Wilderness Seminar, August 2005

The Wilderness Seminar group stops near the Crater Lake trail at the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness for replenishment.

On a clear August day, participants of the Aspen Institute’s Wilderness Seminar gathered near Crater Lake at the base of the Maroon Bells for a discussion of Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime and the beautiful. Our group of 20 formed a circle on a carpet of soft duff in a clearing of towering spruce trees. Just beyond our circle, the twin peaks of the Maroon Bells soared to over 14,000 feet in stunning post card grandeur.

We began drawing out Burke’s meaning when, suddenly, a deer appeared. Tentative at first, then emboldened, the deer sauntered blithely among us. “Cue the deer,” someone whispered, and smiles broke out in a contagion of joy at the temerity of this elegant creature. Burke’s meaning suddenly gained significance as we moved from the abstract to the real:

Sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small. Beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive.

Burke described the setting exactly. Century-old spruce trees overshadowed by jutting peaks revealed the sublime, while the delicate deer, ears and tail twitching, revealed beauty. In one sweeping glance Burke’s distinction became clear, and in that moment, the mission of the Wilderness Seminar was achieved.

DAY ONE

The seminar opened at the Aspen Meadows, the only session held in the traditional roundtable forum. The remainder of the four-day program ranged through wilderness at elevations from 8,000 to 11,700 feet. This foray into the wild, guided by an Institute-gathered notebook of readings, provided clarity and perspective to the complex relationship between man and nature.

Designated Wilderness Areas comprise only 2 percent of the lower 48 states — approximately the same area that is paved — and yet wilderness stirs the heart and impassions the soul. Wilderness represents only a fraction of our national land mass, yet it resonates with a vital part of our beings. Aspen is surrounded by three Wilderness Areas, and it was in wilderness that our journey took place.

To better grasp our wilderness roots we first looked to the divergent philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Where Hobbes saw man’s existence in a state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” Rousseau credited nature for providing man with superior qualities of vigor, good health, and strong instincts.

For cultural perspective we referred to the Book of Genesis, which describes man’s dominion over the natural world with the implication of stewardship. Jared Diamond spoke directly to stewardship in an essay that depicted the collapse of civilizations due to over-consumption of natural resources. The debate over dominion and stewardship was framed in the context of population growth, governance, cultural mores, and sustainability.

Gathered in a serene forest clearing at the foot of the Maroon Bells, it was easy to share in the nature passion of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, but it felt discordant with Medieval interpretations of mountain wilderness as forbidding and foreboding. Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s book, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, reveals that mountains were once considered “nature’s shames and ills…warts, wens, blisters, imposthumes,” created by a punitive God for man’s atonement for his fall from grace.

Crossing the meadow of Sawmill Park

Storm clouds moved overhead, shading the face of the Maroon Bells, portraying the gloom with a cast of dark shadow. Distant rumblings of thunder portended a storm, and we understood the visceral trepidation for untamed forces of nature. Mountain gloom became mountain glory, said Nicolson, only after Renaissance painters and poets celebrated the evocative grandeur of the natural world, as English essayist John Ruskin expressed in the late 19^th century:

…Whenever they brought me near hills, and in all mountain ground and scenery, I had a pleasure, as early as I can remember, infinitely greater than any which has been since possible to me in anything…nor more explicable or definable than that feeling of love itself…

John Muir, who reveled in storms, sometimes clinging to swaying tree tops, resonated with Ruskin’s view of the wilds, which he celebrated with shamanic passion and missionary zeal as America’s foremost conservationist. Muir’s passion was reflected in Western historian Wallace Stegner’s eloquent defense of wilderness a century after Muir:

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed…for wilderness can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, as part of the geography of hope.

Biologist Aldo Leopold recognized raw, omnipotent power in the wilds like Rousseau, while Rachael Carson cautioned in Silent Spring that only one species — man — is able to significantly alter the natural world. Even among the spires of granite and great monoliths of sandstone towering over us at Crater Lake, man has been supreme. Aspen miners of the 1880s probed these geologic treasure vaults for silver, their dominion reaching far into the faults of the earth.

