Road through a Pass

Road through a Pass. . A road, component of a cultural environment, is the most noticeable feature of this otherwise natural landscape. In present form it is not old, not a pioneer route hacked by frontiersmen. Based and graded to support rapid haulage o ponderous loads of logs, this road was built by specialists operating specialized machines. This is a product of 20th century technological culture. , A road of a sort is an ancient and, originally, a natural feature at Union Pass. Wild animals, some--camels, indigenous horses, mammoths -- now extinct, found this passageway and, following easiest grades during seasonal migrations, trod out -- wide in places as a road -- a trail. Perhaps 10,000 years ago progenitors of Nimrod trailed these animals around the edges of a receding glacier and on through Union Pass--leaving along that route its first traces of human culture. Around 1700 A.D. Shoshones, descendants or replacements of the earliest hunter, acquired the horse and, among other impacts made by them on the natural environment, the dragging ends of their travois poles widened and deepened this road. , Chronological stages in the Union Pass cultural environment have been: aboriginal, fur trade, explorations and geological surveys, outfitting (recreational industry) and ranching, and management of natural resources-- including forestry Forestry, defined as "cultivating, maintaining, and developing forests", implying harvesting, came last owing to local patterns of development. Although Wyoming was a bellwether in Theodore Roosevelt's early conservation movement, pressing local concern regarding new national forests on livestock grazing and wildlife and watershed protection--forestry waited. Substantial timber harvesting, a tie hack era, only began after 1900; up grading a Union Pass wagon road to high speed hauling standards was a midcentury project.