This story is about the absurd dream of a six-year-old boy that eventually came true. There was no fairy godmother waving a magic wand. Only sheer determination to see his childish vision become reality.
This hero is Paul Rokich. He was born in 1932 in Utah. His father worked for the big copper mine at the foothills of the Oquirrh Mountains. Paul remembers standing with his father outside their house one day, when he was six, and looking up at the mountains. They were black, the once beautiful forests gone, destroyed first by the felling of timber by the early Mormon settlers, then by extensive sheep grazing, and finally by the smoke and pollution of smelting operations. Paul decided that one day he would go up those mountains and put the trees back, and he never forgot that vow, though it would be twenty years before his dream became reality—first came school, then the army, and then a family.
Not until 1959 did he start work on the project he had envisioned twenty-one years before: putting the trees back on the mountains near Black Rock Canyon. Of course, everyone thought he was crazy. First of all, they said, reclaiming those mountains was simply not possible—the topsoil was so degraded what with the loss of vegetation and the excessive arsenic and lead pollution from the smelting that it had become what is known as “desert paving.” Second, Paul had a full-time job, a wife, and three children. Ignoring his critics, he took great buckets of grass seed to his selected site—he went as far as he could by car, and then carried on walking and sowing, every evening and every weekend. Walking and sowing, walking and sowing. And he planted some trees where the soil seemed suitable.
Week after week, month after month, year after year, he worked at his passion, and the grass began to grow, and more and more trees flourished as he reclaimed one canyon after another. There were many setbacks—such as the state digging out a lot of his trees for a highway, and animals eating the vegetation he had grown—but he never lost heart. For fifteen years Paul worked mostly alone, on his own time, with his own money. Sometimes his family and friends helped.
“You try and look at this over a 20 or 30 year span,” he said in The Man and His Mountains: The Paul Rokich Story. “If you don’t you just might as well give up. Because you’re going to have to deal with the crickets, the grasshoppers, the fires, the drought, people stealing your trees, and all kinds of other problems. If you keep coming back, you finally win.”
Finally, the Kennecott Company began cleaning up the poisonous emissions from the smelting operations, spending millions of dollars. And eventually the company hired Paul to help them with their belated restoration project. Today the Oquirrh Mountains are green, covered with native grasses and plants originally seeded by Paul and trees that he planted as seedlings. The very first of these, put in the ground in 1959, is still there. The animals have come back, including elk, deer, coyotes, foxes, and even mountain lions. Thanks to the vision and almost unbelievable dedication and persistence of one man, a totally devastated environment is now a flourishing ecosystem.
I have flown over those mountains, looked down on those trees—and marveled. I have not met Paul, though I have tried. I haven’t even been able to speak to him on the phone. But my good friend from Utah, Randall Tolpinrud, let him know of my interest and admiration, and Paul sent me a signed copy of his book, which I treasure. He also sent me a laminated leaf from one of the very first trees he planted that I treasure even more. I carry it around the world, for it symbolizes both the indomitable human spirit and the resilience of nature if given a helping hand.
