Buddy Jones Is A Man With A Mission - Written by Tom Valtin
Buddy Jones is a man with a mission. “I want to get more Black people to visit our national parks,” says the retired contractor and former elite rock climber. “A…
Buddy Jones is a Man With a Mission
Buddy Jones is a man with a mission. “I want to get more Black people to visit our national parks,” says the retired contractor and former elite rock climber. “A lot of Black folks, when you tell them the national parks belong to them, they look at you and say, ‘Really? Why don’t any Black people I know visit them?’ You have to wonder… have they really been invited?”
Jones has been brainstorming with the Sierra Club how they could do a better job of extending that invitation to people of color. “We need to keep reminding them that the national parks are public lands that belong to all Americans by birthright,” he says. “But even more importantly, we need to tell stories about people of color who have been prominent figures in the history of our national parks…people like Charles Young, the first Black superintendent of a national park; the Buffalo Soldiers, all-Black regiments in the Army who became park rangers in Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon after the Civil War; James Beckwourth, the mountain man who ‘discovered’ a trans-Sierra trail in the northern Sierra and spent four years living with the local Indigenous Tribes while ‘improving’ the pass that now bears his name.”
Last summer Jones and his wife Lori launched Buddy’s Touring Service in Visalia, California, a 45-minute drive from the southern entrance to Sequoia National Park. “We give guided tours free of charge to community leaders and people of color who haven’t been to Sequoia before,”Jones says. “Folks who’ve toured the park with us are always moved by the experience. Several first-time visitors have told us they were already making plans to come back with friends.”
“I was introduced to the parks at an early age,” says Jones, who at age 80 is still a commanding presence. “Spending time in the parks as a kid changed my life, and now that I’m retired I want to create opportunities for young people of color to have the same kind of transcendent, empowering, life-affirming experience that I had when I ‘discovered’ the parks in my formative years.”
Sequoia National Park - New Bridge Built by Buddy’s Contracting Service
Buddy’s Touring Service takes visitors to see the park’s scenic highlights, including the giant sequoia, the largest living things on earth, found only in a 100-mile-long ribbon between 5,000 and 7,000 feet on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. But Buddy’s Tours also also focus on the rock walls, trails, bridges, and other infrastructure improvements engineered and built by Buddy Jones Contracting Services between 1992 and 2003.
“I don't know of another Black-owned outfit that completed more major construction projects in Sequoia than we did,” Jones says. “I’m very proud of that, but nowhere in the park or the park literature do we get a mention. It would be great to see an exhibit, a plaque, or a sidebar in the literature you get when you enter the park, acknowledging our work. That could go a long way toward instilling a sense of pride and ownership among park visitors of color, especially young people.”
Congratulations to Buddy Jones from President George Bush at Reopening of Sequoia National Park - May 30, 2001
Richard “Buddy” Jones was born and raised on the east side (or, as Buddy puts it, “the Black side”) of Riverside, California, one of nine children whose father, Buster Jones, was a garbage collector with a third-grade education.
“Buster loved cars, and he was a self-taught, intuitive master mechanic,” Buddy says. Eventually he quit his garbage-collecting job and opened Buster’s Auto Shop, where he earned a reputation as the best mechanic in Riverside. “If you were Black and on the road in Southern California and you needed a mechanic, Buster’s is where people would send you.”
Buddy’s mother Geraldine presided over a home (a “three-room shack,” Buddy recalls) in which profanity was forbidden, good manners were enforced, and the whole family sat down together for dinner every day, some perched on boxes because there weren't enough chairs to go around. “We never thought of ourselves as poor,” Buddy says. “We just didn’t have much money.”
“Geraldine, who had a sixth-grade education, understood the importance of showing us the world. On weekends she’d load up the car with as many of us kids as she could squeeze in, drive to my dad’s shop, ask Buster for some gas money, and then we’d drive up into the mountains. Occasionally we’d drive way out into the Mojave Desert. There were no Black people there. Mom had never been to these places before. She was courageous.
“Spending time in the parks as a kid changed my life -- probably saved my life,” Jones says. “Now that I’m retired I want to help create opportunities for young people of color to have the same kind of experience; what you might call an epiphany. It may have been state parks and national forests that my mom took us to, not national parks, but I didn’t make that distinction; I just knew it felt good to be there.
“In the high country there are no lights, no horns, no sirens,” Jones says with a faraway look in his eyes. “The water is sweeter, the air is cleaner, the fish are more delicious. Everything you need is in the pack on your back. In the high country you come face to face with who you are.”
