who loves wild nature live?
The question of where someone who loves wild nature should live faced us when we moved to Grand Junction in June 2007. If you know how much Laurie and I love hiking, photographing, and botanizing in wild country, you might think we’d want a home in the middle of the desert or woods or mountains. I’m well aware that such choices work out very nicely for many people. We’ve had, and continue to have, friends who live in places like that. We have friends who once lived in an old farmhouse in the Adirondacks with only one other house nearby and nothing visible but meadows, woods, and mountains. We have friends who live in the hills south of Ithaca, on a little traveled road with nothing but woods and old fields around them. We walked a loop from their house one time along the road and along a wild creek running through a wooded hollow. We have friends who live in the middle of the woods on a hilltop south of Ithaca in a geodesic dome they built for themselves. We have friends whose home is surrounded by acres of their own woods, situated in a little valley hidden from a rarely traveled road. We have friends whose beautiful house is located in the hills and woods south of Eugene, Oregon. We found wild orchids on a walk down a lane in back of their property, and raccoons typically surround the house waiting for handouts. When we visited another friend, he was renting a place in the foothills above Boulder, Colorado, where a black bear made regular rounds at twilight. Throughout our travels, we’ve observed countless other tantalizing residences far from town and far from neighbors, surrounded by wild country, and sometimes with spectacular views of mountains, valleys, or ocean. The temptation arises to be envious, but in general I consider such dwellings nice places to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
Here’s my reasoning. Yes, we love wild country, but we love all kinds of wild country. I envision a home in the country working well for people whose passion is to explore a particular place in great detail and to experience it over a long period of time. But Laurie and I are more restless than that. We value variety as much as immersion. When we lived in Ithaca, New York, if we went to Buttermilk Falls one day, we’d go to Connecticut Hill the next. If we had been in the Adirondacks last weekend, we’d head for Lake Ontario or northern Pennsylvania this weekend. If we traveled to Colorado on last summer’s vacation, we’d think about North Carolina or Maine or Michigan for our next trip. We’ve known and admired people who return time and again to the same places, either cherishing the places’ familiarity or finding pleasure in details and subtle changes that elude the casual visitor. If we were like that, we might have sought an idyllic spot somewhere in western Colorado with wild country nearby and settled in. We’d make our trips to town whenever necessary, but the rest of the time we’d envelop ourselves in the wild things around us, the weather, and the changing seasons. But we’re not like that.
For us, it makes a lot more sense to live in town, where our civilized needs can be met with short drives or, better yet, by walking. In Ithaca, I walked to work at Cornell University, and it was a five-minute walk downtown, where Laurie had a weaving studio. In Columbia, Missouri, we had a food store, a gym, and a few restaurants within a five-minute walk. The University of Missouri campus was two miles away, and downtown Columbia two and a half, both accessible by a hiking and biking trail. In metropolitan Phoenix, where we’ve lived for short periods of time, we chose apartments in downtown Scottsdale rather than look for a home in the desert or the suburbs. It’s true that, in each of those localities, we drove to most of the wild places where we wanted to walk, but we didn’t do appreciably more of that than we would have done if we had lived in the country. Yes, if we lived in the country, we’d take some of our walks from home, but we’d travel elsewhere to walk as well. Indeed, I've observed that most of the times when we visit friends who live in the country, we usually drive to the trail if we go for a hike.
In Grand Junction, we began by looking at apartments close to downtown, but invariably they were undistinguished buildings with little but a parking lot for landscaping. We took a realtor’s advice and looked at newer and more attractive places in the suburbs, but they were too far from anything worth walking to. No wildness and no civilization either. We ended up choosing the Northwoods Apartments near 12th Street and Horizon Drive. The apartment itself is perfectly adequate for our needs. Out the bedroom windows, we can see the Book Cliffs as well as trees, houses, the parking lot, an apartment building, and a church. The living room and dining room, unfortunately, overlook a courtyard with a swimming pool. Potential views of the town or the Uncompahgre Plateau in that direction are blocked by other apartment units. The courtyard is nicely landscaped—a garden rather than a wild place, of course, but nice enough—but the swimming pool is another matter. I can understand why someone would like a swimming pool nearby, but why they’d want a view of it from their living quarters is beyond my comprehension. We’ve done our best to minimize its visibility from our apartment, but the best that can be said for the pool is that it’s lightly used.
