SPEAKER_07: All right, let's get started. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything, your products, content you create and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website, or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, Use the offer code INVISIBLE to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel.com slash invisible. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Every year, park rangers and trail workers across the U.S. take part in a kind of scavenger hunt on their days off. They're looking for a particular tool, one that's often over 100 years old, but to them, it shines like a diamond.
SPEAKER_03: And with the right combination of strategy and luck, they might spot the perfect one on the wall of a local Cracker Barrel restaurant.
SPEAKER_07: That's 99 PI producer, Lasha McGowan.
SPEAKER_03: Because this hot commodity is an antique steel blade crosscut saw.
SPEAKER_07: Imagine one of those old timey lumberjack photos, the kind where two men in plaid are working away at a tree holding opposite ends of a huge human length saw. That is a vintage crosscut.
SPEAKER_09: Oh, gosh. The first saws I named, I named all with a King Arthur theme. So I had Arthur and Guinevere, of course, and then along came Lancelot. This is Dolly Chapman.
SPEAKER_03: She's worked on trail crews for more than three decades, building and maintaining trails with the U.S. Forest Service.
SPEAKER_09: And Gareth and Lynette, who were a couple. And Elaine and Percival. And of course, I have Excalibur is my favorite axe.
SPEAKER_07: Dolly's an expert at finding, using and maintaining these coveted saws. And she's got a matchmaking reputation. People call her up to get paired with their perfect crosscut.
SPEAKER_03: Dolly's saws hang side by side in her workshop in Northern California, looking a little bit like a walk in closet full of incredibly sharp clothes. She has 40 of these vintage saws in her collection, which is pretty amazing, given the lengths that sawyers and collectors go to in order to get their hands on even one of these things. A lot of what I like about them is there's so much more to them than you see at first
SPEAKER_09: glance. I saw a treasure when the previous owners saw junk.
SPEAKER_07: Some people spend hours mining websites like eBay and Craigslist. Others search in person on saw hunting road trips, driving up and down highways to stop by yard sales, antique stores, and even places where the saws aren't technically for sale. Well, if you go in restaurants in rural areas, restaurants and bars, you see painted saws
SPEAKER_09: hanging above the bar and on the wall. I'm sure you've been in a restaurant with a painted saw on the wall and not noticed it yet.
SPEAKER_03: On its face, it may seem a little intense, you know, to care about old saws so much that you end up trying to barter with your Cracker Barrel server because they have a wall decoration you just really want to take home. But the vintage crosscuts that trail crew leaders go hunting for, they aren't just for show. Often, the plan is to put these saws back to use after the paint has been scrubbed clean and the teeth have been sharpened, many return to the woods, bucking and felling trees in the American outdoors.
SPEAKER_07: In fact, vintage crosscuts that were made between 1880 and 1930 are often the tool of choice for the hundreds of trail workers who maintain the American backcountry today. That's ahead of chainsaws and newly made crosscuts.
SPEAKER_03: And the reason this old tool has stuck around for so long, even in an age where there's newer, better gadget coming out every year, it goes way beyond the physical saw itself.
SPEAKER_07: Because the rise, fall and unexpected second life of the crosscut saw is the story of how America created the very concept of wilderness.
SPEAKER_03: Wilderness. It's a word that summons images of old growth forests and ancient untouched mountain peaks.
SPEAKER_08: Honestly, when, when I hear that word and I think about it, I picture myself on a ridge in the mountains, looking probably across other ridges in the mountains.
SPEAKER_03: This is Adam Sowards. I'm an environmental historian, and have studied public lands for about a quarter of
SPEAKER_08: a century, national parks, national forests, things like that.
SPEAKER_07: The concept of wilderness might seem like it's been around forever, like it came with the planet as a kind of package deal. But in the long history of the natural world, the idea of wilderness that we're familiar with today is actually pretty new.
SPEAKER_03: The word wilderness first popped into use in the year 1200, essentially to describe land not being used for farming. Much later, the colonization of North America gave wilderness a new meaning and a new purpose. It became a way to define and distinguish white settler society.
SPEAKER_07: Early wilderness in the US mostly meant danger, a place to be wary of.
