Essay: Imagineering Cultural Landscapes
When I was 12 years old, my dream job was to be an “Imagineer” for the Walt Disney Company. An “Imagineer” is Disney’s cute (and trademarked) job title for the engineers who design the attractions at the handful of Disney theme parks and resorts around the world. Disney, of course, has deep pockets and is able to hire top talent, and anyone who visits a Disney theme park will observe that these Imagineers are, indeed, very good at their jobs.
For those privileged enough to visit a Disney theme park (and old enough to remember it), it’s evident that Disney’s innovation and attention to detail in their parks is astounding. Rides and performances include mind-boggling special effects, often based on secret technologies that Disney holds dearly close. Mundane facilities such as stores and restrooms are designed down to the tiniest detail, so as to maintain the feeling of immersion in whatever storybook realm they are supposed to represent.
A trail says, “This is where you want to go, trust me. I will take you there.”
Underlying these Imagineered landscapes is deception. Not in a nefarious sense, but rather in the way a magician deceives in order to surprise and delight. Disney’s buildings utilize optical illusions to seem taller; plaster is used to imitate rock; foam is used to create fake snow; animatronic creatures poke their herky-jerky heads from between fronds of a non-native tropical plant. For children, this is all very real. Adult visitors to the park know they’re in an artificial landscape, and are more than happy to suspend their disbelief to escape the mental burdens of our own, less magical reality.
And there is nothing wrong with that. While the theme park landscape is artificial, the joy and excitement for visitors is very real. Authenticity is in the eye of the beholder.
Trail alignments are determined by natural constraints, user management, and aesthetic choices. Some boulders are too large to move; others, intentionally kept or moved to keep users within the confines of the trail and to maintain a more ‘wild’ aesthetic.
As an adult, I find myself working not as a Disney Imagineer, but as a trail worker for the National Park Service. On the surface, these professions —and employers— might seem quite divergent. After all, National Parks are wild spaces, where human intervention is minimal, and non-robotic wild animals reign supreme. The attractions of a National Park might even kill you. A National Park, to most, would seem the antithesis of Disneyland.
But National Parks and Disneyland have more in common than most people would like to admit. Both the Disneyland visitor and the National Park visitor are deceived about the landscapes into which they enter. While the Disneyland visitor is willfully and happily deceived, however, the National Park visitor is, more often than not, oblivious to the subtle deceptions at hand. We trail builders play a key role in that deception, as we engineer the paths from which most visitors view and experience a park.
For many National Park visitors, National Parks (and similar protected wild spaces) are landscapes frozen in time. They represent a primeval space with minimal, if any, impact from humans. Like dioramas in a living museum, parks are places where humans observe —from a trail, most likely— but do not interfere. This commonly-held perspective stems from a western notion of segregating humanity from the rest of nature: cities are for humans, parks are for the wild animals. In reality, many National Parks have been altered, built, and designed to adhere to certain aesthetics and cultural values. Imagineered, if you will.
Take, for instance, the park in which I work, Muir Woods National Monument. Muir Woods is a small but heavily-visited redwood grove first protected by law in 1908. Visitors today walk on a quiet footpath amongst towering old-growth coast redwood trees. Sword ferns, huckleberry, and redwood sorrel carpet the forest floor, and Redwood Creek babbles quietly through the center of the canyon. For many visitors, it feels like the forest hasn’t changed in millennia.
While the trees in Muir Woods themselves are indeed old (most trees are 600-800 years old), much of the surrounding vegetation and landscape architecture has been altered significantly over the years. According to a colleague of mine, many of the sword ferns carpeting the understory were planted in the early days of the park to promote a more primeval aesthetic. The park used to feature significantly more development, with roads, bathrooms, and even a gravity car slicing down into the canyon. These roads and tracks have since been removed and replaced with narrow trails and boardwalks to create a quiet, more “natural” environment.
And, of course, before the land was a park, and before European settlement, Miwok people likely made significant changes to the natural landscape for thousands of years through controlled burning and other indigenous land management practices.
