at the time I wrote “Dont you just hate when you’re out braving the fierce elements, getting all bromantic, snow camping in your new camo, three room walk-in tent, taming the wild wilderness with your manly hunting skills and your extra large truck, and first thing in the frigid frigging morning, before you even had your folgers, some skinny little old longhair drives up, clicks into skis and shuffles and glides right past and off into the trackless forest. Sorta kills the mood. ‘Reckon we ain’t rightly allowed to shoot at him though, eh?'”
Reading that now over ten years later, I flinch a bit, recognizing how I was playing into that narrative, in my writings anyway. I reality I was just going skiing and never even saw them, just their camp. And I have no big problem with hunters, just the side they have been assigned to in the strategic divisiveness.
But now their snowmobile brethren in the manufactured culture wars have so taken over this vicinity, that skiers dont even come here anymore. Even on this side of the canyon, which is in an Official NFS Wilderness Area where motorized activity is not allowed, it’s like a rutted roaring open pit mine.
They are intentionally breaking the rules that are there to protect their neighbors right to recreate as they choose, and this fragile, rare and increasingly beleaguered resource itself. This is the point at which false equivalencies are made plain by their bad faith willingness to cheat, and play dirty, with their unfair advantage.
Sure it’s just a few bad apples, with the tools to do disproportionate damage, but it reflects poorly on their community as a whole. Correctives have to come from within, which laissez faire, libertarian culture discourages. But unwillingness to act is a choice. As is ignorance.
For years I reported to the Agency on trespass violations and impacts I witnessed, here in our meager, delicate, climate change threatened, subalpine habitat. shrug
I used to call it Golden Eagle bowl, and had regular sightings of the shy rare raptors here in this valley, including dramatic breeding flight displays, huge dives and barrel rolls, incredible agility for a bird so big. This is why we cant have nice things. We as a society apparently can’t muster the will to discipline our cheaters and bullies, our precious stunted manboys.
It’s small consolation that they don’t even know what all they are missing, by just going along with it, and treating the world as a backdrop for their two-dimensional, adversarial gamer reality show life. Sucks for us all