As we hiked down the trail from Crater Lake, thunder boomed from the ridges, mist slipped like a veil over the high peaks, and our minds churned over wilderness history, philosophy, and culture. Walking, as Thoreau expressed, is beneficial for digesting ideas and mulling perspectives, and the hike offered stimulus on these ends.

The group stops Sawmill Park for a seminar session

After a short drive up the Castle Creek Valley, we convened at the ghost town of Ashcroft, where lightning strobed the afternoon sky and rain pounded on the tin roof of an historic, weathered saloon where we took shelter. The deserted ghost town was eerily quiet in the century-long absence of silver miners who forged their community from the wilderness in 1879. Their dominion came with guns, drills, and dynamite, their view of nature straight from Hobbes.

Once the storm had passed we set out in the misty mountain air on a trail along Castle Creek, its waters shimmering over multicolored river rock quarried by glaciers ten thousand years ago. Our eclectic group ranged from captains of industry to school teachers from Dallas to wilderness writers to noted conservationists. Our conversations shifted randomly with our choice of hiking partners, as did our perspectives. Common to our experience was awe and wonder at the sublime wilderness around us.

In half an hour we reached the Pine Creek Cookhouse and met our dinner guest, Father William Meninger, a learned Trappist monk from the Old Snowmass Monastery 20 miles from Aspen. Father William pulled a handwritten manuscript from his robes and described the sacredness of mountains:

Seminar moderators Elliot Gerson and Roger Widmann

Different religions, cultures, and traditions revere lofty summits as heavens or hells, gods or demons, wombs or tombs, temples or divine dwelling places. Attempts have been made to harmonize these puzzling different views to variations on a single universal archetype and to describe the spirituality evoked by mountains by reducing them to some kind of cosmic axis standing at a universal center and linking the various levels of existence from the pits of hell to the heights of heaven.

Our after dinner discussion tempered the sacred with a practical challenge focused on the impassioned debate between defenders of old-growth forests and those who would log them. As we left the Cookhouse and stepped into the inky night, flashes of lightning on silhouetted ridges provided a metaphor to the often black and white viewpoints on which resource issues revolve. Again we faced the question of balance between dominion and stewardship, a prominent theme in resource disputes.

DAY TWO

The trailhead near the historic logging and mining town of Lenado is 15 miles from Aspen on a narrow, winding mountain road. Decrepit wooden shacks converted into eclectic cabins define a backwoods community that retains frontier qualities. From Lenado we hiked into the 82,000-acre Hunter-Frying Pan Wilderness Area.

Our destination was the Margy’s Hut, a rustic log cabin on a timbered ridge at 11,300 feet. The 6.5-mile trail wound through a profusion of thimbleberries, raspberries, chokecherries, cow parsnips, and wild roses along the murmuring creek. The trail plunged, climbed, and seemed to vanish at points as it followed the steep drainage through some of the greatest profusion of biological diversity in the Aspen area.

Spirited discussion around the campfire completed the Wilderness Seminar.

We held each other’s hands for balance as the trail crisscrossed the stream on narrow log bridges. We gathered around the trunk of an enormous Engelmann spruce as one participant, a noted naturalist, gave an impromptu lecture on the riparian ecosystem through which we hiked. On the trail, our conversations ranged from the challenges of corporate leadership to individual hopes and dreams. Gradually, we became well-acquainted through warm, meaningful encounters while sharing the same profundity of experience.

After three hours of hiking, the valley opened to a broad meadow at over 10,000 feet whose western horizon was rimmed by the Elk Range and marked by the distinctive shark teeth of the Maroon Bells. Resting in warm sunshine and satisfying ravenous appetites with the lunches from our backpacks, we explored William Cronon’s seminal essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness.” Cronon cautions that the concept of statutory wilderness is a cultural invention that establishes a hierarchy of nature in which we risk losing our connections with less glamorous natural places:

In its flight from history, in its siren song of escape, in its reproduction of the dangerous dualism that sets human beings outside of nature — in all these ways, wilderness poses a serious threat to responsible environmentalism.

