winner of the International Ski History Association 2013 Ullr Award.
Childers applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Mountains Are Calling: Tourists and the Unmaking of Yosemite National Park, with the following results:
On opening to the top of page 99, a reader would read the sentence, “After more than a decade of financial struggles, the Yosemite Valley Railroad made its final run in August of 1945.”Visit Michael W. Childers's website.
After briefly learning of the railroad’s mounting financial issues, the destruction of a key trestle by an errant cigarette butt, and the final run of Train Number 23 from Merced to Merced Falls to pick up two railcars, the page jumps to the 1970s, when environmentalists begin arguing that rail travel might just be the solution to Yosemite’s growing traffic problems. Among them was a young University of California, Santa Barbara graduate student, and future dean of National Park history, Alfred Runte argued in National Parks and Conservation Magazine returning to railroad to Yosemite would guarantee maximum protection with maximum visitation.
In one of my favorite stories in the book, page 99 then introduces readers to designer and writer Christopher Swan and City of San Francisco professor Chet Roaman’s novel yv88: An Eco-Fiction of Tomorrow. “Part science fiction novella, part illustrated schematic, the book proposed a radical transformation of how visitors enjoy Yosemite by removing all the roads into the park and replacing them with a solar-powered railroad that carries visitors from Merced into the Yosemite Valley.”
In many way page 99 captures the struggle at the center of the book’s story of Yosemite on how to ensure access to visitors while protecting its environment. Trains, even solar powered ones, solved what many saw as the primary problem facing the park: cars.
--Marshal Zeringue
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