The Klamath Knot: Explorations of Myth and Evolution

by David Rains Wallace

Winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing, the Commonwealth Club Silver Medal for Literature 1984, and named one of the twentieth century's best nonfiction books by the San Francisco Chronicle, The Klamath Knot, originally published by Sierra Club Books in 1983, is a personal vision of wilderness in the Klamath Mountains of northwest California and southwest Oregon, seen through the lens of "evolutionary mythology." David Rains Wallace uses his explorations of the diverse ecosystems in this region to ponder the role of evolution and myth in our culture. The author's new epilogue makes a case for the creation of a new park to safeguard this exceptionally rich storehouse of relict species and evolutionary stories, which has largely been bypassed by conservationists since John Muir.

Genres: Nature, Nonfiction, Natural History, Environment, History, Ecology, Science

174 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

David Rains Wallace is an author of geography and geology related books. His book, The Klamath Knot, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal in 1984.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

From one special corner of the biosphere, David Wallace explores the evolution of life on earth. Before you say, "not another treatise on evolution," The Klamath Knot is a different animal.

Even though Wallace's knowledge of the Klamath ecosystems and the dynamics of evolution are fundamentally sound, he's grasping for much more in this book. As the smaller print under the title states, it's an "exploration of myth and evolution." The Klamath Knot represents the rare blend of hard science of the world we can observe and measure with that of the world we can only imagine or dream. That's quite a subject-matter-bridge to cross, but Wallace pulls it off. Once I got a couple of chapters into the book, the distinction between science and myth began to blur (i.e., Do giants really exist? Not sure).

Wallace doles out each chapter as the creator planned it. He introduces us to rock, primal ooze, water, and ultimately life. And the backdrop for each major step of life evolving on this planet is the Klamath Mountains. A truly magical and diverse region along the California and Oregon border that stretches from the Rogue River south to the Eel River. A place that is home to old growth forests, runs of salmon and steelhead, and high deserts. Wallace takes us into some of the more remote places of the Klamath and masterfully focuses on the biological importance of each ecosystem.

The book goes well beyond the physical world and ponders some interesting questions. Like where is life on our planet headed? Is it possible to know where it's headed? What can we learn from evolution? Does life evolve from cooperation or competition or both? What is the role of myth? Does Big-Foot really exist? Could he exist? Is this creature another branch along life's tree?

I admire the author for both his skill and courage in addressing such diverse subject matter. Reading the Klamath Know will leave you with a renewed sense of wonder about the natural world.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wallace’s book is more a reflection on the things of nature than on this particular geographic area of southwestern Oregon-northwestern California. The book has glossaries of geological time and scientific names, but no index. This is an indication of the book’s focus. As a logical progression through natural history, it starts with the author’s reflections on evolutionary theory, then moves to rocks, fossils, lichens, primal ooze (old lake beds and critters), water and fish, forest and forest critters, and finally to the tops of the mountains and their high meadows.

The Klamath Mountains were once connected to the Sierras (identical rocks and fossils) but were then separated for some unknown reason by a 60 mile offset that connected the Sacramento Valley with the Modoc Plateau. To the immediate south lies the coastal range, consisting of sedimentary rocks pushed up by the collision of the North American and Pacific plates. The “Knot” part, I presume, is the junction point between the Sierras and the coast range. The location and elevation of the Klamath Mountains (with sub ranges, including the Siskiyous and the Trinity Alps) are such that this area contains a unique combination of ecosystems and biodiversity (habitats of the Great Basin, Coastal Range, Cascades, California’s Central Valley, and the Sierra Nevada).

Wallace’s commentary raises the eyebrows here and there. He states that religion and science are mythologies in the sense that both provide an account of the origin and meaning of life. Wallace is not anti-evolution so the reference to science as myth relates to the misuses of evolutionary theory such as Social Darwinism, the theory of Teilhard de Chardin, and eugenics. He also writes that Moses and Jesus formed a trinity with Darwin in the sense that all three were transformative of their cultures. This is an odd grouping. Darwin was focused on our continuity with all of life, not on relationships with a god and people. Elsewhere, Wallace strays in his analogies. For example, he writes that “Organisms outlast mountain ranges because they work much harder at existing than rocks do,” forcing the reader to think about how, exactly, is it that mountain ranges work at all to exist?

