When President Woodrow Wilson signed the act creating the National Park Service on Aug. 25, 1916, the agency was charged with protecting the natural beauty of Yosemite, Yellowstone and 34 other ”crown jewels” of the West. As the National Park Service celebrates its 75th anniversary, its domain has grown beyond the imaginings of its founders: 357 parks, monuments, seashores, rivers and preserves scattered over more than 80 million acres, the world`s greatest system of parks.
Today, the park service not only protects scenery and wildlife, but must defend such treasures as the Grand Canyon against smog and other modern encroachments, manage newer units (such as San Francisco`s Golden Gate National Recreation Area) that are more urban playgrounds than wilderness sanctuaries, and shepherd the visitors whose sheer numbers threaten the health of such parks as Yosemite and Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Last year, the parks tallied a record 251 million visits, and park service officials expect even more company this year as post-war events in the Persian Gulf and a lingering recession prompt vacationers to stay closer to home.
If you are one of the thousands who are heading for national parks this year, we have a few suggestions from the writers and photographers who have devoted much of their lives to chronicling the splendors of the American landscape. Their choices surprised us; some spoke of hidden or rare places, such as New Mexico`s El Morro National Monument or Alaska`s Koyukuk Wild River, while others, including Wallace Stegner and David Muench, found private paradises amid big parks such as Oregon`s Crater Lake and Maine`s Acadia.
Their joy in a place was palpable, whether their visit was the first or the 50th. These poets of the land speak for all of us whose love for the national parks, and the heritage they embody, grows more passionate each year. In 1872, Yellowstone was named the first national park, and in the decades that followed, parks were chosen as outstanding examples of the natural splendors of the American West. Wallace Stegner, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the novel ”Angle of Repose” and of many volumes of Western history, considers Crater Lake National Park in southwest Oregon, established in 1915, a classic.
”People miss out on Crater Lake,” Stegner says. ”They forget about it.”
Not only is Crater Lake off the interstate highway, but its shores are shrouded in the deep snows of the Cascade Range for eight months of the year, accessible only on skis or snowshoes. Stegner said earlier this year, ”My granddaughter just came back from skiing there and was lyrical about it.”
His granddaughter`s lyricism is well-founded; the 1,900-foot-deep lake, result of a violent eruption that leveled Mt. Mazama almost 7,000 years ago, glows an eerie blue. Even in midsummer the Rim Road, which offers stunning views of the lake, feels uncrowded, and Stegner praises the trails that wind through the park`s cathedral-like forests.
”There`s a kind of mystery about that park. It`s very quiet and moody-profound. The lake is very blue, and that thing is deep; you have the sense of it going clear through to China.”
Acadia National Park is the only national park on the rocky New England coast, and on summer days the roads on Mt. Desert Island are packed with vacationers.
It`s not the sort of place you`d expect to find New York writer John McPhee, who traveled most recently among the pirates of Ecuador for his book
”Waiting for a Ship.” But in the more secluded corners of Acadia, he finds a placid retreat from his New Jersey home. ”It`s the most beautiful coast you ever saw,” McPhee says. ”It`s got fiords, deep penetrating bays, and the spruce go right to the water.”
To escape the crowds, McPhee heads off to the carriage trails through the woods, built by industrialists who vacationed on the island at the turn of the century.
”It`s a favorite place of mine to run, to ski, to hike,” he says.
McPhee, whose many books on geology include ”Rising from the Plains,”
loves the rough face of the Schoodic Peninsula, where rocks still bear the scars of glaciers that carved the land centuries ago. ”It`s a hell of a scene,” he says.
Ancestral traces
Many park units were created not to protect natural history, but to preserve the marks of human history on the landscape.
Stewart Udall, historian and secretary of the interior in the administrations of Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, treasures El Morro National Monument, a sandstone cliff in a remote area of central New Mexico that stands along the route of the first Spanish explorers.
”There`s a huge butte, a `castle,` ” says Udall, author of ”To the Inland Empire.” ”On the wall is an artifact, the oldest European signature artifact in the U.S. Juan de Onate wrote it in 1605.”
