway, share your thoughts with the class if you’ve got a minute.

Cody Townsend’s day job requires him to fly down mountainsides, occasionally touching skis to the surface to prevent plummeting to certain death. The other day he posted this way-cool video of one of his adventures, which required three hours slogging up a narrow stone slot in exchange for a 60-second thrill ride back down the hill. The vid:

Flashing Hallways from Cody Townsend on Vimeo.

The blog post explaining his motivations in greater detail.

(Hat tip: The Adventure Life)

Bryce Canyon National Park, 2006

I just spent an hour watching previews and excerpts from the latest Ken Burns magnus opus, “The National Parks, America’s Best Idea,” which opens Sept. 27 (this coming Sunday) on PBS stations nationwide. If you haven’t seen it already, the 25-minute preview opens with a park ranger recalling his oneness with Yellowstone bison at 60 degrees below zero. You kinda get the shivers, and not from his depiction of the cold. Another part has a cinematographer recounting a nighttime shoot of a river of orange molten lava flowing into the ocean at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. It’s pretty cool on a computer screen; imagine seeing it live.

Oddly enough, the one guy who seems to speak mainly in platitudes about our national parks is Burns himself. Genuine wilderness junkies get a crazed, eyes-too-wide look on their faces when attempting to put their experiences into words. Burns looks like he’s memorized his script.

I got a little misty-eyed when they played the old-fashioned fiddle music as the cameras panned over Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Zion, the Great Smokies. I fell for all these places at first sight, as any person with an ounce of soul should.

Still, there’s something slightly irksome about waxing on for night after night about how great Americans were because we “saved” these lands, which came into being over the course of billions of years and will last billions more, long after our kind becomes extinct. None of this was really done for the edification of nature; it was done for the edification of Americans — motivated by an urge to preserve pretty things.

Nature is not just awesome shots of the sun setting behind the Grand Tetons. It’s what grants us permission to live. I have this nagging fear that folks will see these shows and think “hey, we saved all those national parks, our work’s done here. Let’s get back to building more subdivisions.”

The parks are just a start. We won’t stand a chance till we treat the whole planet with the reverence lavished on its showiest places.

(All pontificating aside, this page of videos is worth a look. Best seen at full screen — click on the little box in the lower right hand corner).