Wilderness Workshop celebrates 60 years of the Wilderness Act with local stories

Wilderness Workshop hosted an event on Tuesday to celebrate 60 years of the Wilderness Act.

The event, called A Wild Ride: Celebrating 60 Years of the Wilderness Act, was hosted at The Arts Campus At Willits, and five locals shared their experiences with the wilderness through live storytelling.

The Wilderness Act was passed on Sept. 3, 1964. It was signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson after a 73-12 Senate vote and a 373-1 House of Representatives vote.

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“Demonstrating the immense public support for this landmark conservation law, and three years after that, Joy Caudill, Connie Harvey, and Dottie Fox, inspired by this new legislation, founded the Wilderness Workshop,” said Wilderness Workshop Executive Director Will Roush. 

“I don’t think there’s anyone here, or potentially anyone in this whole valley, who isn’t grateful that those three women saw the incredible potential in this legislation,” he said. “Over the next decade and a half, those three women, along with countless advocates and supporters, did the work that ultimately led to the Roaring Fork Valley being ringed by wilderness.”

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The three women secured congressional wilderness designation for the Hunter-Fryingpan, Collegiate Peaks, West Elks, and Raggeds Wilderness areas, as well as doubled the acreage within the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness Area. All of these locations equal almost a half-million acres of wilderness in the White River National Forest.

For the last 60 years, Wilderness Workshop expanded its land protection tools from wilderness to public land, adding 110 million acres. Nationally, there is wilderness in almost all 50 states. The workshop has also partnered with regional and national organizations, including the Sierra Club, the Southern Ute Wilderness Alliance, and the new National WIlderness Coalition.

“I think it’s worth just taking a moment to be grateful that we have such a law and that we live in a country where that type of protection is still possible,” Roush said.

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, Wilderness Workshop partnered with Writ Large’s Alya Howe to host “A Wild Ride.” Similar to her other live storytelling events, this one showcases community voices to explore different perspectives on and connections to wilderness.

Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness

Sloan Shoemaker was the first storyteller of the evening. He worked for Wilderness Workshop for 22 years, where he eventually served as executive director. His passion for the wilderness took him to climb North America’s highest peak, raft its deepest canyon, and testify twice before Congress. He moved to Colorado from South Carolina in 1984.

“I am practicing his execution,” Shoemaker said in his opening storytelling remarks. “I am 15 years old, and I’ve had enough of the abuse. I shoulder an antique 16 gauge shotgun. I didn’t mean to pull the trigger. The blast leaves a fist-sized hole in the bed right where my dad’s chest would have been. The whole shock shakes me to my senses, confronting me with the violence of my revenge fantasies.

“Were it not for the solace I found in nature, I may be in prison now and not before you. But thankfully, nature showed me another way,” he said. “Nature based trauma therapy, I then knew intuitively, is my lifeline to sanity. As soon as I was free, I fled the racist, violent, patriarchal South that I knew and headed West, seeking the solace of wide open spaces.”

After more than a decade out west, Shoemaker secured a staffing position in 1998 at Wilderness Workshop. His favorite duty was wilderness air and water quality monitoring.

Our backyard, as he called it, the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, is considered a Class I airshed. He made the comparison that his trouble in his youth juxtaposes the cleanest, purest air that can be found right near his home.

The Clean Air Act gives special air quality and visibility protection to national parks bigger than 6,000 acres and national wilderness areas bigger than 5,000 acres that were in existence when it was amended in 1977, according to the National Park Service. These areas are classified as “Class I.”

Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness was one of five areas in Colorado designated as wilderness in the original Wilderness Act of 1964.

“My wild ride has been one of the evolving relationships to wilderness, where the changing needs of my own personal growth have shifted my perspective over time. That is precisely why I am deeply grateful for the immutability of capital ‘W’ wilderness,” Shoemaker said.

Sangre de Cristo

“He tells me about his annual backpacking and fly fishing trips to his favorite mountain range, the Sangre de Cristos in southern Colorado,” Trina Ortega said. 

She is the Catena Foundation’s Coal Basin Ranch and Trails Manager. She also served as editor-in-chief of Mountain Flyer Magazine, as well as a founding editor for the Sopris Sun.