Jones attended San Diego State University on a football scholarship, becoming a star linebacker under the tutelage of John Madden and Don Coryell, both of whom went on to coach in the NFL, for the Oakland Raiders and the San Diego Chargers, respectively. While still in high school he’d met Shirley Brodsky, a white civil rights activist, and the two married when Brodsky became pregnant. It was while looking for housing near campus that Jones encountered the entrenched segregation that was still the norm in mid-1960s Southern California.
“Madden and Coryell suggested I go to the SDSU Student Housing office, and they’d give me a list of places near campus, but when we went to look at them, the owner would suggest that we look on “the nigger side of the tracks.” It was undisguised, unapologetic racism, and eventually we gave up on the notion of finding a place near campus.
1970’s - Living in a mixed race community
“Luckily, we knew a mixed-race couple from L.A. who’d been through the same thing we were going through, and they suggested that we check out Synanon, an alternative community and drug rehab facility in Santa Monica
“I’d never used drugs, so I wondered why they were steering me to a drug rehab facility,” Jones says. “But we were curious, so we decided to drop by a gathering at Synanon that was open to the public, and the first thing we noticed was that it was integrated. Every table was occupied by a mixed group. That was all I needed to see. I applied for a teaching job at the Synanon School, and as soon as it was offered to me we moved in. In truth, I think more than anything else they hired me to serve as a role model to Black youth who were in danger of getting onto the wrong track
One of the first people Buddy met at Synanon was Rod Mullen, the man who introduced him to rock climbing and his closest friend to this day. “We were kindred spirits,” Buddy says. “We both loved being outdoors and I was a runner, so I invited Rod to run with me in the mornings before school. Before you know it we were running five miles together nearly every day.”
Most weekends Mullen would go climbing in the Santa Monica Mountains. “I was intrigued,” Buddy recalls, so eventually I asked him to show me the ropes. He took me to Stoney Point Park, on the western edge of the San Fernando Valley. I was hooked from the get-go.”
The two became regular climbers at Stoney Point and Chatsworth State Park, popular climbing destinations for Angeles Chapter Sierra Clubbers. “You didn’t see a lot of Black climbers back then -- or now, for that matter -- and a racially mixed climbing duo was definitely a rarity. I didn’t give it much thought; I was too busy learning how to climb at places like Joshua Tree, Death Valley, Pinnacles, and Tahquitz, Southern California’s premier climbing destination, in the San Jacinto Mountains east of Riverside.
“I remember standing on a summit with Rod after an especially difficult climb, looking out over what seemed like all of Southern California and thinking this had to be one of the best feelings in the world -- the adrenaline rush, the camaraderie, the beauty of the scenery, the joy and the stress and the challenge of the climb. It was time to go to Yosemite.
“I was struck speechless on entering Yosemite Valley and seeing formations like El Capitan and Half Dome for the first time. “I’d never seen such massive walls, let alone climbed them. I was awestruck. This was the real deal. This was climbing on a whole different scale.
“Big-wall rock climbing requires total focus,” he says. “One mistake, one lapse in concentration, and you’re a goner. But all you’re thinking about is your next move and the finger hold that’s literally the difference between life and death. You pray to god that if you make it to the top you’ll never do this again. Then you get to the top and you can’t wait to do it again.”
For the next two decades Jones and Mullen were regulars in Yosemite, the only mixed-race duo among the serious technical climbers scaling the park’s big walls. “It was rare in those days to see mixed-race groups in the parks,” Jones says. “ But climbing liberated me from being concerned with that; I was too busy falling in love with the mountains.
Buddy Jones Contracting Services landed its first national park job in 1994, painting parking lots in Yosemite. “The Park Service was looking for minority contractors, and thanks to the federal government’s Business Development Program, 8(a), I was able to borrow enough money to bid on multi-million-dollar jobs.
Retaining walls restored by Buddy’s Contracting Service at Tunnel Rock - 1992
“Before long we were landing contracts to build trails, walls, pedestrian bridges, and other major infrastructure projects,” he recalls. “A Yosemite Road Superintendent took note and phoned up his counterpart at Sequoia, saying, ‘You should hire this guy Buddy Jones to work for you down there.’”
Over the next decade, Buddy Jones Contracting became one of the biggest and most visible Black-owned outfits doing major construction projects in Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Yosemite National Parks. Between 1994 and 2003 the company grew from two to 65 employees and grossed over $30 million.
“The jobs I’m proudest of are the restoration of the Giant Forest and additions to Wuksachi Village, one of the main visitor hubs in Sequoia,” Jones says. “The 8(a) program opened up so many opportunities for me. What a dream come true, to be able to make my living in the very places where I fell in love with the high country and the national parks as a young man.”
