Yosemite | Lost LA | Season 3, Episode 1 | KCET

[Music] when you visit Yosemite the idea of the place seems to loom as large as its towering granite cliffs you feel the urge to invest you somebody with meaning to find an idea that makes sense of the profound scenery like many Angelenos I relish my annual trip to Yosemite as a time to leave the city behind for a while and recharge among the black oak monolithic granite and tumbling waterfalls and yet I'm also aware the irony given just how urban Yosemite Valley can feel when crowds swarm in when the federal government first set it aside as a park in 1864 Yosemite represented a radical idea the preservation of American wilderness a diorama of primitive America protected for the benefit of future generations is this the right way to think about the park you know somebody's founding principle has been challenged over the years from the artifice of the firefall to the Park Service's clash with hippies in 1970 and to the erasure of its native inhabitants from the parks very origins could there be a more authentic way to experience Yosemite and who gets to decide what's authentic la is an idea as much as a city a set of hopes and beliefs that inspired millions to move here but behind the idea of la are the stories of people dreamers who realize their vision for Southern California and others so let's look back and uncover some clues to have forgotten past in the archives Lost la explores the untold history behind the fantasy of California [Music] I stumbled upon these postcards in the USC libraries special collections here in one photo album is a catalog of the way artists and writers and even the National Park Service have trained us to see Yosemite carefully framed views of the parks monumental scenery which visitors can replicate from roadside Vista points and paved foot trails it made me wonder how did you somebody become a tourist attraction a sort of natural theme park where scenery is a thing to be consumed a list of natural attractions to check off these postcards tell a tidy story about Yosemite maybe a little too tiny I went to see a steward of the land someone who spends a lot of time thinking about these things Yosemite Ranger Shelton Johnson Shelton first made his name as a scholar uncovering in the archives the once forgotten history of the Buffalo Soldier as an early guardian of Yosemite National Park but he's become famous as an eloquent ambassador for our parks and I wanted his take on a question that had been troubling me it's almost impossible to have a you know an unfiltered experience of Yosemite there are all these cultural images that are just packed into our head yeah but but how can we try to have an authentic you know communion with with what's here what actually exists actually I see people everyday that are having a completely authentic experience in Yosemite Valley every single day they're usually around two years old three maybe four or five when we're kids we have that unfiltered bias I mean we we just are open to the world there's no adult faculty to say was this something that we really need to know is this important is this minor if that's not there that hasn't developed yet so kids are natural biological perceptual sponges that soak in the universe fully no filtrate no filtering is going on and so every kid implicitly is John Muir [Music] John Muir didn't arrive in Yosemite in 1868 without some cultural baggage of his own he was a committed romantic trained by the arts and literature of his day Muir sought the sublime in Yosemite a communion there with God and God's nature and through his writings John Muir encouraged us all to Co some of these nature in that way and protected as something sacred but nur didn't just engage with Yosemite intellectually he also experienced it kinetically testing the limits of his body and his luck as he scaled the parks cliffs and surmounted its highest peaks I wanted to better understand this John Muir so I visited a man who has embodied mirror on the stage and on the screen for more than 35 years I'm so excited to talk to you because I actually saw your show might be about ten or nine or ten years ago in Yosemite Valley in the theater and I was just sort of blown away I mean you really inhabit that John Muir character and it's clear that you've done just I mean tons of research and homework I feel like an important part of John Muir's relationship with Yosemite were just the mountains in general it wasn't just it wasn't just spiritual wasn't just sensory it was it was physical like he he wanted to experience it with every fiber of his being the wild of the the circumstances the more inclined he was to go and engage it I they loved storms he thought they were the most interesting aspect of engaged in the wilderness he just really wanted to get himself immersed in it he was sort of like an extreme athlete of his time in many ways as soon as he got out of into the wilderness he became instantaneously sort of rejuvenated by it and enthused by its messages which were for him as as grounding as anything he had ever had for religious upbringing mm-hmm so how has the preservation of Yosemite I guess changed since when we were first is that foot there music citement of a preserving land for its own sake was something that was fairly new in the consciousness of Americana so and it was that that inspired Roosevelt to help out in many ways it was Roosevelt for example