Clash of Cultures

September 2007

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has no rangers. Yet the agency manages over 310,000 acres of land owned by the City of Los Angeles in the Eastern Sierra—almost Ľ of the amount land in the California State Park System. The 278 State Park units in that system have 250 rangers and lifeguards—an average of less than one ranger per park unit and one ranger for every 8 square miles. It would require 60 rangers to cover Los Angeles’ Eastern Sierra lands as well as that—a level the Coastal Conservancy describes for State Parks as a “dire shortage of staff”. It is no surprise then, when the already overextended Mono Lake Tufa State Reserve staff function as quasi-rangers on the adjacent Los Angeles lands in the Mono Basin.

State Reserve Interpretive Specialist Dave Marquart left me a message at home two Sundays after Labor Day. He said that someone was on L.A. land at the County Road on Lee Vining Creek, building ditches and diverting water. This person had been there a few days and done a lot of work. The individual had tried to contact me but I wasn’t in the office. I called Dave back, and I was able to confirm that the individual was someone who had contacted the Mono Lake Committee the year before about his activities rewatering channels on Mill Creek. He had said that there wasn’t much more work to be done by hand on Mill Creek.

I had replied by email, thanking the person for his well-intended efforts and the information about the channels, and asking if he was familiar with a scientific report that identified historical channels—hinting that his activities might not exactly be following an approved restoration program. I said we’d contact him if we had a need for volunteers to do Mill Creek restoration work. He never replied.

He called himself Naaan (name changed since I don't have permission to use his name here), and seemed to be a guru of sorts. He has a book of poetry, but the Committee Bookstore didn’t carry his book because the former Retail Manager thought the poetry wasn’t very good.

After I finished my lunch, I headed down to talk to Naaan. On the way I stopped at Old Marina and read the Mono Lake level gauge—the water level was still falling 1/10 foot per week.

I thought of other things I could combine with this trip. I had just spent the morning giving a restoration tour to a college class along the Lee Vining Creek Trail. While on the trail, I noticed a bright orange tarp in an area where I looked down on an illegal camper the Friday of Labor Day Weekend. He was camping right next to a channel entrance that was drying up as the flow in the creek dropped. Bill Trush, one of the stream scientists heading up the stream restoration program, wanted to see this channel kept open a few more years until the vegetation had a chance to mature. I hadn’t had a chance to reopen the channel entrance since I saw it dry when I looked down on that camper. But the growing season was ending, and it didn’t seem like a high priority. And I figured the camper was only there for Labor Day Weekend.

As I drove on the dirt road from Old Marina to Lee Vining Creek, I passed a car coming in the other direction. It was rare to see another car on this road. But just this morning, as I finished up the restoration tour with the college class, we looked down on a hunter dressed in camo that was sneaking up on a deer—just downstream of that dry channel entrance near the orange tarp. It might have been the same deer we had just flushed just up the trail. Up on the hill above us were two more hunters with a spotting scope.

The class was camping in Lundy Canyon, and the day before they had reported to the authorities some deer hunters shooting from a vehicle. Even having a loaded gun in a vehicle is illegal—nevertheless, the class never saw the Sheriff Deputies come.

While on the phone with Dave, he told me that someone had just driven an ATV up the Lake Canyon Trail—presumably a hunter. Stories like that and ATV tracks illegally off-road proliferate during hunting season.

It is the unethical hunters that give them all a bad name. Some in the class wanted to scare the deer away from the hunters. But we talked about how the ethical hunters can be really good people—and I wondered why people walking out of McDonalds eating factory-farmed meat aren’t greeted with the same derision as hunters. When you buy meat at the fast food restaurant or the grocery store, the blood is on someone else’s hands, but your actions are responsible for a slaughter no better than hunting.

ATV riders that obey the law and stay on roads have no reason to be despised by environmentalists, yet just mentioning off-highway vehicles gets some people into a tizzy. When I described an August dirt bike ride that went around the east side of Mono Lake (on a road), I drew looks of scorn, upturned noses, and self-righteous concern from whom I would otherwise consider tolerant people. People that I respect surprise me with immediate, visceral disdain for snowmobilers. I have good friends that ride dirt bikes and shoot guns. They are great people, and I am always disappointed by the knee-jerk stereotypes about them. It is the same self-righteousness you see when you run into a Northern Californian that hates L.A.—even though the people of L.A. and the employees of LADWP are good people.