Grand Junction is a large enough town that nearly all of our shopping and cultural needs can be met here. So far, the exceptions seem to be a camera store and an Apple computer dealer. At the same time, it’s small enough that nothing is more than a ten- or fifteen-minute drive away. There’s a supermarket we can walk to in five minutes, as well as two coffeehouses, several restaurants, our bank, a gym, and the Kannah Creek brewpub. Even St. Mary’s Hospital and most of our doctors’ offices are within easy walking distance. (Indeed, it’s only a mile and a half to the airport! I have visions of walking there to catch a plane, towing our wheeled suitcases behind us.) Downtown Grand Junction is only two and a half miles away. Other shopping areas, restaurants, the public library, and the Mesa State College campus are closer than that. We don’t always walk to those places, of course, but, even if we drive, it’s not far, and, as Laurie points out, much can be done on our way home from somewhere else.
Clearly, for people with interests like ours, the country surrounding a town is a major factor in its desirability. When we spent a year in Las Cruces, New Mexico, I fell in love with the Organ Mountains east of town, and vast desert areas to the west invited exploration (although Laurie’s enthusiasm for the Kilbourne Hole and the Aden Crater was never as keen as mine). Asheville, North Carolina, was surrounded by mountains and a significant amount of national forest land, and the Blue Ridge Parkway made much of it easily accessible. The apartment where we lived was only a short drive from the parkway. Our three years in Columbia, Missouri, were made enjoyable despite the sadness of my mother’s final years by the nearby presence of state parks and conservation areas: Rock Bridge, Three Creeks, Pinnacle, the Katy Trail, and others. Eugene, Oregon, in our experience, was a dichotomy. Although the Oregon Coast and the High Cascades were each only an hour or two away, with untold possibilities for exploring wild and spectacular country, we found only limited opportunities in the immediate area. The “eastern” situation of too much private land was part of the problem, and so was the prevalence of clearcutting in the Coast Range to the west and the western slope of the Cascades to the east. Tucson, Arizona, and the Phoenix area, where we’ve also spent a fair amount of time, have a wealth of outstanding wildness and scenery close by—in the Catalina, Santa Rita, and Rincon Mountains, for example, or the Superstition Mountains, the Tonto National Forest, and a plethora of BLM lands in the desert west of Phoenix. Phoenix, moreover, has some truly remarkable parklands in the city itself. If you don’t believe me, go to Squaw Peak Park and—instead of joining the crowds climbing Piestewa Peak—hike some of the park’s other trails. Down in some of the valleys, you’d think you were fifty miles out in the desert somewhere. Unfortunately, the sheer size of metropolitan areas like Tucson or Phoenix makes it too time-consuming and tiresome to get to most of the areas where you’d want to hike. It’s okay once or twice, but I wouldn’t want a steady diet of it.
A crucial factor in the desirability of the country surrounding a town is an adequate quantity of public land open for hiking and exploration. As a general rule, public land is scarcer in the East than it is in the West. Living in Ithaca, we were comparatively blessed. I once owned a recreation map of New York that showed public land in green. The vast green area of the Adirondack Park and the smaller one of the Catskills were the most obvious, but, next to those, the area around Ithaca stood out. We had three state parks within ten miles and two more within twenty, and there were sizable areas of state forest land in the hills south of town and even a patch of national forest on Hector Ridge to the west. Almost anywhere else in New York, we would have found our number and variety of hiking opportunities much more limited. Even around Ithaca, “No Trespassing” signs were oppressive. With only a handful of exceptions, I’ve respected such signs, and I understand some of the reasons why people post their land. But that doesn’t mean I like it. I feel like I’m being kept out for no good reason. I have no desire to hunt on anyone’s land. I won’t fire bullets into their kitchen windows or shoot their cows. I won’t catch fish in their creek that they want for themselves. I won’t cut trees or snip fences or leave trash or dump old refrigerators. All I want to do is walk, look for birds and wildflowers, and take a few pictures. I’m convinced that most landowners make so little actual use of their land that they'd never even know I was there. And they’d certainly see no evidence of my presence after I left.
