Fred Feller passes along a message from Bill Guilford:

"I started out trying to write a brief account of my failed mission to Bear Mountain.  It was late at night and my mind, maybe a bit lubricated, wandered a bit and I never actually got around to the details of my failed trip. . . .  Anyway, here's what I did write:

"Dear Joe,

"Sorry to say, I failed you, but I will keep on trying to bag us a bear, bear mountain, that is.

"I only knew you for maybe three days or so, back when we ran that relay from Calistoga to Monterrey a few years back, must have been around 2006 or so.

"Anyway, you made such a strong impression on me that, when I heard of your passing over to the other side and recalled the wonderful experience of that race --which included your spouting off effusively on a wide range of subjects, as well as  your bantering quite entertainingly with the other Fellers in the van (including one – Michael (guess he was there to stand in for Dan) -- who didn’t even come into the world via Gilda and David (yeah, I know that embedded parentheses are bad form)), the first words that came to mind were from Zhuangzi.

"There’s a story in the so-called Miscellaneous Chapters of Zhuangzi about a bad-ass fellow name Robber Zhi.  Zhi and his men have been rambling and rampaging about the countryside in what is now Shandong province in China, generally disrupting the social order, such as it was in those days – 300 BC or so.  As the story goes, Confucius, who was trying to foist his principles on how a society ought to be run onto the populace in general and in particular onto any royalty that might tolerate his prissiness, was quite annoyed by Zhi’s behavior.  He happened to know Zhi’s brother and asked him to make an introduction for him to Zhi.  Zhi’s brother shuddered and told Confucius that his meeting with Zhi would be a very bad idea, because, as he said, Zhi has a mind like a gushing fountain (心如涌泉) and his will is like a cyclone (意如飄風).  He said a few other things too to try to dissuade Confucius from his mission, but those words really stuck with me and through me they kinda stuck to you.   It’s not that I really want to suggest that you were like Zhi in all ways.  After all, when Confucius went to meet him, Zhi and his men were resting on the slope of Taishan (the most sacred mountain in China) snacking on human livers, which one has to assume they had not acquired in a very friendly or sociable way.  Rather it was the image of the gushing fountain and the cyclone that reminded me of you.  I would not be surprised if those who know you well would agree that those words capture something vital about you.

"その忍者は誰です"

Yesterday Joe Feller’s family hosted a wonderful memorial service for him in Berkeley.  Joe’s brother Fred read an inspiring passage by naturalist David Peters about Joe’s work to restore and to preserve Comb Wash.  I thought it was worth reprinting here:

“In March 1988, just after the winter grazing season, Joseph Feller, a professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, took a hike in Arch Canyon.  What Feller saw there, he’ll tell you, was ‘appalling … cow pies everywhere.  The vegetation had all been grazed down to root-stubble.  The stream banks and cryptobiotic crust were trampled and destroyed.  It looked like a war zone.’  Feller headed home determined to do something.

“What he did was appeal BLM’s Comb Wash grazing practices to BLM’s mother agency, the U.S. Department of the Interior.  As a result, DoI administrative law judge John R. Rampton, Jr., directed the area BLM boss to explain and reconsider his Comb Wash grazing strategy….  [T]he BLM manager ignored the court’s mandate and issued another grazing permit, without modifications….

“No quitter, this tenacious feller Joe recruited the National Wildlife Federation and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance … to join in filing a second, much broader appeal….  The upshot of it all was a rare sweet victory in the ongoing battle for public control of public lands….

“If [Edward Abbey] were here today, I know absolutely that he’d be shouting praises from every canyon rim for Fightin’ Joe Feller and his allies at the National Wildlife Federation.  And rightly so, for these brave few, with help from several unnamed but significant others, have returned this desert Eden to the American public.”

For more, see David Peters, The Nearby Faraway:  A Personal Journal Through the Heart of the West 142-44 (1997).  Joe's co-counsel at the National Wildlife Federation, Tom Lustig, passed away in 2008. Two years after that, Tom's sons Brooks and Reid returned to Comb Wash with Joe and scattered their father's ashes; Reid Lustig's account of that trip is worth reading in full.  Joe's own discussion of the Comb Wash litigation and its legal significance can be found here.

David Sklansky

I shared a house with Joe Feller when we were in law school, and we stayed good friends after graduation.  I've never known anyone with a greater zest for life than Joe, or with a more consistently open, curious, and good-humored approach to the world.  I think the first hike I ever took with him was at Cape Cod during the week-long reading period before a set of final exams.  I was reluctant to take a day off from studying, but Joe made the point, obviously correct, that we weren’t going to study the whole week anyway, so we might as well plan a road trip.  Joe had lots of views about road trips, most of which I came to share.  He thought, for example, there were two cardinal rules for a successful road trip:  first, to have a fully worked out itinerary, and second, to be completely willing to abandon the itinerary.  Those have always struck me as good rules for life, not just for road trips.

The picture on the “Welcome” page of this website was taken at the top of Mount Dana on a hike that Joe and I took in 2011.  The day before that we climbed Sonora Peak, the high point of Alpine County, CA; that’s where the picture on the “About Joe Feller” page of this website was taken.  I think it was on the Sonora Peak hike that Joe came up with the idea of the Bear Mountain Project.

Yesterday I drove out to the Stanislaus National Forest to meet a friend and hike up to Corral Ridge, the high point of Calaveras County.  Part of the appeal of that destination was that the trailhead is on State Route 4, which also passes close to the highest prominence peak of Calaveras County, which happens to be named Bear Mountain.  That made for a nice side trip on my way home.

This Bear Mountain is basically a drive up.  You take a gravel road called Stallion Way south from Route 4, between the mining towns of Angels Camp and Copperopolis.  (Angels Camp is where Mark Twain claimed to have heard the story recounted in “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.")   The road climbs about 1400 feet over four miles before arriving at a locked gate, and after squeezing through the gate it’s a quarter-mile or so on foot to the summit.  Most of the top is given over to antennas, but there’s also a fire tower, which apparently you could climb as recently as 2005, but which, alas, is is now boarded up and fenced off.  The best views, I thought, were looking to the west, just before getting to the gate.

It was fun day, but I wished Joe could have been along for the trip.

David Sklansky

Dave Owen (Portland, ME) writes:

"I'm a law professor at the University of Maine Law School.  Along with many of my colleagues, I spent part of last week at a biannual natural resources law professors' conference.  Joe had helped organize the conference, and we watched a video tribute, honored him with the first Joe Feller Memorial Run, and heard lots of stories about his accomplishments and antics.  Even for those of us (like me) who barely knew him, it was hard not to feel inspired by his example.

"On the way from the conference to the Phoenix Airport, Todd Aagaard (professor at Villanova Law School) and I had a few hours, which we used to climb Bear Mountain in Sedona.  I believe it's listed as Bear Mountain number 5 on your interactive map.  I've attached a photo of Todd near the top."