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Standard Routes, Standard Highways

It is our Shangri-La. But it is also very much a landscape at risk from overuse, urban pollution and, in a way, from itself, given its fundamental volcanic activity.

—David Nicandri, Sunrise to Paradise: The Story of Mount Rainier National Park

The funnel illustrates the modern history of people at Northwest volcanoes—themselves inverted funnels, with the throat inside rather than extruding. In the past century, when most approach or climb a volcano, they willingly gather at a few points, like a narrow throat. This transportation pattern demands constriction, not diaspora. Downhill skiing on Mount Hood or at Bachelor Butte, as it’s developed since World War II, poses the extreme case of constriction: after all, skiers fan out from and converge upon central lodges and parking lots. But visitor centers and standard routes similarly exhibit the perils of pre-planned concentration.

In the Northwest, national parks depend upon exceptional mountains. The fifth and sixth national parks, Mount Rainier (MRNP) and Crater Lake (CLNP), have demonstrated since their founding the seminal role of volcanoes in regional identity. MRNP, the final park created in the nineteenth century, was the first dedicated to a volcano. Its 1899 genesis confirmed Rainier’s leading role in the region’s mental map. Washington’s two subsequent national parks, each epitomizing differing generations and philosophies of preservation, tourism, and management, exist because of mountains.

Oregon’s only national park, Crater Lake, created three years after MRNP, commemorates the Northwest’s largest volcano 7,700 years after its eruption and collapse. Geologists estimate Mount Mazama’s explosion as forty-two times more powerful than Mount St. Helens’ 1980 eruption, and approximately four times as much of Mount Mazama vaporized as St. Helens. When visitors sight Crater Lake’s diameter from myriad vantages, and the rim of peaks enfolding it, they picture a volcano that dwarfs Rainier. A giant round glass atop Oregon’s Cascades, a shocking shade of blue, Crater Lake overwhelms visitors with its size and depth. Whether walking or driving along the rim, imaginatively just inside its surface, visitors can reconstruct, in their mind’s eye, the impossibly giant dome of Mount Mazama and its inconceivable blast.

The Northwest’s first two national parks highlight the prominent role of our most exceptional mountains in the nation’s visual iconography. The national affirmation of Northwest volcanoes at the turn of the twentieth century capped, in some respects, nineteenth-century United States’ veneration of monumental landscapes in the American West: a tendency explained by an increasingly popular aesthetic of “big” landscape composition and rapidly accelerating (and shifting) habits of tourism.

With far more people living near, and playing on, Northwest volcanoes, potential eruptions obviously pose considerable human danger. Regional residents and visitors live with the knowledge of the fifty-seven dead from the 1980 Mount St. Helens explosion. Mount Rainier is officially rated as one of the country’s most dangerous mountains since, according to hydrologist Carolyn Tiegen, over one hundred thousand people live on ground that reveals lahar (volcanic debris or mud flow) deposits.1 Wy’East, Mount Hood’s older, native name, implies, among other things, a resting spirit. Oregon’s quintessential mountain icon, Mount Hood has the dubious distinction of being the second most climbed volcano on earth, the numbers approaching typical conditions on Japan’s Fujisan in high season. More ski on it than climb it, and more again live in the path of historic debris flows to the west and north. Dormancy presumes its opposite, when geologic events and human chronologies meet. While risks can be minimized (e.g., far more stringent zoning ordinances and enforcement), ultimately humans have no control over geology; we stand a better chance of mitigating other problems stemming from accessibility and overuse.

Both Mounts Rainier and Hood represent bellwethers of change, particularly in the ongoing problem of crowd control—too many in the funnel’s throat on select summer weekends, for instance. Visitors and residents alike are inevitably drawn to the volcanoes, causing a painful dilemma that captures the primary challenge of agencies such as the National Park Service and the Forest Service in the twenty-first century. Too many leave their imprint with a vehicle or boots—or trash. The span of the past century reveals changing patterns of degradation where they step. Historic and contemporary commitments to accessibility and increasing convenience explain the challenges of overuse as seen through the overlapping stories of auto travel, skiing, and climbing. How we get there, how we play there, and how we reach a summit all manifest that bourgeoning desire for contact and connection. These stories variously illustrate the baleful consequences of industrial-scale tourism.