Onate`s inscription was to the point: ”Passed by here the Governor Don Juan de Onate, from the discovery of the Sea of the South on the 16th of April 1605.” Travelers who followed left their own marks, first in Spanish, then English, through the late 1800s; the rock bears more than 1,000 testimonials. Udall has called the rock ”a unique register of Western history.” He adds,
”It`s a magic place.”
In Iowa lies an even older memorial to the work of human hands.
”A pretty well-kept secret and a great place for the whole family is Effigy Mounds National Monument,” says John Madson, wildlife biologist and writer whose works include ”Where the Sky Began: Land of the Tall Grass Prairie.”
The Woodland-Hopewell Indians, skilled artisans, built Effigy`s 191 animal-shaped burial mounds out of soil between 600 and 1300 A.D. The flying birds and marching bears remain clearly visible today; one bear is 137 feet long.
To Madson, there`s more to the mounds than the resting places of prominent people.
”What gets to me is something one of the rangers pointed out,” Madson says. ”Look at all the labor that was involved in carrying all the dirt up from below by the basketful. And look at all the care that went into designing the mounds. It transcends mysticism, religion and politics of a people. It impinges on love and respect for those who died.”
Madson also loves ”the gorgeous Mississippi River overlooks from the big, high headlands and stone cliffs. It`s beautiful sitting there with a picnic, looking down on the long green mounds, overgrown with Indian pipeweed and wild strawberries.”
Lowell National Historical Park is a monument to a far more recent endeavor: the Industrial Revolution.
Alston Chase, author of ”Playing God in Yellowstone Park,” a critique of park service management of that hallowed park, praises the service`s resurrection of Lowell, Mass., the nation`s first planned industrial community.
”My father grew up in Lowell,” Chase says. ”I remember it as a nearly dead mill town. But the Lowell National Historical Park is a spectacular example of urban renewal. The whole downtown has been made a national park. In the 19th Century it was known as the Venice of America. You can take a trip on the canal boats, and they`ve rebuilt the antique trolley system.
”In America, where so many cities are dying, this park is the reverse. I think it represents the national park of the future.
Remembrance of battles
Alarmed by a nearly successful effort last year to turn part of the Civil War battlefield at Manassas, Va., into a shopping mall, the National Park Service is escalating efforts to protect the many historically significant battlefield sites that remain in private hands.
But Shelby Foote, the Tennessee historian and author of ”The Civil War:
A Narrative” who became a familiar face to 38.9 million people in the epic Public Broadcasting Service series on the war, says he`s lucky.
Shiloh National Military Park in southern Tennessee, close to his heart and home, is the best preserved of all Civil War sites. The gentle green fields stand as they did just before the two April days in 1862, when there were almost 25,000 casualties in one of the war`s bloodiest battles.
”Shiloh really has not changed,” Foote says. ”When I go there, I feel like I own it. It`s one of the things you get out of writing, if you think you`re writing well; you do feel a sense of proprietorship. But the truth is, it`s a part of every American citizen.
”I like to go to the peach orchard where Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston was shot. I like to go to the stump where he died. I like to go where Gen. Sherman couldn`t sleep because of the rain. It`s still all there.”
For many people, the Academy Award-winning film ”Dances with Wolves”
brought to life the tragic clash between the Native Americans and the white settlers.
The park service has custody of many battle sites of the 19th Century Indian wars, and Barry Lopez, naturalist and author of the prize-winning
”Arctic Dreams,” is haunted by Big Hole National Battlefield, 10 miles west of Wisdom, Mont.
Early on an August morning in 1877, federal troops attacked the Nez Perce Indians camped in the little sagebrush-dotted valley of the Big Hole River. The Nez Perce were surprised; they thought they had left the war behind them in Idaho, and were cutting teepee poles for an extended stay. Instead, the battle at the Big Hole drove the Nez Perce south into further warfare and harsh exile. Lopez visited the battlefield just before Christmas.
”I was there on a bitter cold day in December. It was overcast; there was a light snow falling. It was in the neighborhood of 15 degrees. The visitors center was closed. Somebody had left a loudspeaker on, with Christmas carols playing. It was the worst kind of irony.”
Precious remnants
Michael Frome has spent the better part of his life chronicling the national parks; the 25th edition of his ”National Park Guide”(Prentice Hall, $14.95) just came off the press.
”I never met a national park I didn`t like,” Frome says.