that eventually brought the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove big trees back into the National Park System budgeted through URIs urging nature is forever building up and put it down and creating and destroy and keeping everything whirling and flowing chasing everything out of one beautiful form as age comes on one source of enjoyment after another is closed but nature sources Yosemite sources will never fail you but if enough of us go and play among the spirits of the wilderness jumping from rock to rock then we need not despair but what we so learn to love will be as purely a work of loving creation as are these mountains these pine trees my bonny loving flowers [Music] all of us who follow john muir into the backcountry a huge debt to the man not only for teaching us to experience the place with our bodies but also for inspiring a preservation movement that culminated in 1964 with the Wilderness Act setting aside tracts of land that are to quote the landmark legislation untrammeled by man where man himself is a visitor who does not remain but mirror and the Wilderness Act had a blind spot he couldn't see how native people had tended yosemite x' nature for thousands of years he dismissed their role in creating the Yosemite landscape he's so admired and Muir was hardly alone in his thinking for a long time the park didn't make room for native people and the stories had told about itself that cultural shift and perception is extremely important for Americans who are not native people who do not come from an indigenous culture to here because they hold the answers to the questions we're continuing to ask about how do we live in this world and make it sustainable the Native people made this environment sustainable for 8,000 years so far so good so they're the people all over the world is indigenous cultures we need to talk to you about how do we live hand hand-to-mouth how do we live side-by-side with wild animals and wild places and not take so much from it that we lose a sense of who we are in the first place when white settlers first encountered Yosemite in the 1850s the valley was home to the Ahwahnee Chi people and for them the origins of the park were anything but romantic you want each he was a diverse tribe there was you walk by you can see or people that actually were trying to escape what was happening on the coast from the missionaries and stuff coming in and looking for a safe place basically they found you somebody but the California Gold Rush of 18-49 would change everything with it came the miners who formed the militia who burned the natives villages chased them into the mountains and away from their homes they come in here fighting are indeed people here are native people and so they they had to run and hide they said that we they ran all the Indians out of his cemani and that's not true they hid in a cave so far that the soldiers and the Buffalo Soldiers couldn't get to him but they they did kill kill a lot of our native people and elderson and kids and stuff and and burnt down all the houses those who remain settled in other parts of the valley and their home eventually became a state park and then a National Park visited by the rest of the world and in 1931 they were moved to an area where an ancient settlement called la hoja had once been the Park Service along with I guess the Indian office got together and and built well some modern homes for sort of the our tribe at that time and the place they built the new houses for us was was right here at hoga we kind of more or less had the village in them in the valley to ourself when we moved down here they had a more solid roof over their head shall we say but their days in WA hoga were numbered by the late 1960s unless they worked for the park they were forced from the valley once again and their homes destroyed 1977 jay johnson's myself proposed to the National Park Service that we one of the our village back that went on until 1980 a new Secretary of Interior was was in place and the the new secretary approved they ascended a master plan in 1980 and that included our are getting the village so that was that was big news for us for a long time the park remembered its native people through place names like tenaya lake or the awanee hotel as ghosts on a map but the ohe never left when the won't a tunnel a triumph of modern engineering opened in 1933 their descendants were there to celebrate this photograph in a similar photograph taken at a reunion many decades later our powerful reminders that native people still watch over the land in the modern age of tunnels television at smartphones now after many years of negotiation a new village is under construction to keep the ancient traditions alive I know the tradition couldn't be lost anymore we've got to bring our kids back to this you know we've got to let them know where our foundation is our dreams to bring the youth in here and they'll be able to stand oh so much ice maybe three to five days hopefully they will be able to show them the experience that our answers had in living those that's that's where they saw they lived this is a result of our presence being in Yosemite we always say that we never left and we're and we're still here the parks decision to welcome its native people back to their ancestral home and write them back into its history shows that it's willing to rethink some of its practices it's not the first time the park