7/3/2023 0 Comments Lost caves muir woodsThe latter's proclamation stressed that because its "natural formations, known as the Pinnacles Rocks, with a series of caves underlying them.are of scientific value," their significance would now forever be reserved. View of the Pinnacles from the west side in 1911, showing unidentified homestead, possibly the Bates Ranch. During one week in January 1908 alone, he proclaimed three: Muir Woods, the Grand Canyon, and Pinnacles. Over the next four years, he created 18 national monuments, from Devil's Towerin Wyoming to Mount Olympus in what is now Olympic National Park in Washington State. With the 1906 passage of the Antiquities Act, which granted the Chief Executive the power to create such monuments on federal property to protect their indigenous artifacts and other special features, Roosevelt had a tool of considerable power, and he wielded it readily. Apparently Pinchot then asked that the relevant acreage be "withdrawn from entry" - a technical term that meant that no grazing, logging, or mining claims could be filed on this portion of public land.īut it took Roosevelt's signature to make the national forest a national monument. University president David Starr Jordan was crucial go-between, assuring Pinchot that the site was home to rare species that should be saved, offered abundant recreational opportunities for an urbanizing Bay Area, and contained a geological record unusual enough to warrant scientific investigation under controlled conditions. The enterprising Hain worked as well through connections at Stanford University to reach out to the local congressional representative and national figures such as forester Pinchot. | Image: Open LibraryĪs much as to defend the Pinnacles' natural beauty and archeological resources as to promote his guide business, Hain advocated for a more consistent and rigorous protection of the parkland, a theme he pressed through a lantern slideshow that he toured through the region and in articles written for statewide publications. Schyler Hain's article in the July 1905 issue of Out West magazine. Its real value, as conservationists on the national level like Roosevelt and Pinchot, and on the local, like Schyler Hain, a homesteader and the landscape's most persistent booster, lay in a different kind of commodity: what we would call ecotourism. There would be precious little logging in this particular forest. Forest Service had been created in 1907, all forest reserves became known as national forests, a subtle shift in name that the agency's first chief Gifford Pinchot believed reflected their purposeful utility to all the American people. Its initial 14,108 acres were set aside as the Pinnacles Forest Reserve in 1906, one year after the U. Indeed, it is a rare example of a site that has enjoyed protection under these three different forms of federal management. Both moments required a very human force: politics.Īs with so many other origin stories about the national forests, monuments, and parks in the United States, President Theodore Roosevelt was present at the creation of Pinnacles National Monument. I looked up from the screen and there the new park's signature landform, North Chalone Peak, filling the windshield it and the rest of the Galiban Mountains dazzled in the crisp blue sky.įor all the Pinnacles' striking beauty, for all its geological significance (its heights comprise the remnants of an ancient volcano), cultural resonance (the Cholone people and others made good use of its upcountry woodlands and riparian habitats), and ecological richness (California condors have been successfully reintroduced here) - none of these values by themselves were responsible for the initial creation of the national monument in 1908 or its redesignation as a national park in 2013. It came in the form of an email that arrived as we sped through the sun-drenched Salinas Valley, flicking past tractors tilling the fertile soil, work crews laying down irrigation pipes, and fields bearing winter crops of kale, red cabbage, and, one sign promised, "romaine lettuce: coming soon!" That exclamation mark was doubled as I scrolled through the much-anticipated announcement that President Obama had signed legislation turning Pinnacles National Monument in the nation's 59th national park.
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