Call of the Wild

The regulars stepped off the bus wearing oiled boots, scruffy knapsacks, faded blue jeans. Bright-eyed, they talked of things and places far removed from everyday city life: of lady fern and sorrel, of landmarks with such strange-sounding names as Evolution Valley and Tuolumne Meadows, of high places where the air is pungent with eucalyptus. Their packs held only a few necessities: a knife to carve a walking stick, binoculars clinking against a canteen cup, sandwiches. By contrast, the newcomers in the party wore madras shorts, sneakers, and apprehensive faces. They carried pocketbooks, transistor radios, straw baskets with food enough to fatten all the pheasant in the heather. New and old hands alike, 85 in all, were part of California's famed Sierra Club, out for a day's hike through the mountains. Their leader, a gangling Sierra surveyor, bluntly laid down the law: no straggling behind, no getting ahead, no smoking, no chewing gum wrappers tossed along the trail. No dogs. And put away those transistor radios.

That said, the Sierra Club band strode off behind him into sun-dappled woods, up a winding creek bed. Many had walked no farther than the distance from living-room sofa to TV tuning dial in years. For these, the brisk uphill pace, over boulders, across the brooks and fallen trees, was arduous going. By the time they sprawled out for lunch, on ledge rocks by a waterfall, blisters were rising on tender feet.

And the uphill trail got tougher and more slippery all the time. But by midafternoon, even the tenderest feet were firmly planted on a windblown, grassy highland. Off in the distance gleamed San Francisco Bay; beyond it, looming out of the sea itself, was Mount Tamalpais, its summit aswirl with purpling, swiftly scudding clouds. The hikers' blisters were forgotten now, the land had worked its magic; there were no newcomers any more.

The event was a simple outing, superficially nothing more than a Sunday hike in the woods. But for Sierra Clubbers such outings have a deeper meaning. They fear that on some still far distant Sunday there may well be no woods left to hike in, and they return from each expedition more determined than ever to prevent that day from coming. "Is it a religion?" one Sierra Clubber was asked last week. "In a way," he answered, "it surely is."

Walkers & Talkers. Seventy-five years ago in the U.S. heartland, it was well-nigh inconceivable that vast wilderness areas such as California's 400-mile-long Sierra Nevada might one day be threatened. John Muir, a bewhiskered Scot with a passionate love for his adopted land, formed the Sierra Club in 1892 as a force to preserve Yosemite National Park, then only two years old, from encroaching sheepherders and cattlemen. Today, with factories turning rivers into running sores, with housing tracts creeping like eczema where once tall timber stood, the Sierra Club is more militant than ever in preaching and practicing Muir's exhortation: "To explore, enjoy and preserve the scenic resources of the U.S. and its forests, waters, wildlife and wilderness." Its 24,000 members, ready to fight at the drop of a tree, belong to 17 chapters scattered over California, Nevada, the Pacific Northwest, Wisconsin, the Great Lakes, the Atlantic seacoast and the Rio Grande, and include such walkers and talkers as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Publisher Alfred Knopf, a band of Congressmen, and a paid representative who serves as a lobbyist in Washington. Such members have made the Sierra Club the most powerful citizens' conservation organization in the U.S.

Vanishing Wilds. Its influence has grown steadily since David Brower became its executive director. Brower, 51, who runs a 30-man paid staff from San Francisco headquarters, enlists swarms of volunteers from every chapter to help in cranking out a massive barrage of preservation pamphlets. But the club's heaviest editorial weapon is a series of lavishly illustrated books designed to awaken the nation to the threat of vanishing wilds. Brower led and won the fight to save Colorado-Utah's Dinosaur National Monument from a proposed series of dams, the greatest conservation battle since the establishment of the National Park System--to which the Sierra Club has also been deeply committed.

The club is engaged on every other conservation front from the seashore on New York's Fire Island to the threat of a hydroelectric project at Rampart Canyon on Alaska's Yukon River. This month in Las Vegas, Brower and fellow zealots took aim at yet another target: the proposed $500 million Bridge Canyon Dam on the lower Colorado River which threatens, say Sierra Clubbers, to back up water some 93 miles and inundate part of Grand Canyon National Park itself.

They have not neglected California. At home, the club's most bitter battle currently rages over one of the state's biggest and oldest trees, the Sequoia sempervirens. The ever-living redwoods are all but dead: 83% of California's original stand has been cut, and, by U.S. Forest Service estimates, most of the state's 250,000 remaining acres of virgin redwood will be gone by 1980 at the present cutting rate. Even the famed 5,000-acre National Tribute Grove, set aside as a memorial for U.S. war dead after World War II, is soon to be breached by a freeway. The Last Redwoods, latest in the Sierra Club's handsome series of books, protests on behalf of conservationists: "It is somehow preposterous that we of this generation should have the power to reprieve or condemn a race which nature has preserved over more than 100,000,000 years."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.