Even such marketing decisions as book covers acknowledge the Northwest obsession with outdoor recreation: activities that descend from an earlier paradigm of activist (i.e., recreational) tourism. Books about the Northwest, particularly travel books, regularly feature a volcano on their cover as though it signifies the region. This sense of entitlement, of “ownership of nature’s endowment,” creates a series of problems, for example at particular sites on particular volcanoes.2 Personal “mountain glory” becomes an issue when many seek it at the same time and place.

As nearby mirrors or blank slates where some regard themselves and express their affinity, the volcanoes unsurprisingly reflect streams of organized publicity and promotional materials. At Mount Rainier, where thousands climb per season, almost all climb in the summer on the two standard routes: the vast majority on the Disappointment Cleaver-Ingraham Glacier route on the south side, and the rest, the Emmons-Winthrop Glacier on the northeast side. Yet other, more demanding routes (e.g., Liberty Ridge on the northwest side) have also seen far more parties in the past generation. Mount Hood has been represented as a volcano for the masses since July 19, 1894, when a crowd gathered on its summit with the express purpose of founding the Mazamas.3

Fig. 3. The famed photo of the Mazamas inaugural climb on Mount Hood via the Coopers Spur (northeast) route, July 19, 1894. The photo, unintentionally comic, reveals the traditional style of a group climb, with a single rope and plenty of alpenstocks. Inset photo is of W. G. Steel, first president of the Mazamas. Wikimedia Commons.

On Hood, an average summer season sees ten thousand climbers, the vast majority chunking up the southern route above Crater Rock. But even the Cooper Spur route on the northeast side and the demanding west side routes see more traffic than a few decades ago. These volcanoes, like the others, reveal both a dispersal and concentration of climbers, the latter—standard routes—far exceeding the former.

These standard routes have come to resemble Mount Rainier’s Longmire–Paradise or White River–Sunrise roads in their congestion. Like standard routes on other volcanoes, they imitate the congestion of Interstate 5 between Everett and Olympia, Washington, between Vancouver, Washington, and Tigard, Oregon, and above all, within Seattle and Portland city limits. By the late twentieth century, standard routes resembled not only their approach highways but also prized urban neighborhoods. They presented miniature versions of crowded metro scenes—and metro problems. There is a new thickness here that is even stranger because of glaciers and rock ridges.

Congestion in various guises partly explains the threat to Northwest volcanoes posed by urban pollution (see epigraph). Urban proximity means not only bad air but also new conceptual categories. The Everett-Olympia megalopolis adversely impacts Rainier, which rises just east of I-5 and the linked cities. Mount Hood is defined by juxtaposition to urban sprawl as approximately two million Oregonians, more than half the state’s population, live within seventy-five miles to the west. Mount Hood National Forest’s (MHNF) western boundary lies only twenty miles from Portland’s eastern city limit, and in the early twenty-first century, it defines itself as an “urban national forest”—a recent designation in U.S. Forest Service history. “Urban national forest” poses an oxymoronic challenge and inevitably means, among many implications, auto congestion and pollution—a baleful legacy of city proximity. An “urban national forest” defines itself according to a nearby city or cities: a high population density living next door. Cities creep to the woods. Clearly this changes the historical identity of national forests—originally conceived as domains distinctly apart and away from population centers (e.g., Gila National Forest, New Mexico)—and demands new lenses and a different set of management protocols.

Because they reference us in so many ways, people want to arrive near volcanoes quickly. In Washington, private vehicles have carried increasing thousands to Mount Rainier for a century or more. Compared to Mount Adams and Mount Baker, Rainier is far more roaded, at least two highways crossing its southern and eastern skirts. Only Mount St. Helens, since its national monument status, also draws visitors to the west, south, and northeast via paved roads. From its beginnings, Mount Rainier National Park was designed with cars in mind, as several studies have documented. It’s all about getting to the mountain, and the quicker, the better. Visitors expected a quick trip then and still do today.4 Sometimes, though, the quick trip has slowed due to congestion on two-lane mountain highways.

With Mount Hood, traffic flow has always been part of the modern white story below its southern flanks, and the Barlow Road Historic District (within Mount Hood National Forest) preserves the extant, westernmost pieces of the old Oregon Trail. Zigzag, a hamlet west of Barlow Pass and a ranger district within MHNF, commemorates a particularly steep section of the trail: it connotes industrial-scale transportation, not a Native path. Portions of U.S. 26 and Oregon State Highway 35 were built along the trail route. Oregon’s best-known volcano, beacon of the Columbia River Gorge, dramatically ushered in the final miles of the Oregon Trail, and had thus been a palpable part of the United States’ great western migration more than a century and a half ago. Only Mount Hood’s north side (i.e., upper Hood River drainage) lacks a highway; Oregon’s many other volcanoes are less roaded, though several highway passes (Santiam, McKenzie, and Willamette, as well as the pass just south of Mount McLoughlin) exponentially increased their accessibility.