Buddy Jones Contracting completed its last national park job in 2002, right around the time Buddy turned 60. He has devoted himself to environmental activism and community-building in the Visalia area ever since, giving presentations to organizations including the Boys & Girls Club of Tulare, the Tulare Rotary Club, and the California Black Chamber of Commerce, from whom he has received a bevy of community service awards.
Now, halfway through his 81st circuit around the sun, he hosts a weekly online forum, Buddy Jones & Friends, co-sponsored by Traditions of the Ancestors (TOTA), a website dedicated to creating “a more connected and respectful world” through storytelling and sharing traditional folkways.
“Lori and I recently teamed up with TOTA to organize a BBQ Cookoff in Visalia, with live music, African drumming workshops, arts and crafts, and lots of locally sourced food and drink. We advertised by word of mouth and more than 3,500 people attended!” Jones enthuses. “There were more Black people there than anytime I can remember in all my years in Visalia.”
It’s an idyllic late-summer day in Sequoia National Park; shirtsleeve weather, with the barest hint of cooling breeze. In less than a month, wildfires will rage within the park, choking the air with smoke, turning the sky a Martian orange, closing the park to the public, and incinerating thousands of giant sequoias. But nobody knows that yet.
Jones is feeling expansive because today Buddy’s Touring Service is taking six African American women -- three relatives and three friends -- on a guided tour of the park. None of the six has ever been to a national park before, and they are all aflutter at the prospect of seeing the big trees.
The oldest and largest trees on Earth, giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) occur naturally only on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, in a narrow 100-mile-long band lying generally between 4,500’ and 7,000’ in elevation. It is estimated that the total population of giant sequoias, now officially listed as an endangered species, is between 75,000 to 80,000 individuals, representing less than five percent of their number prior to the California Gold Rush of 1849.
The tour has just arrived in Wuksachi after an extended stop at Tunnel Rock, a natural drive-through attraction clinging to a plunging canyon wall. From here to Wuksachi, a distance of 20 miles that takes an hour to drive, the vertigo-inducing roadway is flanked by thickset stone buttresses, at once workmanlike and aesthetically pleasing, painstakingly laid by Buddy Jones Contracting Services some 30 years ago.
Jones was standing on a footbridge built by Buddy Jones Contracting Services in 2001 in Wuksachi Village, a major visitor hub in Sequoia National Park. The stonework buttressing the bridge is another visually stunning example of hand-shaped granite construction, laid out by master stonemasons -- “hard to find these days,” Jones says. “There are plenty of good stone masons, but not many masters.”
Buddy and the Black Ladies at Sequoia National Park - June 2021
Jones is feeling expansive. “This is a peak experience for me -- no pun intended,” he says, addressing the friends and relatives who’ve come on today’s tour. “None of you had ever seen this park until today. In all the years when I was working and climbing in the parks, I hardly ever saw Black women. Now here you all are, sharing my inspiration.”
He pauses, tearing up, then gathers himself. “I wish my father could have seen this place,” he says, dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief. “My dad was my #1 role model in life, followed by Martin Luther King and John Muir. MLK was my inspiration when I was a young civil rights activist, and Muir was my guiding light when I fell in love with the national parks.
“I know some of my brothers and sisters think Muir was racist,” he says. “Judged by today’s standards, he may have been; after all, he was born into a society where all white people were racist. But Muir never promoted or supported a racist agenda. He educated himself, he spent time with Native Americans, he evolved, and his journey helped him move past his prejudices. I say, don’t dwell on the man’s flaws, but rather on his legacy, which you see all around you in this magnificent park.
“Every time I see a giant sequoia, I ask myself, ‘How could anyone want to cut one of these down?’ Well, if not for John Muir, there might not be any more giant sequoias. These trees are his legacy. Muir wasn’t perfect. None of us is a saint. Shall we condemn Muir because he doesn’t have a full halo? But I’ve yet to meet a hero who didn’t have flaws, my dad included. So far as being a champion for the environment, Muir’s the man. He’s my MLK of the parks.”
The last stop on the tour is the General Sherman tree, the largest sequoia yet to be identified, making it, for the time being, at least, the largest living being on Earth. A 15-minute walk -- longer for some of the group -- takes us down into a draw, the forest growing ever cooler and ever darker.
“I wish my father could have experienced this place,” Jones says, eyes raised to the forest canopy, dappled with golden late-afternoon sunlight.
Tom Valtin
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