6   FROM THE WAR TO DIRECTOR WIRTH

As the decade of the 1930s closed, the national park wilderness situation was confused. On the one hand, Park Service policy was, as expressed by Thomas Vint, that there were to be no lines drawn around wilderness in the national parks. The service would limit development to what its planners saw as essential for meeting the mandates of the National Park Act and legislation establishing each park. The rest of the land in national parks would be “wilderness.” On the other hand, planners working on new parks were discussing wilderness in their plans for management and development. There was no contradiction in this necessarily, but it reveals how far the Park Service was from resolving its collective mind about wilderness. In the decades of the 1940s through the 1960s the agency would continue to tentatively feel its way toward a stance on the wilderness issue.

Events well beyond park boundaries greatly influenced the path the Park Service followed in this search in the 1940s. Foremost among them was World War II, which effectively stopped all work on national park and wilderness issues for six years. Visits to parks were curtailed by urgent war work and the concentration of the nation's resources on the war effort. Park Service budgets and personnel declined sharply. National Park Service headquarters was moved to Chicago, indicating how far from the center of the nation's agenda national park matters were at this time. Then, at the end of the war, people returned to national parks in rapidly growing numbers. A park system that had been neglected for many years found itself inundated with visitors and straining to meet the demands they made upon the park system's human and physical resources. For a time Park Service leaders were unable to respond satisfactorily to this challenge. Then, in the mid-1950s, they launched a politically savvy and well-funded effort, which they called Mission 66, to repair and construct park infrastructure. These challenges were on a scale unimagined by earlier generations of Park Service leaders, but so were the resources channeled their way in Mission 66.

The conservation movement shrank to virtual dormancy during the war and, like the Park Service, recovered slowly afterward. The generation of conservation leaders too old to fight or otherwise contribute directly to the war effort kept the conservation fires banked. They fought commercial invaders who, under the guise of patriotism, attempted to log, mine, and otherwise gain long-sought access to pristine parklands. Together the Park Service and conservationists were largely successful in protecting the wilderness parks. After the war conservationists rebuilt their organizations and responded to familiar and new threats to parks and wilderness. This response, catalyzed and unified by a struggle to keep dams out of the national park system (Hetch Hetchy's fate still sharp in their memories), resulted in the growth of a conservation movement stronger, more energized, and more powerful than it had been before the war. Gradually its focus shifted to the issue of wilderness, and conservationists set their sights on achieving a level of protection for wilderness that was not provided, in their view, by discretionary policies of the Forest Service and the National Park Service. A long and epic legislative struggle for a wilderness bill was launched at precisely the same time the National Park Service won the congressional support it needed to redevelop the national parks and respond to the rapidly growing pressures of postwar America. Mission 66 and the drive for the wilderness bill began in 1956, and both efforts were to culminate in the mid-1960s.

SETTING UP THE NEW “WILDERNESS PARKS”

Wilderness parks were, as described earlier, authorized or established in the 1930s. Two meetings convened before the war, one involving Olympic National Park and the other Kings Canyon National Park, brought up issues involving wilderness that would emerge in the postwar period. One meeting, in July 1938, drew up a General Statement of Controlling Development Policies for Olympic National Park. Secretary Ickes was present at part of this meeting before relinquishing his seat to his representative, Irving Brant. Others present were Park Service officials, biologist Lowell Sumner among them. The meeting resulted in the incorporation of a powerful prewar wilderness policy statement into a national park master plan.

The master plan opened with a statement of the three reasons the park was created, which were to preserve the virgin rainforest, protect the Roosevelt elk, and provide “protection of one of the finest remaining scenic wilderness areas of the nation, with emphasis on maintenance of wilderness conditions for the benefit of future generations.”1 Policies guiding the master plan were then enumerated. No new roads would be built into the park. Olympic would be a “trail park” with many miles of good trails but with areas totally free of trails “so the youths of future generations too may exercise their ‘sense of direction’ … in traveling cross country where only elk and deer trails now are found.” Accommodations would not be constructed inside the park, and existing resorts inside park boundaries would be eliminated as opportunity for their purchase might allow. The Park Service would work with other agencies to maintain natural conditions in the management of forests and wildlife, for “within the national park all native species have a proper place in the national picture, and should not be disturbed where it is necessary for essential development or essential protection.”² There was talk of constructing cabins in the wilderness to house trail crews, but the planners thought such cabins a bad idea. “Few things can be more destructive to wilderness qualities in a forested park than to regularly encounter … cabins along trails when traveling on foot or horseback.” Cabins, they wrote, citing a “ruling of the Director in another case,” had often been the beginning of development in national parks. Tents would be preferable, the director had stated, because they can “be located from time to time where the work requires, and leave no permanent scar in the wilderness when moved.”³

This 1938 meeting and the subsequent Olympic National Park master plan put meat on the bones of Secretary Ickes's idea of a wilderness national park. The plan was specific and attacked directly the issues of road building and resort development that had so long bothered those who believed there had been too much emphasis in park management on accommodating automobile-oriented tourism. While Ickes had promoted the general idea, Park Service planners and even the director were moving toward defining precisely how a wilderness park would be managed. This was not inconsistent with Vint's approach of considering land not developed as wilderness. It was simply an assertion that the way to more wilderness was less development. The Olympic plan was, however, the first clear indication of how an overtly wilderness park might be designed and managed.

The Kings Canyon meeting was convened on March 12, 1940, in the Park Service's San Francisco regional office. Attending were Sierra Club board members and other conservationists (including Newton B. Drury, soon to assume directorship of the Park Service), park superintendents, and regional Park Service officials. The first topic discussed was planning for development of the new park. With the exception of the fifty-year-old General Grant area, the new park was wild. At issue was how far the road in the South Fork of the Kings River should be extended beyond its current terminus at Cedar Grove. Nearly everyone present agreed that the ideal was the least intrusion upon the wilderness character of the area. Promises had earlier been made to local interests to reduce their opposition to the park proposal; they had been told they would be guaranteed access. The issue of where the road should end involved keeping those promises. Where should campgrounds and ranger stations be located? What should be the role of the Forest Service (which managed the lower valley of the South Fork, including Cedar Grove) and the Park Service in the area?

