Tireless, fearless and often rambunctious, Martin Litton devoted more than 60 years of his life to protecting the natural beauty of the West, from stopping dams in the Grand Canyon to preserving California’s ancient redwoods and sequoia forests.
The legendary outdoorsman and environmental activist died Sunday at home in Portola Valley at the age of 97 — a decade after becoming the oldest person ever to guide a boat through the Colorado River rapids in the Grand Canyon.
Litton was one of the last surviving members of the 1950s and ’60s generation of conservation leaders who pushed Congress to expand millions of acres of national parks and wilderness across the West. He served as a board member of the Sierra Club from 1964 to 1973 and travel editor of Sunset magazine from 1954 to 1968.
“His goal, ever since he was a kid, was to save things that he saw being destroyed,” his son, John Litton, said on Monday. “He thought that too many people wanted to destroy things for a buck, and he was trying to say ‘stop.’ It was to remind everybody where their soul is.”
With a deep baritone voice and a white beard, Litton commanded attention and spent his life refusing to take no for an answer.
When state highway officials were considering paving a freeway through North Coast old-growth redwoods in the 1960s, he convinced then-Gov. Pat Brown to fly with him in his single-engine plane over the forests. Brown ordered the road plans halted.
He worked with the Sierra Club, Save-the-Redwoods League and the National Geographic Society to convince Congress to establish Redwood National Park in 1968, saving tens of thousands of acres of ancient trees from logging. But afterward, Litton was despondent that in a compromise with timber companies, lawmakers had left unprotected massive trees on steep slopes in the same watersheds. He helped lead efforts in the 1970s to expand the park by 48,000 acres.
“He came up and kicked us in the butt. He told us not to settle and to push for the biggest boundaries,” said John Amodio, of Sacramento, who worked on the campaign. “He told us you are the voice of the redwoods.”
Litton was born in Los Angeles on Feb. 13, 1917. As a teenager, he explored the Sierras on rented pack mules. At age 18, he wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times, urging that Mono Lake in the Eastern Sierra should be preserved from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
After graduating with a degree in English in 1938 from UCLA, he was working for a dude ranch when he was called to active duty in the Army Air Corps. Litton trained as a glider pilot and flew missions with the 82nd Airborne’s 325th Glider Infantry Wing over enemy lines in Europe. On one mission, he was shot down, and after several days of firefights with German soldiers, hiding in marshes and walking along roads, he made it safely back to Brussels, Belgium.
Litton married Esther Clewette of Los Angeles in 1942. After the war, he became a freelance writer for the Los Angeles Times, exploring California and the West with his family.
“We climbed the top of Mount Whitney once in the late 1950s. We’d been in the backcountry for two weeks,” recalled his son, John. “My mother, my sister and me with him. I was probably 12, and my sister was 10. We did trips to Alaska and British Columbia. We ran the Grand Canyon. He was a great dad. I don’t know what more you could have asked of a father.”
In 1952, David Brower, the fiery executive director of the Sierra Club, asked Litton to help him battle plans by the Bureau of Reclamation to build two dams at Dinosaur National Monument on the Colorado-Utah border. Congress killed the project in 1956.
Brower and Litton became lifelong friends, with Brower calling him “my environmental conscience.”
“He and David Brower, everything that we in the modern environmental movement got to do, we did it on their shoulders,” said Mark Dubois, co-founder of Friends of the River. “Martin was a fiery, fierce, no compromise in defense of the earth guy.”
Litton began whitewater rafting in the 1950s and eventually with Brower and other activists defeated plans a decade later to build two dams in the Grand Canyon, Marble Canyon Dam and Bridge Canyon Dam.
“You would be motor boating on top of the Grand Canyon right now if it weren’t for Martin Litton,” said John Blaustein, a Berkeley photographer who was friends with him for 45 years.
In 1971, Litton started a company, Grand Canyon Dories, to take tourists through the Grand Canyon in wooden boats. He continued his advocacy in the 1980s and 1990s, pushing for more protections for the ancient sequoias of the Sierra Nevada.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton established Giant Sequoia National Monument, preserving 328,000 acres. But Litton, who founded Sequoia ForestKeeper, a nonprofit, still battled with the Forest Service after that, saying its rules too easily allowed trees to be cut in the monument in order to reduce fire risk.
In an interview in 2012 with High Country News, he was asked about the current generation of environmental activists.
“No one wants to pick up the sword and charge,” he said.
Paul Rogers covers resources and environmental issues. Contact him at 408-920-5045. Follow him at Twitter.com/PaulRogersSJMN.