The published narratives of pioneering climbers in Atlantic Monthly and Overland Quarterly sold Mount Rainier to national audiences who, a generation later, would crowd to it. John Muir’s climb included the first photographer, Arthur C. Warner, whose camera, plates, and tripod weighed over fifty pounds and whose images complemented the rhapsodies of Muir (Pacific Monthly) and his fellow proselytizers. Similar narratives were published extolling Mount Hood. Come to Paradise, Timberline, or beyond! With both volcanoes, the majority of early climbs championed a central, southern route that, for reasons of weather and ease, became the standard routes. Road development tied into these routes so that most visitors (whether climbers on not) were funneled to a pair of locations. Different sections of the funnel reinforced one another. By the twentieth century’s first decade, large, expeditionary climbs sponsored by the Mazamas or Mountaineers required elaborate infrastructure including transportation, as their histories document.5 Gone were the days of long rides on horseback, negotiating forest and river canyons.

Particularly since the 1950s mountaineering on both volcanoes dispersed itself over a variety of routes of increasing technical difficulty. But most climbers converged on these standard routes—that narrow throat—because they afforded, and still afford, the best chance of summiting. Standard routes match novices with the easiest way up. It’s simple addition. The match-up enhances the likelihood of bragging rights, and from the beginning the achievement of summiting proved a significant lure and rationale. It remains one of the most potent versions of status tourism: there’s nothing like pointing to a distant Northwest snowpeak, or gazing upon its online images, and telling others, “I’ve climbed it.” Altitude feeds attitude, in the Northwest and elsewhere.

Yet the early work of public relations revealed contrary agendas. With Rainier the boosterism eclipsed cautionary notes or alarms about landscape degradation. Almost all early climbers and promoters represented unabashed, full-throttle developers whose volcano gospel solicited mass visitation. That 1876 essay boasting Washington’s mountains (see epigraph, Chapter 1) closes by predicting Rainier as a place for resort development: “When the locomotive is heard in that region someday, when American enterprise has established an ice-cream saloon at the foot of the glacier, and sherry-cobblers may be had at twenty-five cents half-way up to the top of the mountain, attempts to ascend that magnificent snow-peak will be quite frequent.”6

From the beginning access engendered amenities. The dessert fantasy illustrates standard, late nineteenth-century American travel expectations reflected in the Northern Pacific Railroad Wonderland guide series, which targeted leisure visitors, not necessarily more active recreationists. That 1876 booster-climber was right about the railroads but wrong about sweet amenities being an inducement for climbers. His prediction signifies a narrow recreational, commercial reduction (“American enterprise”) of Winthrop’s “American Idea.” In this reduction, coming to the volcano requires desirable goods and services, not necessarily new experiences. About sixty years passed after August Kautz’s 1857 summit attempt before the Longmire–Paradise road became a reality and lured autotourists. Ironically, for a brief period an ice cream stand squatted at the base of Nisqually Glacier: ice upon ice. Build a stand and they will buy and slurp. But big groups already traveled to Rainier, Baker, Hood, and other volcanoes, thanks to the pioneering mountaineering clubs, the Mazamas and the Mountaineers.

Subsequent trailblazers also made prescient claims about development at Rainier. The first woman to climb Rainier linked contrary values: its private transformative potential and tourist potential for the new state of Washington. The latter—her painterly sketch with conifers as frame—would become a Northwest visual icon, an aesthetic amenity. Her particular advocacy remains as valid now as when first published: “It is a beautiful ride through the wilderness, alone with nature and her wonders, with scarcely a sound to break the silence. Great tall trees line the winding trail, so tall you can not look up to the tops, so straight they seem like pillars of an ancient building, and this trail the aisle through which one passes to admire. It is then one can realize the resources of this state and dream of its future preeminence.”7 This Chamber of Commerce copy, Northwest boilerplate that fueled regional chauvinism, links visionary potential (e.g., Winthrop) with tourism broadside. The tensions between those agendas foreshadow common dilemmas observable on standard routes and elsewhere. The promised rebirth preached by early climbers turns problematic in the presence of crowds.