Throughout her story, she speaks about her brother. During one particular trip to her brother’s favorite mountains, the Sangre de Cristo, her brother and their cousin took mountain bikes to Venable Lakes in the 1980s.

“The bikes were heavy, and it was steep getting up to these remote high alpine lakes above tree line,” she said, continuing her story. “But they persevered, and after a couple nights of fishing and camping, it was time to descend.”

Ortega’s brother and cousin started down the narrow, single trail track. Once they cleared the evergreen forest, however, the trail smoothed out and became steeper.

“So he yells at my cousin, ‘Whatever you do, do not slam on the brakes. It’s gonna be fast. It’s gonna be steep. Just sit back, keep your balance, and let her roll,'” she said. “As they blazed down the trail, they were all smiles. The crisp, mountain air brushed across their cheeks. The bikes floated on this bed of pine needles, the evergreen forest smelled fresh and organic. Nothing else existed except these two boys in this wild, wonderful trail in the Sangres.”

That trip became even more special after the early 1990s when the area was designated official wilderness, prohibiting bikes altogether forever. The Sangre de Cristo is the southernmost subrange of the Rocky Mountains. The wilderness can be found entirely in Colorado and includes four 14ers.

“It truly was the ride of a lifetime,” Ortega said.

Her brother died 12 years ago at the age of 51. Three summers ago, she traced the same trail her brother did two decades before.

“As I quietly walked into the wilderness, I pictured him smiling and laughing, blazing down that trail on his ride of a lifetime,” she said. “I touched the soil. I inhaled the evergreen forest, and as the crisp mountain air brushed across my cheeks, I heard him say, ‘You are safe.'”

Glenwood Canyon

“But then one time Clifford Duncan said, ‘You can take the Utes out of the mountains, but you can’t take the mountains out of the Utes,'” Bill Kight said. 

He is the executive director of the Glenwood Springs Historical Society and Frontier Museum. He retired from the U.S. Forest Service in 2016 after 38 years. In his retirement, he is a part of the storytelling group Writ Large.

During his story, he talks about his good friend, Clifford Duncan. One morning, the two men drove to the wilderness in Glenwood Canyon in the White River National Forest.

The White River National Forest contains sites like Maroon Bells and Hanging Lake, 11 ski resorts, 10 peaks over 14,000 feet, and eight wilderness areas that cover more than a third of its acreage, according to the U.S. Forest Service.

As pavement turned into dirt road and snow came down, their Jeep bounced until it was parked at the trailhead.

“I had a map with me because my job was to help the Utes reconnect with their land, their ancient land, their ancient ancestral homeland. They called it home, not wilderness,” Kight said. “We started out on the trail. No one was there; no footprints on the trail. As the snow started to accumulate, Clifford didn’t need a map. He went off the trail, and I followed him. And when he got in that kind of mode, it was hard for me to catch up.”

Duncan traveled in the middle of two knolls where there was a 50 foot wide circle. In this circle, it was not snowing despite the snowy conditions surrounding them.

Kight followed in his friend’s footsteps.

“We went to the center of the site, and he performed a ceremony, which I was privileged to be a witness of, and what ceremony that was, no one else needs to know,” he said. “When he reconnected with the land, it was powerful.”

After the ceremony was done, the pair of friends got back in the Jeep and headed back to Glenwood Springs.

“I took him to his favorite restaurant. I was getting ready to open the door, and he goes, ‘Bill.’ I stop, I freeze. He says, ‘Bill, some people will think what we did today was magic. Really, it’s the way we should live. Every day,'” Kight said.

Mount Sopris

“I think my favorite view in the valley might be in the City Market parking lot. I think it’s my favorite view because no matter what kind of day I’m having, good or bad or somewhere in between, I can almost always see Mount Sopris,” Zoë Rom said.

Rom is a podcaster, journalist, trail runner, and comedian. She also authored the book “Becoming a Sustainable Runner” and is on the Board of Directors for Runners for Public Lands.

