Memorial Day in the shrinking West

It was to be a reunion, a few days of roughing it and chance to rest and take it easy on Memorial Day weekend. Instead it was a reminder of how the West is being lost.

"Hallooo! Iz thees vhere za PAHTY ees?," hollered the grinning tourist, stumbling off the Green Tortoise tour bus and into our remote campsite.

We stood there stunned, speechless.

This really isn’t happening, I thought, no way. Only in nightmares do full-size tour buses bounce up remote jeep trails and unload 30 or 40 foreign tourists for the night in the middle of your quiet camp dinner. What’s more, these were young, loud vacationing Europeans – the European equivalent of the infamous Ugly American tourist.

One minute we were the only people on Earth, the next it was party, or "pahty" time.

Here I had gathered six friends to a remote campsite off a dirt road south of Mono Lake for a peaceful evening of star gazing and a chance for them to get acquainted with "California’s Dead Sea," as Twain called Mono. For about ten years I’ve camped at this same spot, never encountering another camper, much less a tour bus.

Yet after the bus unloaded and the crowd began loitering about, smoking and running off in all directions to fertilize the trees, I realized that I’ve spent several years bracing myself for this camping horror.

The Great American West is shrinking, as Secretary of the Interior, Arizonan Bruce Babbitt said last month in Incline Village. Even in the 20 or so years since I started rambling around the deserts, there’s been a lot of change. More people demanding more space and use on a limited land. Everybody wants to run cattle and sheep, mine minerals and water, bury nuclear waste, preserve it for hikers or otherwise lay claim to the deserts. Open spaces are filling in and everyone wants a piece of it – including me.

I want to be able to trundle out over a rutted, neglected jeep trail and find a 500-year-old juniper to sleep beneath without hearing, seeing or smelling another human being for days. As a Westerner I’m used to open spaces. I figure a big sky is my right.

My old pal John feels the same way. He drove up from Southern California with his wife and friends to "get away from it all" last weekend. That’s why all six-feet, four-inches of him was poised angrily over that unbudging bus driver – ready to pulverize the twerp. I argued against the invasion alongside John for a few minutes, until my Western idealism collided with reality.

It was no use. Those Europeans didn’t mind crowding us out any more than we Euro-Americans had qualms about pushing aside the Spanish in California, who themselves had no problem displacing American Indians, who in their turn, did a good job hunting down and eradicating all the horses and other large herbivores in North America some 10,000 years ago.

Add to this tragic history the fact that the world is getting overrun with humanity and we really shouldn’t have been surprised to see that bus bumping towards us. It was a sign of the times; seven campers armed with a telescope can’t hold back 5.5 billion people.

How much of this crowding we can stand is probably dependent on how much we endure everyday – which American subculture we hail from. Folks in cities are used to traffic snarls and crowds everywhere. Hiking into the Desolation Wilderness west of Lake Tahoe, along a trail crowded with Eddie Bauer patrons doesn’t seem to bother most city folks, according to Don Lane, recreation supervisor for the Forest Service’s Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit. Lane knows. He has worked for the Forest Service for more than two decades and has talked to thousands of visitors.

At our Mono Lake campsite it was clear that we would have to surrender or retreat. So in the glare of the bus’s floodlights we abandoned out dinner and re-packed our tents. Then we rolled away heavy-hearted, in search of our vanishing mythical American West.