In his last chapter, Wallace picks up the evolution as myth theme once again, but now defines myth as imaginative wonder. “Science,” he writes, “has allowed us to begin to imagine states of consciousness quite different from our own. We can begin to see trees, birds, and spiders not as masks concealing humanlike spirits but as beings in their own right, beings that are infinitely more mysterious and wonderful than the nymphs and sprites of the old myths….We are very different from trees, but we also are like them. As we learn how they live, we learn a great deal of how we live.” This nice thought is ruined somewhat by calling it myth.

[Pat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nature writing is surely the most soporific of genres, but this book is a cut above. It helps to know the region (the western border of Oregon and California -- Bigfoot Country -- but not entirely necessary). The Klamath Knot is a great meditative work about one of the more mysterious regions in the Lower 48.

[Hilary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ended up really enjoying this book, after trying to start it a few times. It's a beautiful exploration of the the Klamath Mountains in northern California, the rocks, animals, and plants, and the ways human beings and their mythologies have interacted with the area. The writing is humane, deploring abuses of the land without eviscerating the fallible people who carry them out.

[Lyra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book was long overdue. I found myself wanting it to be less speculation about myth and evolution, and more about the Klamath mountains.

[gwayle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an elegant look at plant and animal evolution--and climate and tectonic change--through the lens of one of the most biologically diverse regions on the face of the earth. I especially enjoyed learning about different ways that species evolve--through natural selection, but also preadaptation, symbiosis, and neoteny. Wallace has interesting and persuasive things to say about the "myth" of evolution and how it compares as a worldview. Certainly informative and intellectually engaging, this book is also playful, literary, imaginative, and challenging.

[David Robertson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book won Wallace a John Burroughs Medal, and it was well-deserved. Wallace explores the ecosystems of the Klamath Mountains in northern California and southern Oregon over the course of nine chapters. Following an introductory chapter in which he introduces the mountains as he "discovered" and explored them, Wallace then goes on to describe the mountains' origins and geologic history and the ecosystems that characterize in the region (i.e., lakes, streams, forests, and grasslands). However, this book is not just straightforward natural history or nature writing. Wallace has two overarching themes that knit the narrative together: how evolution shapes the habitats he explores, and how mythology (exemplified by Susquatch or Bigfoot) affects people's understanding of place. The approach is masterful and prevents the book from being a standard listing of species and natural processes. Incidentally, the title is derived from the geological history of the region; tectonic forces so distorted the rocks that make up the mountains that geologists have called the area a "knot" of tortured rock.

[Chloe Wieland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great examination of the vastness of life in the Trinity Alps. I love backpacking in this region, and this book was fun to have with me on a trip while I watched newts swim and stared into the primordial ooze of a mountain lake.

A series of essays about being in the wilderness- if you're looking for a catalog of plants and animals in these mountains, this is not it. But, if you're looking for someone to philosophize about Yeti- this is the book. Some weird digressions, but entertaining and a reminder of what it's like to be alone with your mind in the wilderness in the pre-smartphone/cameraphone era.

[Donna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I usually love natural histories I didn’t like this one as much as others I have read. I had a hard time wrapping my head around the various ecosystems he was writing about and where they are located. I want to explore this area. I think he spent too much time of speculating about and talking about the giants we refer to as Sasquatch when their existence is still debatable. Some of his ideas and theories seemed a bit off to me, or maybe it was that I wasn’t understanding them correctly.

[Andy Caffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me 35 years to get through this book. In 1988 I moved to both Humboldt County to join the Earth First! effort to save the last unprotected large stand of old growth native redwood forest, Headwaters Forest, and to Southern Oregon (inside the Klamath Knot) to join the EF! effort there to save the largest stand of any kind of coastal old growth native forest, in a proposed wilderness area we called the North Kalmiopsis.

Except for 1990-1997, I've lived here for all that time. In 1988, I tried to read this book about what I had no idea was becoming my new home. But I didn't know the area at all. Now I'm familiar with the entire area, although I still have much of it to explore. So I guess the Klamath Knot had to become my home for me to sink into this book which has no photos at all.

I was the first Earth First! campaign videographer. I became a videographer to convey this area and the antics and heroics of those fighting the last stand to save the last stands. I felt that was the only way I could get it into the minds of my fellow Americans so that we could en masse save these places. I can't imagine how I would do it merely using words.