has reversed the mistakes of its past Yosemite it once seemed would do anything to encourage visitors it staged public bear feedings it allowed campers to drive on to the fragile Valley Meadows and for nearly a century amid so much natural splendor it staged a wildly popular thoroughly artificial spectacle the fire fall which brings me back to those postcards I was so interested in I met up with Ranger Scott gediman to find the location where my Firefall postcard photo was taken [Music] well as a kid growing up in Los Angeles we would come out here to Stoneman meadow and we stayed in housekeeping camp and I just remember that we had the classic station wagon with the with a wood paneling and when you had a big pad in the back and we would come out here to Stoneman meadow we'd put the pad out in the meadow and we'd look up at the fire fall and I was 6 when they stopped but I vividly remember watching the fire fall and I thought it was the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life mm-hmm so describe it for me what did it look like and when did it go off it went off after sunset I D yeah what it was a tradition we're looking over at Cree village the historic village that they started receiving guests in 1899 it started as a camp and so the way it actually happened was up on the top of Glacier Point they would have a campfire and they would have the campfire all day and they only used red fir bark and so the fire would go all day and they would get the embers and so every night at 9 o'clock there was a special ceremony that people would gather here in Yosemite Valley and they would play the Indian love song this was entertainment for visitors and someone will be up on the top with a big shovel and they shovel over the embers right at there at Glacier Point and it literally looked like a waterfall of fire and it would just come down with the embers an orange line and just go right into the trees how far down did it go it went all the way to the bottom we're here at 4,000 feet we're looking at Glacier Point a little over 7,000 feet so we've got a 3,000 foot drop and so when you would see the embers go down it was very reminiscent of Yosemite fall upper Yosemite fall which is a long column and and and I just have these vivid memories of watching the fire fall and it was something that was done every night in the summer this image was reproduced but hundreds of thousands of times right and it still is yes and and what you're seeing from this image is not only in the fire fog lace your point but also the the famous camp curry sign yeah Camp curry that sign is still there I've seen it and and it looks it looks the same today sure sure looks like it's a very similar vantage point here it is if we look right up at Glacier Point we can see that as it comes down basically sure point over the ledge trail and right into curry village so it's just about the exact angle where we're at right now yeah amazing so Scott you grew up in LA what part of LA in North Hollywood okay and what was it like as a kid driving from LA and and seen Yosemite it was literally my dream and my goal since I can remember to become a park ranger in Yosemite National Park congratulations thank you this is back in 1968 and this is up at Glacier Point and that's me and my brother Steve who still lives in Los Angeles with a ranger and then fast-forward 40 years later and Here I am with my son and my daughter at the same tree I love it and just very excited so it's it's it's it's very cool it's you know somebody's in the bloodline yes it is yes it is yeah the Firefall ended because every time they engaged in that activity and push those burning red fir embers off the Glacier Point those burning embers scald they literally scorched the cliff walls on the way down and then the people in them in the meadows below we're all looking up to take in the site they're all trampling on Meadows wet netis wildflowers they're literally trampling the beauty they came to see but their vision was focused up and their vision was not focused below so all of those things added up to the superintendent at that time saying that that was an activity that was known no longer in concert with national national park philosophy in terms of land management so it was ended with the end of the fire fall in 1968 that same meadow would soon be the site of an incident that would change Park Management forever my mom worked at 20th Century Fox in the music department from 1945 to 1988 so I was on a soundstage before I could walk really so I kind of grew up as a Hollywood kid and so from that I started working on documentaries and I came up to us Emma T over Springbank in 1970 I found all these people wandering around in this meadow and there were people from both sides of the generation gap talking to one another and I thought it would be really great to make a movie about Yosemite as the healing power of nature because this place is so awesome and so overwhelming that you could kind of get past your own prejudices that's so I came back and fourth of July with a crew of three and we made a 22 minutes sync sound film with a budget of 1,300 dollars and of course I should say that on the second day of shooting they had a riot in this metal [Music] [Applause] over someone there were frames from the film made the New York Times in the Washington Post and the footage because we were the only crew here the footage made the CBS Evening News 