The Outdoors: Call of the Wild

The regulars stepped off the bus wearing oiled boots, scruffy knapsacks, faded blue jeans. Bright-eyed, they talked of things and places far removed from everyday city life: of lady fern and sorrel, of landmarks with such strange-sounding names as Evolution Valley and Tuolumne Meadows, of high places where the air is pungent with eucalyptus. Their packs held only a few necessities: a knife to carve a walking stick, binoculars clinking against a canteen cup, sandwiches. By contrast, the newcomers in the party wore madras shorts, sneakers, and apprehensive faces. They carried pocketbooks, transistor radios, straw baskets with food enough to fatten all the pheasant in the heather. New and old hands alike, 85 in all, were part of California's famed Sierra Club, out for a day's hike through the mountains. Their leader, a gangling Sierra surveyor, bluntly laid down the law: no straggling behind, no getting ahead, no smoking, no chewing gum wrappers tossed along the trail. No dogs. And put away those transistor radios.

That said, the Sierra Club band strode off behind him into sun-dappled woods, up a winding creek bed. Many had walked no farther than the distance from living-room sofa to TV tuning dial in years. For these, the brisk uphill pace, over boulders, across the brooks and fallen trees, was arduous going. By the time they sprawled out for lunch, on ledge rocks by a waterfall, blisters were rising on tender feet.

And the uphill trail got tougher and more slippery all the time. But by midafternoon, even the tenderest feet were firmly planted on a windblown, grassy highland. Off in the distance gleamed San Francisco Bay; beyond it, looming out of the sea itself, was Mount Tamalpais, its summit aswirl with purpling, swiftly scudding clouds. The hikers' blisters were forgotten now, the land had worked its magic; there were no newcomers any more.

The event was a simple outing, superficially nothing more than a Sunday hike in the woods. But for Sierra Clubbers such outings have a deeper meaning. They fear that on some still far distant Sunday there may well be no woods left to hike in, and they return from each expedition more determined than ever to prevent that day from coming. "Is it a religion?" one Sierra Clubber was asked last week. "In a way," he answered, "it surely is."