SPEAKER_03: This kind of thinking helped European settlers define themselves in opposition to indigenous people. So starting in around the 17th century, the idea was that white people lived in civilization, and indigenous people lived in the hostile wilderness. And for 200 years, that's how it went. Wilderness didn't have the greatest reviews.
SPEAKER_07: Then came the Industrial Revolution, which was when wilderness started to take a different shape.
SPEAKER_03: Industrialization created the conditions for certain things to grow chaotically and exponentially. Things like cities, factories, pollution, a working class. It shattered the old patterns of rural life, and it brought on new ways of relating to land.
SPEAKER_08: There's a lot more people that are talking about the busyness of cities and the crowdedness of cities.
SPEAKER_03: The Crosscut Saw played a major part in America's industrialization. This tool, it helped loggers topple countless Douglas firs and redwoods to make way for new cities. And Adams says that it was around this time, during the chaos of the Industrial Revolution, that wilderness had a glow up.
SPEAKER_08: So beginning in the mid part, or the late part of the 19th century, celebration of the wild begins.
SPEAKER_07: As steam and coal power came on the scene, cities got bigger, noisier, and more polluted. The idea of wilderness became more and more appealing as a contrast to the pressures of industrial capitalism.
SPEAKER_08: And as that industrialization expands, and as the cities get bigger, that desire to not only have access to those places, but to create those places and protect them, intensify.
SPEAKER_03: Wilderness started to represent an escape from an urban life that felt like it was expanding out of control. Writers and poets described wild spaces as pure instead of scary, safe instead of savage, no longer an unfarmed wasteland, but more of a temple, something of value to humans that needed to be protected from humans. There's sort of a religious dimension to part of that.
SPEAKER_08: There's an anti-urban dimension and an anti-urbanite position too. So we don't like the people who live there, so we need to go to these other places where they might be pure.
SPEAKER_07: By the Romantic era, American writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau believed that wilderness was a creation of God that provided important space for intellectual and spiritual stimulation, a place where good men could become great men. The famous photographer Ansel Adams became known for his landscape photos of the American West and Adams helped propel the idea that America's wilderness was a point of pride and national identity.
SPEAKER_03: And maybe a lot of this kind of thinking is sounding familiar at this point, but at the time, the idea of wilderness was still mostly an intellectual and artistic one. Several wild places weren't so accessible to the urban masses yet, and most people definitely weren't going there on vacation.
SPEAKER_07: That started to change in the early 1900s when the US government established the Forest Service and Park Service and America's wild spaces started to gain national attention. You and your family can enjoy this wonderland at very modest rates because a variety of
SPEAKER_00: tent accommodations are available. A tent like this with comfortable furnishings, lights, bedding costs only $2.50 daily per person and fine meals are available.
SPEAKER_03: An outdoor recreation movement took off that would only grow and grow and grow as Americans hiked, canoed, and camped their way into the first decades of the 20th century. Wilderness became a place where not just wealthy artists, but everyday Americans could find the promise of health, relaxation, and moral regeneration. By the 1920s, the Park Service was building cushy resorts, complete with dude ranches
SPEAKER_07: and even scheduled bear feedings.
SPEAKER_03: So in order to get as many tourists as possible into these parks, the government went hard on building roads. And all this development meant that the crosscut saw was in extremely high demand. These saws were being churned out in huge numbers by manufacturers who were selling newer models every year.
SPEAKER_09: There were three main companies in the US that made them. There was the Distant Saw Company, the Atkins Saw Company, and the Simons Saw and Steel Company. They tried to outsell each other every year. They each made their own steel.
SPEAKER_03: By the Great Depression, millions of Americans were put to work, many of them wielding the crosscut to clear trails and lay down miles and miles of pavement. These saws helped make way for the next big thing that shaped wilderness history—cars.
SPEAKER_07: By this time, over a million cars were being sold in the country each year. Many of their owners eager to drive the widely publicized Park to Park Highway, which connected 13 national parks by road. From Yellowstone, you could drive north to Glacier, west to the Cascades, south through the Sierras, and east past the Grand Canyon.
SPEAKER_07: These new highways, combined with affordable cars and promotional campaigns, well, they got millions of Americans outside. Within just four years, national park attendance tripled.
