The power of place has a long reach. Years ago, I was trapped in Lhasa, capital of Tibet, by my own doing at a time of riots, suppression and extreme weather. Travellers were ordered out of the country via Chinese airports. I was determined to exit the way I'd entered - overland, through the mountains and the border with Nepal. The roads were closed, long stretches obliterated. No transport - no permits.
I met a wary American who had certain contacts. No reason why he should help. We sat and talked: mountains were the common ground. We were of an age, the overlaps uncanny, as if we had traced each other's footsteps.
I mentioned Yosemite in California, and Sentinel Rock there, the Steck-Salathe route, 1,500 feet of vertical granite groove, the most awkward climbing in my life, my most exhilarating memory . . .
Suddenly, we were blood-brothers in the grimy cafe. Wariness gone, he explained how that climb had been for him and many others the hearthstone of Yosemite tradition, the first breakthrough on to the Big Walls of the world. Devotees returned year after year, as if on pilgrimage, to climb the face of Sentinel via its body-swallowing cracks and grooves, a route pioneered by Allen Steck with the great John Salathe, a Swiss blacksmith who began climbing in his late 40s and in a few short years revolutionised the sport in the US, with his ascents of legendary faces. Later, it was eclipsed by bolder climbs on the bigger walls of Half Dome and El Capitan, also in Yosemite. The physical struggles of Sentinel, the burrowing and squirming within the rock, became unfashionable and fell from favour. It was described as a "grunt". But there was still a trickle of pilgrims . . .
The American put me in contact with a Frenchwoman who had a Sherpa in a Lhasa jail - drunk and disorderly. The Sherpa would shortly be returning towards Nepal with dubious access to a jeep and driver and so I began the journey across the smothered plateau to the end of the ruined road, and thence on foot to the border of paranoia.
All the way through Chinese occupation, I held an image in my head of a verdant, rock-rimmed, tree-lined, meadow-bedded valley steeped in Californian sun, with pristine granite walls where climbers moved in that fourth dimension that is the free spirit.
I've climbed in Yosemite many times since then. For me, it's the most sensational natural feature in the world, this deep and narrow valley three miles long, enclosed in walls of grey and gilded granite where waterfalls do what waterfalls do, where wilderness might reign if it were let, where every year about four million people and their vehicles crowd the confines of the valley-floor and choke the roads with traffic, fill enormous campsites with roadmobiles, shop for souvenirs in the franchised villages, guzzle Coke and gobble burgers, graze in the ample restaurants.
Here, where physical and aesthetic options are paramount, many visitors simply slouch between their cars and their food, and the extent of modern obesity - sad blowout of the consumer balloon - is cruelly clear.
Recently, the Park Service - responsible for the Valley and the High Sierra wilderness - has opened a vast new carpark beside Yosemite Village to accommodate yet more coaches and camper-vans. It seems fair to wonder whether this is a National Park - or a national car-park.
Think of parallels at home. Imagine four million visitors a year, every year. No, not in the whole of Ireland, but in the heart of Wicklow say, or the core of Connemara - perhaps the Dingle peninsula. Or a portion of the Burren. We're practising in our own small way. We have the wooden gangway slung over Glendalough across the Spink, a procession of railway-sleepers butted end to end, leaching oils and greases into the mud, marching manically over rock and scenic ridge to leave the walker without warning in the middle of a swamp. This is the kind of comic error made in parts of Britain more than 20 years ago, before they graduated to more discreet techniques of pathcraft, using gravel and a drainagemesh to traverse boggy ground.
In Yosemite, the rage for order and access at all costs has extended to a quarried stairway with almost megalithic steps on the lower shoulder of Half-Dome. We are constantly admonished to learn from the mistakes of others - and we do. We learn to make exactly the same mistakes.
Once upon a time, the Ahwahneechee occupied the valley of Yosemite. To them, the emblematic buttress of El Capitan was To-to-kon-oolah, mythical first leader of the people. The granite headwall of HalfDome was Tis-sa-ack, a tribal maiden lamenting her beloved, the north-west face dark-stained by her tears. That myth was to be updated and fulfilled in blood. Gold was found in the High Sierra in the 1840s. Hydraulic mining ravaged the mountains. The tribes fought back in defence of streams and fishing-grounds. In 1851, a military expedition raided the valley, burnt out the Ahwahneechee, starved and captured them, placed them elsewhere in a reservation.
Still, there was hope even then for the valley, if not for its inhabitants. Abraham Lincoln, in the aftermath of the Civil War, signed a bill making Yosemite a state park in 1864, the first in the US, eight years before Yellowstone. The totemic quality of that landscape was enshrined in protective legislation, where it has remained ever since, as if held aside in a refined grip to be chipped and pared and whittled in the names of access, recreation, tourism, all masquerading as education.
Nonetheless, through many decades of management, the Park Service has never exploited Yosemite as corporate ownership would have. The service has created an extraordinary, artificial construct with a suburban type of development at tarmac-level, while above the canopy of trees there is at least a plausible illusion of the wild - apart from paved pathways that protect the incompetent from themselves.
There's nothing new in the clamour for development to cease, for the closure of roads and car-parks, for the restriction of Yosemite to those prepared to visit on foot.