But nothing’s likely to change in that regard. So, given a choice, I lean toward living in a town with lots of public land around it. It’s worth noting, of course, that not everyone has a free choice of where to live. In most cases, family, job, or some other factor dictates. In our travels around the country, we’ve passed through regions where public land of a reasonably wild quality seems to be scarce or nonexistent, and I’ve tried to imagine living in such places. I’d have a hard time. That said, however, I should also say that Laurie and I have discovered ample numbers of wild places worthy of good hiking in many parts of the country, from the prairies of the Great Plains and farmland of the Midwest to odd corners of New Jersey. I would search out places like those wherever I lived and would insist that we can never have too many of them. Wild places suitable for exploration are more plentiful than most people realize. Laurie and I have discovered many of them in all parts of the country that are little known to the general public. I recall, for example, a group of local kids at Jump Creek Falls in Idaho, amazed that people from New York had found the place. Everywhere we’ve lived—from Ithaca to Las Cruces, Eugene to Asheville—we’ve had local people tell us that we had discovered many places to hike that they didn’t know about.
When we moved to Grand Junction, it was the first time that location had been an open choice. We lived in Ithaca because I found work there. We lived in several other places because I was able to arrange sabbatical leaves there. We lived in Columbia, Missouri, because it was close enough to the home of my aging mother when we needed to be nearby. When she passed away, and Laurie and I decided against returning to full-time traveling, we found ourselves for the first time in our lives with a completely free choice of where to settle. We knew in general what we wanted. It had to be a middle-sized city—big enough to be culturally interesting but small enough to get out of without miles of city streets or freeways to negotiate. We envisioned concentric circles around a town, marking off distances to be traveled in a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, or a reasonable vacation period. Grand Junction is immediately surrounded by such places as Colorado National Monument, the Book Cliffs, and Grand Mesa. A larger circle includes the San Juan Mountains and the canyon country around Moab, Utah. A still larger one encompasses the entirety of the Colorado Rockies, the mountains of northern Utah, the canyon country of southern Utah, Yellowstone National Park, the rest of Wyoming, and much of the cultural and scenic wonder of New Mexico. Draw the circle still larger and you find Grand Junction almost smack in the middle of the entire western United States.
Those are the places we’re willing to drive to. We abhor the thought of spending much of our time and gas money driving to grocery stores, banks, or barber shops. But we’re happy to drive to trailheads in Colorado National Monument, and some of them—No Thoroughfare Canyon, Liberty Cap, Ute Canyon—are scarcely fifteen minutes from home. It might take a half hour to get to other trailheads, including ones along the road that traverses the national monument. Parts of Bangs Canyon, with its colorful clay and sandstone badlands, are even closer. It’s only a short distance farther to additional canyons in the McInnis Canyons National Conservation Area and less than thirty miles to Rabbit Valley, where you can hike trails or drive roads of dubious quality to spectacular viewpoints above the Colorado River where it carves its way through Horsethief and Ruby Canyons. A trail or a very bad road will take you to an array of natural arches in Rattlesnake Canyon that rival those in Arches National Park. A half hour in the other direction, southeast along the Gunnison River, will take you to a road up Escalante Canyon or a trail up Dominguez Canyon, both of which contain spectacular cliffs, petroglyphs, and permanent streams with waterfalls. Turn 180 degrees from the red-rock cliffs of Colorado National Monument and you face the Book Cliffs, where the rocks and scenery are different, and you can hike exhilarating trails to Mount Garfield or Corcoran Point. Vast areas of the Book Cliffs we’ve not even begun to explore. There are parks along the Colorado River with riparian forest still intact. In less than an hour, we can be at elevations of 8,000 feet on the Uncompahgre Plateau or 10,000 feet on Grand Mesa. In two or three hours, we can reach the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Dinosaur National Monument, or the wonderland of canyons, mesas, arches, and archeological sites around Moab. It’s only ninety miles to Ouray, where you’re already in the midst of the San Juan Mountains—high on nearly anyone’s list of the most interesting and spectacular mountains in the country.