SPEAKER_03: But the success of these efforts concerned some of those early worshippers of the wild. With all these roads and tourism, it seemed to them that wilderness was at risk of losing its moral character, its purity. The unique quality of wilderness was that it existed outside of human life. So if all these pristine landscapes would one day be rolled over by hundreds of cars a day, was that wilderness at all?
SPEAKER_07: And so in 1935, a new political movement started to emerge, spearheaded by a small group of people with one specific goal in mind.
SPEAKER_08: Let's not have roads everywhere. Let's keep some cars away.
SPEAKER_03: A group of eight Americans got together to defend the wilderness against recreational and commercial overuse. Among them was ecologist Aldo Leopold, Forest Service chief Bob Marshall, and Benton Mackay, the guy behind the Appalachian Trail. Together they called themselves the Wilderness Society, and they had one specific enemy, the car.
SPEAKER_08: What united them was not every last detail about what they thought wilderness should be, but what united them was the fight against the automobile.
SPEAKER_03: The Wilderness Society wanted Congress to create a new type of federal land called wilderness, with a capital W. They wanted wilderness to be part of the country's public lands. But unlike other types of public land, like national parks, forests, and monuments, wilderness would be a separate category, a place with specific and permanent restrictions on human activity.
SPEAKER_07: The Wilderness Society dreamed of preserving plots of land throughout the country where roads and most types of commercial development would be forbidden. This included things like logging, resorts, or any type of human-made structure.
SPEAKER_03: This was a hard sell. I mean, setting aside millions of acres of land that you can't claim ownership of or make profit on doesn't sound very American to me. But they kept trying.
SPEAKER_07: As World War II swung around, wood became a critical war material, and the demand for lumber grew exponentially. And it was around this time that chainsaws entered the chat.
SPEAKER_09: In just a few years, chainsaws were doing all the work, and crosscut saws were completely obsolete.
SPEAKER_07: The efficiency of chainsaws helped fulfill the country's appetite for wood during the war. And because it could cut more wood at a faster rate, it had major economic appeal. Chainsaws so dramatically replaced the old crosscuts that crosscut manufacturing came to a grinding halt.
SPEAKER_09: So there were thousands of crosscut saws in the country belonging to logging companies, belonging to woodcutters, belonging to individuals, for which there was no use anymore.
SPEAKER_03: Picture hundreds of crates of crosscut saws being pushed to the back of warehouses because no one wanted them anymore. These tools eventually found their way to antique stores or someone's basement. Others found new purpose as wall decoration. And just like that, with crosscuts no longer in use, commercially at least, the American outdoors got a whole lot louder.
SPEAKER_07: Eventually the Wilderness Society's anti-car campaign succeeded. Under 66 legislative rewrites, wilderness became a concept that was signed into law.
SPEAKER_10: Members of the cabinet and the Congress, ladies and gentlemen, this is a very happy and historic occasion for all who love the great American outdoors. In 1964, Congress passed the Wilderness Act, and America did something no other country
SPEAKER_07: had ever done. It passed a law to protect land and preserve it in its natural state.
SPEAKER_10: The Wilderness Bill preserves for our posterity, for all time to come, nine million acres of this vast continent in their original and unchanging beauty and wonder.
SPEAKER_07: It presented something powerfully new in public lands history by placing value on collective restraint. Today, there are roughly 112 million acres of protected wilderness.
SPEAKER_03: Wilderness went from being a set of cultural values to physical plots of land with defined borders and a legal definition. And that definition, well, it's a doozy. Well, I have it right next to me.
SPEAKER_08: I can read off some of the phrases. An area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.
SPEAKER_03: Untrammeled. It's oddly poetic, a choice of word that somehow manages to be specific and a bit vague all at once. Wilderness is a place of primeval character, the act goes on to say, that it should be preserved in its natural conditions and allowed to maintain its ecological freedom.
SPEAKER_07: One important thing to note about this new capital W wilderness is that the untrammeled part was actually enforceable by law, which meant that all this land suddenly had to be free of all mechanization and motors.
SPEAKER_03: There's a particular section of the act, section 4C, if you want to follow along at home, and it excludes the use of motorized equipment. Which means no snowmobiles, no jackhammers, no powered rock drills, and no chainsaws.