Discussion ranged across these issues, and there was disagreement. The Sierra Club's William Colby favored extending the road far enough so that as many people as possible could experience the highly scenic canyon, one of the principal attractions of the new park. He invoked John Muir in his argument, commenting that Muir had been farsighted enough to realize that concessions had to be made to allow most visitors to see the valley. The payoff would be, as Muir had argued forty years earlier, that visitors would appreciate both the experience of the valley and the need to protect it as a park. Colby advocated that the road go beyond the present terminus and end near Copper Creek, which is what finally came to pass. Other members of the Sierra Club, who thought Muir's arguments were no longer relevant in an era of significantly increasing visitation to most national parks, disagreed with Colby. The less road building, this faction thought, the better.

The Park Service's Harold Bryant, head of the Branch of Research and Information at this late stage of his long career, saw the mandated wilderness of the new park as an opportunity. The minutes of the meeting described his thoughts.

He brought out the fact that the Park Service is facing something rather new in the development of parks, for the Kings Canyon is the third park that has been created with the main idea behind it of making it a wilderness park. He mentioned Isle Royale, the only park with no roads at all; Olympic National Park where it is desired to have no roads through it and to consider only roads at the edge of the park which would give some access into the park; and now the Kings Canyon National Park. Dr. Bryant said he felt it was up to the Park Service to show that they know how to develop a wilderness park where people can find solitude and quiet and gain inspiration, away from crowds of people. He stated … that we should move slowly and study the problem and not start out as in other parks with the sole view of getting development started. He said he would like to have us proceed cautiously enough to see if we can't do something different.4

Bryant's remarks summarize well the park wilderness situation at this point in the story. The agency had moved (as at Isle Royale) or been moved (as at Olympic) to emphasize the wilderness values of new parks. The temptation to “get development started” in new parks was very much present, but strong voices within the agency, like Bryant, urged caution and a new approach.

The March meeting did not resolve the issue of where the road should end; not until 1946 was Copper Creek decided upon as the terminus. Debate continued not only on the road issue but also on where in the valley of the South Fork it should be located. The Sierra Club pressed for the least intrusive road, and the Park Service suffered internal division over the issue. In the end, however, pressure from the Sierra Club, aided by the opinion of eminent landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (at the time a Sierra Club vice president), led to a decision to follow the path of least intrusive road development. The struggle over development at Kings Canyon would continue for decades, but the concerns of Bryant from within the Park Service and Olmsted from outside assured that the interest of wilderness preservation would be at the forefront of all development discussions.⁵

Newton Drury did not have much to say at the March 1940 meeting about Kings Canyon development, but he no doubt listened carefully. Five months after this meeting he became director of the National Park Service, succeeding Arno Cammerer, who resigned for health reasons. Drury, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley like Mather and Albright, was not a “Mather man” as directors Albright and Cammerer had been. They had served under Mather and generally embraced his philosophy and approach to building the national park system. Drury had never been in the Park Service. Leader of the Save-the-Redwoods League for two decades, he had served as executive officer of the California State Park Commission since 1929 and in that role proved himself an able administrator. He had been a National Park Service critic at times, was an honorary life member of the Sierra Club, and was a wilderness preservationist. Historian Donald Swain notes that Ickes, who had tried to recruit Drury to the post in 1933, had high hopes for the new director. “To Ickes, Drury held out the hope of new vigor in the Park Service bureaucracy and he symbolized the importance of wilderness preservation.”6

DRURY AND THE WAR YEARS

When Drury became director in August 1940, the National Park Service was flourishing. The appropriations that had grown so much as a consequence of New Deal programs remained generous. National Park Service influence in the broad field of outdoor recreation was at its peak. Roads, trails, fire lookouts, and other construction projects were under way in many park system units. Emergency relief funds were still available and CCC crews, while waning, were still at work in the parks. The major new parks at Olympic and Kings Canyon were being organized. Isle Royale National Park was finally established in 1940, land acquisition there was proceeding well, and establishment of Mammoth Cave National Park was imminent. Secretary Ickes's choice was at the helm, and the National Park Service seemed to have prevailed in at least some of its battles with the Forest Service. Drury was heading up a strong and maturing land management agency that, while it still faced many challenges, seemed assured of long-term survival and the favor of a growing constituency. Then, just over a year after Drury assumed the directorship, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the United States entered World War II, and National Park Service fortunes changed rapidly.

In 1941, before the bombs and torpedoes did their deadly work in Hawaii, more visitors than ever, numbering 21 million, entered national parks. The shift of priorities to war led Congress to cut 1942 appropriations to the Park Service in half. Visitation that year dropped to half of what it had been in 1941 and continued down throughout the war years. All construction and land acquisition stopped. National Park Service staff, which had been developing experience, expertise, and esprit de corps for two decades, was decimated by enlistment in the military and severe budget reductions. Full-time appointments dropped between June 1942 and June 1943 from 4,510 to 1,974.⁷ To gain space needed for war work, National Park Service headquarters was moved from Washington to Chicago in 1942 and would not be returned to the nation's capital until 1947.

Drury and his skeleton crew carried on in the face of all this. Master planning continued, and the first round of master plans for all 166 units of the park system was completed in 1942. Supported by conservation groups, which had also shrunk in wartime, Drury and Ickes fought to keep commercial interests from capitalizing on park resources. Loggers, miners, and stockmen maneuvered to get at the resources that park status had denied them. Their motives were cloaked liberally in the rhetoric of national need and patriotism, but they made few incursions despite constant pressure applied to the weakened Park Service. Long-simmering issues, such as Albright's goal of bringing Jackson Hole into Grand Teton National Park, heated up occasionally. When President Roosevelt invoked the Antiquities Act to proclaim Jackson Hole National Monument in March, 1943, congressional ire was piqued and Drury had a political fight to manage. John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had been acquiring Jackson Hole land for two decades with the idea of donating it to the federal government for the park, threatened to sell the land if the government would not accept it. This forced a reluctant Roosevelt, urged on by Ickes, to act. The Park Service, off in the political hinterlands of Chicago, did not relish being thrust into such a fight, but the stakes were high. Thus occasionally, during the war years, did national park issues capture presidential and national attention, if only briefly.