We learned from other writers that Western fascination with wilderness can do harm to the Third World, pitting conservation against the interests of developing economies. If indigenous peoples are to retain autonomy and cultural integrity, said one writer, large international conservation organizations must resist undermining indigenous cultures by lobbying against traditional, life-supporting work on the land.

The cozy Margy's Hut was the Wilderness Seminar's destination and accommodations

Gathered in that wide open meadow, the questions started coming:

Is wilderness a fundamentally American cultural invention, the export of which is presumptuous, self-serving, and imperialistic?
Does wilderness conservation in the Third World assail the autonomy and threaten the livelihood of people trying to live off the land in primitive simplicity?
Do we assign wilderness a Garden of Eden idealism and impose impossible expectations on indigenous peoples?

Our minds brimming with ideas, we paused to explore the surrounding forest where a plane crash 30 years before had left three dead. Pieces of the plane — tragic, desolate, virtually forgotten, alien in that wild landscape — attested to human frailty and mortality. Gradually these remnants were being absorbed into the forest by the majestic indifference of nature, which cast yet another light on our journey.

The final 45-minute ascent to Margy’s Hut traversed through the deep hush of a dense spruce/fir forest where ferns and wildflowers filled the under story. Many of us walked in silence, our minds occupied, our senses taking in forest scents, the call of a bird. Tall trees stood cathedral-like, and occasional shafts of sunlight illuminated the forest floor. Our breathing was deep and rhythmical in the thinning air at 11,000 feet.

Turning a final bend on the trail, Margy’s Hut stood in a clearing, wood smoke rising from its stovepipe. The hut, named for Margy McNamara and built by her husband, Robert McNamara, became our base camp for two days. Cooking was done on an antique wood-burning stove and the only electric power came from solar panels. Bunks were available, but many participants elected to pitch tents under the surrounding pines. Solar showers were hung from crossbars in a small clearing, and the deck of the hut became an impromptu seminar forum with views of the rugged Williams Mountains.

Packs were dropped, appetizers were served with beer and wine, and participants did what mountain hikers appreciate most — gazing at a panorama of mountains and forest spreading across the miles we had walked in the past two days. The more energetic among us volunteered to split firewood with the ax and chop kindling for the stove with the hatchet. Soon, the welcome smells of dinner wafted from the hut. The tables were pulled together, plates were filled, and conversations from the trail and seminar sessions resumed in free and open discourse.

Arjun Gupta speaks to the group on the porch of Margy's Hut

That night, after tents were set up and sleeping bags unfurled, we gathered around a crackling campfire where sparks shot forth toward a smear of stars in a clear, cool night. By the light of the fire we read and discussed selections from Psalms 104, the verse of Lao Tse, and the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, and William Wordsworth, who wrote:

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to mind.

To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

DAY THREE

The fragrance of fresh coffee permeated the hut as the morning sun streaked low across the Williams Range. Birdsong and mountain breezes wafted through the open door as we read a paean by Chief Luther Standing Bear, whose idealistic reflections described wilderness as a sacred, pristine haven. Historian J. Baird Callicott adjusted our view with his depiction of the broad-ranging human impacts man has made on the North American continent since his arrival 10,000 years ago. Wilderness activist Dave Foreman brought management and idealism to bear in his vision for big, connected wilderness areas linked by wild corridors throughout North America, in which biodiversity is protected and “wildness” is allowed to flourish.

At mid-morning, with lunches packed and compasses in hand, we sought nature on our own terms. Breaking into small groups, we followed a compass bearing without benefit of trail or guide and bushwhacked through brush and fallen timber to the ridge of 11,700-foot Mt. Yeckel. Gathering on the summit, we gained perspective through wilderness trials depicted in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, John Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, Wallace Stegner’s The Sound of Mountain Water, and Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage.

Our summit experience culminated with an Aspen Times article about three remarkable Aspen women who championed wilderness during the 1960s, and through grassroots activism, lobbied successfully to more than double the size of the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness.

The Wilderness Seminar crew celebrates its summit of all 11,765 feet of Mt. Yeckel.

