Western Lands Preservation
and the East

Founder's Blog – 4 January 2024

At this point I've spent four months in Ithaca, New York, attending college.  That's some 1,800 miles away from Utah, WLP, and the Preserve.  I've only visited the Eastern States once before, on a trip in 7th grade to visit family and tour colleges.  Coming back, I expected things to be different than the West, but I wasn't sure how.  And after this time, I think I'm getting a sense of it.  So let me share what I think is different about the East, how it relates to WLP, and why there will be no Eastern Lands Preservation.

First time I went out to explore nature in New York, I took a weekend for a trip to Robert Treman State Park.  It consisted of the land to either side of Enfield Creek, for about a two mile stretch, including one part of the creek that they sectioned off as a swimming hole.  Mustering together all my alloted foresight for the month, I decided to go on Labor Day, and, surprise!  The park was crowded.  I walked the two-mile trail up the creek and stopped counting after I passed 150 people.

That's a huge number of people!  Whatever happened to the solitude of nature?  I came to hear the twitter of birds and the rush of flowing water, not cars running and people yelling.  Labor Day definitely caused a lot of the crowds, but it's still the same problem I see up the American Fork canyon near my home in Utah: excessive crowds take away a lot of the enjoyment.

But after I went up, I still had to walk the two miles back to the road, and after my experience going up, I was sure I wanted to avoid the main trail back down.  Seeing no alternative, I simply plunged into the trees, direction in mind, and went walking off the trail.  This is bad.  Parks do not like you doing this because if you're not careful you can hurt vegetation and cause damage.  But it was the only way I could see to enjoy some time in nature.

Me in tree in New York.

And I did enjoy that walk.  I was free to wander and explore, and perhaps get lost a tiny bit.  I found a rocky outcropping and was able to sit and overlook the stream below without ten other people clamoring for the same view.  I climbed a tree for kicks and felt so good I had to take a picture to preserve the moment.  That's the feeling I hope to encourage with WLP.  A solitary appreciation of nature, rather than a commercialized tourist site.

But going off the trail exposed some unpleasant aspects of the park.  If I strayed a little too far off, I inevitably found myself at the nearby road's edge, or in someone's backyard.  There was at most a half-mile of room between the creek and the roads around it, and even less to the houses along those roads.  That's different from back West, where there's huge swaths of State and BLM land, with cities between them.  Every square inch in the East seems to be divvyed up, and the overall effect is that there's mostly development, with nature in between.

WLP is here to keep that from happening in the West as well.  Cities are growing like crazy and they could easily gobble up so much of the beautiful landscapes here, or more likely overwhelm them with too many crowds.  The West is special for being so open and making the outdoors accessible.  That's what we want to preserve.  It's our name — Western Lands Preservation.

I like to think of it as damage control in the East.  There's a project near Ithaca called the Emerald Necklace, where the Finger Lakes Land Trust hopes to connect 50,000 acres of conserved land.  But as the name implies, that land is chopped up into smaller chunks, leaving no way to enjoy it in its entirety.  Some of the "emeralds" are called Forest or Nature Preserves, and they range in size from 30-300 acres (most are ~100).  And these acres are almost inside towns, where houses are visible and people take their dogs on morning walks through the preserve.  Right now WLP has 30 acres, but that's the launchpad for us to preserve so much more land that's truly special in the West, for future generations to enjoy.

These are only my beginning thoughts.  I've been to much of what nature Ithaca has to offer, and I think I've distilled their impression on me in this post.  But there's a lot more I haven't seen.  It's inconvenient for a student to travel far, but I'd like to visit the nearby National Forests that are larger in size than what I've been able to access.  And from what I've heard, the Adirondacks in Northern New York are so large, grand, unpopulated, and untouched that it might completely blow me away and invalidate everything I've said so far.

But there's one more reason why WLP is for the West.  I think it's beautiful here.  The East has a lot more rain and a lot more trees, and while it looks nice from a distance, I think it conveniently covers up how crowded it is.  And sometimes it takes a good, open view, clear of trees, to really appreciate the landscape.  At least the terrain in New York is more varied than the Plains states, but I think I've been quite spoiled growing up in Utah.  Coming back after four months and seeing the Rockies exploding out of the earth, contemplating how small our sprawling cities are compared to what nature can cook up, watching pink sunlight glint off the snowy mountaintops half an hour after sunset...  There's nothing that compares.  That's what we're trying to preserve.

This was a long post, and I've been letting these thoughts simmer for a while.  I think moving East has only strengthened my convictions about the West.  While it's difficult being so far away from the company and our lands, I'll continue to do what I can to forward our vision and bring nature closer to us.

Some images of Western Lands . . .

– Steven Whitney

 
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