The general issue of wilderness also faded into the background of American consciousness during wartime, but there was some activity among those who kept a wilderness watch during this period. The question of what to do about wilderness in national parks remained unresolved in master planning. A master planning conference on Kings Canyon was held in the Washington office of the Park Service in July 1941. Director Drury told the group that “many of the basic policies of the Service are on trial in Kings Canyon National Park.” One issue was maintaining the park as a “strictly wilderness area.” Drury said he did “not like the implications associated with use of the term ‘wilderness park’ because it places the Service in a position where it must justify other parks more extensively developed.” He wanted the group to come up with a clear statement as to “how far we can go in developing the park and still carry out this primary obligation” of preserving wilderness values.8 Drury's sympathies were with wilderness preservation, but as this meeting indicates, even he was uncertain about how wilderness should be manifest in park planning and management. When the Kings Canyon Master Plan was completed, wilderness designation was present, if in a confusing way. Under “land use” in the “Development Outline” one finds “Classification of Areas,” the first category of which is “primitive class” and within which falls “Wilderness Area.” Then the plan stipulates that the majority of the park is designated as a “Primeval Wilderness Area, without roads; and characterized by primitive conditions of transportation.” Yet on the maps of the plan, no wilderness designation is outlined. Park Service policies may, in Drury's mind, have been on trial, but treatment of wilderness in this and other master plans of this period did little to clarify National Park Service wilderness policy at this point.9 The policy of keeping wilderness “zones” vague and indistinct continued.

Robert Sterling Yard, from his position as president and permanent secretary of The Wilderness Society, continued to press the Park Service and Forest Service about their wilderness plans and designations. He wanted clarification of definitions, and he continued the campaign for a system of “national primeval parks” that had been championed by the National Parks Association. (He also continued as editor of the now occasional National Parks published by the NPA.) In July 1940 he asked Director Cammerer to clarify the National Park Service definition of wilderness and to provide a list of wilderness areas in national parks and monuments. He was not satisfied with Cammerer's reply that the Park Service measured its wilderness by subtracting the gross area of its roads from the total areas of the park and calling the rest wilderness as he interpreted Vint's position. In 1941 Yard queried Drury on the same issue and, in the director's absence from his office, received a reply from his administrative assistant that Yard must be asking about “Research Reserves.” The assistant knew that there were such reserves but did not know how many there were.¹⁰

Drury patiently responded to Yard's continuous stream of requests and in February 1943 penned a letter to Yard, which is the clearest statement during the war of the director's views on national park wilderness. Yard had in January written an exasperated letter that closed, “I am hoping that some day the Park Service will develop Wilderness Areas of its own.”¹¹ In his response to this letter, Drury's opening comment echoed Cammerer's earlier statement. “Roadless areas and Wilderness areas within National Parks can only be determined by the size of the Park and the amount of area not now developed. The Parks in reality are divided into two zones, developed areas and undeveloped areas.” There are no plans, Drury continued, to expand developed areas. “Briefly stated, the future development program occupies the same ground that is occupied by existing facilities. No further trespass into the wild is necessary.”¹²

Drury admitted in this letter the difficulty of saying where exactly a wilderness boundary might be drawn along an existing road or park boundary. But, he asked rhetorically, what difference would drawing such a line make? “What regulations will apply to the Wilderness area that does [sic] not apply to the remaining undeveloped park land?” Yard would have appreciated an answer to this question. Drury then asked, “Shouldn't its classification as National Park land be the best protection it can have?” The reason Yard was pressing the issue was, of course, that while he might agree that such classification should be the best protection, he did not believe that it was. Drury continued, arguing that compared with other public lands (such as national forests), national parks provided the highest level of protection of natural conditions. Some encroachments, such as trails, patrol cabins, and “facilities for fire detection and fire fighting are necessary.” The National Park Service must weigh the risk of “larger scars by fire” with encroachment on wilderness. Would Yard have excluded from wilderness classification all areas encroached upon by such necessary development? Drury concluded his letter by admitting that there were many such issues, but in the end he and his Park Service believed that “we must take the parks as they are and attempt no further encroachment on the natural, but rather work toward retrenchment.” This was the policy, and he could see no point in designating “a tract within a tract” as wilderness. He closed with the statement, “It is the hope of the National Park Service that National Park status is the safest classification wild land can attain for its protection in a natural condition for future generations.”13

Thus did the most preservation-oriented director of the Park Service to this point (and perhaps since) attempt to lay to rest the issue of special designation of wilderness in national parks. No response from Yard is extant, but he probably found Drury's comments both reassuring and troubling. The war was on, and that reduced the threat that the Park Service would develop its parks for additional recreational use. It simply lacked the resources to develop at all. Yard undoubtedly believed that Drury was sincere, but he had been around long enough to know that Park Service directors come and go. Would the next director stay with the policy on development as Drury described it? Yard was nearing the end of his long career. He was eighty-two years old and seemed obsessed with the idea of a special system of “primeval parks.” Drury hoped he could quiet and reassure the increasingly strident Yard, and perhaps he succeeded. On the other hand, Yard may have quieted down because he was old, tired, and approaching the end of his life. He died in 1945.

Yard's death led to a leadership decision for The Wilderness Society that was to have profound consequences for the wilderness movement in general. To this point in its history the society had employed a single person in the roles of president and executive officer, and this had been Yard. He had done a good job in the relatively slow period of the war, but as the conflict seemed to be nearing its end, the society's council decided it would need more resources to address its goals. Two men, Olaus Murie and Howard Zahniser, were selected to staff and lead the organization. Murie would work, as director and later president, from his home in Moose, Wyoming, while Zahniser, as executive secretary and editor of The Living Wilderness, would oversee action in Washington, DC. Zahniser would tend to administrative matters and run the society's day-to-day operation. Both men had worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service and its predecessor, the Biological Survey, Murie as a field biologist and Zahniser as a writer and editor. Murie was a consummate outdoorsman who had spent years in trying field conditions in Alaska and the West. Zahniser was urbane, an intellectual far more at home on Capitol Hill than in wilderness. Both men were independent, Murie retarding his career by fighting his Biological Survey superiors over its predator policies and Zahniser expressing ideas considered radical by many at the time. Zahniser thought modern man's manipulative and destructive behavior toward nature, epitomized by development and use of the atomic bomb, demanded some response in general and from him. “All of us can unite in a determination to do our best to understand the cosmos we now perceive before we shatter its whole into disintegrating atoms,” he had once written.14 Murie and Zahniser decided they could do the most good by taking up and building on the work of Bob Marshall and Robert Sterling Yard. They thought The Wilderness Society could lead what would likely be a long struggle for legislative protection of wilderness. They could, in this way, address threats to the cosmos.

