NATURAL RESOURCE SCIENCE AND MANAGEMENT IN THE WEST
Over Look / Under Foot
February 22, 2024
Two artists road trip through Utah’s national parks
Text and photographs by Katie Hargrave and Meredith Lynn Captions by Birch Malotky
As tent campers and national parks enthusiasts, we spend a lot of time in the company of Airstreams, Winnebagos, and Jaycos, and have come to appreciate that for many, the RV makes a kind of relationship to nature possible. RVs can re-create the comfort and access of home in the middle of spaces the federal government has set aside to be preserved as wild. We have seen our fellow campers set up potted plants, satellite dishes, and full multi-course meals in the middle of what we hope to be wilderness.
This comfort and accessibility is in opposition to romantic visions of national parks and some approaches to conservation. Nature writer Edward Abbey famously wrote in Desert Solitaire, “You can’t see anything from a car.” There is a value judgement implicit in this statement. Abbey and others equate a certain connection to nature with spirituality, purity, and a unique kind of enlightenment, but that sort of experience in the outdoors deliberately excludes most park goers.
Using all five Utah national parks as a springboard, we took a rented van and teardrop trailer on the road to consider the complexities of a relationship to land that is heavily mediated by vehicles, cameras, and our own nostalgia. Through Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Parks, we enact and document the tourist experience, asking how our portrayals of public land and outdoor recreation differ from the actual experience, and whether an unmitigated relationship to nature is possible, or even desirable.
Katie Hargrave and Meredith Lynn are artists and educators who work collaboratively to explore the historic, cultural, and environmental impacts of so-called public land. They met at the University of Iowa, where they both earned MFAs and began to understand art-making as a form of real discourse. Find the rest of Over Look / Under Foot at meredithlauralynn.com and katiehargrave.com.
Katie and Meredith wish to acknowledge the land where this work was made, as the management of these places has happened from time immemorial by the Ute, Southern Paiute, and the Ancestral Pueblo peoples. While these sites are under the control of the National Parks System, it is Indigenous peoples who continue to put necessary pressure on the US government to preserve these spaces.