The Sixties: Wilderness v. recreation, educated v. affluent

Continuing to consider the Sixties ... let's take a look at the Sixties through the lens of class, using the long battle in the 1960s over Mt. San Gorgonio in Southern California, which was a harbinger of the coming class wars between the educated elite, the prosperous upper middle class, and, mostly as bystanders, the masses.

The single best place to downhill ski in Southern California would be the north slope of Mt. San Gorgonio, near Big Bear Lake, 80 miles east of Los Angeles in the San Bernardino Mountains. It's 11,500 feet high, and, due to the extreme elevation, about 3,000 vertical feet of skiing would be usable well into spring each year. (Most SoCal ski mountains top out at around 8600 feet, which is about where a San Gorgonio ski complex would start.) And Old Greyback is a more rounded mountain, more like volcanic Mammoth in the Sierras, better suited for non-lethal skiing than most of the alarmingly steep SoCal mountains. 

But, it also has a lovely alpine wilderness below the peak that's well-watered and not too steep, especially around the two natural lakes at about 9000 feet. (Despite the name of Los Angeles's main NBA team, natural lakes are extremely rare in Southern California.) Here's Dry Lake, which actually isn't dry most of the time:

I found this 47-year-old Sports Illustrated article written just before the Ecology Age kicked fully into gear in the late 1960s that discusses the political struggle between skiers and wilderness enthusiasts in the early 1960s. Obviously, this isn't terribly relevant to the latest breaking news out of wherever, but it offers an insight into educated American opinion just before the Sixties broke over everything.

February 01, 1965 

The Battle For A Mountain 

Sportsmen are fighting sportsmen in the conflict over beautiful, rugged Mt. San Gorgonio, a lofty wilderness near Los Angeles which conservationists want to keep wild and skiers long to penetrate 

Coles Phinizy

In southern California, east of Los Angeles, where yellow tongues of smog lick the dusty feet of brown mountains, there is a rocky giant called Mt. San Gorgonio. It is 11,502 feet tall—a half a head higher than the other peaks flanking it in the San Bernardino range. By early spring, when most of the range and the crests of the adjacent San Gabriel range have lost their kiss of snow, big San Gorgonio often still shines white—the one true jewel of the lot. It is also the least spoiled today, because 34,718 acres of it above the 7,000-foot contour have been set aside by Congress as a wilderness area where there can be no road or building, or any use of land vehicles or planes. 

San Gorgonio is a product of dramatic geologic faulting; in its upper faces there are vast cirques that were gored out long ago by glaciers. Although it is today, by law, supposedly a place of emptiness and little noise, for the past quarter century it has been a critical battleground. On and off since the late 1930s skiers have been trying to open up the San Gorgonio wilderness so that tows and lifts for downhill skiing might be built on its hoary upper slopes. As anyone might guess, all manner of conservationists and outdoorsmen have rallied to defend the wilderness against the ambitions of the skiers. It has been a peculiar battle. Both sides feel strongly on the matter, but even in the most crucial moments, there has been little uncontained anger. Indeed, the only thing that has been expended at all recklessly in the long fight has been talk. 

The battle is, in fact, only worth considering at this time because, sooner or later, similar fights will break out in other areas.

That turned out to be true, and in a hurry after 1965.

In the U.S. there have been many quarrels over land before, the miners, railroaders, loggers, cattlemen, sheepmen, farmers, industrialists, sportsmen all scrambling for a proper share. Now for the first time, on the high ground of San Gorgonio, we have sportsmen against sportsmen in a major fight. 

Skiers v. backpackers was something of a class battle of the upper realms, with skiers tending to be affluent and wilderness enthusiasts extremely well-educated Thoreau quoters. The family snow play crowd (see below), in contrast, is mass-market and wasn't much represented in these debates as the 1960s went along. Their interests generally sided with the skiers in terms of making use of roads and other facilities.

The one real reason such a battle is taking place and that others will follow is that the U.S. population is becoming a burden.

Boy, that's something you seldom read anymore.