Under its new leadership The Wilderness Society continued to focus on immediate challenges to wilderness in both national parks and forests. Murie wrote to council member Robert Griggs in 1945 that “preservation of Wilderness values is very closely akin to preservation of values in national parks. It so happens one type is largely in national forests, the other in national parks. And The Wilderness Society has certainly concerned itself with national park problems.”¹⁵ Murie was writing to Griggs about the possibility of joining forces, perhaps even uniting into a single organization, with the National Parks Association. He anticipated a need to focus on both forest and park wilderness. The two groups might work together more effectively as one, with a division of labor between park and forest issues. Ultimately they decided to remain separate but to work closely together. For a time they worked out of the same offices. Murie and Zahniser made increased cooperation with other conservation groups a major goal and achieved close relations with the Sierra Club and the National Parks Association. The two Washington-based groups joined the still California-focused Sierra Club in a successful effort to save from ski resort development the San Gorgonio Primitive Area in the San Bernadino National Forest of southern California. They worked together on the society's project of assisting groups in the upper Midwest who were fighting to keep roads and resorts out of Minnesota's Quetico-Superior wilderness. Zahniser and Charles Woodbury of the National Park Association convened a meeting at Mammoth Cave National Park with the aim of unifying the efforts of conservation organizations. This postwar generation of conservation leaders saw a need for unity. Historian Stephen Fox describes this as “the application to politics of an ecological imperative: to see each issue in context, to emphasize cooperation and interrelatedness.”16

CHALLENGES AFTER THE WAR

As the war ended, people returned to the national parks. Visitation in 1944 was 7.4 million, rose to 8.5 million in 1945, 21.7 million in 1946, and went up steadily each year, reaching 46 million in 1954.¹⁷ These visitors found parks poorly staffed and roads and facilities in disrepair. Harold Ickes was not happy in the Truman administration and was succeeded at Interior by Julius Krug. In April 1946 the National Parks Association's Devereaux Butcher visited the new secretary and reported that Krug was most interested in increasing travel to national parks and in particular in making them more accessible to low-income people than they had generally been before the war. Did this portend development that might damage the “primeval” parks? The watchdogs would have to be vigilant.¹⁸ Drury, in his annual reports and annual appropriations requests, made the case for increased funding of his strapped agency, but Congress, worried about war debt, modestly and inadequately increased appropriations to the National Park Service. Despite Secretary Krug's orientation to development, this lack of funds meant that, at least for a time, the Park Service would not be pushing any new projects into wilderness areas.

Conservationists and the Park Service were confronted by other challenges in this postwar period. One was a proposal to open the entire Olympic park to logging. When that proved unattainable, timber interests tried to remove some of the most valuable timbered areas from the park. A proposal was floated to reduce the size of Joshua Tree National Monument to allow mining. The killing of wolves was advanced as a way to resolve a long-simmering conflict at Mount McKinley National Park over wolf predation on Dall sheep. Two growing threats of special concern were a push by resource interests, especially stockmen, for less federal control of land in the West and plans for dams that would affect national parks. Of the first threat writer Bernard DeVoto—who branded the whole initiative a “land grab”—wrote in 1947:

This year, possibly counting on the postwar revulsion against government control to favor their efforts, some of them are launching a new and particularly vigorous attack. If they should manage to breach the policy that has kept the parks inviolate, one may anticipate the ultimate destruction of the parks, both as wilderness reserves and as the “pleasuring grounds” which the act of Congress that set aside the first one called them.19

Ultimately this threat, which was greatest to national forests, would, with DeVoto's help, be thwarted, but not before it raised considerable anxiety among conservationists.

The threat of the dams was not so quickly blunted. Director Drury told the National Parks Association in April 1946 that “the present craze for dam building constitutes a very grave threat to the national park system.”²⁰ The Glacier View Dam in Montana threatened Glacier National Park. The Army Corps of Engineers proposed a dam in Kentucky that would flood caverns at Mammoth Cave. The Army Corps had also begun a flood control project in south Florida that would divert water necessary to maintain the aquatic environment of the Everglades. In the West, the Bureau of Reclamation had big plans for the Colorado River and its tributaries, plans that were a potential threat to many National Park System units. The story of this dam threat has been thoroughly told and will not be detailed here, but it must be mentioned because of the profound effects it would have on the conservation movement and thus on the future of wilderness and national parks.²¹

Ironically, reservoirs created when dams were built had become part of the national park system. The Park Service had taken over management of Lake Mead behind Boulder Dam in the 1930s and had taken on recreation planning and ultimately management of the lake created by Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State. It agreed to survey the recreational potential of reservoirs that would be created by the Bureau of Reclamation's Colorado River Basin Project. Drury thought such work threatened the mission of his agency and tried to take the National Park Service out of the reservoir recreation business but lost the policy debate. Richard Sellars has described Drury's predicament:

The Park Service tie to river basin studies and reservoir management put it, as Drury stated it, in an “equivocal” policy and philosophical position. Although committed to protecting the park's scenic landscapes from intrusions such as dams, the Service, through its reservoir work, lent support to the inundation of scenic canyons and valleys throughout the West. Moreover, Drury's fears that reservoir recreation commitments would make the national park system more vulnerable foreshadowed the troubles that arose when the expansive dam-building programs of the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers began to threaten established units of the national park system.22

As the decade of the 1940s drew to its end, the dam threat grew ever more serious.

THE DRIVE FOR A NATIONAL WILDERNESS POLICY BEGINS

Despite all the immediate threats to parks and wilderness, Howard Zahniser was thinking long term. In 1946 he issued his first call for “wilderness zoning” for parts of wild America. He worked with The Wilderness Society stalwart Benton MacKaye to draft legislation that would involve congressional appropriations to agencies for the acquisition of land to be protected as wilderness. The bill was never introduced, but the effort gave Zahniser experience in drafting wilderness legislation.²³ In June 1948 Zahniser engineered a request from a congressional committee chairman to the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress for a study of America's wilderness needs. The Reference Service sent questionnaires to federal agencies, states, and conservation organizations. The Park Service received one and Director Drury responded in late November.

