Below Wilderness Volunteers leader Kathleen Worley reflects on the retirement of Keith Waterfall, a long serving agency contact in the Inyo National Forest. While Keith may have moved on, Kathleen is leading another great project in the Inyo NF in 2016, this time at Lake Ediza in the Ansel Adams Wilderness.
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| A WV crew moving logs in the Inyo National Forest . |
Keith Waterfall was the ranger in charge of the first Wilderness Volunteers trip I ever
led, along with Bill Olmsted, to the Hilton Lakes in the Eastern Sierra.
He partnered with WV to set up projects in the Little Lakes Valley, at
Lamark Lakes, Upper Pine Lake and Honeymoon Lake, Gem Lakes, various
places above Lake Sabrina, and up Big Pine Creek in the Seven Lakes
Basin below the Palisades Glacier. On that first trip he drove up from
his office in Bishop to meet us at the trailhead and hike in with us to
show us the project. He arranged for packers to take in our supplies,
with all our food sealed in big bear barrels that looked like oil drums
(not the sleek sliver bear boxes we use now).
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| Building the causeway |
Our task was to build a
long causeway through a meadow being trampled by packhorses on their
way to Davis Lake. A great two-man trail crew, John and Eric,
supervised our work. We hauled logs to mark the sides of the causeway,
stripped off the bark, gathered rocks, laid them inside the log rails
and crushed them with rock hammers, large and small. We had a great
crew. Carol got up early and made coffee every morning. Joel had every
gadget known to mankind, so we connected via radio during the free day,
one group atop a mountain and the other at the edge of a waterfall. Amy
swam out to the island on Davis Lake at lunch while the rest of us
watched the week-long progress of a fire high up in a granite bowl above
us. John came to my rescue when bears returned to camp in the middle
of the night after breaking into one of the food barrels earlier in the
day. They’d eaten or carried off most of that night’s dinner, but we
managed to improvise something; for the rest of the week people returned
from trips into the woods carrying tooth-dented cans of tuna.
Not
all trips Keith set up were quite as memorable, but there was always
something strange and wonderful. He chose campsites with amazing views
and a good spot for a kitchen. He found us places to camp the night
before each trip and chose great packers to take us in and back out
again.
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| Volunteer Michelle Collins "holding up a rock" on the 2013 Bishop Pass project |
Some projects were more fun than others but all felt worth
doing. We had a great time destroying all trace of the former trail
over Bishop Pass. Though a new trail had been constructed, people
coming down the pass could see the old one and were tempted to take it,
since it looked shorter and less steep, but it passed under an active
glacial moraine that could at any moment roll giant rocks onto
unsuspecting hikers. We got to roll many a rock ourselves, obliterating
all evidence of the former pathway. We also attempted to obliterate
all non-natural traces of a former private lodge in the Seven Lakes
Basin. We filled and carried bags of cement from the foundation down
the trail to a point above one of the lakes where we could dump the
cement into the water. At
one point, a woman in a pink inflatable boat rowed across the lake to
find out what was happening, threatening to report us to the forest
service. She didn’t know what to make of the fact that the people who
were doing the dumping were in fact forest service employees. We
cleaned campsites, got rid of fire rings, built a new trail at Gem
Lakes, built checks and steps above Sailor Lake on the way to Hungry
Packer and Midnight. We got to visit Heidi’s house, the remains of what
had been built for the High Sierra filming of Heidi. This past summer, I
joined Misha Kokotovic for the leader training trip at Honeymoon Lake
and walked on the stone pathway above the lake created by the WV crew
Ron Harton and I had led there many years before.
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| Leader trainees Bobbie Morrison and Dave Marancik on the 13 year old stone pathway built by an earlier WV crew. |
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| Tools packed by Keith |
Keith
always sent us out with great trail crews, though the crews had fewer
members as forest service budgets diminished. He did his best to find
worthwhile projects we could accomplish successfully, knowing that WV
crews are capable of more than might be expected of others. We worked
with Student Conservation Association interns, with Friends of the Inyo,
with volunteer camp hosts, with back- country rangers, with trail crews
and on our own. Now that Keith has retired, we don’t know what will
happen exactly. The Forest Service has decided that the Inyo National Forest can cutback on trail crews and back-country rangers, so they will need
volunteers more than ever, and yet there may be less staff to identify
and/or supervise projects. (
Editor's note: The 2016 Inyo project at Lake Ediza is being planned with the Mammoth Lakes office instead of Bishop office). I will miss the yearly conversations I had
with Keith about where we might go, what we might do, why some trips
filled and others didn’t and what we might do about that. I will miss
meeting him at the office in Bishop where I would transfer all the food
from bags and coolers into the sleek silver bear boxes that packers
would carry up for us and that no bears ever managed to open.
On behalf of WV, I extend many, many thanks to Keith Waterfall for
being one of our longest-term partners. His last name seemed so perfect
for a man who was so well fitted for his position that we sometimes
wondered whether it was a name he had acquired rather than one he was
born with. In any case, it suited him as perfectly as he suited his job.
May it continue to connect him with wild places during his retirement.
Keep in touch, Keith. We’ll miss you.
Kathleen Worley grew up in Reno, Nevada, which perhaps explains her love of the high
desert as well as the granite spires and crystal clear lakes of the
Eastern Sierra Nevada. She has led more than 30 projects with Wilderness Volunteers in Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Oregon,
California, and Hawaii. She recently retired from
teaching theatre at Reed College in Portland, OR.
