When Nature Becomes Culture: The National Register and Yosemite's Camp 4, A Case Study

ANDREW KIRK AND CHARLES PALMER

For environmental advocates cultural analysis of natural sites opens the door to a universe of historic preservation laws originally designed to protect cultural resources. These can be used, as in the case of Camp 4, to protect significant areas that fail to meet the standards required for preservation purely on the basis of natural qualities.
VISUALIZE FOR A MOMENT A CAMPGROUND in Yosemite National Park. Not one of the elaborate camps, with tent cabins and a rustic dining hall—but rather a bare-bones affair with little more than a comfort station, some food lockers, tables, trees, and picnic tables. Scattered throughout the area are granite boulders, dotted with ill-defined smudges of chalk, one decorated with the outline of a lightening bolt. This initially unimpressive little plot of dirt does not seem a promising candidate for the National Register of Historic Places, yet it is listed there. And the way it got listed there illustrates two things: changes in the interpretation of history in the national parks, and, more importantly, an interesting new legal front for environmental activism closely linked with cultural preservation.	1
Figure 1. Sorting out pitons for the third ascent of the Nose on El Capitan, 1963. Photo by Glen Denny.
Many environmentalists disparaged the cultural turn in environmental history over the past decade, worrying that an emphasis on human activity could undercut a century of efforts to preserve wilderness areas. However, for environmental advocates, this cultural analysis of natural sites opens the door to a universe of historic preservation laws designed to protect cultural resources, like Camp 4, that fail to meet the standards required for preservation purely on the basis of nature alone.	2
Between 1997 and 2003, Camp 4 was the focal point of a battle for recognition of historical status between the National Park Service and the international climbing community.1 There are many examples of contentious National Register and National Landmark nominations, and public historians and preservationists understand that the Register is far more susceptible to politics and changing cultural perceptions of history than its tidy instruction books and neatly lined forms suggest. Lately, a series of controversial nominations of non-traditional sites generated new interest in National Register nomination as a tool for advocacy. As new scholarship in the fields of western and environmental history worked its way into Register nominations, NPS administrators and researchers were forced to rethink their historic preservation standards.	. . .