On Thursday evening, January 12, the Siskiyou Land Trust will host Bruce Johnston narrateing a slideshow of his three-week, 120-mile trek to the Base Camp of Mount Everest in Nepal. Everest is the centerpiece of Sagarmatha National Park that was established in 1976 by the government of Nepal to protect and manage their unique region. The park’s natural heritage and dramatic beauty of the high, geologically young mountains and glaciers were recognized by UNESCO as a world heritage site in 1979. The program begins at 7PM at the Sisson Museum Auditorium in Mt. Shasta, with a suggested donation of $8 as a fundraiser for SLT.
UNESCO describes the park as encompassing the infinitely majestic snow capped peaks of the Great Himalayan Range, the chain of mountains including the world’s highest, Mt. Sagarmatha (Everest), and extensive Sherpa settlements that embody the openness of the park to the rest of the world. The park hosts over 20 villages with over 6000 Sherpas who have inhabited the region for the last four centuries. The Sherpas continue their traditional cultural and religious practices including the restriction of animal hunting and slaughtering, and reverence of all living beings. These practices combined with indigenous natural resource management practices, have been major contributing factors to the successful conservation of Sagarmatha National Park. The constantly increasing numbers of tourists visiting the property, 3,600 visitors in 1979 to over 37000 in 2014, has immensely boosted the local economy and standard of living with better health, education, and infrastructure facilities.
In 2002, the park implemented a buffer zone program to enhance protection and management of the property and to enhance conservation in combination with improved socio-economic status of the local communities through a revenue return system. The park area is also the major source of glaciers, providing freshwater for the people downstream. In addition to conservation of the values of the park a priority of the park is to monitor the impacts of climate change on flora, fauna and Sherpa communities.
Bruce Johnston has spent countless days hiking and backpacking, a pleasure that started in his Boy Scout years growing up in Eureka, California. He earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Psychology at Humboldt State University and a Ph.D. in Education at the University of Oregon. Bruce and his family moved to Mount Shasta in 1990 and he was a Counselor at College of the Siskiyous for 22 years, retiring in June, 2012. With the free time that retirement affords, he’s returned to his hiking and backpacking roots. In the Spring of 2013, Bruce and a long-time friend and fellow Eagle Scout, travelled to Nepal to undertake the longest hike of their lives, a trek to the Base Camp at Mount Everest.
