Crime Interlude

9/7/08
The next morning I drove down to Big Pine, showered at the Big Pine Motel, stopped for a coffee to go and just happened to notice the headlines of the local paper: The Bristlecone Forest Visitors Center, my intended destination for the day, had burned down two days earlier. Since the Visitor Center had no electricity and only a small amount of fuel on the premises, the cause was presumably arson. The story also reported on the vandalism at Big Pine trailhead as well as similar attacks at South Lake trailhead where I had seen the State Trooper patrolling early in the morning the previous weekend. Ah ha. This was all on top of vandalism to a laboratory at White Mountain Summit, a seven-mile hike in from any trailhead.

It seems I was right in the middle of a crime wave targeting backcountry facilities and their visitors in the High Sierra. The paper maintained that any links between these crimes remained conjecture, though noted that the trailhead attacks were identical. The paper speculated whether the motive was an effort to intimidate hikers and environmentalists. As a hiking environmentalist, that was certainly my concern. I needed more information. With my visit to Bristlecone Pines now on hold, I drove back to Bishop and the White Mountains Ranger Station and conferred with the ranger on duty. He was less hesitant to speculate that the vandalism might be linked to opponents of the new wilderness proposals for the White Mountains. I learned later that online speculation included the possibility of protest over renaming Palisades Mountain after David Brower. This sounded preposterous to me, but since no one was taking credit for it, we all mentally accused our own demons.


The ranger did not think I was crazy to continue using trailhead parking lots, so I reupped my bear canister and got a backcountry permit for later in the week for Kearsarge Pass out of Independence. The ranger also told me the Forest Service had already driven a trailer up to serve as a temporary Bristlecone Pine Visitors Center, and that while a small portion of trail and signage was destroyed, the trails and trees were all fine. So that trip was a go. Finally, I saw that by true serendipity the author and photographer of a brand new book on the Bristlecone Pine (A Day in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest by Dennis Flaherty/Mark Schlenz) were appearing at the bookstore in Bishop that very night, so I decided to wait around town for that. Bishop is not the easiest place to kill a day, though not the worst either. Legendary mountain photographer Galen Rowell has his studio in Bishop and I spent a lot of time there, ultimately concluding his work was generally too melodramatic for me. I had lunch at a sandwich place with a sign that read “Standing there watching me will not help me make your sandwich faster. In fact it will piss me off”.


At the reading the author introduced himself to me right away and seemed like a friendly enough guy so when I overheard him and the photographer discussing the Visitor Center fire I probably too-boldly butted in with the hopes of hearing some inside info. Instead they expressed umbrage at my speculation of an anti-environmental terror campaign, insisting that trailheads in the Sierras have been safe for 30 years. A little embarrassed, I slunk off and chatted on neutral territory with a couple of tourists. After the author’s talk and a slideshow by the author’s wife and publisher, John Louth, the Forest Service Manager of the Bristlecone Forest, got up to speak. But instead of talking about the crime or any investigation - what I wanted to hear - he spoke enthusiastically of rebuilding, specifically fundraising for rebuilding, starting right there and then with a jam jar on the table.

I spent the night at Horton Creek Campground, my third now, and a loverly night it was. And headed up to the Bristlecone Pine Forest early Sunday morning.