A Jumble of Governmental Jurisdictions Imperil the Glory of Sierra’s Eastern Face

The eastern Sierra is one of America’s great secrets. Lying along the Great Basin backside of California is the grandest unspoiled outdoor recreation area in the nation so accessible to a massive population.

But this vast, rugged stretch of eastern California is also incredibly vulnerable. It is not prepared to deal with the explosive use and development certain to occur when 15 million Californians fully realize the range of wonders to be seen and experienced within a day’s drive from home.

Even now, the eastern Sierra isn’t unpopular. On winter and spring weekends, U.S. 395 is jammed with Los Angeles-area skiers going to Mammoth Mountain. Campers and boat trailers join the traffic scramble when trout season opens at Crowley Lake and the streams that tumble down steep canyons from the Sierra snowfields. The U.S. Forest Service imposed quotas years ago on the trail up 14,495-foot Mt. Whitney and routes into other popular backcountry areas to limit damage from hikers’ boots and pack-animal hoofs.

Without foresighted, coordinated planning--the sort of planning not now being done--such pressures could quickly overwhelm the area with helter-skelter development of the kind that has spoiled other resort regions.

For now, the most remarkable fact of this 10-million-acre playground is that so much of it remains very much as it was when naturalist John Muir roamed the High Sierra a century ago and rhapsodized about icy peaks, alpine meadows, glaciers and “a thousand dashing waterfalls with their marvelous abundance of irised spray.” Quite simply, Muir said, the Sierra Nevada was the most divinely beautiful of all the mountain chains he had ever seen.

The eastern Sierra region of Inyo and Mono counties is the size of Maryland and Connecticut combined, yet has fewer than 30,000 residents. In a 250-mile arc linking Lake Tahoe, Mt. Whitney and Death Valley is some of the nation’s most spectacular and diverse mountain, valley and desert terrain, plus an assortment of geologic oddities rivaling Yellowstone. This is the nation’s longest and highest mountain wilderness outside Alaska. The Sierra crest is the eastern boundary of three national parks--Yosemite, Kings and Sequoia--and serves as the headwaters of some of the nation’s most spectacular wild rivers, including the Kings, the Kern and the San Joaquin. The Sierra south of Mt. Whitney is the realm of the California golden trout. Just a few miles across Owens Valley, the White Mountains, also reaching above 14,000 feet, are home to the ancient bristlecone pine forest, the world’s oldest living trees. On a topographic map, the eastern Sierra is one grand cohesive unit, unbroken by a transverse highway for a distance of nearly 200 miles.

On a map of governmental jurisdictions, however, the eastern Sierra is a hodgepodge. The most striking feature of such a map is the lack of privately owned property. The great bulk of land is held by the federal government, except for the Owens Valley itself. The valley floor is primarily owned by the Los Angeles City Department of Water and Power, which bought up most of the ranches years ago to gain control of the area’s water rights. The streams that rise in the eastern Sierra and feed into the Owens Valley and Mono Basin are the major sources of Los Angeles’ water supply.

In all, at least 15 major federal, state and local agencies and units of government exercise day-to-day authority over crazy-quilt sections of the eastern Sierra. Each is responsible to its own constituency and each has its own regulations and priorities--priorities that often overlap or clash with one another. On one side of a mountain peak, the National Park Service of the Interior Department is in charge; on the other side, the U.S. Forest Service of the Agriculture Department is responsible.

For all this government, no single body is concerned with the long-term growth and development of the eastern Sierra as an entity, no agency attempting to foresee the problems as more and more people come seeking outdoor recreation and as more and more entrepreneurs come to develop facilities to accommodate those visitors.

Planning never has been a popular concept in rural areas where county boards of supervisors are often dominated by ranchers and other individualists who resent intrusion from big government.

But gradually, eastern Sierra leaders recognize that their economic destiny rests with the tourist and recreation industry and, to a declining degree, on traditional ranching and resource-exploitation industries such as mining and logging. In fact, that is going to happen whether the local officials do anything about it or not.

The question is whether the various interests can work together to plan and manage such growth--and limit environmental damage--to the long-range advantage of the entire area. One proposal for doing so has come from Mono County Supervisor Andrea Lawrence of Mammoth Lakes, who advocates creation of a national recreation area “to accommodate the demands for various types of local development while at the same time preserving the resource values that are the county’s major assets.”

A national recreation area is designed to manage growth and development in public lands areas that have “outstanding combinations of outdoor recreation opportunities, aesthetic attractions and proximity to potential users. They may also have cultural, historical, archeological, pastoral, wilderness, scientific, wildlife and other values contributing to public enjoyment.”

The eastern Sierra meets such a definition on every count. So far, Lawrence’s proposal has received a decidedly chilly reception from her rancher-dominated board. But her idea at least has started the debate.

There are informal attempts by government officials with common interests to work together, mostly on a personal basis. But there is no structure for coordinating policies toward a common goal; institutional biases and mandates of different agencies often clash.

Consider the recently drafted 10-year management plan for the Inyo National Forest--2 million acres in Inyo and Mono counties, including the High Sierra crest and the Inyo and White mountains across the Owens Valley. The plan, to its credit, recognizes the prime recreational value of the forest. But the multiple-use congressional mandate of the Forest Service prevents it from making the sensible decision that the forest should be managed almost exclusively for preservation of the superb mountain environment and for recreational use.

When Inyo forest officials called for public comment on the plan, nearly 300 persons and organizations argued that Inyo rangeland was not suitable for leasing for cattle grazing. And the Interior Department asked the Forest Service to at least halt grazing along stream beds because of the damage done by livestock.

In its final plan, the Forest Service did restrict grazing along streams, but it could not yield to the overwhelming local sentiment for eliminating grazing on the Inyo forest altogether. The Forest Service response was: “Grazing is considered an appropriate use of the national forests. The challenge is to use it wisely and without undo impacts to other resources. It is neither our responsibility nor our authority to eliminate grazing on national forest lands.”

The inherent problem is that grazing is not necessarily an appropriate use of this particular forest. It is impossible to allow cattle to graze on these forest lands without impact on other resources. There are similar conflicts dealing with timber cutting and development of hydroelectric and geothermal energy projects. One federal agency may be compelled to encourage development of these resources while another is required to protect them from exactly that sort of exploitation.

Grazing, logging and hydroelectric development are banned from the national parklands just over the Sierra crest. The Park Service found the Inyo’s accommodation of all-terrain vehicles in some areas unwise. There even are different rules for wilderness travelers wanting to build campfires on either side of the crest. It is absurd to have conflicting federal policies at work side by side within the same mountain environment. As much as local officials may oppose Washington’s meddling, congressional action is necessary to make federal rules and priorities compatible throughout similar areas of the Sierra.

The foundation of any planning process, however, is local participation and support. The eastern Sierra needs articulate grass-roots leadership to come together on a common assessment of potential problems, on common goals and on workable solutions.

The advantage the eastern Sierra still enjoys is an opportunity to act before growth and development get out of hand, to control its own destiny and thrive economically while still protecting a natural resource that makes the area so attractive to visitors. If successful, future generations of Californians will be able to gaze with awe on the Range of Light as John Muir did, seeing it “reposing like a smooth, cumulous cloud in the sunny sky, and so gloriously colored, and so luminous, it seems to be not clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like the wall of some celestial city.”