The latest research shows that humans have been living in North America and Tularosa Basin [in New Mexico] for at least 23,000 years. It was previously thought that humans arrived in North America closer to 13,500–16,000 years ago.
—the National Park Service
We’re not the first people to be amazed at the wonders of the West. Our vision stretches to imagine what the first Americans must have thought when they crossed the Bering Strait. Whatever propelled them to make that hazardous journey, they ended up in a new world and surely must have noticed its magnificence, its difference, its unusual fauna—and how the frigid weather became progressively warmer as they traveled south.
The narrative traditionally taught in U.S. schools features a westward movement by European colonials, but the truth is that the continent was settled from the West to the East and to the South. Some 23,000 years ago, intrepid human beings left footprints in the wet sands of New Mexico.
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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These people were marveling at the wonders of the West some 20,000 years before the Egyptians started to build pyramids. Their daily environment was shared with saber-toothed cats, mastodons, giant sloths, dire wolves, and condors with wingspans of four meters—relics of these creatures are still being pulled from the La Brea Tar Pits, in Los Angeles.
The mind plays tricks on our sense of history. One of them is called shifting baselines. The term stems from the theory that the epoch in which we are each born becomes the baseline from which we judge the original state of nature. If our environment is decaying, and biodiversity is declining, and the natural world seems less wild than it used to be, then we register this observation by comparing the current state of things with our own childhood experiences. The world was different back then, much more different than we actually know.
If you were born in the 1950s near Torrance, California, you knew that giant lobsters could be caught easily off the beaches, and it’s not true anymore. If you were born in John Muir’s California in the 1880s, you lamented the way Yosemite had become more traveled by the 1920s. If you were born in the 1600s, you were unaware of the variety of animal populations that once inhabited North America.
This issue of Alta Journal is dedicated to setting the record straight and to noticing what is still truly wild and wonderful in the West, however diminished and different it has become from what our ancestors thought and observed. Alta wanted to make a record of what we, of this generation, think are the spectacular wonders of the West, knowing that our grandchildren may hardly recognize these marvels. Their baseline will be their own experiences.
We asked our best and brightest, our contributors, to nominate and describe the Seven Wonders of California. Few of them still make their livings as hunter-gatherers, so the hallmarks of our modern world are cultural as well as physical. Not just spectacular nature—butterflies, and trees that have survived through evolution, and giant ocean waves that are liquid cliffs for new explorers—but also human creations: theme parks, fast food, freeways. These contemporary wonders serve as a new baseline.
I suspect that every reader will nominate something we missed. But that is the point. Our collective experience becomes our history.
Ambrose Bierce defined history as “an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.”
As the present bleeds into the future, many of our current events will fade, but I would bet that writers and artists will keep the most accurate records.
Write to letters@altaonline.com and tell me about your own California wonder.•
Will Hearst is the editor and publisher of Alta Journal, which he founded in 2017. He is the board chair of Hearst, one of the nation’s largest diversified media and information companies. Hearst is a grandson of company founder William Randolph Hearst.
