Filthy hippies touched some of these rocks. (Image by Meros Felsenmaus.)

Novelist Edward Abbey (The Monkey Wrench Gang) was a radical eco activist and onetime park ranger. He wasn’t exactly known for subtlety when it came to protecting nature, deriding both mainstream culture and counterculture; he possessed the rare ability to anger both conservatives and left-leaning environmentalists. Abbey was not in a sanguine mood about behavior in Yosemite National Park when he wrote this philippic for the September 3, 1971 issue of Life. An excerpt from “The Park That Caught Urban Blight“:

“For 14 years, I was a seasonal park ranger. But I quit because I found myself forced more and more into the role of a petty policeman. This year, I went to Yosemite Valley, the most troublesome of all Park Service areas, to see the park rangers in their new role as Park Fuzz, to see Smokey the Bear as Smokey the Pig.

In the foothills of the Sierras, up through the old mining towns of Coulterville and Chinese Camp, the flowers were blooming–silvery supine, California poppy, paintbrush and penstemon–and the traffic was light. When I saw a sign ‘Water Ahead,’ I anticipated a drink of pure Sierra Nevada spring water, fresh from the rocks. I found the spring, but another sign beside it read ‘Water Contaminated; Unfit to Drink.’

Later, several miles beyond the park entrance I stopped at a turnout of the classic view of Yosemite Valley below. There was El Capitan, Half Dome, Sentinel Dome, Bridalveil Fall, and a blue haze above the valley floor. Wood smoke? Exhaust fumes? In nearby Cascade Creek I found my first Budweiser can in the clear snow water.

Down in the valley teen-age gypsies with sleeping bags, backpacks and ragged heads slouched along the road, thumbs out. Damn lazy city kids, I thought–let them walk. Good for them, and I spurred my widespread Pontiac right on by. Hitchhiking is illegal in national parks. Hitchhikers are poor, dirty, immoral. I was one; I should know. They steal your credit card, they leave a weird smell lingering in the back seat, they contribute nothing to the national economy.”