Alright, then, you might be thinking, if we like those places so much, why wouldn’t we want to live, say, on the boundary of Colorado National Monument or some other tract of public land? We’d have the pleasure of no human neighbors at least on one side of us, and could walk into protected wild land whenever we wanted to. We’d be there on the edge of a wild place through all the seasons and all the weathers. Best of all, we’d be there in the delicious hours of evening and early morning. I can’t say that we’ve never found thoughts like those tantalizing, but the answer is, no, we would not want to live in such a place.
I certainly wouldn’t want to live there if our house was only one of many, giving us neighbors the same as we would have in town. That’s obviously the situation on the outskirts of Grand Junction, where residential development butts against Colorado National Monument; and we’re also well acquainted with it on the margins of the McDowell Mountains in the Scottsdale area. I’ve looked at those subdivisions and tried to imagine living in them. I see us getting into the car and driving every time we need or want something from town. And I take note of the other houses that would surround ours. Yes, if we lived there, we would have the McDowell Mountains or Colorado National Monument in one direction; but, in every other direction, we might as well be living in town. It’s a classic case, it seems to me, of having neither the conveniences of town nor the solitude of the country. The common dream, of course, is that one’s house is the only one there, but how long is that likely to last? How soon will another house appear, and then another, and another? Oh, I know that some people successfully acquire an ideal situation where solitude is luxuriously permanent, but I also know that such situations are rare.
There’s another issue here as well. Even if our house was the only one on the boundary of Colorado National Monument, I wouldn’t want to live there if I thought the presence of our house diminished the value or quality of the monument. I know enough of human diversity to be certain that some people enjoy standing on a viewpoint in some wild and scenic place and seeing houses. But that's not what those of us who are genuinely serious about wildness want. “Adjacent to State Park!” say ads promoting real estate developments, but they never acknowledge that the state park is also adjacent to a real estate development. Laurie and I have long known that the presence of houses goes a long way toward diminishing our enjoyment of wildness. During the thirty years that we lived in Ithaca, we observed a steady proliferation of new houses and houses under construction along the roads leading out of town. Whereas we had once marveled at how quickly we could leave Ithaca behind and be in lovely pastoral surroundings en route to a state park or state forest area, we more and more found ourselves annoyed by the periodic emergence of yet another new house which we hadn’t remembered seeing before. Even a lone house in an otherwise wild setting can be annoying, especially if I come upon it unexpectedly. One of my least favorite experiences is driving—or, even worse, walking—in surroundings whose wildness impresses me and coming upon someone’s house with its mowed grass, tended garden, vehicles parked in the driveway, and kids’ toys in the lawn. I’m craving wildness, and the house screams domesticity. In Colorado National Monument, the first part of the trail into the lower end of Monument Canyon parallels a fence for a hundred yards or so with a housing development on the other side. A woman looks up from her gardening to say, “Good morning.” Dogs bark. I hate that stretch of trail even though I have nothing against dogs or gardeners. Whereas I go to Monument Canyon for wildness, dogs and gardeners remind me of the replacement of wildness by human enterprise. I would not want to live in one of those houses, knowing the effect its presence can have on the experience of people using the national monument. Hell, I was halfway depressed when I discovered that the apartment complex where we lived in Asheville was visible from one of the Blue Ridge Parkway overlooks.