The quiet solitude of this sketch could only be imagined by visitors a generation after 1890, the crowds already descending on the volcano. But the description of west slope forest, old growth or not, quickly became a fundamental aesthetic criterion governing Northwest road design and management, one that has changed little since. The metaphor of the forest cathedral, a nineteenth-century romantic cliché, retains much currency in the popular imagination—and among many road designers. Celebrated in painting and poetry (e.g., William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” 1816) for generations, the cathedral as track or roadbed arched with conifers became a west slope commonplace, almost a birthright. Riding towards the volcanoes or the ocean, I remember so many conifer arches casting damp shade, a thin slice of sky overhead.

The green curtain illusion retains great power, as though motorists straddle winding Native American paths through undisturbed ranks of forest, far removed from their usual domains. By the twentieth century’s third decade, most visitors experienced the tree tunnel from car seats. The tree tunnel remains arguably the primary design and outcome on many secondary highways—no matter the clear-cuts one hundred yards or less behind the screen, particularly near the coast: a deliberate visual deception. Motorists crave the temporary shelter and sanctity of a wooded tunnel. As the century wore on, in many locales these tunnels comforted motorists even as they hid logged tracts just beyond sight.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the gospel of development held sway, as volcano publicists drew virtually no distinctions between the notion of set-aside land or park and full-service resort. It’s all about amenities, however modest or “inadequate.” The prevalent mind-set favored access and infrastructure as though these arctic islands resembled coastlines or lake (or river) shores. Another booster-climber preached the same gospel for Rainier: “Some day in the near future, when a good road has been made in Paradise valley, it will become one of the greatest summer resorts on the coast. All the natural resources for such a resort are there now, and it would not require any great amount of capital to develop them.”8

Part of the drama of MRNP management in its first decades centered on a changing and increasingly restricted definition of the word “resort.” All Paradise needed was “capital,” and capital arrived seventeen years after MRNP’s founding with the formation in 1916 of the Rainier National Park Company (RNPC), the park’s central concessionaire. That same year, which also saw the creation of the National Park Service (NPS), work on the first Paradise Inn began, and the inn opened for business the following year. John Muir’s “lower gardens of Eden” quickly filled with people pursuing a variety of activities—some ridiculously inappropriate by twenty-first century standards and some, trashing the place: for a few years in the early Depression, golfers teed off at Paradise; a generation earlier, campers hacked away at live shrubs and trees for their campfire wood.9

In this era, the market for national parks would be sustained through corporate backing controlled by the NPS. The legendary first director of the NPS, Stephen T. Mather, brilliantly sold both the current parks and an expanded NPS to an increasingly mobile public. Handsome, wealthy, generous, and unstable, Mather was a marketing genius who genuinely believed conservation and endless promotion go hand in hand. Mather brought the masses, increasingly in hired or personal “motors,” to the parks, and he envisioned the growth of the parks occurring through careful collaboration with private enterprise. His collaboration with his young assistant, Horace Albright, anchored the NPS in its initial decades and manifested itself through their frequent motor tours of current or potential western national parks, including the Northwest.

Development of Mount Rainier National Park and the rapid growth of Rainier National Park Company go hand-in-hand as though the Park is a priori linked with a range of accommodations. Most could not imagine the park apart from amenities and services. They brought clear expectations of convenience if not comfort (and ice cream) with them. Accommodations depended on increasingly quick and easy access. Once the volcano became the center of a national park, an elaborate infrastructure insured endless employment for a host of civil engineers. The same story played out at the collapsed volcano and deep lake in Oregon.

From the beginning, mass transit—railroads, then roads—developed according to access to Paradise and the climb beyond it, and again, this example served as prototype of most volcano trailheads and standard routes. The first Paradise tent camp, the poetically named Camp of the Clouds (1896), a gritty tent city surrounded by stumps, belied its airy, even angelic promise. Soon enough it gave way to increasing creature comforts, as visitors inevitably wanted more than old canvas tent walls. From the mid-1880s, the Northern Pacific Railroad offered excursions to Wilkeson on its branch line, then horseback travel to what became MRNP’s northwest corner (Carbon Glacier and nearby alpine parks like Spray Park). After 1904, the Tacoma Eastern Railroad, a local line merged into the Milwaukee system in 1918, hauled thousands of visitors to Ashford, only six miles from MRNP’s main (Nisqually) entrance.10

The latter route proved more popular than the Northern Pacific’s Wilkeson run because of Paradise’s draw and climbing route. The Mountaineers and interested others took the Tacoma Eastern (the “National Park Limited”). And by the 1920s, the heyday of the Tacoma Eastern, auto tourism eclipsed railroads as the preferred mode of tourism. Visitors like my grandparents wanted to reach Rainier’s base according to their own schedule and whim, and the sooner, the better. Tourism shifted from railroad to private schedules.