SPEAKER_07: Meaning that people working in the wilderness started to rely heavily on crosscut saws again.
SPEAKER_03: As in, sorry, Cracker Barrel, but we're going to need those crosscuts back.
SPEAKER_09: So a saw. Now there are all different types of saws, and I'm going to go over a bunch of them because it is fascinating. What I like about crosscut saws... A couple months ago, I followed Dolly Chapman down to a national forest just outside San
SPEAKER_03: Diego, where she was leading a crosscut saw training for park rangers and trail workers. At the end of the training, participants would walk away with a certification, allowing them to use crosscuts on the job.
SPEAKER_09: I think we're ready for you guys to start grabbing saws and working together. This is the part of the day I wait for.
SPEAKER_03: Dolly told me that when the Wilderness Act first passed, a lot of people didn't want to switch from chainsaws to crosscuts. I worked on one national forest where instead of sawing fallen trees, they would blast them
SPEAKER_09: out of the way. And I was a blaster too, and that sounded like fun.
SPEAKER_03: As in using explosives to clear trees instead of sawing them at all. And then there were the people who tried to sneak chainsaws in.
SPEAKER_09: But after a while, there were enough of us sharpening crosscuts and doing a really good job with it that people were saying, hey, this is fun. We want to use the crosscut saw.
SPEAKER_03: Now there are some case by case exceptions to the Act's rule against motorized tools, but by drastically reducing the use of things like chainsaws, it's made wilderness areas quiet in a way that's unlike anywhere else. Quiet from all the human made noise, at least.
SPEAKER_08: Except when you're out there, it's actually loud. You can hear the wind, you can hear the water, you know, stumbling over the rocks. You hear the breeze through the trees. So you can hear all these things that you know you can't hear elsewhere when you're hearing traffic.
SPEAKER_03: Crosscuts first made a comeback because they had to, but now they're increasingly desirable even in non wilderness areas where chainsaws are technically allowed. With a lot of forested land seeing increasingly long fire seasons, some trail crews are finding that crosscuts are just safer. You don't need to haul a bunch of flammable fuel like you would with a chainsaw. And the relative quiet of a crosscut is a lot less disturbing to wildlife.
SPEAKER_07: Ever since the crosscut revival, though, the vintage saw has become harder to find, especially as some are being snatched up by collectors or competitive lumberjacks. Many others are being kept as family heirlooms.
SPEAKER_03: In fact, the Wilderness Act and its emphasis on the purity of nature, it's kindled interest from a whole subculture of diehard crosscut users, sharpeners and collectors. Back at Dolly's training, people continued taking turns pulling a crosscut through a fallen log two by two. Pretty soon it was my turn. And as I hesitantly walked towards the log, I thought back to a moment that morning when everyone shared what they loved about this tool. A well-sharpened vintage crosscut moves cleanly across the grain of a log, pulling out wood in a sort of noodle-like shape. Dolly says the test of a good saw is if you see a pile of fresh spaghetti forming at your feet as you move back and forth.
SPEAKER_09: And then when you're sawing through wood with it, it makes a singing noise, just a beautiful, comfortable, rhythmic sort of, I won't say it sounds like bells, but it's kind of a singing noise.
SPEAKER_03: And sure, you're sweating in your goggles and your hard hat, butt muscles clenched in preparation for every pull. But there's also something elegant about it. This saw demands a kind of dance between two people, a thoughtful exercise in communication and trust. In short, what people tend to love most about the crosscut is in the experience. These days, new crosscut saws are being manufactured again. There are modern-day crosscuts available for purchase online. And Dolly says there's actually plenty of these models lying around, mostly unused, in federal storage facilities.
SPEAKER_09: When the U.S. government spends money on tools, there are a lot of requirements that they buy only new equipment and that they buy American-made equipment. And we really don't want our government employees to be buying things off of eBay or buying antiques. That doesn't sound professional.
SPEAKER_03: So no need to dig around for secondhand tools in old logging towns. And yet every trail worker I've spoken to for this story has said they strongly prefer the vintage crosscut. Even the Forest Service published a study in 2005 comparing the quality of vintage and modern saws favoring the older ones.
