From Austin to Echo With Love

Beaucoup boxelder bugs, COVID-19 and one big snake don’t detract from the spectacular beauty and important history of Echo Park

The three-foot snake coiled around the base of the vault toilet in the ladies room across from our campsite in Echo Park, Colorado. We had just pulled up after a seven-hour road trip from Boulder, so naturally had to head straight to the restroom.

My wife Millie was the first to enter the six-by-eight-foot glorified outhouse, and when she yelled “Snake!” I didn’t believe her. She’s never cried “wolf,” specifically, but has yelled “bear!” on more than one hike, unnecessarily frazzling my nerves for a good chuckle. One time, at Lake Tahoe, I really did spot a bear on a trail, and had to convince Millie and my parents we Must. Turn. Around. (By the way, see this “What not to do in a bear attack? Push your slower friends down in attempts of saving yourself, says the National Park Service.”)

Andie, Carrie and Millie on their way for a hike while I hung back at the campsite to write.

Regarding the snake, it was the week of June 22, 2020, and we were finally in Echo Park. In March, our Colorado friends Andie and Carrie had invited us to join them there. Then the United States finally began to take COVID-19 seriously, and over the next three months–with the National Parks shutting down–we weren’t sure we’d make it to Echo Park in 2020. But just 10 days before our tentatively scheduled June trip, Andie emailed to let us know that overnight camping was now allowed.

On June 17, Millie and our blue-eyed yellow Lab-Husky dog-child Sancha and I pulled out of the driveway of our home near Austin, Texas, and headed to Colorado, with a two-day, stopover in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to celebrate our 25th anniversary.

Over our 2,000-mile, round-trip journey, while the world was still deep in a global pandemic, contracting COVID-19 was our biggest worry–certainly not a long snake wrapped around a toilet just as you have to “go” in the middle of what is billed as “primitive camping.”

Carrie was the first to validate Millie’s snake claim. As Carrie peered into the restroom, I crept beside her and we were both relieved to see this was not a rattlesnake. With its black-and-brown blotching pattern, we guessed it was probably a nonvenomous bull snake.

But still. How are we expected to use the toilet without freaking out, especially at night? It didn’t help matters when Carrie warned us to look up when using the loo because sometimes snakes crawl up on the ceiling rafters and could fall down on you.

Carrie coaxed the snake out of the ladies room, and it promptly slithered away–to the men’s toilet.

All four of us gathered the courage to use the bathroom (ladies side, of course, looking up, down and all around), and then began setting up camp just across the sandy dirt road. Echo Park sits deep in the 300+-square-mile Dinosaur National Monument on the Colorado-Utah border. Our campsite was near the banks of the confluence of the Yampa and Green rivers, which over millions of years have carved the spectacular red rock and sandstone canyons that are Echo Park and Dinosaur National Monument.

Enjoying our 25th anniversary in Santa Fe.

From our campsite, we had views of the river, with the enormous Steamboat Rock jutting from it, and a spectacular 1,000-foot-high scrub-brush-dotted cliff across an expansive meadow of crispy, sharp grasses (Indian ricegrass, I think, thanks to the very cool iNaturalist app). We began to decide where to put our tents–and then the mosquitos descended.

Millie and I had laid out a tarp on a patch with a gorgeous river view, and began to stretch the tent over it, when mosquitos swarmed our faces, and bit every limb we have in about a minute. I had never been surrounded by so many mosquitos, and it was unbearable to put up the tent at that site. Goodbye river view, hello cliff view.

We pitched our tent under a tree close to the picnic tables, but the mosquitos were still relentless, pretty much the whole time we were in Echo Park. And, it was hot, easily over 90 degrees. Even the nights were not as cool as this Texan escaping our fiendish summer heat would like.

But that’s not all. The picnic tables, our tents, Sancha’s food dish, and pretty much everything we had became covered with orangey, leggy insects—the boxelder bug, I discovered after getting access to the Internet on the way back to Boulder. At least the boxelder bugs don’t bite, but too much of any insect is unnerving.

Once again to the rescue, Carrie and Andie had brought along a screen house, providing more shade and a respite from about 95 percent of the mosquitoes and pesky boxelder bugs. Inside the screen house, Little Sancha dug holes and burrowed into the powdery dirt to stay cool.

None of this really mattered. We had come to explore, and didn’t plan to sit around our campsite all that much. Except for me, as I wanted to hang back one day and write some pages for my book, Greenish: How To Protect the Environment Without Hugging A Tree.

I believe the more time we spend outside, the more apt we are to protect the environment­–bull snakes, boxelder bugs and all. That’s why I’m writing Green-ish entirely outdoors. I’ve written chapters on the balcony of a small apartment on the edge of the jungle in Tulum, Mexico, where the mosquitos were fierce, but in hindsight, not Echo-Park fierce.

Sancha in front of that 1,000-foot cliff, which was our view every morning as we woke up in the tent. She loves the great outdoors as much as we do, including sleeping in the tent.