Because of that, I'm always skeptical about reading nature books about a place I've never seen. That's probably why it took me so long to get to this book which my fellow eco-warriors praised highly when I joined their efforts back in 1988.

Now I can tell you that Wallace has written a very good book about why the Klamath Knot is so special. He focuses on the area south of the unprotected North Kalmiopsis wilderness we have fought to preserve, the region which is already, largely, a designated wilderness area called simply Kalmiopsis.

This is a book about evolution. Evolution of North America from the ancestral forests that crossed North America 40 million years ago, which today only remains as a multi-faceted remnant in this one precious spot that straddles the western and central border of California and Oregon.

This 1983 book is a bit outdated. Most scientists don't call our human-like primate ancestors of Homo sapiens hominids anymore. We call them hominins. That refers to the species that developed after the split from chimpanzees. Hominids refer to the great ape species we left behind: gorillas, bonobo and orangutans.

And evolutionary science has refined a lot more since 1983. Nevertheless, I wish Wallace had stuck to the evolutionary story, which he puts into the grouping of myths. He's not saying evolution is merely a myth. It's more like a replacement myth that settles in most people's minds like a vague myth, such as the rise of humans from apes to super-intelligent, mostly large-headed alien-like beings. The idea that all species, especially humans, are constantly evolving toward the light, so to speak, is an inaccurate myth. We simply have collections of traits that helped our predecessors survive in the conditions since the retreat of the forests where the hominids still live today.

Wallace then tries to go all Joseph Campbell on us. He even has four of Campbell's books listed in the bibliography. Here he is out of his league: you can't be another Joseph Campbell simply by reading some Joseph Campbell! I found it particularly bothersome when he referred to Moses as an historical figure to make a point. We now know there was no Moses and the jews didn't migrate from Egypt to the Holy Land. The Jews were indigenous to the levant, not immigrants.

Wallace mixes the two things up. Until the last paragraph of the book, a reader might think Wallace believes that Bigfoot actually exists. But if you think about it, North America has no great apes for Bigfoot to evolve from. There has been no ape evolution on this continent. And while there are monkeys in South America, there are no great apes there. So Bigfoot would have had to cross the Bering Straight land bridge like the ancestors of our continents first peoples.

That cost Wallace a star in my review. Following evolutionary explanations is hard enough if you have no familiarity with the concepts or the material. Having studied intertidal marine biology from high school on, I do have some familiarity with the material Wallace covers. And that allowed me to enjoy the evolutionary movie Wallace does a pretty fair job of painting. I sure as hell couldn't do that.

If you are familiar with this region of the world, I do recommend this book. I don't know of ANY others! If you aren't, then you are probably like me back in 1988 and might find it a tough and confusing slog.

If you are curious about this region, I suggest you go to youtube and look for a video of the sage of Bald Mountain Lou Gold's slide show presentation on the North Kalmiopsis.

[Mia · Rating 3 out of 5]

On a recent trip to Oregon, traveling north through Northern California on Interstate 5, we crossed the Klamath River, flowing west. A few days later, traveling south along the California coast through the Coast Redwoods, and braking braking for elk crossing the road, we came again to the Klamath flowing into the Pacific Ocean. How did it cross the mountains? In looking for answers, I found this book, written forty years ago, a meditation on the Klamath Mountains, a mountain range separate from the Sierra and the Cascades, and not visited as frequently. In this book, the author describes some of the mysteries and anomalies of the Klamath Mountains, which has a variety of species that are separated from similar species in other mountains, some hundreds of miles away. He also engages in a lot of poetic speculation on the relationship between species and the various habitats which exist seemingly jumbled together in these mountains. Much of the scientific information has been altered by the tremendous scientific advances of the past forty years, but the poetic writing is still evocative of the beauty and mystery of the natural world.

[Jennie Pugliese · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am not a non-fiction person but wanted to read about the Klamath Region in preparation for my trip there. Wallace's writing is a bit too lyrical for me -- some people have no problem with, or even really enjoy when writer's engage with nature/science writing with lyrical prose but it almost always feels cheesy to me and this book was no exception. The concept was interesting enough: using modern evolutionary theory and other natural/environmental theory/science to explore the uniqueness (both environmental and spiritual) of this area.