1970 was a time when most young people were sort of part of the youth movement of course the Ranger cars would go by and the young people standing on the sides were going boom there's a cop car with all the windows bashed out of it and we assembled in front of the Rangers and we had County Sheriff's and all of their deputies so many law-enforcement people just crashed in on your summative Ally and we're all standing by ready for something after several days of pleading with the revelers to respect the parks rules the Rangers held a sit-down meeting to discuss the growing conflict but it boils down to the fact that the national parks are supposed to be and are in fact vignettes or fragments of primitive America national parks are not set aside to be big rustic fun farms a number of young people embrace this meadow treating it pretty much as you would expect a treat Golden Gate Park motorcycles are being ridden across this people were trampling it down into dust and I think that's part of what shocked the National Park Service at the time I think it was a complete lack of understanding about how to police a large crowd yeah essentially they used a loudspeaker and they said the meadow will be closed at seven o'clock and if it's not closed the assembly will be declared illegal and at 7:15 they came out of these trees with like twelve or fourteen horses and just stampeded the meadow and ran over a bunch of people and hit a bunch of people on the head with ax handles right you had hair back to your down you nut crack and Dean had a beard down to about here he drove a Norton motorcycle and the wind would blow the beard into two halves he looked like Yosemite Sam so the director of the National Park Service saw the movie is a guy called George Hartzog and he he basically said to me after seeing the film you seem to know what's going on here better than anybody on my staff they don't know how to talk to these kids would you like to come up here and do an evening program for the the kids that we can't seem to reach and so Dean came on board and Bob came on board and we did a program seven nights a week from basically Memorial Day to Labor Day for three summers in a row after the riots I came back to work as a firefighter the next year and I had heard that there was somebody doing a hippie show in Yosemite Valley and so I came down to find out what it was all about I heard Johnny Mitchell and and Van Morrison Tunes waking through this forest and came around a bend and there was a wide movie screen with multiple images and slideshows and one of days fantastic programs going on and that began my career for the National Park Service that I've had the pleasure of enjoying for the last 48 years all of us who were volunteers and working were in love with the place and we wanted to introduce our friends to this place that we really loved this place filled a spot in my heart that had been empty and that changed my life completely changed my life Henry David Thoreau said in wilderness is the preservation of the world and he's not talking about wilderness as a natural history idea what he's talking about is the importance of preserving wilderness so that human beings can experience wild unbridled nature because that will change them and so I think that that's you know I I guess I'm speaking from my own experience because I came up here at 19 years old and was kind of a wayward kid and you know and I think for Bob and and anybody pretty much anybody with a green and gray uniform on I mean that's that's the gig there's something there's something magical about this valley and and it speaks to people like Bob Roni and Dave Asher and I and the millions of people you know literally 5 million people a year who make the long expensive arduous journey to come to places like Yosemite and it's a place that I love in a place that I feel driven to to help protect Yosemite remains a battleground over nature and its management but the powerful beauty of the park continues to inspire and frustrate our attempts to describe it and you describe this as something like a cathedral right I mean it's like a very big Cathedral it's it's at once very vast but it also is enclosing Cathedral is trying to put Yosemite on a human dimension it's too big for a cathedral if there were a cathedral this large you'd never hear the sermon and it's just on the edge of human comprehension could almost take it all in and there's enough of it that's beyond that realm that we just go this is amazing looking again at these postcards I now realize how much was left out of the frame dark episodes like the eviction of Yosemite s native people riots and traffic jams I also see how picturesque views like this could provoke struggles over how to manage the land and when I look at this photo I now see there's a problem with searching for the one real Yosemite people have always been part of this landscape as long as we respect its past and remember its future the authentic Yosemite experience is the one we create for ourselves [Music] Union Bank is proud to support lost la additional funding for lost la made possible in part by the Ralph M Parsons foundation California State Library and Ray foundation and California Humanities

Channel: PBS SoCal

Views: 24,612

Keywords: kcet, southern california, Lost L.A., Yosemite, Nathan Masters

Id: OMeEeqzCEZM

Length: 26min 40sec (1600 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 10 2018