Call it a duel of knowledge, of desire, of experience. But more than anything, to listen to Will Hearst and Paul Saffo trade their favorite places across California and the West is to be struck by the deep love they feel for this land and their emotional connection to it. Hearst, aside from being the chair of Hearst Corporation and the editor and publisher of Alta Journal, is a horseman and amateur pilot who delights in the legends and lore of any given place in the Golden State. Saffo is a noted futurist and professor at Stanford University who doubles as an EMT and participates in search-and-rescue operations involving lost hikers and climbers. As a forecaster, Saffo can’t help but look at a map and consider what comes next for the vast, unspoiled blank spaces.
Central to their discussion is the worry that revealing the location of a natural wonder may ruin it, this being an age in which nothing is real unless it is photographed or filmed for social media and shared and shared and shared and shared. Take Joshua Tree. During the 2019 government shutdown, millions of tourists flocked to the famous—and fragile—national park to strike yoga poses for Instagram and take selfies for Twitter and advertise the good times waiting for all. The casualties: vandalized ancient flora, trashed restrooms, and a trampled ecosystem.
Yet both men are loath to believe that nature should be locked up and not enjoyed. Instead, they argue that it should be experienced with respect and joy. What’s more, wilderness is in the eye of the beholder. A rugged adventure for some is a tame walk in the park for others. Fortunately for us, the West has more than enough of everything: steep mountain peaks, shadowy box canyons, secret hot springs, abandoned mines, majestic waterfalls.
Hearst caught up with Saffo via Zoom to explore the idea of a disappearing West and what constitutes wilderness. They also shared their bucket lists of places to go—and to return to.
WILL HEARST: The poet Gary Snyder makes a distinction between Nature, which is everything that exists, and the Wild, which in his vocabulary is the places in nature where humans do not control the outcome, where we are less important.
By Gary’s definition, there are fewer and fewer really wild places—we have reached hegemony over the planet. Even the notion of global warming assumes that we’re in charge, that we’re responsible for what happens. If we’re supposed to do the right thing, to preserve the planet, it’s presumed we must have that power. But if that’s true, then the wilderness is becoming more and more like a garden or a zoo.
Gary’s right! Real wilderness is disappearing. The vast empty spaces that once existed are shrinking into ever smaller bubbles, and we are fighting a losing battle against preserving some sense of wildness in the wildernesses we have preserved. Just look at rush hour on the Pacific Crest Trail, or two years ago, the line of 200 climbers waiting on the Hillary Step [of Mount Everest] for their turn to take a selfie on the summit. Yet we are drawn to the empty places on the map,
