This week, we visit three national monuments (more than two dozen are under review by the Trump administration and could be made smaller and opened to logging and mining): Berryessa Snow Mountain in California (below), Gold Butte in Nevada and Bears Ears in Utah.
The sideways dawn light as it winks across the vineyards from the east: It was the first thing I noticed as I pulled off a California freeway.
As I drove, the vineyards gave way to wheat-gold foothills, black cows in fields.
The fields gave way to darkly arching oaks, tree tunnels shading a narrow country road outside Winters, Calif. The early-hour brightness indicated the nearness of summer.
Here, an hour and a half northeast of San Francisco, the dense press of civilization lifts, and the open wilderness weaves itself into the landscape. The light is somehow ventilated, given more space. I watched a cloud bank slowly roll over a cliff, rearranging itself like a gauzy muslin scarf.
In the six o’clock glow of the last days of May, I entered the southern boundary of Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, one of our country’s newest national monuments. The knobby fullness of the surrounding hills resembles rising bread. Named for the craggy 3,057-foot peak at its northern end, the monument runs along a ridgeline that stretches south through seven counties to Blue Ridge, where I would start my hike. One writer called Berryessa’s outline a long, lumpy Christmas stocking. This is the toe, and I’m dipping in.
What do we want from our wildlife areas? Something so remote we’ll never see it? Or something close enough, braided into our tangle of civilization, to remind us of all that exists alongside us in this world?
When Theodore Roosevelt signed the 1906 Antiquities Act into law, he gave presidents the power to protect cultural, historic and natural resources under threat with the national monument designation. More than a century later, millions of acres of public lands have been protected, many across the American West. They include the Pacific Remote Islands, the largest marine reserve in the world, which was proclaimed by George W. Bush and expanded by Barack Obama, and the Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, an astounding, alien landscape of plateaus and cliff faces created by sedimentary erosion, chock-full of fossils.
This year, 27 national monuments were made newly vulnerable to oil, gas and other resource extraction, placed under review by President Trump for what he deems as presidential overreach amounting to a “massive federal land grab.” But it’s important to note that these places were never meant to be walled off or untouchable. They’re meant to be explored.
Designated by Mr. Obama two years ago, Berryessa Snow Mountain was a complicated puzzle of orphaned lands managed by a host of government agencies. But looking at the pieces together now, you’ll see they make up a rich wildlife corridor amounting to a third of a million acres, with densely forested slopes and some of the rarest plants on earth.
Because the monument is situated north of Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay, all of it intersects with human activity. Its landscape reveals more than 10,000 years of Native American artifacts and cultural sites, and is flush with places to hike, camp, fish, hunt, bike and go boating. Locals advocated protection for the region for years. On the editorial pages of California newspapers, the outcry against Mr. Trump’s order has been fierce; along with Berryessa Snow Mountain, seven other national monuments in the state were covered by the order.
In these contentious times, it seems fitting that Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument was birthed in flames. Days after Mr. Obama’s July 2015 designation, wildfires raged across Napa and Lake counties, eventually engulfing 100,000 acres by the end of the summer, including much of the landscape earmarked for the monument. The trails in the area reopened to the public just one year ago.
I came to Berryessa Snow Mountain to see about the possibility of rebirth — indeed, to remind myself how to imagine what that could look like. One thing rebirth looks like is an explosion of wildflowers. As I ascended the Blue Ridge Trail, it was hard to ignore the vibrant, in-your-face display of fire-follower blooms: white Stebbins’ morning-glory and delicate yellow whispering bell, for instance, whose seeds lie dormant in the soil until heat and smoke trigger germination. At every step, a new floral arrangement seemed to present itself: woolly sunflower, fire-red Indian paintbrush and pale pink splendid Mariposa lily, all taking advantage of the extra sunlight and soil moisture freed up by the recent fires.
The trail I chose, the Homestead-Blue Ridge Loop, is considered the gateway to the national monument. It’s a terrific — and tough — five-mile loop that starts and ends along Putah Creek, with a steep elevation gain of 1,300 feet over two and a half miles to the highest point. What you get for the effort, along with sore legs, are those thick blankets of wildflowers, a panorama of the Sacramento Valley and glorious ridgeline views of Lake Berryessa from the very top.