It’s also true that I don’t want a house on the edge of public land if it means restricting most of my hiking to that particular piece of public land. I know you can hike the same trail over and over and always find something new. I know the same trail can be entirely different whenever the weather or the season or the time of day or your own personal mood changes. But I also know I wouldn’t long be satisfied with that. If my garden path opened into Colorado National Monument, I’d still want to go to Bangs Canyon. I’d still want to go to Rabbit Valley, Rabbit’s Ear Mesa, and Devil’s Canyon. I’d want to check out Dominquez Canyon now and then and see the fall-colored cottonwoods from the Gunnison River Bluffs. Hasn’t it been a long time since we’ve been to the Book Cliffs? And there’s a whole different world up on Grand Mesa or the Uncompahgre Plateau. And the San Juan Mountains! Good heavens, we can’t forget the San Juan Mountains! We can’t not go there just because we live in this charming house on the boundary of Colorado National Monument.
So, you see what would happen. We’d drive to all of these other places anyway, the same as we would if we lived in town—and, on top of that, every time we needed or wanted something from the civilized world, we’d also drive to town. So it’s not a hard choice for me. Yes, by living in town, we lose something in not having a wild place—one wild place—outside our back door. But all the other wild places are just as accessible. And, if we lived in the country, we’d miss the chance to walk to the supermarket or the brewpub.
I would be happier if people kept their domesticity in town and left the countryside country and the wild places wild. Oh, I’ve heard the complaints of country dwellers that it’s too crowded and noisy in town. “There’s too much traffic.” “Neighbors are too close.” It’s not that I don’t know about those things. In Ithaca, we were awakened and kept awake by people living in apartments behind the house where we lived, including partiers, ordinary conversationalists, and even a pianist who played beautiful music in the middle of the night. In Eugene, Oregon, I nearly broke down the door of an apartment across the street from ours when their uproariously loud music angered me by waking us up for the umpteenth time. But we switched our Ithaca bedroom to a different side of the house, and other places where we’ve chosen to live—including apartments in Columbia, Missouri, Scottsdale and Mesa, Arizona, and here in Grand Junction—have been consistently peaceful and quiet. Good management is clearly an asset in that regard, and so is the careful choice of a place to live in the first place. Ear plugs help, too, although I’d hate to live in a place that was tolerable only with ear plugs. Sadly, good fortune is also a vital factor, and I’d be the first to admit that any significant back-to-town movement would have to be accompanied by the development of better habits in regard to thoughtfulness about neighbors.
So what am I saying? We want to live in a town with a variety of wild places readily accessible (to which we’re willing to drive), and we want the amenities and necessities of civilization within walking distance or a short drive. In addition, there’s one more element in our idea of an optimal living situation—a nice asset to cap off the other two—and that’s to also have a little wildness in town.
How well Grand Junction will work out in these respects remains to be seen. We’re still exploring. Within walking distance of our apartment, we have vacant lots that harbor a few birds and wildflowers. All of them are sparsely vegetated and dominated, somewhat bleakly, by soil that’s a mixture of clay and gravel. Typical of urban vacant lots, they look abused, but I think that’s actually the way the landscape around Grand Junction looked when American settlers first arrived. Limited rainfall and the nature of local soils ensured a rather bleak environment until the valley was irrigated. The wild things that I know best are wildflowers, and I’ve observed that the ones in our vacant lots are mainly weedy species introduced from elsewhere in the world.
In other wanderings, I’ve discovered Matchett Park, a city park primarily set aside for future development. At present, it contains irrigated farmland and a zone of barren but interesting terrain that I suspect characterized much of the Grand Valley before irrigation. The park, which also provides views of Grand Mesa and the Book Cliffs, is about a two-mile walk from home, primarily along residential streets. Elsewhere, a hiking and biking trail is being developed along the Colorado River, but all of its access points will be a long walk from where we live, so we would most likely drive to it. Another potential asset is a network of irrigation canals that wind through Grand Junction. Filled with water and flowing smoothly and swiftly, they’re uncommonly lovely, especially in the evening or morning, and they’re bordered by roadways that invite lengthy walks. Sadly, however, the irrigation commission prohibits trespassing along them.