Road traffic and MRNP share a long history, one that links the quotidian with the exotic. Significantly, cars entered MRNP in 1907–8, before any other national park. By 1908 motorists chugging up the Longmire–Paradise road (not completed until 1915) reached, with a short walk, the terminus of Nisqually Glacier. Rainier’s twenty-six glaciers proved a primary attraction in MRNP’s initial decades.11 The fact that it is the most glaciated mountain in the country outside Alaska only whetted the appetite to see some “rivers of ice”: a monumental novelty, further proof of the United States’ landscape heritage. Nowhere else could motorists drive to a glacier’s terminus. That fact captures, in miniature, a primary paradox in western American travel and further illustrates this parable of constriction: one can reach the spectacular—a frozen arm of poet Marianne Moore’s icy octopus—from sea level passively, with little or no physical effort.

Auto tourism grew up alongside the National Park Service, as private vehicles remain the central mode and reference of most visitors’ experience. Auto tourism reenacts the late nineteenth-century mode of heritage or reverential tourism—with a difference. The paradox of auto tourism brings the natural world close up but it remains, figuratively if not literally, beyond the windshield: closer but still removed, beyond the footlights.12 This rich paradox presumes that windows bring the outside world, particularly as framed by landscape aesthetics, into our eyes and imaginations rather than create a permeable barrier which seals off and distances the outside. The illusion deludes motorists given the inescapable fact that we often remain seated, passive, and virtual: spectators at least one remove from sensory participation in the mountain scenery. The outside is magnified yet we remain within a theater of glass walls, bodily detached. We love to sit, especially behind or above an engine. The paradox notwithstanding, for a century private vehicles have dictated the meaning and shape of access within both national parks and national forests.

Windshield volcanoes foreground themselves because of road design, wherein approach highways figure as part of their drama. Within MRNP’s early history, the design and construction of Eugene Ricksecker’s Longmire–Paradise highway rendered it a model “scenic narrative.” Ricksecker, the Tacoma-based assistant engineer, mapped the roadbed as though it were a natural feature, part of the ridges and canyons southwest of the alpine parks of Paradise, a dark glacier with hairpin turns. Such road designers, here and on other volcanoes, regarded their designs as part and parcel of the volcano’s symbolic heritage.13 This design philosophy extended even as it distorted the nineteenth-century gospel of mountain sublime, as though paved roads and vehicles represented transitory appendages of a volcano’s rich meanings. This core tenet of NPS road aesthetics enhanced the illusion of car approaches being extensions of Rainier itself, like its radiating glaciers and ridges. Seated and stationary, motorists bring some diminished version of the mountain’s meanings inside their windshields.

If mountain roads are storied, part of the story presumably passes from the mountainscape to those who approach or recede. By the summer of 1915, motorists could not only drive to Rainier’s south side, but to Yellowstone geysers and over Tioga Pass in Yosemite National Park. Approach roads carry some of the meaning of spectacular national parks and peaks. Washington Highway 504, the main (westside) approach to Mount St. Helens, was designed, particularly in its remodel after the 1980 eruption, very much as a scenic narrative which climaxes with Coldwater Ridge and Johnston Ridge just beyond. As motorists approach these ridges, the horseshoe-shaped volcano with the opening to the north progressively discloses itself like a stage curtain slowly widening.

For a few, roads weren’t necessary. In a stunt symbolic of the twentieth-century love affair with tires—a new claim to possession—a motorcyclist in 1925 followed the preferred climbers’ track to the 9500-foot level on Mount Hood.14 Why not ride to the top, as motorists would later do on Colorado’s Mount Evans and Pikes Peak? Let the motor do the work, according to this clamorous mind-set.

