Enchantment Under Pressure

It isn’t enough for your heart to be broken because everybody’s heart is broken now.

Allen Ginsberg

I like the word enchantment, as I referenced in my last post when describing Enchanted Valley in the Olympics. It is a pretty good bet that the place will be beautiful, and your hike will not be disappointing. At least it used to be that way.

Enchanting places are always popular and for good reason. They are beautiful. People want to go there, and they should. We hike for many reasons, and for most people one of those reasons is to surround ourselves with nature’s unspoiled beauty.

A recent news feature (Paradise Under Pressure, KING 5 News) by a Seattle television station described in horrific detail the desecration of the wilderness in a popular hiking destination called the Enchantments. Located in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area, the place consists of a long string of lakes, over seven hundred of them. Rising above them are the Cashmere Crags. This destination will always be found on popular trail apps when one is looking for adventure and beauty in Washington’s Cascade Mountains. Influencers boast on social media about the Enchantments, a short drive from Seattle and only a four-and-a-half mile hike to Pilchuck Lake. On a busy weekend day, as many as 2000 hikers follow the trail to the lake.

Those hikers leave behind piles of poop on exposed rocks with their accompanied “toilet paper blooms.” They leave piles of trash, graffiti on rocks, and campfire rings in a place where fires are not allowed. They trample the wildflowers in the fragile alpine meadows. In short, the place is no longer enchanting.

The news program focused on the lack of Forest Service oversight, arguing that the budgetary cuts our President mandated last winter resulted in the number of rangers in the area going from eleven to one. Certainly that lack of enforcement unquestionably plays a major role, but I have another question that nobody seems to be able to answer and many people are not even asking. Who would do such a thing to an enchanted place?

Who would leave plastic bottles scattered on the ground? Who would poop on a rock and leave it there for all the world to see? Who would start a fire when numerous signs clearly state that they are not allowed and fire danger this summer is so very high? Who would desecrate a sacred place? I would not, and if you are reading this, you probably would not do it either. But somebody is doing it. Lots of people are doing it.

Several years ago when my daughter Leah and I hiked the Washington section of the Pacific Crest Trail I became alarmed by the trash we were seeing and started talking to campers about it. Their responses were all the same: “Of course I wouldn’t do that.”

But somebody does do that, and I have a theory. I call it Teacup’s one per cent rule. In my heart I believe that most people who take the trouble to hike to a beautiful place do not litter and care as deeply as I do about the pristine environment they are visiting. There is no way to accurately determine how many people are violators of this ethic, so I want to throw out an estimate. Suppose just one per cent of the hikers who go there are the ones trashing these beautiful places. I suspect the percentage is higher, but for the purpose of making my case, I will keep the figure low. That means if 2000 people are hiking to the Enchantments most days through the summer hiking season, then twenty of them are leaving behind their poop and their trash. Multiply that figure by the number of days the trails are free of snow and open to hikers, about ninety, and you have 1800 people each summer leaving behind what the rest of us do not want to see or smell.

What has become of us? More important, what will become of us? Are we a people who have become so distracted by the electronic world that is our screen, always there in front of us, that we fail to pause, to savor, to worship the real world where our feet touch the earth our mother? Whatever your religious persuasion, the natural world is a gift. It is the reason we are here, walking and loving the world that created us. Love this world. Savor it. Walk gently please.