In late 2019, Andie joined Millie and me in Big Bend National Park in Texas, where I wrote in the Chihuahuan Desert, with views of the Chisos Mountains. In February 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was brewing beyond our wildest dreams, I wrote on a tiny beach in Akumal in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Between these and future journeys, I continue to write more pages on the screened-in porch of the “enviro-hacienda” Millie built for us south of Austin in Hays County.

Our campsite with Steamboat Rock jutting from the confluence of the Yampa and Green rivers.

I admit when Andie invited us to Echo Park, I’d never heard of it. After visiting the National Park Service website, I was intrigued to discover Echo Park was the center of an environmental controversy in the 1950s. That clinched the trip for me. In my book Green-ish I’ve covered a spectrum of environmental headlines, ranging from lead in the water in Flint, Michigan, all the way back to the 1800s, when naturalist John Muir’s Century magazine writings about over-grazing and logging in the Sierra Nevada Mountains led to the creation by Congress of Yosemite National Park.

To me, there is a three-pronged theme common among these environmental controversies: 1. An environmental threat builds, 2. Excellent journalism and sometimes lawsuits bring attention to the issue, and 3. Change happens—sometimes for good, and sometimes in the favor of powerful industries, lobbyists and politicians blocking environmental protections.

In the case of Echo Park, unlikely allies–from the General Federation of Women’s Clubs to the Sierra Club (which in July renounced John Muir and its other founders for being racist)–united in the 1950s to prevent a the building of a dam, which was to be part of the massive Colorado River Storage Project (not just in Colorado but also New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming). The dam would submerge Echo Park and the surrounding Dinosaur National Monument (designated in 1915), and their spectacular canyons, ridges and rock formations. Proponents of the dam said the new reservoir would provide much-needed water storage for the arid region, and an outlet for boating, swimming and other recreation and tourism.

Writing in the screen house that saved us from thousands of mosquitos and boxelder bugs. In the background, you can see the outhouse where we found the snake curled around a vault toilet.

Keeping in theme with the environmental events I’ve been covering like Flint and Yosemite, strong communication is always key to change. In the mid-1950s, Sierra Club executive director David Brower put the Echo Park situation on the national stage by publishing This is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and Its Magic Rivers, and making sure every member of Congress got a copy of the book, along with a brochure entitled, What Is Your Stake In Dinosaur? Howard Nahniser of the Wilderness Society negotiated with politicians behind the scenes, and on April 11, 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed legislation for the Colorado River Storage Project–sans the proposed Echo Park Dam. In fact, the Colorado River Storage Project Act allowed for several dams but prohibited any being built in a national park or monument.

According to Sierra Club historians, “David Brower was a master of persuasion. He convinced several generations of idealistic youth, through speeches, images, and the printed word, that saving the earth was an urgent spiritual matter.”

Brower served as the Sierra Club executive director until 1969 and was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times. More significant was that the Echo Park Dam controversy is credited with bringing about modern-day political campaigns protecting the environment, including the Wilderness Act signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Not only did this legislation (penned by Howard Nahniser) end up protecting more than 110 million acres of federal land to date, it also eloquently defines the word “wilderness” as follows:

"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."

Where man himself is a visitor who doesn’t remain. To me that means do go visit places like Echo Park, but then do go home–hopefully with some renewed respect for nature. If you camped in Echo Park, you know “Pack it in. Pack it out” so hopefully wouldn’t dream of littering anywhere. If you appreciate views of vivid blue skies like the breath-taking one we experienced at the top of Wagon Wheel Point, then maybe you’ll remember the connection between fossil fuels and air pollution. If you have to lug and ration water and go without hot showers in Echo Park, then hopefully you’ll remember to conserve natural resources at home.

As I worked on this essay in the car headed back to Boulder, I kept feeling a tickling sensation on my legs and would scoop up yet another Boxelder bug and toss it out the window.  Echo Park really does echo, and on the drive home I also recalled testing out the natural sound chamber by shouting “Sancha!” (not snake!) on a trail by the Green river and seeing her turn around as if saying, “Yes? What is it?”

We’re safely back at the enviro-hacienda now, after our 17-day road trip. U.S. COVID-19 infection rates only got worse while we were gone. But in July, after four years of legal battles, the Standing Rock Sioux scored a victory in federal court bringing Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) operations to a stop until a full environmental review is complete and new permits are secured.

Millie and I were there at Standing Rock witnessing and writing about the unprecedented juncture of environmental justice, energy and water in November 2016. That December, Barack Obama and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers blocked the project, but in January 2017, after days in office, Donald Trump signed an executive order allowing construction to continue. Now, after the recent legal victory, the DAPL environmental process will take years, and a new administration could block necessary permits to resume pipeline operations.

Just remember. There may be snakes, mosquitoes, heat, long roads, head-spinning politics and even a deadly pandemic, but the persistence it takes to protect our natural resources and enjoy the dazzling beauty of the wilderness will always be well worth the effort.

Howard Nahniser’s definition of wilderness may have been “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain” (obviously pronouns need updating), but that doesn’t mean you can’t go back to the outdoors.  Please do. Because if you return to nature and all its beauty and thorns, you’ll be more likely to protect the environment when you get home.