After lunch we sought our own resonance with the wilds, spending two hours alone in “solos” that provoked insights that were written in a letter, self-addressed and sealed, to be mailed to their authors six months later. One participant shared this experience:

The Seedling

While I sat in contemplation, I was captivated by the storm moving down the ridge on the other side of the valley. Lightening shot from the darkness and hammered the crest of the far ridge. Rain was just occasionally reaching over to where I was sitting.

I had taken shelter on a steep slope next to a fractured rocky outcrop — hoping any lightening that came my way would find the rocks more attractive. Then I noticed it. It was growing out of a fracture at the base of the topmost rock in the outcrop. A small fir seedling not yet a foot tall. Beautiful, almost perfectly formed, growing first outward then straight up. Somehow a small seed must have blown into the fracture and taken root. Now in its chosen home, it was struggling to bring its life to an impossible place.

From my perch I could clearly see that it was only a matter of time before the unstable rock above broke loose and tumbled to the valley below, crushing the seedling. Indeed, as the seedling grew, the pressure of its own roots would add to the instability and hasten its demise. Yet here it was, struggling against the impossible, unaware of its own hopelessness.

A few minutes later, the sun broke through and bathed the seedling in glorious light. The seedling was pure hope.

Art was the theme of our final night around the campfire, where we viewed and discussed paintings by Bierstadt, Gauguin, and a Japanese watercolor of Mt. Fuji. We resonated with New York Times art critic Arnold Rothstein’s essay, “Mother Nature’s Blockbusters:”

One is humbled by the Canadian Rockies and Glacier National Park because nature doesn’t return the compliment. It makes nothing of culture; it looms over it, declaring its supreme autonomy and power. Nature’s display leaves us both exalted and humbled, which may be how we learn what to hope for from human art.

DAY FOUR

T he wood stove crackled, coffee brewed, breakfast simmered, and the hut door was opened to blue skies and bright sunlight. Participants came in from their tent sites and shared thoughts from a collection of “Bedtime Readings” that the Institute had provided for quiet introspection after the campfire had died, when the night breezes sighed through the forest.

A group shot in front of the scenic Maroon Bells

What moderator Elliot Gerson had cautioned would be a “rigorous seminar, both physically and mentally” had achieved its goal. Over four challenging days we hiked mountain trails, stood before majestic peaks, felt the presence of wild nature, and wrapped our minds around a pantheon of wilderness thinkers, historians, and philosophers.

What Gerson had wished for on Day One as “interesting weather” was delivered, as if on cue — just as the deer had appeared at Crater Lake — with roving thunderstorms, rain dashing against our hooded jackets, sun radiating from deep blue skies, and smoky mists clinging to mountain peaks.

“This seminar has given each of us special meaning for our relationship with the natural world,” concluded moderator Roger Widmann at our final session, “not just in wilderness, but with nature all around us. This has truly been a journey…in every sense of the word.”

A school teacher from Dallas said he had never been so moved by a nature experience as he was during the past several days and that he would try to bring nature into his classrooms. An art gallery owner from Washington, DC, said she had discovered a missing part of herself during her solo, and that exposure to wild nature offers a vital therapeutic experience that touches the soul. A conservation lobbyist confessed that the seminar taught him that Thoreau’s all-important sense of contact with wild nature is essential for eliciting awareness and care of ecosystems in people of all backgrounds. A nature writer stated that he had never felt more alive in body, mind, and spirit than after four days of thinking and hiking in the pure mountain air. A member of the Aspen Institute board of directors concluded that the seminar had successfully communicated the founding values of the Aspen Idea. “We should have done this years ago!”

As we slung on our packs to hike down the trail and back to civilization, we said our good-byes. Hugs and pledges for reunions evinced our new friendships and deep connections. With a final survey of the rugged Williams Mountains, we parted, musing over the words of Maurice Herzog, leader of the 1950 French expedition to Annapurna:

This diaphanous landscape, this quintessence of Purity — these were the mountains of my dreams. An enormous gulf was
between me and the world. This was a different
universe...a fantastic universe.