In park terminology, these time slices of park history are “cultural landscapes.” As defined by the National Park Service: “cultural landscapes are places within US National Parks that have significance in American history and authenticity to a certain time period.” But who determines which cultural landscapes are significant and worth preserving? At what point does historic trash become archeological treasure? Why value some non-native plantings (i.e., an historic orchard), but remove others (i.e., invasive plants introduced by settlers)? These are difficult questions that park managers must consider. I do believe park managers generally make these decisions in good faith, albeit subject to their own biases; until recently, cultural landscapes of black and indigenous groups were generally overlooked in park priorities.
I’m not here to answer those questions, nor do I think there is a “right” answer. Current values in cultural landscapes will likely evolve more in the future as technology enables new means of experiencing parks, and cultural shifts change educational priorities. My point here is that park landscapes are a construct of human priorities.
Trails are, in many ways, a distillation of these priorities. As the primary form of access to a park, trails and roads determine how the vast majority of visitors will see and experience a park. They are meticulously planned and carefully maintained, despite common perceptions of trails as being as natural as the landscape around them. Trails are designed to confine visitors into a sacrificial corridor of impact, and to direct them to a particular destination. Sometimes, a trail corridor is designed to avoid a specific area, perhaps an area with an endangered species, archeological site, or environmental hazard. Trail builders will install protruding rocks called gargoyles to coax hikers to stay on a trail. Trail builders are social engineers as much as landscape engineers. A trail says, “This is where you want to go, trust me. I will take you there.
“Want to see Half Dome? Step right this way. Want to look down into the Grand Canyon? This is the best view.” In this regard, trails are not so different from the carefully planned human corrals in the line for It’s a Small World at Disneyland.
And just like the Disneyland Imagineers, trail builders have paid close attention to detail to preserve the magic. Impacts from construction work are carefully restored using transplants and duff. Limbed branches growing into the trail are cut off at the nodes to prevent “stobs”—telltale signs that someone came through and cut back the encroaching brush. Hardware on structures might be painted brown to better blend into wood. Some sawyers will rub dirt onto a newly cut stump to make the cut look older and less fresh. I recently visited a worksite where the trail crew had screwed strips of bark onto dimensional lumber in order to create the illusion that a bridge abutment had been built from whole logs rather than a more modern style of steel and wood construction.
Was this retaining wall built with whole logs? Nope, the crew attached strips of bark to the dimensional lumber to create a more natural aesthetic.
None of this is a secret. Park histories and cultural landscapes are well documented on park websites and on interpretive panels scattered around park sites. Most park rangers will tell you these histories if you attend a ranger talk. Observe closely while hiking on a trail and you will see the telltale signs of trail maintenance and construction if you look for it. Attend a trail workday as a volunteer and you will learn even more of these subtle tips and tricks.
As someone who has worked in the parks for years, I can attest that most visitors are oblivious to the extent to which park landscapes have been constructed by humanity. These visitors see what they want to see in the same way children in Disneyland see what they want to see: an untouched wilderness, a real-life princess castle. The unknowing park visitor, if anything, demonstrates how effective the Imagineering of National Parks was for much of the 20th century. It is only recently that park managers have begun to reckon with the complex history of park landscapes, and to try to educate the public about that complexity.
Understanding a more nuanced history of a given landscape does not make it any less inspiring or delightful. If anything, it makes it more so, adding depth and richness. And, unlike the Imagineers of the Walt Disney Company, we trail builders and park rangers are happy to let you in on the secrets behind the curtain. So strap on your boots, step right up, and be amazed.
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Special thanks, as always, to my friend and editor Laura Booth, who published a similar reflection on Muir Woods in the Nature of Cities in 2018 titled “Making Parks Relevant: Muir Woods as a Museum that Invites Multiple Narratives.”
Trails are moved, re-aligned, closed, opened. New trails change visitors’ experiences of a park.