It is the bad apples that ruin it for everyone else. Great technology requires great restraint and responsibility, and apparently there are a lot of hunters and OHV-ers out there ruining it for everyone else.

The same thing happened with a shooting area on Cuesta Ridge near San Luis Obispo, people would shoot up couches and appliances and leave them there. The Forest Service cleaned it up, and posted a sign saying if the trash came back, the range would be closed. Sure enough, it came back, and the range was closed with a locked gate. The few bad apples ruining things for the many.

It is a very personal thing to legislate values. Liberals hate it when conservatives try to legislate social values, and conservatives hate it when liberals try to legislate environmental ones. The main difference seems to be that environmental misdeeds affect all of us, therefore we should all have a say—but that doesn’t make it any less personal. Our relationship to the land, our land ethic, is very personal.

As my car approached the creek, I tried to remember to tell Jessi, one of the Mono Lake Committee's interns, to wear bright colors the next time she reads the piezometers. Once a week she is measuring the groundwater level in piezometers—a fancy name for plastic wells—along Lee Vining Creek between the main channel and the dry channel, where the hunter was stalking the deer. But maybe we shouldn’t send an intern out there at all during hunting season?

Maybe that is where the scorn for hunters comes from—fear. If they mess up, it is my life on the line. A favorite place to hike turns into a dangerous place to be during hunting season, and that builds resentment in the non-hunting population. Combine it with the often-seen illegal, dangerous, and impolite antics of the unethical ones, and no wonder the average person turns up their nose at the thought of hunters. How about the guy years ago that shot a pronghorn antelope in the Bodie Hills, not knowing the difference between a deer and an antelope.

I reached the creek, but I didn’t see the white rental car that Dave said Naaan was driving. I grabbed my camera and went to see the channel work. It was just downstream from the County Road crossing, where about ten years ago we had done similar work with State Parks. The State Reserve Ranger at the time was concerned that the channel (that eventually entered state land) was drying up because of sediment deposited in the entrance from erosion at the County Road crossing. We organized a few volunteers, met the ranger with shovels, and dug a ditch from the main channel to the dry channel, letting water back down it again, watering the thirsty trees along it. I later got in trouble from LADWP for not having permission (or permits) to do the work.

In subsequent years, the channel became a high-flow channel once again, drying up at low flows. The trees along it seemed to do okay, and the question of the County Road crossing wasn’t one that the stream scientists seemed interested in engaging Mono County (the road owner) about. Nature was taking its course, albeit with the impacts from the road influencing it, and it was deciding not to water that channel.

I worked my way through the Black Cottonwoods and soon reached the same location where we had dug the ditch 10 years prior. The work Naaan did was amazing. The new ditch had to be deeper because the creek had downcut, and Naaan had dug elaborate deep ditches lined with cobble walls. He had placed a flat rock that looked like some kind of altar on an island in the ditch entrance. Water was flowing down the channel once again.

It was a work of art. It looked like someone’s garden—not exactly appropriate in the wild Mono Basin, a National Scenic Area. As I followed the water down, I wondered what I would say if I met Naaan. I don’t think he was causing any harm, but it wasn’t exactly the best way to do things either. I could invite him to do work on the channel upstream that everyone agreed was a good one to keep open. I could direct him to a recently-opened channel on Rush Creek that needed additional work. Out there his artistry wouldn’t be near a road, wouldn’t be noticed by visitors, and would actually contribute to an organized restoration program.

As I walked back up the road to my car, I didn’t see him anywhere. There was a white Honda SUV parked under a tree, but it didn’t sound like the car Dave described as Naaan’s.

I reached my car, grabbed my water bottle, and walked up the road upstream. I decided to investigate the orange tarp I saw at the entrance to the dry channel, where someone was camping two weekends ago. If the camp was still active, I could warn Jessi about it—and if it wasn’t, I could clean it up.