Drury first noted that The Wilderness Society defined wilderness as “areas retained in their primeval environment or influence, or … areas remaining free from routes which can be used for mechanized transportation.” National parks and monuments “of considerable size” would qualify as wilderness under the first part of this definition, in Drury's view, but many would be disqualified by the second part because there were roads within their boundaries. Even so, “they would contain many large wilderness areas which are not crossed by roads.” With this qualifier, Drury addressed the first question, which asked for the agency's definition of wilderness:

This Service has no official definition of “Wilderness Area.” The Wilderness Society's definition, however, seems acceptable. Wilderness areas in the National Park System are not designated as such, but the establishment of national parks and monuments preserves wilderness conditions.²⁴

Throughout his response Drury took the position that the questions were not really applicable to the Park Service, since it had no designated wilderness, but he answered them and gave a telling response to the question, “Are there any suggestions you would care to make as to an over-all National Wilderness Area Policy?” Drury wrote:

The National Park Service has no particular suggestions to make regarding an over-all national wilderness area policy except that it believes that the few remaining areas in the United States qualifying for such status should be preserved and that they should be preserved inviolate by Congressional mandate rather than by administrative decision.25

Drury's suggestion might be read several ways. He may have been thinking of Forest Service primitive areas, which could be made and unmade by “administrative decision” and had been many times. This seems the most likely explanation of his point, since the Park Service continued to be in conflict with the Forest Service over areas in national forests they thought should be classified by Congress as parks. But he might also have been thinking of his own agency, where administrative decisions had in the past developed the wilderness. Perhaps he recognized that one way to assure wilderness in parks was to mandate that they be wilderness parks, as at Olympic and Kings Canyon. Whatever he was thinking, his was a strong pro-wilderness statement.

The Forest Service, in its response, explained its system and said it had no plans for additional wilderness areas. It replied to the question about national wilderness policy that it could take no position on the matter without further study. In its view, the secretary of agriculture should decide important land use issues, such as wilderness designation of national forests, and some additional legislation might help make that possible. Its response was far less supportive of a national wilderness policy than the Park Service seemed to be.

The survey found respondents divided on the need for legislation to implement a national policy and opinions ranged widely as to what wilderness policy should be.²⁶ Nevertheless it was useful to Zahniser and his colleagues in that it revealed significant support for a national wilderness policy. Of course it also revealed strong differences of opinion about what specific path should be taken to better protect America's remaining roadless areas in national forests, parks, and other jurisdictions. The upshot of this study was, however, that it “set the stage for Zahniser's first detailed proposal for comprehensive federal wilderness legislation.”²⁷

Before the Library of Congress study was released, the Sierra Club convened the first of a series of conferences on wilderness that would be held biennially until 1969. The idea for this first conference came from Norman Livermore, a high-Sierra packer and Sierra Club director, who thought the Sierra Club should lead in formulating wilderness management policy for the high Sierra. These conferences would bring agency managers together with conservationists and be a principal forum for discussion of wilderness through the critical early years of wilderness legislation and later creation of the National Wilderness Preservation System. The first conference marked the beginning of an inclusive discussion of wilderness management. Its focus was not on wilderness philosophy or legislation but on wilderness recreation and management of the wilderness resource. Since the Park Service was the overseer of much Sierra wilderness, it was well represented at the meeting. Lowell Sumner was the opening speaker, addressing the problem of meadow destruction by visitors and how to deal with it. Carl Russell, the superintendent of Yosemite, spoke to the need to educate wilderness users. Regional Director Owen Tomlinson chaired the session “Wildlife Management Affecting Wilderness Areas,” in which Sumner strongly made the point that wildlife management in wilderness had to be different than conventional approaches that aimed to produce game animals for hunters and often involved predator control. Sumner argued that “we harm wilderness by exterminating mountain lions, for instance, in order to raise more deer (that may then find insufficient food for their increased population). In the wilderness we should try to preserve or restore the natural balance.”28

Sumner made these remarks at a touchy moment in Park Service wilderness management, for it was embroiled in deep controversy over management of Dall sheep in Mount McKinley National Park. Russell and Sumner were both intimately acquainted with the “sheep-wolf controversy” there and knew that Drury had recently called in a scientist to be an impartial analyst in the argument about whether wolves should be controlled to maintain a larger sheep population. This adviser had made recommendations for “active control” of the wolves, and Drury had lifted the limit earlier imposed on killing wolves. Harold Anthony, the scientific consultant, had reported that “in my opinion the situation with regard to the wolves in Mount McKinley National Park is a critical one, first with respect to the uncertain future of the Dall Sheep if it must accept any wolf predation at all, and second with respect to the loss of public confidence in the Park Service as the administrator of the federal wilderness areas.”²⁹ Park Service leadership was very worried about this perceived loss of public confidence at a time when it was trying desperately to increase its budget. They wanted the public to believe that they were doing what they should in managing wildlife and wilderness. Sumner in particular, who had a long history of struggles over national park wildlife management policy, was very worried by this development. He took the opportunity at the Sierra Club conference to express his concern about the need to manage wildlife in national park wilderness in the Sierra and elsewhere in the park system (including Alaska) with “natural balance” in mind. Discussion of wilderness nationally was heating up, and the Park Service was in the thick of it, though not always on a footing it might choose.

Michael Cohen, in his history of the Sierra Club, calls the early Sierra Club wilderness conferences a process of “constructing a system of trails between old and new ideas.”30 The conferences brought together groups with diverse ideas about what wilderness was and what it ought to be: conservationists, land managers, scientists like Sumner, economic users such as stockmen, and recreational concessionaires such as packers. They offered an opportunity for all of these diverse interest groups to explore what a national wilderness policy might be and for thinkers like Zahniser to float their ideas.

Zahniser took advantage of the opportunity to introduce his biggest idea at the second conference in 1951. What was needed, he said, was a congressionally established wilderness system in which Congress specified what the proper uses of wilderness should be. Congressional action would prohibit the Forest Service from declassifying or modifying the primitive areas and the Park Service from expanding its developed areas into wilderness portions of the parks. Zahniser's idea was that conservationists should go all out for a wilderness “system” involving all federal agencies that had any wilderness within their jurisdiction. Many of his colleagues questioned the wisdom of this approach in 1951. They thought he was reaching for too much. But Zahniser thought the time had come to lay the proposal on the conference table for critical review and debate. The issues were argued until, in 1957, a wilderness bill was finally introduced into Congress.

Before the push for wilderness could begin in earnest, other obstacles had to be overcome, and foremost among these was the growing threat to national parks and wilderness from the dam builders. The Bureau of Reclamation's proposed dams in Dinosaur National Monument became the focal point of the fight on this front. Proclaimed a monument in 1915 to protect 80 acres of dinosaur bones and enlarged to 209,744 acres by Franklin Roosevelt in 1938, Dinosaur was a little known but very beautiful and wild unit of the national park system. The Green and Yampa Rivers converged in the monument, flowing through a deep canyon that the bureau thought an ideal dam site. Advocates of dams in the monument claimed there was a provision in the 1938 proclamation that would allow dam construction there, but conservationists disagreed. They girded to fight what many thought might become the worst intrusion in the national park system since Hetch Hetchy. Newton Drury had been worried for years that the national park system was increasingly in jeopardy from the nation's growing interest in dams. Though the Bureau of Reclamation was a sister agency in the Department of the Interior, and there was no doubt that the Truman administration was in favor of the Colorado River Storage project, Drury strongly and publicly objected to the Dinosaur dam proposal. The consequence of Drury's open defiance of administration priorities was that in 1951 Secretary of the Interior Oscar Chapman asked Drury to resign as director of the National Park Service.

