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Wild Wilderness was founded in the early 90's by a couple of guys who loved the unconfined wilderness experiences afforded by traditional backcountry skiing. We created a local support group and a letterhead tagline that summed up our interests, saying: "Wild Wilderness - A user group that appreciates the value of wilderness". Years later, we replaced the word "wilderness" with "wildness" to better reflect our interests in wildness wherever wildness could still be found. Yet from the very start, our mission has always been the same -- to protect and enhance opportunities for the enjoyment of those recreational pursuits that are most dependent upon wilderness values.
To be blunt, the pursuit of our mission has not been easy going and our cause has suffered more than a few loses at the hands of motorized and commercial recreation. But, in all these years, perhaps nothing has proved to be as threatening to the interests of wild wilderness, as the growing impacts arising from a trend we've dubbed - "The Commodification of Nature".
Pasted below is an unusually good article from the LA Times that contrasts the values of traditional backcountry winter adventure with the new values of commercialized, commodified, industrial-strength recreation.
Battles for the wild are being waged on all fronts. On this front, additional support is desperately needed.
Scott
There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot. Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question of whether a still higher 'standard of living' is worth its cost in things natural, wild and free. - Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949)
--- begin quoted ---
December 30, 2003
Selling what clouds create
Yet again, adventure packagers have figured out how to cash in on
nature's bounty. As Susan Salter Reynolds reports, resorts are
transforming the rugged and individualistic sport of cross-country
skiing
By Susan Salter Reynolds - Los Angeles Times
Silence isn't golden. It's pure white, powdery and endless. The quiet
is broken only by the sound of "snow bombs" falling from Douglas firs
and Jeffrey pines or the scratchy cries of Stellar's jays. No grinding
gears of chairlifts, no whining snowmobiles, no lift rides with skiers
jabbering on cellphones. Just nature, same as it ever was.
You're kicking and gliding, you're in the zone. At 21 degrees, you're
downright hot. Peel off another layer. Stop. Look up at the clear sky,
smell the sweet air. Feel as if you are the first person to discover
this spot, this view, this exhilarating aloneness. Take off your skis
(no big production); walk, sit, hear yourself think.
This is the "country" in cross-country skiing - pure-driven, wilderness
solitude - and a prime reason why it's one of the fastest growing
sports in the nation.
Cross-country used to be about braving that wilderness without markers,
maps and groomed trails. To get deep into the backcountry, a skier had
to carry a pack and be prepared to spend the night in the snow or a
rustic hut. Today, though, the cross-country experience is being tamed,
tracked and civilized. There are more than 350 resorts in the U.S. and
Canada that offer lessons, guides and just about any level of comfort
and safety a skier could hope for. The packaging of serenity is winning
new recruits, but is the traditional experience losing its spontaneity
and sense of adventure in the process?
Jane Dulaney, a former Wisconsin cowgirl who got sick of fracturing
various bones in hard-to-reach places doing downhill, is a guide and
marketing manager at the Royal Gorge cross-country resort in Soda
Springs, Calif. She says it all boils down to degrees of serenity. The
greater the risk, the higher the payoff. "I have spent a lifetime
acquiring the skills I need to risk my own life and limb," she
explains. "Being in the backcountry alone is invigorating and scary and
empowering."
These days for Dulaney, though, the raw and unknown have been replaced
by the more predictable backcountry of Royal Gorge which, with 205
miles of groomed trails, is the largest cross-country ski resort in the
world. And when they say resort, they mean it. In the hand-hewn stone
lodge, French cuisine and wines are served. Vintage posters of Gstaad,
Arosa and Mont Blanc, saunas and hot tubs add to the feeling of comfort
and elegance. The only risk here is overeating your way to a Maalox
moment. Every night the trails are scoured for stragglers. "It may be a
managed, contrived experience," notes Dulaney, "but it gives people a
glimmer of the wilderness experience."
Royal Gorge is the most elaborate response to the growing market for
less-crazed mountain playgrounds, lower-impact exercise and the
solitude of powdery wilderness. Gene Foley, chairman of the
Cross-Country Ski Assn., which promotes skiing on groomed trails, says
there are 210 exclusively cross-country resorts in his group. Many are
expanding their offerings, from state-of-the art equipment to spa
facilities. But here is where free enterprise gets tangled up in
itself. Skiers want serenity and a cheap way into the winter wilds, so
someone had better package it up and sell it to them, even if
commodifying it dilutes the very qualities sought. And even if
marketing something anyone can do at no cost is akin to selling
breathing.
Chasing solitude with a bunch of other resort guests doesn't add up for
Lisa Paak, 47, who has been skiing the Southwest for 30 years. "Resort
skiing requires interaction with people," she says. "If solitude is
what you want, you won't get it at a resort."
For Gordon Henriksen, a telemark skier who lives in Durango, Colo., the
packaging defeats one of the main purposes of cross-country skiing:
self-reliance, which is among a host of skills not required by the
groomed environment. He recalls an eight-hour traverse from one hut to
the next through avalanche territory outside Telluride, Colo. "Because
we were breaking trail through deep snow, we had to gauge who the
strongest person was and, when that person was tired, we had to act
like a team. It got dark before we got to the second hut, so we had to
decide whether to bivouac or keep going. We had to be confident of our
self-rescue skills." The traditional backcountry foray on skis, says
Henriksen, requires everything from proper physical preparation and
stamina to knowing how to pack and not overload yourself.
Yet even veteran wilderness hands will admit to the appeal of a less
hard-core approach. Doug Kerr, a guide and instructor at the
Mountaineering School in Yosemite, says some people just "want it a
little more sugar-coated. I've slept in the snow. But as I get older, I
want it a little sugar-coated too."