SPEAKER_09: These are just better. And a lot of us, I'd say me included, would only want to use an antique saw because it is better. It's going to feel better in the hand, better balance, better flex to the metal. It'll stay sharp longer. It'll cut smoother. They're just far superior to anything made today.
SPEAKER_03: These old saws, they're made from a higher quality steel and the teeth are set in a crescent-shaped arc. So there are practical arguments that they do cut better. But perhaps more important is something less tangible than the shape of the arc and the quality of the steel.
SPEAKER_09: I think more and more, I like this one because it has a history because it might have worked in a logging camp because it's 90 years old. Because I restored it from real wreckage on the back floor of an antique store. So there is that nostalgia.
SPEAKER_03: That nostalgia for the antique crosscut, it's complicated. Because in it, I can't help but hear parallels to the way we think about wilderness today. It makes me think back to something Adam told me. That one motivation behind protecting these places as wilderness was a desire to preserve a frontier frame of mind. That wilderness could be a place for the weary urban human to use traditional tools like the crosscut and imagine doing what their ancestors did on the open frontier.
SPEAKER_07: There's a certain romantic idea to using a vintage crosscut that feels really similar to the romance that Aldo Leopold and others felt about wilderness in the 19th century. The pursuit of something untouched, unsullied by contact with humans and industry.
SPEAKER_05: There seems to be this really big obsession with purity. This is Shandiin Nez. Shandiin is a conservationist who used to lead crews with Ancestral Lands Conservation
SPEAKER_03: Corps, an all indigenous environmental group based out of New Mexico. Wielding a crosscut has long been part of Shandiin's family history. Back in the mid 30s, both of her grandfathers were crosscut sawyers for a logging company in the Chuska Mountains.
SPEAKER_07: Shandiin never anticipated felling trees with crosscuts herself, but for the past 10 years, she's led trail crews into the backcountry on work trips, rarely going into the wilderness without a crosscut saw.
SPEAKER_03: And Shandiin says she gets the romantic allure, both with crosscuts and with wilderness.
SPEAKER_05: I think before I became as involved with outdoor recreation and working on trails and increasing that access, I did have like this romanticized thought and I guess kind of like a colonized thought of like, wow, this is really beautiful. Humans are the worst. Keeping it in like this like quote pristine state or before I realized that uninhabited land is a myth.
SPEAKER_07: Uninhabited land is a myth. The thing about wilderness is that it never really existed. Not today, not in the days of Teddy Roosevelt or in the Industrial Revolution and definitely not back when European settlers landed in North America.
SPEAKER_03: Because long before these spaces were even referred to as wilderness, they were populated and tended to by the indigenous people who lived there.
SPEAKER_05: John Muir and Everett Roos came in and spoke about these places so eloquently, but it lacked a lot of knowledge. It lacked a lot and just holds a lot of deep seated racism and hate towards Indians.
SPEAKER_07: John Muir, a forefather of the American wilderness movement, argued that wilderness should be cleared of all of its inhabitants and set aside to satisfy the urban humans need for spiritual renewal. In his writing, Muir described indigenous people as quote, dirty, lazy, and uncivilized. In one essay collection he wrote to promote national parks, he assured prospective tourists that most indigenous people were dead or quote, civilized into useless innocence.
SPEAKER_03: And remember Ansel Adams, that famous nature photographer? Well, he actively avoided photographing any of the local Miwok who lived in Yosemite Valley, even though they were rarely out of his sight. He filled thousands of human free negatives with land he knew that the Miwok had tended to for at least 4,000 years. And he knew that indigenous people throughout the country were forcibly evicted from what are now our wilderness areas, all in the interest of protecting these spaces from human disturbance.
SPEAKER_05: But for me, being of this land, you know, my people are of this land.
SPEAKER_05: It feels like a, I guess, like a continued exploitation of land in like the name of purity. And again, purity being like a staple of like white supremacy and colonization.
SPEAKER_07: This pursuit of purity is a big part of what influenced the Wilderness Act of 1964. Because coded within the language of preservation was that wilderness landscapes should be free from human presence.
SPEAKER_03: Ultimately, uninhabited wilderness as a concept had to first be created before it could be preserved.