“The playful curve of its false summits, a light dusting of snow like a pearl necklace,” she said. “I especially love the Alpine glow, the brilliant pinks and periwinkles caused by those amazing, fading last rays of winter light.”

Rom gave the audience a lesson in geology. 66 million years ago, before the parking lot was built, pressure from deep within Earth’s crust forced magma into the sedimentary layers of rock that were two or three miles beneath the Earth’s surface. 

Over time, those weaker layers were eroded, and it left behind the igneous dome. Over the next 10 million years, glaciers continued to whittle away at that rock, leaving behind the playgrounds that surround Mount Sopris today, she said.

Its original stewards, the Ute people, called it Wemagooah Kazuhchich, which translates to ancient mountain heart sits there.

“And it really is a heart, isn’t it? It feels like the Earth itself is wearing its heart on its sleeve. It’s something deeply personal and internal that’s been surfaced to watch over these twin valleys. It, of course, was later named after someone who never bothered to climb it but, like me, deeply admired it. And how can you not, right? It’s amazing, it’s inescapable, almost unavoidable. Our entire valley orients itself around Mount Sopris,” Rom said.

She said that while the 12,965 foot tall mountain never needed our validation, it received it anyway in the 1964 Wilderness Act, which codified a way for us to set aside lands as wilderness.

“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain,” she said as she recited the definition from the original act.

Maroon Bells

Natalie Spears’ grandparents found their way to Snowmass in the 1950s after World War II and polio left behind bad memories in their native Massachusetts.

“And they fell in love with these wild lands, with the lakes and the peaks and the rivers, and they hiked and camped and skied my grandmother back to health,” Spears said.

She grew up to become a folk musician. Her recent album is called “The Hymn of Wild Things.”

Before she was born, however, her grandmother died in February 1981. Her mother’s family decided to bury her ashes, enshrined in an urn, at the Maroon Bells since it was a place they had spent so much time together as a family. 

Throughout the decades since her grandmother’s passing, various family members had tried to retrace the steps back to her grandmother’s ashes but to no avail.

“So, our grandmother’s remains remained a mystery. And for a long time, I was like, this is kind of ridiculous that we don’t know where my grandmother is,” she said. “In 2015, (my cousin and I) decided we were gonna go and find grandma’s ashes.”

Over a weekend in August 2015 the cousins, along with a family friend, finally met up.

“We cobbled together the clues that we had received from our family and from my uncle. He had given us sort of a generalish description of where they may be, which included two mountain passes and a couple lakes and roughly like three square miles of territory,” Spears said. 

In 1981, their family had only taken one photo. The photograph was of Spears’ aunt crouched down near a couple of rocks, with a nondescript ridgeline in the back, and dotted with trees. To the left of her were three trees and a stump.

“Talk about trying to find a needle in a haystack,” Spears said.

After two days of no luck and during the second night of their search, Spears, her cousin, and their friend paused in front of some ponds to take a moment to remember that despite not locating her grandmother yet, they really just wanted to go on the trip to be in a place that her grandmother loves. 

“It’s that time of night when the trout are jumping, and I’m standing there, and we’re talking about our grandmother and thinking about her in this place and thinking that maybe these are the descendants of trout she had caught,” Spears said.

Suddenly, her family friend notices that the angle of the trees has finally lined up with the ridgeline in the photo. 

And Spears looks to her left and sees three trees and a stump.

The three run over and pull out the metal detector. The detector’s beeps quicken. They start digging in the spot the detector has indicated, throwing back sticks and rocks.

Spears hits something hard, and as she brushes away more dirt, a copper urn emerges from the ground. On the urn is a plaque that says her grandmother’s name, along with “One of God’s Loveliest Creatures.”

The plaque also says her birth date and death date. Her birthday was Aug. 22, 1915, the date that Spears had found the urn, 100 years later.

“We realized we found her on her 100th birthday. I just feel the hair on my arms begin to stand on end,” she said. “At that point, we’re just like weeping, and we’re just still in this place where we knew she had been, where her spirit was resting. So, almost every year since that time, I’ve been able to go up to a resting place. We took GPS coordinates, but I remember where it is.”

Regan Mertz can be reached at 970-429-9153 or rmertz@aspentimes.com.