We are fast running out of room for working, decent living and playing. By present, crowded standards, almost all outdoor sports require an exorbitant amount of space—a large factory and housing enough for all its workers can be built in the same space needed by 18 men to play a game of baseball. In the U.S., east and west, there are wilderness tracts far larger and more precious than San Gorgonio, and there are other snowy mountains better for downhill skiing. San Gorgonio has become the first battleground of sportsmen simply because it is located near greater Los Angeles. In municipal Los Angeles and in the tangle of contiguous cities that lie with it under a blanket of smog, there are now more than 10 million people. The air they breathe on inversion days is only slightly better than the old foul breath of Pittsburgh. The particular virtue of the megalopolis is the complex of freeways by which ordinary men escape in their off time, some of them heading for the water, some for the deserts, some for the mountains, some for the ball parks and horse tracks, and many simply leaving home to find a louder jukebox playing a different tune. 

This passage reflects the Era of the Common Man thinking that would die out as the Sixties went on. Within five to ten years, you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody in the fashionable sporting press extolling freeways for providing freedom to average guys.

... In winter many "go to the snow," as they say, even when there is no snow. They often go to bare ski slopes simply to ride the chair lifts, to hike about, to breathe clean air and to gaze across at Palos Verdes and Catalina Island floating on the distant horizon. 

Any New Englander reared in a cold, nubbly land where belly-flopping, ice-ball fights, tobogganing and bundling were taken for granted would be amazed to see the use southern Californians get out of a ski slope. If the slopes have any meager snow cover at all, the desperate Californians engage in what they call "snow play." For the benefit of old Down Easters who are not hep to modern recreational terms, by "snow play" a southern Californian means all the usual trivial, thrilling and dangerous pleasures of winter. For example, three weekends ago on the Mt. Baldy ski slopes, the highest in southern California, there were about four inches of intermittent glaze and slush on the upper reaches. Although all slopes were closed to skiers, the main chair lift still carried 1,800 snow players and sightseers to the 7,800-foot level. ... at the base of the lift Greg Zemenek, 9, Steve Madison, 9, Ricky Traynor, 9, Dale Traynor, 8, and Darrell Traynor, 7—all of El Monte, Calif.—were battling with brown snowballs. It was not altogether clear who was siding with whom, but all five participants were carefully mixing one part mud to one part snow in their ammunition so that the sparse patches of slush would last for the duration of their small war. 

While these small boys battled, in the main parking lot Darlene Bryan, age 10, of Santa Monica was weeping because her uncle would not let her put a three-foot snowman in the back seat of the car. Some families came to the slopes carrying garbage can tops, inner tubes, crate tops and air mattresses, and when denied access to the lift with such dangerous vehicles, they climbed part way up on foot and slid down tree-studded, rock-rubbled slopes that would have scared any sensible belly-flopper out of his wits. ... 

Not a lot has changed at the Mt. Baldy parking lot other than the ethnicity of the snowball fighters.

On the January weekend when people were having such snowy fun around Mt. Baldy, only six of the 13 ski areas within 100 miles of Los Angeles were open for skiing, and all of these six were using artificial snow to supplement the meager natural fall. ... During the same period, above the 8,400-foot contour on San Gorgonio there was a foot of snow, and the conditions on the fiats and north slopes were good for recreational skiing. 

Quite obviously, for skiing or for any kind of "snow play," Los Angeles needs more room and more reliable snow, and that is why the pressure is on the prize acreage atop San Gorgonio. After a number of smoldering years, the battle for San Gorgonio broke out again about three years ago when a group of southern California ski-lift operators petitioned the Forest Service to open up 3,500 acres between 8,000 and 11,000 feet (see map).

My impression is that in Switzerland, developers typically won most of these battles, so the Alps are covered with gondola lifts, cog railways, tunnels inside the Eiger, hotels, hostels, and so forth. In the U.S., the exclusionary wilderness ethic turned out to be quite a bit stronger than in Switzerland, perhaps because the Alps were always inhabited by the Swiss, so there was a natural alliance between developers for the wealthy and the rural masses.

