The Struggle for the Valley: California's Hetch Hetchy Controversy, 1905-1913

Ecotourism and the trouble with transportation

“…I shall never forget our three camps; the first in the solemn temple of the great sequoias; the next in the snow storm among the silver firs near the brink of the cliff; and the third on the floor of the Yosemite, in the open valley fronting the stupendous rocky mass of El Capitan with the falls thundering in the distance on either hand". (Roosevelt, 1903) Some readers might bristle with the idea of President Roosevelt being used as an exemplar of an ecotourism experience given his predilection for hunting and subsequent tension with Muir over the protection of the Hetch Hetchy Valley (Curry & Gordon, 2017;Richardson, 1959). While such concerns are valid, 'ecotourism' and 'ecotourist' are contested phenomena (see Fennell, 2015b) subject to the cultural framing of societies that participate in (Lorenzo-Romero, Alarcón-del-Amo, & Crespo-Jareño, 2019) and support (Schweinsberg, Darcy, & Wearing, 2018) nature-based travel.…”