Jackson Hole Snowboarder Magazine 78
Elena Hight negotiates some tricky footing while fully loaded and donned in snowboard boots.
path I want to take and given me a spark,” she said. The lessons contained in Ode to Muir will inspire more people to protect these wild places too, Hight added. Jones and Hight embarked on a 40-mile foot-powered adventure into the John Muir Wilderness to not only explore, but also reflect on the importance of these sacred wild spaces. Jones used the Sierra Nevada to unpack symptoms of a warming climate for his audience: drought, more wildfires, loss
of agriculture and irreversible changes to the environment. Throughout the film, Jones is candid. He grieves about the disconnect between lawmakers and the outdoors. “You got to get in nature, then fall in love with nature, to want to protect nature,” Jones says in the film. “I don’t think our elected officials value it as much as they used to. Historically you look back and it was a big deal for businessmen and politicians to go and sit by
the campfire and see the stars.” Muir’s great, great grandson, Robert Hanna, noticed that problem, too, and did something about it.
‘More beautiful than anything built by the hand of man’ Three years after the 2008 recession, California was scrambling to revive the state’s economy. State lawmakers brainstormed various solutions. One option they considered: cutting funding to 70 of