Although the operators and skiers will argue the point forever, the 10% of the area that they want for trails, lifts, parking lots, restaurants and so forth is an important ecological part, used by cougar, bobcat, deer, bear and bighorn sheep. It is also, from the human point of view, the esthetic heart of the area. ...

Some skiers claim they are ardent conservationists; some of the wilderness defenders claim they are ardent downhill skiers. In their nobler moments, the skiers lean heavily on the late President Kennedy's old pitch of vim and vigor.  In their nobler moments the wilderness defenders fetch up the wisdom of old Henry Thoreau, pleading that city people need the tonic of wilderness to clear their addled heads and fortify their souls. ...

By 1970, Thoreau, the spokesman for New England post-Puritan near-misanthropic elitism, was huge.

While both houses of Congress were weighing a number of different wilderness measures during the past two years, both sides in the San Gorgonio fight took their causes before congressional committees, and ever since there has been a great outpouring of emotion, needless words and confusing figures. No one can surely say how many skiers there are in southern California, but one statistician opposing them claimed that there were 61,010 in 1963. The skiers variously estimate their own strength at somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000. In any case, this means that there are still somewhere around 10 million people in the area who do not ski. According to the Forest Service, last year there were 53,900 visitors who rode horses or hiked into the wilderness (this total includes one lady pushing a perambulator and another carrying a straight-backed chair). 

This means that, despite the publicity the battle for the mountain has received in the local press, there were around 10 million people in the area who did not bother to visit the wild battleground. 

... There is no doubt that if the high ground of San Gorgonio were opened up to skiing, the area would get far greater use than it does now. The sport of skiing flourishes in the U.S. wherever there are slopes, lifts and reliable snow close to heavily populated areas. On their side the skiers have the old and often valid doctrine of the greatest good for the greatest number. But weighed against this are two equally logical considerations. First, the American wilderness is disappearing, and we grieve already at its passing. Second, as soberly put in a committee hearing by a geologist named Barclay Kamb, "It is argued that the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number compels development because the downhill skiing facilities would attract so many more people than presently visit the area in its wilderness state. This claim takes us back to the basic question of values at the heart of wilderness preservation. It is like arguing that we should convert our churches to roller-skating rinks because that would get the attendance up." 

The battle for San Gorgonio will continue—that is the only thing certain about its future. As long as the mountain is wild, it will have defenders, and as long as it shines with snow in winter, there will be skiers wanting it.

It's interesting to see that back in early 1965 a writer felt he had to explicitly argue against majoritarianist utilitarianism -- "the greatest good for the greatest number" as the moral default. One of the key changes of the Sixties was that the default assumption of who was in the moral right flipped from the majority to just about any organized minority.

Since then, the wilderness advocates won completely at San Gorgonio. There has been no development at all of the high country. Backpacking became highly fashionable around 1970, as part of the anti-materialism ethos of the hippie era, although its popularity would seem to have receded much in recent years, perhaps in part because it's hard to get started in it.

A big change since then is the emergence of small but well-networked extreme sport enthusiasts. Individuals will climb San Gorgonio in the dead of winter to ski down once. (My dad would go skiing in the Sierras that way back before WWII, but was quite happy when somebody finally got an old Model T up to the top of the run, flipped it over and attached a rope tow to the engine.

Whereas at one time, if you thought spending 6 hours climbing a mountain to get 15 minutes of skiing was a good idea, you'd pretty much have to be a Caltech student to know similar individuals. (The Caltech Alpine Club has been around for decades.) But, now the Internet helps individuals with unusual tastes get together.

In fact, besides implementing a wilderness permit quota system to manage crowds, wilderness activists succeeded in closing the last three miles of road to the trailhead to make the region less accessible. Back in the 1970s when I hiked to the top of San Gorgonio three times, it was only a six mile roundtrip to Dry Lake with 1200 feet of elevation, which made it an ideal weekend backpacking trip. Now it's a 12 mile roundtrip with 2400 feet of gain. At that altitude, it sounds daunting for a decayed physique like mine.

My guess is that the result at San Gorgonio is fairly representative of the developments of the 1960s: the tastes of the highest class won the legal war over those of the next highest class. 

Meanwhile, the masses get fatter.