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5EQUOIAWATCH:Challacombe: THE GREAT 

 each other, and mutilating the planet 



Man needs wilderness even as his body needs 

 clean water. Interacting with the strange, his 

 mind expands and thrives. Faced only with the 

 indexed and tamiliar, his mind suffocates. A few 

 hundred thousand years ago, man's brain 

 evolved rapidly to a larger size. What role, one 

 wonders, did our long, intense interaction with 

 the unfamiliar — i.e., wilderness — play in this 

 phenomenon? 



That which we know of creation is minuscule. 

 Libraries we have without end, but they are as a 

 blurred page to what remains to be puzzled out 

 and described. 



The Sequoia, in its glory and mystery, stands 

 as a grand, provocative metaphor for what we 

 have yet to discover about creation. Even the soil 

 which supports the Sequoia teems with un- 

 known processes. 



The venture into the Sequoia forest is our 

 return to the natural frontier, to the unex- 

 plained, to the challenge of nature's world. The 

 Sequoia is our evolutionary experience revisited. 

 The urban mind, when plunged into the vast, 

 vertiginous Sequoia wilderness — with no scale 

 of size for reassurance — can be seized with 

 something very close to panic. But this fright is a 

 wholesome and most necessary experience. For, 

 as of old, the mind is being forced to reach for a 

 fresh understanding — to try for a paradigm yet 

 to be articulated. 



Whenever man's mind breaks from his cul- 

 tural inher itance and perceives what genera- 

 tions have overlooked, he experiences one of 

 life's rare vahdations. Archimedes knew such 

 when he leaped from his tub and shouted, 'Eu- 

 reka." It is then that the world suddenly en- 

 larges; the individual feels Nature has addressed 

 him specially. 



That spine-tingling encounter with the un- 

 measured and wordless, which early man trea- 

 sured, still waits for you in the trackless Sequoia 

 retreats. Our forest managers, crippled from lack 

 of im^nation, prefer you think of "their" Se- 

 quoias as 19th-century exploitable resources. I 

 would have us consider them as a link with our 

 deep past and as provocateurs of that lively, 

 resilient, inquiring, inventive, wondering mind 



MIRROR 



of discovery we must have to forge into the 21 st 

 Century and beyond. 



If we can create Disneylands and their fantas- 

 tic, but fake 'frontiers," would it really lie be- 

 yond our genius to conceive of discrete ways to 

 offer the genuine article — the real frontier 

 experience itself — through a Sequoia encounter? 

 Tourism, rightly managed, certainly promises the 

 opportunity of more jobs, multilateral economic 

 returns and worldwide approbation than does 

 the heartless destruction of what can never be 

 replaced. 



Consider just California's growth and de- 

 mands on the Sierra wilderness — to say nothing 

 of tourists by the hundreds of thousands arriving 

 from Asia and Europe. The established Sequoia 

 reserves are no longer remote but have become 

 "day parks" for Bakersfield, Visalia, Fresno, 

 Merced, Modesto and other Valley cities. To this 

 pressure add the populations of the Bay Area 

 and Southern California which weekend in these 

 mountains. The 19th-century idea of the Sierra 

 as an endless wilderness to cut was not good 

 then and is brain-dead now. Who will pay to 

 camp, fish and hike in a desert of stumps? 

 Greater than a few transient jobs is the pubhc's 

 need for mountains as mountains, undestroyed, 

 inviting and wonderful. 



And what of our troubled youth? Many in the 

 1930's, and more recently, found work in the 

 great forests of the Sierra a healing passage 

 between urban anomie and a productive matu- 

 rity. These forests require an intensive care 

 system yet to be formulated. What better merger 

 of needs, then, than youth finding individuality 

 and the forest assisted to live alongside the new 

 urban realities? 



THE IMAGE IN THE MIRROR 



These 300-foot red-barked monsters survive 

 from an age when the earth knew not man 

 but bred many robust species. The Big Tirees 

 were coeval with the dinosaurs and other fasci- 

 nating life forms lost to the world millions of 

 years ago. Only on the isolated, specialized 

 plateaus and ridges of Cahfomia's Sierra Ne- 

 vada — like an island in time — were the largest 

 of the primeval trees, the Sequoias, able to hold 

 on until the present 



