Volunteer Spotlight

Mary Kay, Margy Verba, Jose Perez, John Dittli, Bill Bailey, Carol Wiley, Dave Willis, Louie Lujan, Todd Vogel, Matt Nelson

John Dittli

A picture is worth a thousand words.  In the wilderness advocacy business, that is a gross understatement.  Reality is that a few breathtaking pictures will often do more to convince an elected official that a wild place deserves protection than a hundred pages of ecological analyses ever could.  And this is precisely why CWHC is so fortunate to have John Dittli on its team in the Eastern Sierra.

John has been enjoying California’s rugged landscape for as long as he can remember.  He took his first backpacking trip into California’s wilds at the age of six, and by the age of sixteen he had hiked the entire length of the Sierra Nevada.    His love for the land continued into college, where he earned a degree in geography while spending his summers working as a Wilderness Climbing Ranger for the National Park Service. 

Somewhere along the way John picked up a camera to help document his adventures, and he has been shooting ever since.   What sets John’s work apart is his passion for recording the beauty of wild landscapes.  A long time wilderness advocate, he believes in developing a personal relationship with the lands he is photographing.  As John explains, “Wilderness sports photography is more than dropping models off at the top of some peak, then photographing them from the helicopter on their way down.  To create an image that evokes a sense of place the photographer and the models need to be involved in the entire backcountry experience, which usually means some sweat getting there and a few nights taking it all in.”

This great love for the land has led John to be intimately involved over the years in the California Wild Heritage Campaign’s efforts.  He sat on the committee developing a local compromise on the protection of wild places in the Eastern Sierra, and the results of his efforts there were unanimously supported by the Mono County Board of Supervisors.  His work was then introduced by Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon and Senators Feinstein and Boxer as The Eastern Sierra Rural Heritage and Economic Enhancement Act.  On top of his time on this committee, John has tirelessly written letters to elected officials and provided testimony at numerous public meetings in support of this legislation. 

Perhaps most powerfully, John has donated a great number of his images to the cause.  His photos of the Eastern Sierra have been used in testimony on the hill, and copies have been distributed to Senators and U.S. Representatives.  John has not only donated images of the the Hoover Wilderness Addition, but he also has gone to do shoots of the Amargosa River specifically because CWHC needed gripping photographs of the area.

Like we have heard many times, pictures are worth thousands of words, and so CWHC is very grateful to John Dittli – and all the other activists around California – for working to keep California’s last wild places wild.

John Dittli’s images have appeared internationally in hundreds of magazines, books, calendars, posters, and advertisements, and he has been contracted by numerous companies including North West Airlines, Nike, 3M, and Patagonia,  His work can be viewed at www.johndittli.com

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