The Friends of Madera Canyon are but one manifestation of the groups that “declare our dependence on the Earth and our responsibility to it.”  Wallace Stegner, Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist, wrote these words in an essay titled It All Began with Conservation. Stegner went on to state that “We are still in transition from the notion of Man as master of Earth to the notion of Man as a part of it.”

Many of you have read such authors as Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness) and Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac), luminaries in the literature about conservation and wilderness.  Stegner was more well-known for his fiction: Angle of Repose, Big Rock Candy Mountain, Crossing to Safety, The Spectator Bird, among many other titles. But, beginning in the 1960s, Stegner also wrote prolifically about environmental issues.  He brought to his essays, non-fiction books and novels a passion for the West unparalleled in the American literary scene.

In 1960, in the midst of the campaign to persuade Congress to pass The Wilderness Act which had been debated for years, Stegner wrote a letter to David Pesonen, a UC Berkeley professor charged with working on a portion of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission’s report focused on the wilderness. The letter became known as “The Wilderness Letter,” well-known to generations of environmental activists, and, in the 1960s, read on occasion by Interior Secretary Steward Udall as the text of speeches Udall gave in defense of public lands in general and wilderness in particular.

Stegner began: “If I may, I should like to urge some arguments for wilderness preservation that involve recreation, as it is ordinarily conceived, hardly at all. Hunting, fishing, hiking, mountain-climbing, camping, photography, and the enjoyment of natural scenery will all, surely, figure in your report. So will the wilderness as a genetic reserve, a scientific yardstick by which we may measure the world in its natural balance against the world in its man-made imbalance. What I want to speak for is not so much the wilderness uses, valuable as those are, but the wilderness idea, which is a resource in itself. Being an intangible and spiritual resource, it will seem mystical to the practical-minded—but then anything that cannot be moved by a bulldozer is likely to seem mystical to them.”

In short, Stegner maintained that simply the idea of wilderness was valuable. To know that there are still great tracts of wilderness preserved is important for our spiritual well-being, even if we never set foot in them ourselves.

Later in his letter, Stegner proposed, “Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed…never again [to] have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical, and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil…part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.”

Stegner’s letter concluded: “We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.  For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”

As members of the Friends of Madera Canyon, you and I have declared our commitment to “preserve, conserve, and restore” the Canyon, to the best of our abilities. Much of the work of the Friends since 1987 has focused on recreation, as Stegner described it above, particularly in the lower Canyon, below where the Mt. Wrightson Wilderness begins.  In essence, the Friends have participated in facilitating visits by the general public whose main interest is to “drive to its edge and look in.”

We also know that the lower Canyon is the foyer to the wilderness where no man-made structure or excessive alterations are welcomed, where those who enter it choose to be “part of the trees and rocks and soil” and little else. As stewards of this point of entry, the Forest Service and the Friends collaborate to educate visitors to “pack it in, pack it out” and “take pictures and memories but leave only footprints.” 

For many, Madera Canyon might be the closest they will come to the “idea” of wilderness, in Stegner’s words. Surely, the Canyon is, for many, a place of refuge from the bewildering world of modern life. It is a part of the geography of hope.

When you are in the Canyon, don’t you stop and listen occasionally to the quiet or to the music of the birds? Don’t you get a kick out of walking by the deer as they take note of you and then continue with their grazing? Don’t you look up the mountainsides and marvel how grand the view and how small you seem in relation to it?

You and I live in interesting times. The geography in which we can find hope has transcended scores of “interesting times.”  If we are successful stewards in our time, it will transcend scores more.  I find comfort in that connectedness—to the past, to the future, to the land.

Dan White