Free The Last Season by Eric Blehm

behind rock-wall windbreaks. Fire pits were his nemesis, engineering feats he deemed “fire castles” for their sheer immensity. They often came complete with iron grates that campers hid in nearby hollow logs or hung from trees when they left the mountains. Generations of families had been coming to these spots for years—sometimes kicking out other campers who were squatting on their campsite. Imagine their surprise when they couldn’t find “their” campsite and a young, mustached Ranger Randy materialized out of the woods to explain that the area was being “naturalized.”
    â€œNatural-what? I just want to know where my fireplace is!”
    It was predictable. The parks’ management plan had a section entitled “Wilderness Protection vs. Personal Freedom,” in which was written, “Oldtime use of wilderness was completely free of restrictions. Wilderness explorers could hunt and fish without limit, cut down trees at will, camp, make fires and graze their stock anywhere. The tradition of personal freedom in wilderness dies hard…. But when human populations expand they become subject to the biological limitations that govern other dense populations: the greater the number of individuals the greater the loss of individual freedom.”
    Translated: “Sorry, sir, the fireplace your grandfather built with your father has been obliterated, but I replaced it with this highly functional, less obtrusive fire ring that’s—yes, sir, I realize it’s quite small, but it will still provide plenty of warmth and cooking surface, not to mention you won’t have to burn an entire tree each time you light it. By the way, you won’t be needing that ax. The new regulations allow only foraging for deadfall on the ground. Oh, and please don’t cut pine boughs for your bed—that’s illegal now as well. Have a nice day.”
    Randy, who was neither so blunt nor so stiff, strove to respect past freedoms, introducing the new rules and regulations to more than 1,200 park visitors in his patrol area that season without hearing a complaint. The only citation he issued was to a backpacker who had brought his dog with him, which led to a discussion about the difference between national parks and the national forests bordering the parks, which are managed by a much looser set of use regulations. That first season was devoid of any major emergencies: Randy treated one person for blisters, and a dehydrated girl who felt sick merely needed to force down water. He destroyed seventy-five oversized fire pits and collected thirteen gunnysacks of garbage that were hauled out of the mountains by mules. As the summer progressed, he earned his reputation as a devoted and diplomatic workhorse who once hiked 16 round-trip miles to tear down a haphazard community of campsitesthat he’d heard was destroying the serenity of a remote lake. Exhausted after hours of moving rock and logs, he embarked on the 8-mile return to his station and discovered en route one of the Sierra’s legendary can dumps—a rusting midden that couldn’t be passed by. After loading his pack with 50 pounds or more of glass and cans, he returned home well after dark to collapse in his sleeping bag.
    He lived in the spartan accommodations of a tent on the shore of Middle Rae Lake and recorded his simplified life with the romanticized pen one might expect from an inspired 23-year-old truant from society who had been raised on a diet of nature writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aldo Leopold, and Henry David Thoreau. “There is a low plant that grows profusely everywhere, composed of a ‘cup’ of several leaves pointing nearly straight up,” Randy wrote after some afternoon rain showers. “The whole is maybe half an inch high, and they form carpets that one could take for a meadow. Whenever it rains a large drop of water collects in the bottom of this cup and glimmers like