Drury did not go willingly, and Chapman's action drew strong objections from conservationists. Chapman claimed that he was simply rewarding long-serving Assistant Director Arthur Demaray with the appointment as director to replace Drury, but this ploy fooled no one. Drury had crossed his boss, and the boss wanted him out. Zahniser and others argued that Drury had done a fine job and should continue in his post, but the director had committed the sin of publicly criticizing the administration. He was beyond saving, and Chapman appointed Demaray, who accepted the role of honored placeholder until the administration could name its choice as Drury's replacement. After nine months, Conrad Wirth, a twenty-year Park Service veteran, took the reins in December 1951.

What bothered conservationists about Drury's dismissal was that it seemed blatant punishment for doing the job the National Park Service director was sworn to do. Drury had written in 1943, “As long as the basic law [the National Park Act] that created them [the national parks] endures, we are assured of at least these few places in the world where forests continue to evolve normally, where animal life remains in harmonious relation to its environment, and where the ways of nature and its works may still be studied in the original design.”31 If Drury was being punished for his defense of the national parks, then his assurances that “these few places” would remain sacrosanct rang hollow. His pronouncements about the wilderness policy of the Park Service might also be rendered meaningless. Writing in National Parks Magazine, Waldo Leland observed that “the greatest and most persistent danger to which the national parks are subjected results from the plans of other agencies of the government, such as the Bureau of Reclamation of the Department of the Interior, for the construction of an infinite number of multiple-purpose dams for the control and utilization of water resources.”32 Drury had stood up to this threat, or attempted to, and his firing sent a signal that some in the government, the interior secretary among them, thought water resources development should take precedence over protection of the national park system. Leland was well qualified to express this view. He was director emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies and had served on the Advisory Board on National Parks, Historic Sites, Buildings and Monuments from its creation in 1935 until 1950, serving as chairman from 1946 to 1950.

Leland concluded his National Parks Magazine article with a challenge:

Nature conservationists will realize that now, and in the immediate future, they must be more than ever on the alert. They have not forgotten Hetch Hetchy; if the destruction of Dinosaur, which has been conclusively shown to be unnecessary, is consummated, and if Mr. Drury is succeeded by Directors less determined to defend, without exception, the great heritage of countless generations of Americans, the friends of the national parks will resort to all means within their power to create such defenses in public opinion as cannot be broken down.³³

In this challenge he pointed out something else that bothered conservationists about Drury's dismissal. There was concern about his successor, who, even as Leland wrote, was known to be Conrad Wirth. Wirth's dedication to preservation was suspect, and if he was being chosen by Oscar Chapman, that itself cast suspicion upon him. Would he, asked Leland, “be able to defend the Service from undue interference, already manifesting itself, from ‘up-stairs’?”³⁴ Fred Packard of the National Parks Association observed in a letter to NPA president William Wharton that as far back as the 1930s, Robert Sterling Yard had been worried about Wirth. Yard thought Wirth “aspired to be Director, and … with his previous background in State Park work his policies would conflict seriously with a proper national park program.” Packard thought that “under Wirth the emphasis of park policy would be on development for recreation rather than on protection.”³⁵

Wirth had been leading Park Service recreation initiatives since 1934 and had been very successful. He had made the Park Service the leader in outdoor recreation planning nationally, and everyone knew that his primary interest was in the recreation rather than the preservation side of the Park Service mission. The conservation community understood that national park facilities and roads had declined in the neglect of the war years and agreed that a large effort for maintenance and repair was essential. Wirth might be the man to tackle this big task, but would he favor serving the ever-growing recreation needs of the parks at the expense of protecting park resources, and would he defend the parks against development in the way Drury had attempted? Many seriously doubted that he would, and the consequences might be critical for wilderness preservation.

WIRTH TAKES COMMAND

Conrad Wirth was trained as a landscape architect and was deeply committed to the Park Service. His skill as an administrator and his political astuteness had been amply demonstrated in the 1930s when he nearly overnight built up the recreation planning effort of the Park Service to an unprecedented level. He was a leader in the mold of Horace Albright, highly organized, focused on goals, and comfortable around politicians. Unlike Albright, however, he had never seen duty in the field at any level. His entire career had been spent in Washington, DC (except when headquarters had been moved to Chicago and for a short period he spent in Germany after the war). Wirth certainly had visited many parks during his long career with the Park Service, but nowhere in his writings and speeches can passion for nature, for wilderness, or even for park beauty be found. Conrad Wirth knew that his recreation work and his organization to pursue it were important and threw his considerable energies into making his part of the Park Service run smoothly and achieve its goals. He was cut from different cloth than many members of the Park Service and conservation communities who were moved, like Muir, Yard, and Drury had been, by the mystical and inspirational qualities of nature. That Wirth was a practical man, and proud of it, is not a criticism of him, but it helps in understanding the mindset that he brought to his new job. He believed that the Park Service should protect the parks, but also that it should serve the needs of ordinary citizens who were out in the parks for “fun and excitement as well as ‘inspiration.’”36 He thought the Park Service had, at times, erred on the side of preservation at the expense of tourists, and he thought this should be corrected. Historian Michael Cohen has compared the orientation of wilderness enthusiasts and advocates like Aldo Leopold and Bob Marshall with Mather, Albright, and Wirth. Leopold and Marshall believed not in an agency and its work but in working with the land and helping people draw strength and spiritual sustenance from it. The principal allegiance of land managers like Mather, Albright, and Wirth was to their organization, their institution. Their world was that of the institution's values, attitudes, and duties. “In the extreme example, a manager like Conrad Wirth saw a national park as the sum of its facilities, roads, and buildings built for visitors, saw a different reality from those engaged in the wilderness movement.”37 Drury's views of the national parks had been more akin to those of Leopold, Marshall, Yard, and other preservationists than to Albright's and Wirth's. He had expressed this in the 1940s in his writings and talks to the National Parks Association and other conservation groups. Now Wirth's appointment was, it was feared, a move away from aestheticism and preservation.³⁸ It was, thought wilderness advocates, a likely move away from wilderness in the national park system.