I reached the road closure, and the hunters were gone. They left a coiled yellow nylon rope on the ground, which I picked up. I continued walking up the closed road, keeping my eyes open for hunters, just in case there were more. I was wearing a grey hat, blue shirt, and brown pants—not exactly the most visible colors.

Where the closed road reached the dry channel, I followed the channel up to the entrance where the encampment was two weeks ago. The bright orange tarp lay on the ground—a huge orange tube of plastic, which at first I thought might have been a bag I could put the trash in, but it had no top or bottom. The green tent was lying on its side in shambles—bent and broken. Two empty cases of Keystone Ice beer were on the ground, along with a brown paper bag filled with empty cans of beer, pork and beans, and other empty food containers. Near the dry channel was a bar of soap and a small hand towel. There was an ATM receipt that was faded, with an October date, and a zero balance in the savings account.

I walked the few steps over to the dry channel entrance. The water was seeping a few feet into it before disappearing into the ground. I spent 15 minutes reopening it—digging out the larger rocks blocking the entrance—and the water flowed into it once again.

I returned to the encampment, and began dismantling the demolished tent. I packed up all the shock-corded poles, cutting some of the cords with my pocket knife for quick removal. I bunched up the tent into a big ball and placed it carefully in the center of the big orange tarp. I placed the bundle of poles next to it, and placed the beer boxes and cans and brown paper bag in the tarp as well. I even found an unopened can of Keystone Ice—I wouldn’t have been able to finish that much beer either. And after that much beer, I definitely wouldn’t have been able to haul that much stuff out of there.

Once I had the encampment piled on the tarp, I noticed additional trash in the trees several feet away. Further investigation revealed a preference for a different brand of beer (Bud), with much more faded boxes. There were white plastic shopping bags neatly stuffed in various corners of the opening in the woods. Because of the faded boxes, it looked older than the other encampment, with one exception—there was a carefully placed plastic disposable razor and bottle of shampoo on a log. The razor and shampoo were balanced as if someone would come back any minute. I left them there. I was tired.

I returned to the tarp and wrapped up the entire bundle, using the yellow nylon rope left by the hunters at the trailhead. I lifted the bundle—not heavy, but big and awkward—and began carrying it down the formerly-dry channel, now slowly filling with water as far as the encampment from my efforts several minutes ago.

I walked down the channel with my awkward bundle, occasionally stopping to retrieve a fallen tent pole, or a trailing cord. I reached the closed road and while the walking was easier, I had to hold the bundle high to avoid snagging it on the bushes. The sun was hot, and I stopped to finish the water in my bottle.

After 20 minutes of walking and stopping and a bit of repackaging the awkward bundle, I reached the trailhead, and smelled the smell of sagebrush flattened in the middle of the road by the recent traffic of the hunters. I kept walking past a high-clearance section where a rock hidden in the sagebrush in the center awaited unsuspecting low-clearance vehicles. I set the bundle down and continued to my car.

Afternoon clouds were building, and virga was falling above the flanks of the Bodie Hills north of Mono Lake, above federal lands leased by Hilton. Somewhere beyond those hills Steve Fossett’s plane was sitting in the desert for two weeks—as long as the tent and the tarp and the cases of Keystone Ice had been sitting next to Lee Vining Creek. I had been out of water for about 15 minutes and wished for more—but I knew my car was close.

I got in my car and drove it up the road, the constant scraping of the sagebrush roaring against the underside of the car. There were several other cars driving around—two down at the lake, one at the creek crossing with mountain bikes on the back. A busy weekend. But no rangers on LADWP land. No one to contact—especially on weekends—regarding illegal camping or water diversions. I put the bundle in the back of my car, drove back to Lee Vining, and emptied it into the dumpster. 4:00 pm—and I almost passed on the morning’s tour, almost said no, I’ve got a Website revision to work on. I could have come right back to the office after not finding Naaan—too many emails to catch up on after a long weekend to go traipsing up the creek rewatering a channel and cleaning up an abandoned campsite.

But L.A. has no rangers. If the Mono Lake Committee and State Parks didn’t do the job, no one would.

I got back to the office and checked my voicemail—it was the other message Dave Marquart had left me, before I talked to him earlier in the day from home. He said he was about to “make contact” with Naaan.

On City of Los Angeles land. Where there are no rangers.