Two Thousand Sheep and a Camera-Shy Elk

It all started, apparently, with sheep—lots and lots of sheep. In 1869, a young man named John Muir—now remembered as a famous naturalist and co-founder of the Sierra Club—was living and taking on odd jobs in Yosemite Valley. There was already a state park at Yosemite, but the protection California provided it was spotty at best. The companies that catered to sightseers were also in charge of managing the park, and they brought in as many tourists as possible. Others saw the public park as a “commons,” open to anyone who wanted to use it for any purpose, so logging, farming, and grazing were also taking place. It would be decades before Congress established rules for the stewardship and preservation of the parks. The National Park Service was created in 1916.

At Yosemite in 1869, though, Muir realized he himself was part of the problem: He’d been hired to herd 2,000 sheep. “Incredible numbers of sheep are driven to the mountain pastures every summer, and desolation follows them,” he wrote, as quoted here. “Every garden within reach is trampled, the shrubs are stripped of leaves as if devoured by locusts, and the woods are burned to improve the pasturage.” The damage he saw, and his recognition of his own part in it, helped lead him to eventually protect this and other areas.

This summer, as every summer, thousands of people will be visiting national parks throughout the country, and many of us—involved as we might be with preservation and restoration projects elsewhere—will appreciate more than the average visitor, what it takes to safeguard and maintain these public spaces. There are still some glitches, of course, especially in the interface between humans and wildlife in the parks. Last month, a woman in Yellowstone—the nation’s first national park—was attacked by an elk; despite warnings from a guide, she’d been edging closer to the animal in hopes of taking a selfie with it. Just weeks before that, two men in Yellowstone tried to rescue an apparently abandoned baby bison by loading it into their vehicle; the animal later had to be euthanized.

Will you be visiting one of the 59 national parks soon—or have you done restoration work on state or federally protected land? On this centennial of the National Park Service, share your thoughts in the comments about what we’re doing right with the parks, as well as what you think might be improved.