SPEAKER_07: Despite its colonialist underpinnings, it's undeniable that the Wilderness Act's passage was a shining moment in American environmental history. It set millions of square miles of valuable land aside for the sake of protection from American capitalism. And in doing so, it said, we value what's already here.
SPEAKER_03: And yet it's unclear whether the acts leave it be philosophy is still useful when it comes to land management. And some ecologists are pushing for a different approach. It's an approach that more closely echoes how wilderness land had been tended to by the indigenous people who lived there long before it was ever thought of as wilderness, low intensity human intervention.
SPEAKER_07: Here's an example, Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico is an area that's been ravaged by a century of fire suppression and livestock grazing. And it led to really damaging rates of soil erosion. Much of this land is in capital W wilderness, which means workers are limited to primitive tools. But in 2007, they made a bold decision. They decided to take chainsaws to nearly 5000 acres of land.
SPEAKER_03: Sawyers cut small juniper trees and mulch the ground with their branches. This kind of action using chainsaws instead of crosscuts in the wilderness, and at such a scale, it was a rare exception to the wilderness acts rule against motors. And it worked. In the 15 years since rates of erosion have fallen by at least an order of magnitude, and the population of native grasses increased threefold. It's hard to imagine crosscut saws being able to wield such exponential results so quickly. Ultimately, these questions about wilderness, who and what it's for and how we relate to it. It's a debate that will continue to rage on. Because at the heart of it all, wilderness doesn't mean the same thing to everyone. And it probably never will. Last summer, I hiked into the John Muir wilderness in the Sierra Nevada mountain range. At around 10,000 feet along a quiet trail, the sign at the wilderness boundary laid out the rules simple enough to understand closed to motor vehicles and motorized equipment violations punishable. It was August, too early yet for full sun, but the fog poured from the Stony Peaks beyond the tree line. I crossed the threshold into wilderness, suddenly very aware of how much effort went into creating an arbitrary border that I had only recently begun to understand. As I plodded along, my eyes cast downward on the trail, I thought about all the sweat and precision that goes into carving trails like this out of mountainside. All the trees that were chopped with cross cuts to make a path like this possible. The way we've romanticized our country's wilderness, I'm wary of it, but I'm also prone to it. I think about how easy it can be to fall into the idea that there are sacred lands, protected wilderness like this one, and perhaps more disposable lands like the changing cities many of us return home to. I catch myself clinging to the romantic idea that when I step into the wilderness, I'm heading somewhere better than us, a place that's protected from us. That there are some places where we can still walk a dozen miles and not find a gas station or a McDonald's, but instead a glistening lake.
SPEAKER_07: Coming up, we learned that when the Wilderness Act stated that no machines are allowed in the wilderness, they really meant it. Stay tuned. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva Magic Resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. Article believes in delightful design for every home, and thanks to their online-only model, they have some really delightful prices, too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern, coastal, industrial, and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the Geom sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99, and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. Visit article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_07: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Did you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that, so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. And we're back with Lasha Madon. Hey, Lasha. Hey, Roman. I love this episode so much. I love thinking about wilderness as kind of a design space. It's still something that's in the purview of the show, but it is almost completely the opposite of the show.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. And you know, in this episode, there were so many interesting rabbit holes that I wish I could have gone down as a reporter. You know, there's so much more to say when it comes to crosscuts themselves to conservation, which is its own can of worms, land management, indigenous rights, land back. But I wanted to share just this one extra tiny tidbit with you that I ended up leaving out of the episode, but I still find myself telling people at parties.
SPEAKER_07: Okay, I am ready. Go for it.
SPEAKER_03: So do you remember some of that language that's used to describe what is and what isn't allowed in wilderness according to the Wilderness Act?
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. I mean, the key things I remember is no motorized objects, no mechanical transport, that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_03: Yes. And I find the language and choice of words in this piece of legislation really interesting, especially because the language kind of oscillates between the highly precise and poetically vague sometimes even within the same paragraph. And there's these lyrical descriptions where wilderness is described using the words untrammeled and primeval, you know, describing it as a place for a visitor who does not remain. And people are always referring back to this exact text, you know, this weirdly poetic document to try and sort out what is and isn't allowed in capital W wilderness. And one of the biggest debates has been about wheels. Whoa.
