Best is Not Success.
“Wilderness is rapidly becoming one of those aspects of the American dream which is more of the past than of the present. Wilderness is not only a condition of nature, but a state of mind and mood and heart. It cannot be confined to the museum-case status —seen only as a passing diorama from superlative throughways.”
– Ansel Adams in one of his letters after work on the Tioga Road continued after a fervent protest
Sometimes, even with the best of intentions and furor, one’s efforts may not lead to the desired outcomes. And if there were anyone who understood this lesson better it would have been Ansel Adams himself. And Adams’s protest against the rebuilding of Tioga Road would be one of many such instances that taught him that.
In the 1950s, in response to the increasing number of park visitors and in the hope of attracting even more visitors, the National Park Service instituted plans to develop more roads and accommodations, called Mission 66.
Part of the development plan involves dynamiting a three-mile stretch through glacier-polished granite in the Tenaya Lake area to rebuild the Tioga Road through the heart of the Yosemite high country.
Adams took a strong stance against the rebuilding of the Tioga Road calling it a “desecration of Tenaya Lake” and an “insensitive disregard of prime national park values” in a heated appeal to the Secretaries of the Interior and Commerce and the director of the Park Service to cease and reevaluate works to rebuild the Tioga Road.
Following Adams’s protest, which caught wide attention, work on the road was suspended for 12 days. However, the National Park Service eventually continued on its plan to rebuild the road with only slight modifications.
“I am an artist who also appreciated science and engineering, and I know we can’t keep everything in a glass case—with the keys given only to a privileged few. Nevertheless, I want people to experience the magic of wildness; there is no use fooling ourselves that nature with a slick highway running through it is any longer wild…. While the National Park Service is open to most severe criticism in this Tenaya Lake road mater [sic], so are the conservationists, who should have been alert to possible damage. I, personally, must assume my share of the blame because I failed to do my part before most of the damage was accomplished.”
– Ansel Adams in a Sierra Club Bulletin titled “Tenaya Tragedy”
But Adams was not one who gives up easily. He would continue to voice out against what he saw as poor management and commercial exploitations of the national parks (though often having mixed success in having his appeals and suggestions accepted by the authorities).
Adams would also go on to work tirelessly, on a variety of conservation activities in the next few decades such as: serving as president of the Trustees for Conservation, and vice-chairman of the Sierra Natural Resources Council; fighting against the construction of an oil refinery at Moss Landing that would threaten the ecology in the surrounding area; and in various efforts to protect and preserve the Big Sur coast south of Monterey County and the Alaska Wilderness.