If I had my way, the following are qualities that cities and towns would possess (I would expect other people to revise or expand my list):
- Development would be constrained and high-density, with pockets of wildness close by rather than all of it banished beyond a wide zone of suburbs and sprawl.
- Areas of rugged terrain, floodplains, wetlands, and places of scenic, geological, or biological interest would be cherished for their wildness, put off-limits for development, and kept open to the public.
- Every possible effort would be made to have such areas scattered throughout the city or town, ideally within reasonable walking distance for every resident.
- The larger tracts of wildness would be connected by corridors kept free from development. These would allow for the movement of wildlife and would provide locations for longer trails.
- Cluster development would be the rule in new housing and apartment developments, with significant portions of the land left un-built-upon and wild. Portions of these wild areas might be reserved for local residents, but other parts would be open to the public.
- The preservation of tracts of wildness would also be a part of every major commercial, industrial, or office project.
Ithaca, where we lived for thirty years, was blessed by gorges carved through town by creeks en route to Cayuga Lake. Cascadilla Gorge had a trail through it, connecting downtown with Cornell University. The Fall Creek gorge reached a climax in the spectacle of Ithaca Falls, and there were trails into the gorge as well as additional waterfalls. For sixteen of our years in Ithaca, we lived in a house across Giles Street from the gorge of Six-Mile Creek. We crossed the gorge on a footbridge en route to Cornell, and a trail across the street led into it. A half mile from home, trails began that followed the creek through gorges and past reservoirs on city water supply property. The woods there were a riot of wildflowers each spring, and it was possible to start at our apartment and walk a six-mile loop that scarcely encountered a street, road, or house. In addition, a wild woods was among the features of Stewart Park on Cayuga Lake, and there were times when I started at home and walked longer distances to Coy Glen (a gorge southwest of town), to Sapsucker Woods (northeast), and north along railroad tracks beside Cayuga Lake and beneath cliffs and waterfalls that overlooked the lake from the east.
In Columbia, Missouri, the apartments where we lived had their own connector trail joining a rail trail which we could follow for two and a half miles through woods along Flat Branch to the University of Missouri or downtown Columbia. The creek was lovely, and the woods was shady in the summer and offered protection from the wind in the winter. In the opposite direction, the trail led to wetlands and restored prairie in the Forum Nature Area and, beyond that, into the Missouri countryside along Hinkson Creek. Walk nine miles in that direction, and you’d reach the Katy Trail, Missouri’s two-hundred-mile rail trail along the Missouri River, enhanced much of the way by the spectacle of dramatic limestone bluffs. Columbia was also distinguished by several remarkable city parks. On a map, they looked like any other city park—Kiwanis Park, Fairview Park, Rock Creek Park—but, in reality, they were tracts of hills and forest left essentially wild in the middle of town. Kiwanis Park in particular was an outstanding wildflower woods in the spring.
All in all, I remain uncertain as to how well Grand Junction will work out for in-town walking. I’m not the slightest bit worried about the number and quality of wild places outside of town, and I’m confident that we can meet our civilized needs and wants well enough. But we’re still looking for places in town where we can walk when we’re in the mood for a little wildness. One day, during a time when spring wildflowers were dazzling us in wild places outside of town and I was finding nothing but introduced and exotic weeds on my walks in town, I spotted Cisco woody asters in bloom on a hillside while driving a nearby street. A few days later, I walked there to photograph the plants. To my delight, I also found dozens of tufted evening primroses blooming on top of the hill. It was obvious that the hilltop had been bulldozed sometime in the past, but, one after another, I kept finding more species of wildflowers. There were crescent milkvetches, Townsend daisies, cleftleaf phacelias, pepperplants, and San Juan onions. These were not weeds, but genuine native wildflowers. Grand Junction suddenly seemed a bit wilder, and I began to wonder how many other little pockets of wildness I might be able to find. So far, though, I’m still looking, and the bulldozed hilltop is now posted with signs declaring “AVAILABLE” and “PRIME DEVELOPMENT PARCEL.”
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