FOR a century and a half, since the time of John Muir, the "prophet of the wilderness", critics have argued against the reduction of a noble landscape to the whim of the visitor unwilling to approach it with competence, courage, and a sense of adventure. Every form of dilution and crude development has been fiercely debated, and it's thanks to that resistance a plausible illusion of nature still exists above the treeline. It could so easily have been sacrificed to expediency. Hetch-Hetchy, a little-sister valley, was dammed and reduced to a reservoir for San Francisco, despite a bitter battle.
The role of park management is of course to manage and to be seen to manage. And the political measure of success is the number of visitors passing through the park. "Like our armed forces," Galen Rowell, a noted observer wrote, "the Park Service is a powerful bureaucracy with strong resistance to change from the lower ranks and the outside."
Phases of that management have treated wildlife brutally in order to protect precious visitor-quotas. From 1960 to 1972, more than 200 bears were killed and dumped over a roadside cliff. The carcasses snagged and hung in the trees as a grisly reminder of the policy.
They were dismissed as "garbagebears", killed for the protection of tourists. New bear-management tactics prevail today, including rubber-bullets - against the bears of course, not the tourists. Bears see parked cars as a form of tinned food to be prised open for the contents. In the current Yosemite Newsletter, there is a chirpy note to the effect that, in 1999, only four bears had to be put down. The newsletter also notes, in the same year, 16 bears were involved in traffic accidents. They've learned to drive as well?
And the climbers, the wall-rats? Do they hang and skim and soar above the valley-floor, untainted and untainting? Do they tiptoe through the wilderness and redigest their dung? Afraid not; in their own small way they can be a fairly dirty crowd. But at their best, they face the landscape at its hardest and its steepest, and they strive to do it justice. Climbing, for all its faults, is an exacting sport, the pursuit of challenge and adventure through courage and technique. (John Long, one of the finest and most articulate of the Valley-species, wrote: "What made them rats was who they became when they were pasted high above the world. They all seemed to do just a little better on the walls than on the ground. Their quest was their religion, and in religion, seeking is finding. The summit meant nothing, the wall everything.")
John Muir, philosopher and naturalist, was the first Sierra climber. He too stated an honest and eccentric case: "I could have become a millionaire, but I chose to become a tramp".
He climbed frequently alone, fuelled by bread and tea, a profoundly spiritual and ascetic man. When he made the first ascent of an elegant summit he called it Cathedral Peak and remarked: "This is the first time I have been at church in California!"
From Muir's time on, generations of climbers have raided the ramparts, raising the standards of difficulty and achievement until, today, every facet of El Cap has been explored, sometimes with incredible speed and ease, as if climbers have gone far beyond winching themselves up overhanging rock and have evolved the ability to fly very close to it, touching it for balance now and then.
Ordinary mortals like ourselves take days and nights to climb these faces, sleeping on scant ledges if we're lucky, hanging in slings if we're not. Sometimes there are vermin (other vermin) on the ledges, and it's assumed that the mice and rats make their way upwards in overhanging cracks to live off the pitiful detritus of the climbers.
Strangely, though, Warren Harding on the first ascent of El Capitan in 1958 was pestered by rats, high on the face. Were they already there?
Harding's ascent took a total of 45 days, spread over 18 months. Afterwards, he said it wasn't completely clear who was the conqueror and who was conquered. "I do recall that El Cap seemed to be in much better condition than I was."
Once, on a cramped ledge halfway up Harding's route, as evening dulled the golden granite, we conjured up the special power of place ourselves. In the distance of the vertical desert, piton-hammers on other climbs tapped out urgent dilemmas. Safe and secure, we played a reel on two tin-whistles - and, for a moment, the tapping ceased as the music pierced the crystal air and rippled across the rock, an echo of Co Clare; and then the hammers began again. They had a hint of rhythm now.
OF COURSE, multi-day ascents bring certain problems. A solution developed whereby brown paper bags were used as toilets and thrown off the impending wall into the trees, thousands of feet below. The idea was that no one but climbers had any business at the base of the wall, and climbers could look out for themselves. The Park Service correctly outlawed this, and a Poop Tube was devised, a long cylinder in which waste was carried up and off the climb to be disposed of properly.
Some observers are convinced that this forced the development of speed-climbing. Slow ascents require the hauling of volumes of food and water, whereas speedascents carry no cargo, generate no waste. El Cap has been climbed in four hours, perhaps less, by now.
Recently, the original route was climbed entirely free for the first time, without any recourse to aid. The breakthrough was achieved by a woman, Lynn Hill, one of America's greatest climbers in a sport long dominated by men. Hill, 5'2" tall and a little over seven stone, not only solved the thinnest cracks with her slender fingers, but fought the most muscular features to submission on wildly overhanging rock.
Of such a position John Long wrote: "The exposure is so enormous, and your perception so distorted, that the horizontal world becomes incomprehensible. You're a granite astronaut dangling in a kind of space/time warp. And if there is any place where you will understand why men and women climb mountains, it is here in these breezy dihedrals high in the sky."
In other words, it's like jazz: if you're not there, you won't understand.
Not everyone wants to understand. Today, in this great valley of the lost ideal, one gazes with sad affection at the hordes of visitors - a Whitman poem of a place packed like Disneyland. Some are looking for Bambi and Pocahontas; others, in plaid shirts and denim pursue the myth of the primitive. Oh, and the Indians are back - but this time they're from India, the latest bright, young recruits to Silicon Valley, California.
It dawns on me finally that Yosemite could not be other than it has become, in modern America. It is the dream of perfection, a dream that has become a distant memory of the past.