SPEAKER_07: Okay. So I mean, I know wheel and axle is the sort of original simple machine, but I would not have thought that would be banned.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. Wheels are technically one of the simplest machines. And because of that, they're not allowed in the wilderness. Any kind of transportation with wheels, any tools with wheels. Generally, wilderness areas can only be accessed by horseback, backcountry skiing, kayaking, or canoeing, hiking, you know. I had no idea.
SPEAKER_09: The language says no mechanized or motorized equipment shall be used. Mechanized means as in machine.
SPEAKER_07: We could have a whole podcast about Dolly as far as I'm concerned.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah. And Dolly says back when the wilderness act first passed and there were these new rules to work with all of a sudden, trail crews would still use wheelbarrows to move material around.
SPEAKER_09: But then as managers began interpreting the wilderness act a little more strictly, they said, well, wait a minute. A wheelbarrow has a wheel, therefore it's mechanized equipment and we shouldn't be using that in the wilderness.
SPEAKER_03: So the forest service where Dolly worked decided to stop using wheelbarrows and trail work altogether, mostly to set an example for hikers and people coming into the wilderness recreationally. And their perspective was if land managers were seen using wheelbarrows, what argument would there be to prevent other forms of wheeled transport on the same trails like mountain bikes, baby strollers, and deer carts?
SPEAKER_07: Wow. Wait, what's a deer cart?
SPEAKER_03: I think it's a cart that's used to haul your game.
SPEAKER_07: Oh, I see. Okay. But how did they do their work without wheelbarrows? I mean, second to a saw, it seems like the most important tool for a labor intensive earth moving job.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, this is one of my favorite parts. So instead of wheelbarrows, they use shoulder bags, tote bags, basically, sometimes known as dirt bags, to haul dirt and rocks from one place to another without using any form
SPEAKER_03: of machine, or even if it's simple machinery. And isn't that just a delightful image? It is.
SPEAKER_07: I mean, I've never had a positive connotation to the phrase dirt bag before, but now I do, which is amazing. But it does seem very hard if you're just hauling dirt on your back. Yeah. That seems incredibly difficult.
SPEAKER_03: It's an incredible commitment. And today, there is one big exception to the no wheels in wilderness norm, and it's wheelchairs. In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act was able to negotiate with the Wilderness Act. So people who use wheelchairs for everyday indoor mobility are allowed to use them in a wilderness area.
SPEAKER_07: Oh, that makes sense. I'm glad they made that exception. But so you mentioned mountain bikes, though. What about them?
SPEAKER_03: So in regards to mountain bikes, this is where things get a little bit spicy. Because mountain bikes, they aren't motorized. They are mechanized in that they provide a mechanical advantage with their wheels, and they are human powered. And they have a very large following. So their ambiguity kind of puts them in an awkward spot when it comes to wilderness access. Yeah, I bet.
SPEAKER_03: So several mountain biking groups have been pushing for decades for mountain bikes to be allowed in the wilderness. And a big part of their argument takes us right back to that vague, open ended language in the Wilderness Act. People who say that mountain bikes shouldn't be considered mechanical transport say that the Wilderness Act could have explicitly banned bicycles in their language. They could have been specific, but they weren't. I mean, that's a good point.
SPEAKER_07: But the Wilderness Act was from 1964, right? And so were mountain bikes even a thing then?
SPEAKER_03: Mountain bikes weren't even invented at that point.
SPEAKER_07: Okay, okay. That's what I thought.
SPEAKER_03: Regular road bicycles were around and were used. But the first mountain bikes came around over a decade later. So some people say, you know, how could the writers of the Wilderness Act possibly have anticipated that people would have wanted to take their bikes into the wilderness, into the mountains?
SPEAKER_07: So their point of view is that the authors of the Wilderness Act never specifically intended to ban bikes and therefore bikes should be allowed in the wilderness.
