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was full of wicked students," and the neighboring hardwood forests were just as alien—trees grown like a crop, with nary a twig on the ground, the peasants banned even from making a campfire, subservient to the lords of the grounds. Everything was orderly, not at all like home. "I feel
like being in real woods again," Pinchot wrote his parents from Europe. "I shall be glad to leave — all drink and no forestry is not my meat." To his surprise, everyone in European forestry circles wanted to talk about the American West, the big wild of the Rocky Mountains and beyond, which Pinchot had not yet seen. What a tabula rasa! What a place to practice
la foresterie!
Open country, ripe for grand themes!
    When Pinchot returned home in 1890, he was dismayed at how Americans viewed their public domain. What was hailed in Europe as a glorious swath of unspoiled creation was viewed in his native land as a plunderer's buffet. "To waste timber was a virtue, not a crime," he wrote. While others saw a young country in full flex, stapling railroads along every river byway, leveling and burning the woods to make way for progress, overturning the prairie grass for farms, Pinchot saw chaos, death, soiling the garden — "a gigantic and lamentable massacre." The cut-and-run philosophy appalled him. Worse, most public land was being sold at a pittance or handed off to people (not unlike his grandfather) who could not see beyond a season of cashing out. Presidents and governors took every opportunity to give land away—to the railroads, to town-platting developers, to mining conglomerates and timber syndicates, the quicker the better. A fire sale in Eden.
    "The American Colossus was fiercely intent on appropriating and exploiting the riches of the richest of all continents — grasping with both hands, reaping where he had not sown, wasting what he thought would last forever," Pinchot wrote. "The exploiters were pushing further and further into the wilderness. The man who could get his hands on the biggest slice of natural resources was the best citizen. Wealth and virtue were supposed to trot in double harness."
    Pinchot's maternal grandfather urged him to give up this forestry nonsense and come manage part of the family empire.
Old boy, you'll be rich beyond your dreams!
Instead, Pinchot went west to sleep on cold rock and wet ground, to eat dried food and whatever
bony bird he could shoot from the sky or fish he could pull from a river—to get his first look at land he would champion for the rest of his life.
    His trip took him by train to Arizona, to the San Francisco Mountains above Flagstaff, the snowy peaks that towered over Navajo country and the canyonlands of wonder. On to California, to the High Sierra, the Range of Light, granite summits fourteen thousand feet above sea level, and north among the sequoias and redwoods, the biggest trees in the world—it took ten men to embrace a single trunk. In the Yosemite Valley, he climbed above the falls, higher than any he'd ever seen, then clambered down the rock and jumped in and out of the torrent itself, more than a quarter mile of falling water. The moment was pure bliss: baptism in the land. He felt immensely happy, the gloom gone. What's more, he felt that he belonged. In the Pacific Northwest, he hiked past trees with a diameter the size of his dining room table in Manhattan, waded through a sea of hyper-photosynthetic green in the nation's temperate rain forest. All of it was glorious, inspirational, a great thrill, everything his forestry education had lacked. But as the train took him east, back to old money and New York and persistent questions of What next, young man? the self-doubt returned. What good was this epic of self-indulgent travel if he could not put his passion to some use? His life needed an animating force.
    "Footless, useless, selfish, dumb, and generally of no use to anybody," he wrote at the end of his first trip out west. "Rotten as usual," he