The fight over Dinosaur lasted five years, four of them during the Wirth directorship. The National Park Service stayed officially on the sidelines, publicly supporting the Colorado River Storage Project while conservationists fought with all of their resources to keep dams out of Dinosaur and the national park system. Yet even as they publicly stayed out of the fight, the Service at the same time encouraged rafters to float the Green and Yampa rivers, thus quietly feeding ammunition to dam opponents. These opponents ultimately prevailed and did so by unifying and coordinating their efforts to an unprecedented degree. They formed a coalition of seventeen conservation groups under an emergency committee of the Sierra Club's David Brower, Zahniser, Ira Gabrielson of the Wildlife Management Institute, and William Voigt Jr. Ultimately the anti-dam campaign grew to involve seventy-eight organizations. As Mark Harvey has noted, the success in the Dinosaur campaign was especially important to the organizations most interested in parks and wilderness—the Sierra Club, the National Parks Association, and The Wilderness Society.³⁹ These groups were small but recruited larger organizations like the National Wildlife Federation and the Izaak Walton League to their cause. As Harvey observes, “The threat of Echo Park provided them with an excellent opportunity to laud ‘primeval parks’ and to incorporate their agenda into the broader conservation movement.”⁴⁰ The fight over Dinosaur revealed to a wider public the nature of threats to wilderness and parks. More important, success in the campaign, fueled by a public outpouring for preservation, demonstrated that the public cared about protecting the few remaining wild and beautiful places in the public domain. Zahniser understood this and wasted no time—he introduced the first wilderness bill in Congress two months after the battle over Dinosaur ended.

While they marshaled their forces in the Dinosaur struggle, conservationists continued to shape their position on wilderness. They needed to come to some consensus as to what the goal should be. Were they protecting wilderness for its own sake in the sense that wildness is manifest in creatures like wolves and grizzlies that are dependent upon it? John Muir, back in 1875, had thought about this, commenting that “I have never happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself.”41 Or were they aiming to protect it for the people's sake, for the type of recreation that Leopold and Marshall had extolled? If they hoped to wield their newfound power to protect wilderness, they would have to explain their aims to the public, and to do that required a greater degree of clarity as to their goals than had yet appeared in their discussions.

The Sierra Club wilderness conferences provided a forum in which to wrestle with such issues. At the 1953 conference Zahniser addressed the abstract issue of defining wilderness. Forest Service speakers and Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park superintendent Eivind Scoyen brought discussion down to earth. The Sierra National Forest supervisor said he thought the issue of wilderness would rapidly go from “philosophical and spiritual considerations to the cold realities of administration.”⁴² He shared statistics on the huge increase in visitation to wilderness in his forest. Scoyen argued that the impact from visitation could be managed, but the National Park Service hardly had the resources to do it. Wilderness recreation and its impacts on the wilderness resource were growing, the managers argued, regardless of how wilderness was defined. Views were shared and nothing was resolved, but the issues continued to be clarified.

Discussion ensued at the wilderness conference in 1955. One session focused on park wilderness, and Scoyen sang the familiar Park Service refrain. “We should consider the parks as a whole as wilderness and tag the exceptions rather than classifying special portions of the parks as ‘wilderness.’”⁴³ Other park officials spoke to projections of national park visitation— they were expecting 75 million by 1975. While they knew most of the visitors would stay on park roads, pressure would also grow on the backcountry. Zahniser reiterated the ideas for wilderness system legislation he had laid out back in 1951 and joined Harold Bradley of the Sierra Club in a session devoted to classifying wilderness areas. In his history of the Sierra Club, Michael Cohen observes that this alliance was important for its symbolism. The Sierra Club had moved from the idea that compromised wilderness was better than none to a consideration of wilderness “zoning” and had committed itself to The Wilderness Society's idea of legislation. This discussion “marked a significant shift in emphasis for the conference, as well as growth in the strength of the idea [of wilderness].”44 As the legislative battles to come would reveal, all conceptual issues had not been resolved, but matters had progressed among the conservationists to the point that, when the time was right, the drive for wilderness legislation could begin. That time would come before the next conference.

MISSION 66

Meanwhile, back at the Park Service, other issues were the focus of attention. Foremost among them were the challenges posed by rapidly rising visitation. The budget was lagging far behind demand and the pressures it brought. Drury had lobbied for increased appropriations but had been frustrated—appropriations increased but not at the rate he thought necessary. Little progress was made during Demaray's brief tenure, and when Wirth became director his efforts also failed initially to win appropriations adequate to meet needs. Annual visits in 1951 were 37 million and rose to 46 million in 1954. In his annual report that year, Wirth pointed out that there had been no new facilities to meet this increase. The backlog of road, trail, building, and utility projects continued to grow. In 1955 Wirth recorded increased funding, but still “the system has been allowed to deteriorate because of necessarily lowered standards of maintenance, protection and development.”⁴⁵

Wirth and his colleagues were not the only people concerned about this funding situation. Bernard DeVoto used his column in Harper's to bring the problem to national attention. Writing in his usual hard-hitting style, he stated that “Congress did not provide money to rehabilitate the parks at the end of the war, [sic] it has not provided money to meet the enormously increased demand. So much of the priceless heritage which the Service must safeguard for the United States is beginning to go to hell.”⁴⁶ DeVoto detailed the fiscal woes and consequent problems of the national park system and argued that what needed to be done was as clear to Congress as it was to him—appropriate large sums of public money to improve the parks and the Park Service. But, since no such funding seemed likely, DeVoto advocated an extreme measure:

The national park system must be temporarily reduced to a size for which Congress is willing to pay. Let us, as a beginning, close Yellowstone, Yosemite, Rocky Mountain, and Grand Canyon National Parks—close and seal them, assign the army to patrol them, and so hold them secure till they can be reopened.47

DeVoto's column did not result in park closings, but it helped bring much-needed public attention to the growing national park crisis.

Wirth was inspired, in 1955, to mount a new approach to the park funding challenge. He had for three years been submitting budget requests and making the case piecemeal for various projects and programs. Why not, he asked, estimate what it would cost to bring the entire park system up to “satisfactory conditions”? Why not propose to Congress an “all-inclusive long-term program for the entire park system”? He organized the Park Service to study this, and the program he called “Mission 66” was born. The goal would be to seek all funding necessary to complete the upgrade of park protection, staffing, interpretation, development, and financing by the golden anniversary of the Park Service in 1966. Rather than continue the piecemeal approach to appropriations, he would go for the whole package in one large program request.