SPEAKER_03: Exactly. And I will say this is only in regards to wilderness areas. You can use mountain bikes in state forests, state parks, national parks, things like that. But in regards to wilderness areas, another element to the argument that mountain bikers make is that they feel that they do less damage than hikers and equestrians who are both allowed on wilderness trails. And I mean, in 2006, the National Park Service released a study supporting that claim. The study was about what mode of travel affects trails the most. And the results showed that horse trails led to the most severe levels of erosion, then hiking trails and then bike trails, which showed very little signs of erosion. And on the other side of the debate, people argue that bicycles can damage habitat, disturb wildlife, still lead to some levels of erosion. And also that allowing bicycles in wilderness areas has the potential to increase conflict with hikers and limit the hikers ability to enter that dreamy wilderness mindset. You know, just kind of harshes the vibe.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I am sympathetic to this because I'm much I mean, I'm a hiker more than a biker and bikes are very cool, but they totally harsh my vibe when I'm hiking.
SPEAKER_03: In any case, this debate about wheels and wilderness, it came into public conversation in a really big way in 2017, because that year there was an attempt to pass a bill literally called the wheels over wilderness bill.
SPEAKER_02: And this bill advocated for federal wilderness areas to allow not just mountain bikes, but
SPEAKER_03: all kinds of wheels. It didn't pass, but it did set anti wheel advocates off. So I found dozens of fiery op-eds published in 2017 with headlines like and I'm quoting my favorite one here, five lies being told to get mountain bikes into the wilderness. Okay.
SPEAKER_07: So yeah, it is getting spicy. It's a little contentious. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: And you know, to each their own. For now, though, all wheels besides wheelchairs are still banned and hikers and trail workers alike just navigate their way around that rule. And all this makes me think of this one hilarious anecdote that Dolly told me from her time working on trails and I just have to share it with you. So this one time when Dolly was leading a trail crew, her manager told her that there was a giant tire down in the wilderness area that had probably rolled down from the top of a ski hill.
SPEAKER_09: It was like a tire that went to a big loader machine or something. Sure enough, down in the creek bed was a six foot diameter, huge rubber tire that probably weighed 300 pounds. And my boss said, can you get it out of the wilderness? So Dolly tried to crowdsource for the best solution.
SPEAKER_09: And some people said, well, wait till the air quality board says it's okay and burn it. Gross.
SPEAKER_03: And some people were like, why don't you stretch the tire between two trees and then cut it into little pieces and haul it out? And I thought, my God, that would take forever.
SPEAKER_09: And then one person said, well, get a big volunteer group or a Boy Scout troop and tip it on edge and roll it out. And somebody else said, no, that would be illegal. That would be using a wheel in the wilderness. I said, but it is a wheel in the wilderness. It was hilarious because they were saying it would be okay to carry it out, but not to roll it out because that would be using a wheel in the wilderness. And I said, that is just going too far with being a wilderness purist. Oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_07: So what did they end up? They couldn't use it as a wheel. They couldn't use a wheel as a wheel. That is so funny to me. Okay. So what did she end up doing?
SPEAKER_09: Nothing. Nothing. I transferred to a different forest. I don't know what happened, but if Dolly had her way, she said she probably would have
SPEAKER_03: buried it, which we all know burying your problems isn't usually the best way to deal with them. But in this case, I get it.
SPEAKER_07: Wow. That is such an amazing story. Well, thank you so much, Lasha. It's so much fun.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_07: Thank you. 99% invisible was produced this week by Lasha Madon, edited by Kelly prime, original music by Swan real sound mix by Martine Gonzalez fact-checking by Sona Avakian Delaney hall is our senior editor. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Jason De Leon, Vivian lay, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Joe Rosenberg, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. Special thanks this week to Dolly Chapman, Adam Sowards and Shandiin Nez. Thanks also to Joe Sorrentino, Chaz Robles, Kyle Chohio and Robert Parks. 99% invisible is part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family. Now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building and beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 PI org or on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to others Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99 PI at 99 PI.org.
SPEAKER_09: And now and then I meet someone who thinks I'm going to play the saw. You may have heard of people playing a crosscut saw as a musical instrument and I don't quite know how it's done. I think you need a bow like you'd play a violin and you bend it and that's something I still have to learn. I have no idea how to play music on a crosscut saw.
SPEAKER_11: There on the banks of the Moselle Marlena sang and then Marlena sat down, took out a saw from a case and played it like a violin. That sounded exactly like this.
SPEAKER_02:
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