That's a sweet sound to the burgeoning cross-country resort industry,
which has modeled itself after the downhill business. "We try to be as
much like a downhill ski resort as possible," says Dulaney. Royal Gorge
even boasts four chairlifts. But with adult all-day passes topping out
at $26 and rental package rates of $18 a day, the cushiest
cross-country experience is a whole lot cheaper than the cheapest
downhill outing. The core attraction, though, is its groomed track, the
longest contiguous cross-country system in North America. The
20-foot-wide trails are groomed each morning at 5, carved by short
metal skis attached to either a trail groomer or a snowmobile.
Although the downhill ski industry has flattened out at around 11
million skiers per year, cross-country, with 3.5 million devotees, is
growing. That includes an assist from increasing numbers of snowshoers
and no doubt more than a few refugees from the lift lines of overrun
downhill resorts.
Dulaney believes that what's behind the boom is that more and more
people just want to escape "the rat race" of downhill. "After 9/11
people are trying to experience something more down to earth," she
says. Kerr's take is that people want to get away from "the machinery
of life."
The baby boomer quest for ever-evolving fitness strategies has
certainly added to the number of skiers looking for cardio and fat
meltdown. Cross-country skiing burns more calories (700 per hour) than
any other sport.
Up, over and down
On a crisp, blue morning with 2 feet of fresh powder, Tim Breay has
flown from Minnesota to Royal Gorge to spend a quiet week training for
various races. He's thin, middle-aged, athletic, and he's eating a
whopping breakfast of French toast and you-name-it. In many ways, Breay
is your typical cross-country skier for the 21st century. He's not a
granola-munching tree-hugger, but he cares about the environment and
his effect on it. He carries a huge duffle bag with equipment for every
possible condition. And he is a self-confessed wax junkie.
"I don't spend money too much," he says, but he has been known to pay
several hundred dollars for a vial (two applications) of fluorocarbons
for his skis that will allow him to achieve maximum speed at
temperatures above 25 degrees. Although waxless skis have been around
since 1970, even the casual skier needs a boost or an added grip now
and then. Breay doesn't care much about the myriad advances in the
technology of cross-country clothing, but he does love his wax. "The
point," he says, "is to go up and over the hill and then down."
As a competitive sport, cross-country has its glamour players (Bjorn
Dahlie of Norway has won more gold medals than any other Olympic skier)
and its scandals (Johann Muehlegg of Spain was expelled from the 2001
Olympics for doping).
But for most cross-country skiers, the real thrill lies elsewhere. It's
about knowing that winter can't stop you from being outside. Not only
is it environmentally more conscientious than downhill, it's also a
local resource. California, particularly the Sierra Nevada, has some of
the best cross-country conditions in the world, awarded the highest
rating on the Ski Area Environmental Scorecard, created each year by
the Western Ski Area Citizens Coalition, which rates ski areas inside
and outside of national parks.
Packaged cross-country skiing doesn't always have valet service. To get
to Yosemite's Glacier Point, you have to ski a hardy 10-plus miles from
Badger Pass, half of them uphill. The skier has to carry water, changes
of clothing and bedding in a backpack, though dinners are served and
there are comfortable bunks and toilets (composting, no running water).
It's close to a traditional cross-country traverse, except it requires
a guide who knows winter safety procedures. Because it's in a national
park, Glacier Point activities involve educating participants in the
"leave no trace" philosophy. Skiers are encouraged not to make
unnecessary trails off the groomed route and to leave nothing behind.
Badger Pass offers 90 miles of marked trails, 25 of them groomed. Only
17% of the millions of visitors to Yosemite each year arrive in winter.
And for them, skiing is the only way to get to Glacier Point (7,214
feet), where Half Dome (8,842 feet), North Dome (7,542 feet), Clouds
Rest (9,926 feet) and the Echo Peaks (11,000 feet and up) greet you in
the morning, and you can hear Bridal Veil, Nevada and Yosemite falls
roaring into the valley below. Sentinel Dome looms just behind the
lodge. Around 900 people a year do this cross-country circuit, in
groups of up to 20, with reservations that can be made a year in
advance.
"It is thrilling to be here," says Dave Bengston, who runs the
Mountaineering School at Yosemite, drinking hot chocolate by a wood
stove in the lodge. "The thrill comes from the effort. And the effort
gets you places that not many other people get to."
After dinner, cooked by a guide at the Nordic School (one who has
carried her share of enormous packs and sometimes even exhausted skiers
to Glacier Point) the skiers go out to the point on snowshoes and look
down on the lights of Yosemite Village. The High Sierra loom behind
Half Dome, which seems close enough to touch. The Clark Range stretches
to the south and the Cathedral Range to the north. "This gets inside
you in a way that nothing else can," says Bengston, who has done this
trip dozens of times.
So which is better, backcountry skiing or the "groomed" experience? "I
don't mean to make it sound macho," says Henriksen, the telemark skier.
"But not everyone can climb El Capitan. That doesn't mean we should put
a staircase up it. You don't want to sound elitist, but these things
take work and skills that some people have devoted a lifetime to
achieving."
But on the trail back to Badger Pass from Glacier Point, a lone skier
can hear the various sounds her skis make: a musical strumming,
guitar-like sound over hard snow and a shushing whisper over softer
powder. A father and son rest by the trail, the son making a snow cave
while his father heats tea on a Coleman stove. An elderly couple in
woolens, no fleece and still using wooden skis, fly by. Three teenagers
in T-shirts, young John Muirs in the glorious backcountry of
California, stretch and struggle up a hill. "How far to Glacier Point?"
they call out, not waiting for an answer.
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- Privatization 
