Teddy Roosevelt was a Backpacking Elitist Too

Charles Murray claims that anyone who knows of good backpacking spots in the Sierra is an "elitist". When it comes to Teddy Roosevelt, he may have a point.

Sierra Nevada backpackers, beware! Charles Murray, the social policy savant and arbiter of cultural do’s and don’t’s, has proclaimed that anyone who knows of good backpacking spots in the Sierra is an elitist, and specifically a "new elitist."

I take this personally. My most cherished outdoor memories are from the Sierra, where I was first taken by my parents (neither of whom, by the way, got within a thousand miles of an Ivy League elitism factory).  I still have a vivid memory of a hike up to Vernal Falls, when my old man grabbed my collar and prevented what would have been a fatal plunge into a roiling Merced River in full spring runoff mode.

And yet, maybe Charles Murray has a point. Glenn Beck has been warning Fox News watchers to keep a wary eye on America's most notorious wilderness lover. Reading his resume, it has elitism stamped all over it. A Harvard Phi Beta Kappa, a member of the Porcellian Club, a man of inherited wealth and distinguished family name.

His name was Theodore Roosevelt. Yet somehow despite his background - not to mention his deplorable love of wilderness - TR won the respect of people far outside his personal circle: backwoodsmen like the poetry-reciting Bill Sewall in the Maine wilderness, gunfighters like Hell-Roaring Bill Jones on the Dakota Plains, hunting guides like the ex-slave and Texas cowboy Holt Collier in the Louisiana canebrakes, cops on the beat and immigrants scratching out a living in New York’s rough tenements.

Roosevelt’s life on the storm-tossed Plains running cattle and hunting game taught TR the value of conservation. That formative experience led to his insight that protecting lands for the benefit of all, present and future, was an exercise in democracy and essential to keeping America strong. TR spent the spring of 1903 traveling the West and pounding that lesson home. He called the preservation of Yellowstone “essential democracy.” On California’s central coast, he scolded townspeople for vandalizing a stately redwood with trifling advertising posters. At the rim of the Grand Canyon, he implored his countrymen to “leave it as it is. You cannot improve upon it. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.”

And in Yosemite National Park, the crown jewel of the Sierra with its treasure trove of great backpacking spots, TR tramped through the granite wilderness and sequoia groves with John Muir like a schoolboy on summer break, yelling “Bully!” upon waking up at camp on Glacier Point to find it covered with a late-season snow.

Until recently, TR's party followed the example at which Charles Murray now sniffs. One of some two dozen wilderness areas in the Sierra Nevada is named "the Hoover Wilderness": yes, that Hoover, an unsung hero of conservation. Richard Nixon despite his other sins compiled the outstanding presidential environmental record of the second half of the 20th century.

If this be elitism - well, make the most of it.