He met Big Cypress National Preserve, directly north of Everglades National Park in Florida, just last spring. Big Cypress was established in 1974 to help protect the Everglades` threatened water supply, but Frome says it is a worthy addition to the system in its own right, harboring Indian ruins and endangered species such as the Florida panther and the manatee.
Big Cypress also gives Frome something the swampy Everglades can`t:
trails. ”In Big Cypress I can walk on the ground. I see endangered species of plants. I can see pelicans and I can see spoonbills. I don`t see the panthers, but I know they`re in there and that I`m sharing the space with them, sharing remains of the original Florida. I also feel like I`m in a glorious green mansion filled with tropical grasses, trees and plants.
”Fifty years ago this was all one inaccessible land of mystery, from Lake Okeechobee south to Florida Bay,” Frome says. ”Now, because of the extensive development and population growth, the National Park Service protects these vestiges of the original America.”
The wild lands
If the Everglades and other parks are threatened by development nearby, others remain triumphantly wild. Fully two-thirds of the park system`s 80 million acres lie in Alaska. Aside from Denali National Park, which faces an onslaught of tour buses each summer, the 49th state`s parks and preserves remain isolated, welcoming only those intrepid enough to charter a float plane, kayak a river or walk the tundra.
Mardy Murie, author of ”Two in the Far North” and ”Island Between,”
never let the lack of a visitor center stop her. The first female graduate of the University of Alaska, Murie had just turned 22 in August 1924, when she set off up the Koyukuk River, now a protected wild river and part of Gates of the Arctic National Park, with her new husband, the legendary wildlife biologist Olaus Murie.
”I spent my honeymoon on the Koyukuk,” Murie recalls. ”Olaus and I were married at Anvik on the Yukon at 3 a.m. We were waiting for the little steamer to come down the Koyukuk. It`s a wonderful river to travel on,” she says, recalling how the river`s channels braid their way through gravel beaches and flower-bright tundra that remain unchanged today. ”It`s a lovely place and there`s nothing dangerous about it.”
Landscape photographer David Muench, whose many books include ”Nature`s America” and ”Eternal Desert,” has been tramping the backcountry with his cameras for two decades. Still, he gets excited when he steers his 4-wheel-drive truck toward Big Bend National Park, where the Chihuahuan Desert, the Chisos Mountains and the Rio Grande River converge in an extravagant desert wilderness 300 miles southeast of El Paso.
”Every day something changes,” says Muench, who visited Big Bend most recently in March. ”There were things blooming, but it was totally dry:
yuccas at 3,000 feet, and the cactus were beginning to bloom. The bluebonnets were in full bloom in some of the gullies.
”The plant life is a mix-there are aspen on the peaks in the Chisos, and even some pines up in the canyons on the South Rim. You have all different levels of the desert community, plus the river- it defines what Big Bend is. It`s photographer`s heaven,” Muench says. ”I spend four or five days there tuning into the lighting and I can`t even touch it.”
Few people think of California as a wilderness state, but photographer, writer and mountaineer Galen Rowell, whose works include ”Yosemite” and ”My Tibet,” declares that some of the world`s grandest wild lands lie along California`s John Muir Trail, 211 miles long and unbroken by a single road.
”The most spectacular area on the trail, though, is King`s Canyon and Sequoia National Parks, stretching along the crest of the High Sierra,”
Rowell says. ”The trail ends on top of Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the Lower 48.”
Rowell has climbed in the great mountain ranges of the world, from the Alps to the Himalayas. But, he says, ”from Mt. Whitney you can see more diversity. In the distance is Death Valley National Park. Straight down is Owens Valley, the deepest valley in the U.S. On the other side of the valley are the bristlecone pines of the White Mountains, the world`s oldest living things. Look west and you`ll see snow on the mountains well into the summer.” Although California has become the most populous state in the nation, Rowell has discovered that the hand of man has even less influence on King`s Canyon and Sequoia than it did in the past. He can prove it, too. His mother hiked the entire Muir Trail in the 1920s and his aunt`s photo of a King`s Canyon meadow, taken back then, shows the grass less lush than when Rowell photographed it a few years ago. He says, with great satisfaction, ”Some mountain meadows are in better shape than they were in John Muir`s day.”
