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Complex. Because of the primeval nature of the
landscape, the exceptional biodiversity, the critical
water sources and habitat for a variety of species
(including threatened ones like the greater sagegrouse
and the Lahontan cutthroat trout), the possibilities
for solitude, the outstanding geological,
cultural, and scenic value of these areas, they were
inventoried by the BLM back in 1979 as having potential
for wilderness designation.
Since then, the BLM has had to toe a delicate
line while waiting for Congress to decide whether to
protect these areas or release them so they can be
developed. On the one hand, the agency is required
to honor historical activities such as mining (with valid
claims) and off-road vehicle use (on existing roads
and trails). On the other hand, by law, it must manage
the areas “in a manner so as not to impair [their]
suitability for preservation for wilderness.”
We pitched our camp with some friends at an
old fire ring at the edge of Dry Lake, at about 8,000
feet, on a high plateau. A band of pronghorn frolicked
beside the cows on the stubble-grass playa.
To the east rose the Beauty Peak cinder cone; to
the west the twin summits of Bodie Mountain and
Potato Peak, dark colonies of willow and quaking aspen
clustered in their folds.
With the day’s last light fading over the snowdappled
Sweetwater Range, the boys watched
their first satellite run across the sky. A barn owl
hovered for a minute or two over our little campfire
as if to study marshmallow roasting techniques.
Later, when the boys were zipped into their bags,
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© John Dittli
the coyotes—dozens of them, it seemed—began a
round of yipping and shrieking out in the darkness,
all around us. The next morning, along the edges of
the basalt flows, we came upon ancient petroglyphs
and chippings of obsidian. We found bleached cow
bones, pincushion phlox, pennyroyal, waist-high
thickets of red columbines, and Basque sheepherder
inscriptions dating back to 1913.
“You can see them sitting here,” said our friend
John Dittli, a photographer, noting how radically the
outside world had changed in a century. This place,
by contrast, was still essentially the same as when
the first people came though 10,000 years ago.
In the afternoon we made our way back through
Bodie. Our vehicles climbed up along the flanks of
Potato Peak to the headwaters of Rough Creek—
one of two streams in the Bodie Hills determined by
the BLM to be eligible for federal Wild and Scenic
River status. We splashed in the cool, clear water,
walked barefoot in the grass, strolled through fields
of wild iris and onion to drink from the springs. Then,
before heading down Aurora Canyon, back to civilization
and pizza at the Virginia Creek Settlement,
we stopped to explore the abandoned Paramount
mercury mine.
The Paramount site, its 50-year-old mine works
and tailings piles now in the early stages of reclamation
by wild aspen groves, “is rated as having a
high potential for occurrence of gold, silver and mercury,”
according to a recent BLM report, and is of
great interest to Electrum, a gold mining company
that already has begun exploration. “Developing
Pronghorn,
barn owls,
and golden
eagles are
among the
wildlife
found in the
biologically
diverse
Bodie Hills.
© John Dittli
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