Wirth was a politically savvy bureaucrat. He knew how to marshal his resources toward agency goals, had a solid grasp of what needed to be done internally to prepare his case, and had good political skills. As he explained to a skeptical National Parks Association, he thought Congress would more readily fund a systemwide program than a park-by-park approach. The Park Service had solid master plans and could gather plenty of evidence to make the case for a sustained program. He convinced the association and went on to persuade the Eisenhower administration that this approach would be a good one politically. With administration backing he lobbied Congress, and after fifteen years of neglect the park system finally received a large infusion of funding. Its budget started growing in fiscal 1956, rising from $33 million in 1955 to $49 million in 1956, ultimately reaching a high of $128 million in 1965. Mission 66, before it ended, brought to the park system more than $1 billion for operation and capital improvement.⁴⁸

Wirth appointed a Mission 66 committee that drew up fourteen guidelines for the program. One dealt specifically with wilderness, stating that “large wilderness areas should be preserved except for simple facilities required for access, back-country use and protection, and in keeping with the wilderness atmosphere.”⁴⁹ Brower and Zahniser described later how they met in 1955 with Wirth and an assistant to discuss conservationists’ concerns about Mission 66. They convinced the Park Service to add to the stated objectives of the program one that would read, “Provide for the protection and preservation of the wilderness areas within the national park system and encourage their appreciation and enjoyment in ways that will ‘keep them unimpaired.’” There was some resistance to stating this objective in Mission 66, Wirth insisting that it was to be assumed, but he finally relented.50 Lemuel Garrison, National Park Service chief of conservation and protection, was named to chair one of the lead Mission 66 committees. He later reflected in his memoir, The Making of a Ranger, that he was surprised to learn, in gathering information on needs and plans for Mission 66 in 1956, that concern for wilderness among Park Service people in the field was very high. Many endorsed park preservation as the major goal of national park management.⁵¹ This was, thought Garrison, a good thing, but why was he surprised by this response? Later he commented that the Park Service was managing the parks “according to wilderness precepts already,” so he and others thought “the Wilderness Bill was redundant as it related to National Parks.”⁵² Perhaps Garrison was out of touch with people out in the wilderness parks, since he had been in the East for several years. At about this time Wirth selected Eivind Scoyen as associate director rather than Hillory Tilson, who had been serving him as assistant director. Wirth chose Scoyen over Tilson because he knew he needed someone with field experience, and Tilson, like Wirth, had been in the Washington office throughout his career.⁵³ Scoyen would not have been among senior officials surprised to learn of the high level of interest in wilderness and preservation among Park Service field people. His duties in Yosemite had placed him at the center of the wilderness discussions at Sierra Club conferences and in his region and park. The consequence of all of this was that wilderness made its way into the stated goals of Mission 66, which, as will be seen, was a mixed blessing.

Mission 66 began with support from conservationists. They had been working with the Park Service for years to increase congressional appropriations. Everyone agreed that park facilities and infrastructure had deteriorated and needed to be repaired and upgraded. They also agreed that rapidly increased use required investment in projects that would assure visitors a quality experience. In 1956 Devereaux Butcher of the National Parks Association, a persistent Park Service critic, commented about Mission 66 that “it is gratifying to comment [on] a program the Park Service has developed that is so excellently conceived and so far-reaching in its implications as to encourage the belief that the national parks and their administration are going to improve for a long time to come.”54 If such a critic viewed Mission 66 this way, then so did most of his colleagues at this time. Still, just as Yard worried back in the 1930s about what the infusion of New Deal money might do to the parks, so Butcher and others intended to watch the Park Service carefully as it launched its new initiative.

Wirth asked a respected scholar of natural resource issues, Marion Clawson of Resources for the Future, to review Mission 66 projections for the future use of national parks, and Clawson thought their projections low. He thought visitation would reach 80 million by 1963 and might reach 120 million by 1966 (it actually reached over 133 million during that golden anniversary year).⁵⁵ Garrison remembered that Park Service planners thought that “we had to get visitors on the roads, flowing easily through ‘travel tubes’ that we had created, diverted as needed at intersections through multiple lanes and modern signs, sidetracked occasionally for scenic views or a roadside moose.”⁵⁶ The trickle of automobile visitors that had begun back in Mather's day had become a flood, and the Park Service needed to respond. That meant development, and Congress, in approving Mission 66, agreed. Furthermore, the National Park Service idea that development was in fact a method of conservation—first seen back in the Mather era—was a part of the Mission 66 thinking. Garrison expressed it, writing that “appropriate development of facilities such as roads or trails actually could be viewed as a conservation and protection measure, as it tended to channel and restrict use.”⁵⁷ This might well be so, but conservationists worried, as they had earlier, that this excuse might be used to build roads that reduced park wilderness. Their concern about this was a motive for wilderness legislation. Despite all the assurances in the Mission 66 guidelines and other official pronouncements, preservation-minded conservationists like Zahniser did not trust the National Park Service to protect wilderness.

Wirth had, in his long career, advanced the recreation side of the Park Service mission. Would he continue to do this at the expense of preservation? Some thought he might, and some now think he did. Richard Sellars has written that Mission 66 “was a high point of what might be termed the ‘landscape architecture approach’ to national park management, when, under landscape architect Wirth, development of the parks for recreational tourism dominated national park concerns and went largely unfettered by natural resource concerns.”58 In his memoir Wirth touted the “construction accomplishments” of Mission 66, and the list is long. Among accomplishments, of which he was very proud, are 1,197 miles of new roads, 577 miles of new trails, 1,502 new parking areas, 575 new campgrounds, 221 new administrative buildings, and so on. Many of these were undoubtedly necessary to meet basic needs of increasing visitation, yet all of this construction eventually resulted in criticism of Mission 66. Conservationists thought that some projects, such as the widening of the Tenaya Road in Yosemite, crossed the line between needs and wants, justified and not. Some, they thought, were blatant invasions of wilderness.

At the same time as it enjoyed huge support and realized its funding goals, this “Golden Age,” as Sellars notes, brought major changes to Park Service programs. It lost control of natural resource planning to a new agency, the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. Its support from conservationists eroded and, most important for the story being followed here, it lost its “administrative discretion over the parks’ backcountry” to the wilderness bill.⁵⁹