Best Management Practices
Early Season in the Wilderness
Kennedy Meadows, just beyond the Baker Campground, off Highway 108 in the Stanislaus National Forest. I was last here in 1995.
On my way out from that trip, I stopped at the ranger station, and saw a notice about a new management plan being developed for the Emigrant Wilderness. The Forest Service was inviting comments on the draft plan.
Yeah, I had some comments. I’d just walked, in six days of near solitude, on trail and off trail, to Toejam Lake and Leopold Lake, past Emigrant Lake, and up and over Big Sam and back down past Kennedy Lake. I’d walked through alpine pastures stirred up into a muddy morass by cows. My eyes had watered as I dodged the steaming piles of horseshit littering mile after mile of trail, and I’d wished for a summer thunderstorm to wash those tons of stinking feces into the Stanislaus River. I’d set up my little tent in vacant horse packers’ camps where the trees were girdled by tie-ropes and dying, the soil was denuded and compacted, next to lakes choked with algae.
So back in 1995, after getting home, I’d mailed in 6 or 8 pages of comments about what I’d seen. The Forest Service put me on a mailing list, and for a few years I got updates on how the management plan was progressing. Most of the debate seemed to be over proposals to remove some of the old low dams which, as I’d seen, flooded portions of the highest alpine meadows into late August.
Now, here I am, 12 years later, walking back in to the Emigrant Wilderness.
You couldn’t ask for a more stark transition, I’m thinking. The Forest Service operates the trailhead parking lot, which is nicely laid out and well-kept. It’s mostly empty this early in the season. There’s a mix of a few well-used sedans, some pickup trucks, and a few horse trailers. The air is sweet. Walking over to the tap to fill two canteens, I survey the license plates and bumper stickers. I decide my favorite is: “I’d Rather Be Here Now.”
Then it’s a brief trek down the entrance road to the Kennedy Meadows resort. A big sign announces this is private property. Vehicles, all SUVs and pickups, are parked at random angles on an asphalt lot that has been extended, amoeba-like, here, there, and everywhere into the forest. The drone of a diesel generator is loud enough to drown out any birdsong. A hokey “old-fashioned”-style sign advertises cocktails and dining. Just behind, horses stand in open pens. I’m walking through a superheated miasma of exhaust and dust and the smell of manure.
I keep my stride as I walk past the cabins and RVs and camp trailers squeezed on to the lot, then past more RVs and trailers pulled off a little ways into the woods. A few people are out fishing this low-gradient, sinuous part of the river. It’s cooler here, and I relax a little and breathe more deeply as I stroll along the road.
Up ahead, there’s a new billboard-style kiosk. It’s got a 4-H-project look—a few color photos, each with some text below it. I stop to read. It’s about “Leave No Trace Ethics” for livestock in the wilderness. About tying up stock properly, moving stock to avoid overgrazing, scattering manure when leaving camp. Things like that.
There’s your management plan, I’m thinking. Best Management Practices (BMPs). Maximum Extent Practicable, as we say in the stormwater pollution prevention business. I laugh bitterly and shake my head as I continue up the gorge.
It’s well past 5:00, and it’s more than six uphill miles to where I want to camp. Now I step lively into the adventure ahead.
My goal is a campsite near Relief Creek, high above and on the far side of the reservoir of the same name. It’s been 12 years. When I get near where I think it is I can’t quite remember if the site is before or after the ford across Relief Creek. I can’t figure it out in the gloaming.
I decide not to risk wading through the rapids when I’m tired. I find a nice spot, though, in a cedar grove at the very top of a high rock outcrop. I come back down for water. It’s dark by the time I’ve bathed and changed and lugged my canteens back up to the top. I cook dinner, and as I enjoy the hot food the full moon comes out to keep me company, illuminating the rock faces all around and the reservoir far below.
The second day, I continue across Lower Relief Meadow. As I climb the canyon on the other side, I reach snow. After post-holing another mile or so, I reach Upper Relief Meadow. It’s clear of snow, but pretty mucky, and there’s deep snow on the other side. I walk back the length of the meadow to where I remember there's a campsite with a view.