Hard to engage with many of the chapters if you hadn't actually been there and explored the area extensively previous to reading. The most interesting bits that I wish he had elaborated more on or spent more time digging into were the connections made between natural phenomena and mythology/lore. Needed more mythologic narratives and less detailed descriptions of biota that I could find in a text book if I wanted to.

[Mike Barnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Parts of it are spectacular, but the continual discussion of “giants” (Bigfoot) just really turns me off, even though the final chapter — which is really the highlight of the book, as far as I’m concerned — tries to turn it into an apt metaphor and organizing idea. I especially hate his calling evolution a new mythology akin to religion. I think it would be better to say that the human tendency to mythologize has corrupted evolutionary theory into abominations that resemble religion: used to justify terrible ideas and behavior. That a proper understanding of evolution would provide the kind of knowledge that he appears to promote. I believe that is what he tries to say in the last chapter, but cannot seem to approach it other than through his silly insistence on using Bigfoot as an organizing principle.

[Mathieu · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Klamath Knot is the geological formations in SW Oregon and NW California, from about the Rogue River to the Klamath River to the Trinity River. This is a geologically unique area, as explained in the book, due to the joining of a couple tectonic plates. The mountains there are different from their neighbors, and the ecology is also unique, having formed from near limits of glaciers and the unique species that remain.
This is a book about evolution, ecology, and philosophy. Well written, well told, Wallace brings a lot of visions together. And of course, bigfoot is also mentioned.
Yes, this is a place to visit. Wallace seems to have spent much time in the forests and mountains here, he is insightful into the natural history and the species that exist.

[David Clemens · Rating 4 out of 5]

the last two chapters are the best, in my opinion. having moved to Washington State 10 or 12 years ago, i find the forest and mountains fascinating. My educational background was similar to the author, and we are of the same generation. it amazed me that he was having all these thoughts 40 yrs ago when he was writing this book.

[Terryls · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish it had been more about the physical science of the area and less about musings and fantasies of mythology.

[Glenda Clemens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read the book because I'm a member of the Rains family AND interested in myth and evolution. Found the book very easy to read and loved the storytelling.

[Denis Karsten · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting if your interested in Southeastern Oregonian wilderness and observations of the many different climes it encompasses.

[Benjamin Padilla · Rating 5 out of 5]

A journey into evolution and philosophy told through the ecosystems of the Klamath Mountains, some of the most beautiful and ecologically diverse mountains in North America!

[David Kessler · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific book which shows the relationship of all the flora and fauna including us and how we compose just a beautiful range of mountains. The Klamath range which includes the Trinity Alps, the Yolla Bolly Mtns, the Marble Mountains, the Russian Wilderness and the Red Buttes. Why did the author names his book the Klamath Knot?

[Blaire · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has to be one of the classics of nature writing. It's also my neck of the woods, which makes it of added interest to me. It is by turns lyrical and poetic and informative; an approach that allows Mr. Wallace to vividly convey an overall picture for this area and the reason it is unusual and special.

[bookinglibrarian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This evocatively literate explanation of evolution as illustrated by the biologically unique flora, fauna, geology, aquatic and geographical environmnet of my home country, the Siskiyous-Klamaths was worth re-reading after many years.

[Rae Hills · Rating 3 out of 5]

amazing book full of good information and stories, interesting commentary on human consciousness and history. too many metaphors in some parts for my liking. he has the perfect amount of belief in bigfoot

[Reuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reread Oct. 6, 2005.

Reread again June 7, 2014, in preparation to finally visit the Klamath Mountains and the Kalmiopsis Wilderness.

Obviously, I really like this book.

[Missoula Flood · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite nature writing books. If you like the mountains of Southern Oregon and Northern California you have to read this book.

[David Peters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read with an important message for us all. One of the few books I kept and revisited from my college years; outstanding writing.

[Jefferson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this beautiful and whimsical reflection upon evolution and creation as Wallace describes each part of the Klamath mountains.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

A classic of natural history. A trove of mineable quotes regarding the Klamath's microcosmos.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very layered approach to a very beautiful stretch of Oregon /California wildernesx.

[Susan Eubank · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really 3.5. Interesting approach, not quite pulled off. Epilogue was good too.