The next hours are pure hedonism: I nap a couple of hours in the sunshine, and then go for a dip in the creek. On the way down, I hear a bear, and then see him sauntering away. I do some yoga on the creek bank, read for a while, and then make dinner. You couldn’t pay me to trade a night in this spot for the most luxurious hotel.
The third day, I’m headed back out. I’ve walked 15 miles in the last 40 hours, and there’s another five miles to go. I’m in no hurry, and my feet need a rest. I find the right place to stop, lean my pack against a tree, take my boots off, and pull out a pen and paper.
Three things about best management practices.
- First, they may be the “best” we can do, but no one should pretend that they are designed to be adequate to the problem at hand, or even that they will have any significant effect on the problem.
- Second, the whole point of the “BMP” approach is to avoid having to change how things are done. Instead, we try to “manage” our activities to minimize environmental impacts.
- Third, the very nature of BMPs prevents any systematic assessment of their effectiveness. BMPs work in tiny increments against a background of other, often more significant, perturbations and variations caused by changes in weather, climate, economy, culture, etc.
So I can’t really say if the outreach to horse packers and other livestock handlers had any effect or no effect at all. The trails are not nearly as fouled, and campsites not nearly as trashed up, as I’d seen them back in 1995. But this is early June, and there is no sign, save the prints of a lone hiker, that anyone has been up this way toward the high country yet this year.
Bare spots and stirred-up mud tell me Upper Relief Meadow has not recovered from grazing of previous years. At the second night’s camp, I'd had to kick partly decomposed horse manure aside before pitching my tent.
No one is going to come up here measure how well the horse packers implement their version of “leave no trace ethics.” And certainly no systematic evaluation of the management plan is going to challenge the absurd idea that one could move many thousand-pound hooved animals through an alpine meadow while “leaving no trace.”
In that way, this rural “BMP” approach is not much different from urban stormwater pollution prevention programs. Here as elsewhere, the “BMP” approach was adopted because regulators lacked authority—and environmental advocates lacked political strength.
Perhaps what’s worst thing about BMPs is that they are a reification—BMPs become “things” removed from their social and political context and covered with a technified gloss, making it that much more difficult to get insight into the genuine dynamics of resource exploitation and damage.
We need a new algorithm for bringing about incremental environmental improvements.
We need to turn the BMP concept inside out. Instead of assuming current activities won’t or can’t change, we should assume they must and will change. Instead of identifying a “best” non-disruptive management practice, regulations should be deliberately disruptive.
Agencies should set standards which can’t be met under the current way of doing things, standards like:
- Eliminate trash, or
- Make new developments match the pre-project hydrology of the development site, or
- “Leave no trace” of horse manure.
The point of doing this is not just to achieve immediate environmental benefits, but—more importantly—to force broad sectors of society to actively engage and work together to solve environmental problems.
This engagement would lead, in turn, to completely different methods for evaluating progress, methods that use anecdotes, controlled pilots, and a variety of data sources to gain insight into the interrelationships of habit, culture, and economy, how these relationships are changing, and how the next wave of environmental regulation might influence the overall picture.
I get up and stretch. It’s time to go. I could stay longer if I wanted to, but I’m running low on energy. I’ve got a long dusty walk ahead in the mid-day heat, and a long drive back home to Berkeley after that.
As I near the Kennedy Meadows Resort, I notice where the owner has dumped a few truckloads of riprap in an attempt to protect the road from an encroaching outside stream bend. The clean grain of the broken rock tells me it hasn’t been there long, and looking at the state of the banks, I'm guessing it won’t hold for many seasons.
The dam that created Relief Reservoir is starving this reach for coarse sediment, and the stream has a bedrock bottom, so it’s going to widen and wash away its banks for a while yet, beginning with the banks just upstream and downstream of this spot.
As I walk back through the resort parking lot, past the cabins and cocktail sign, I see a shiny new plaque—maybe not brand new, but certainly installed in the last dozen years. Reading, it I realize it must have been prompted by the Forest Service’s management plan.
Placed by the Native Sons of the Golden West, it gives homage to the original cattle drivers, celebrating their foresight in constructing dams to retain seasonal runoff in the delicate high meadows. As the plaque notes, dam construction continued until the “Wilderness Act of 1964.”
Quotation marks in the original.