While volcanoes don’t lend themselves to amenities development, some locations at their bases do, and cars bested trains for access. In the early twentieth century, Mounts Baker, St. Helens, and Hood had become destination resorts, as had the Cascades Lakes south of South Sister, Diamond Lake below Mount Thielsen, and Crater Lake. Road access to Mount Hood had developed earlier than any other volcano; for west slope folks, visiting it meant retracing in reverse direction the final miles of the Oregon Trail, the nation’s most famous nineteenth-century westward migration route. Tiny communities around Mount Hood had seen extensive commercial developments before the Cascade Forest Preserve was dedicated in 1907, absorbed into the Oregon National Forest in 1908, and renamed Mount Hood National Forest in 1924. At least three lodges were built along Mount St. Helens’ Spirit Lake in the two decades after 1913.15 Crater Lake Lodge opened in 1915 (and the improved CLNP company hotel, in 1928), and the rim drive—another scenic narrative displaying its sundry facets as a continuous story—was finished in 1918.16 The most famous mountain lodge in the region, Mount Hood’s Timberline Lodge—built by U.S. Forest Service, Works Progress Administration (WPA), and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) crews—opened in 1937, long after the roadbed of U.S. 26 had been regraded. Timberline, at the base of Mount Hood’s standard, south climb route, reveals the same concentration of climbers because of similar chances of summit success as at Paradise.

During initial surges in development many local constituencies, desiring both national recognition and amenities infrastructure, tried but failed to persuade the nascent National Park Service to elevate “their” volcano into a national park. The failure of the NPS to name other volcano national parks in the 1910s through 1930s illustrates the role of chance as well as the prior claims of various commercial interests. In retrospect it looks like a crapshoot, one in which most of the snowpeaks lost. After the precedents of Rainier and Crater Lake, local lobbies bombarded the NPS and the competition, along with initial lodges or villages or ski hills, doomed the cause. For example, local interests lobbied hard for a national park centering on Mount Hood after 1911.

During their busy summer in 1915 NPS director Stephen Mather and second-in-command Horace Albright were besieged by Northwest promoters. Albright, a bright young Berkeley lawyer recruited by Mather and like him a vigorous outdoors enthusiast, participated in many “field studies” trips by train, car, horseback, and foot. The Mather-Albright pair grew extremely close, an uncle-nephew relationship confirmed on these trips. As Albright chronicled in old age, “Many people from Seattle to Portland were urging us to make national parks out of every volcanic mountain from Mount Baker to the California border. Mather and I agreed we couldn’t make every peak a park and didn’t have time to inspect them. We already had Mount Lassen, which had been erupting and was quite the sensation. It had been a national monument and in 1916 was upgraded to a national park.”17 The chronic eruption of Mount Lassen (southernmost of the Cascade volcanoes) in 1915 coincided with the initial proliferation of the NPS, which ensured its preservation. The “accidental” publicity of eruption placed Lassen in the company of Mounts Mazama and Rainier.

By contrast, the other Cascades volcanoes, dormant, failed to make the grade because of supposed aesthetic inadequacy, commercial (e.g., mining) claims, cost, or, for Mather, redundancy. Recalling the summer of 1918 and an onslaught of lobbying, Horace Albright stated, “We declined to consider . . . Mount Hood, Mount Baker, Mount Shasta . . . and many other beautiful areas because they did not measure up to what we regarded as national park standards or had too much commercial development or too many inholdings, or because the cost was prohibitive considering what the Congress would give us.”18 According to Northwest mountains historian Harvey Manning, the biggest volcano and biggest crater were enough for Mather and Albright in 1923 and subsequently.19

Therefore if the NPS included two Northwest volcanoes it had enough. Given subsequent NPS growth, those early verdicts are lamentable. If park status meant preservation, the other volcanoes lost out in the short term. Commercial developments and inholdings precluded Mount Hood, for example, as several lodges dotted its flanks by the 1910s. Though the powerful preservationist Harold Ickes, Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, promoted park status for Mount Hood in the 1930s as well as an “Ice Peaks National Park” proposal centered on several Northwest volcanoes, World War II fiscal priorities killed the effort.20 The USFS attempted some other modes of preservation at the snowpeaks, but their efforts couldn’t match a national park designation.

Whether in a national park or not, volcanoes lured motorists, and that meant convergence at the end of steep, curving roads. As at Mount Hood, the first generation of CLNP history illustrates the validity, if not a priori necessity, of the funnel design at Crater Lake. In its initial decades few visited for a variety of reasons, including rutted roads and primitive accommodations. According to Horace M. Albright, CLNP “was in terrible shape, and something drastic had to be done,”21 and in that same summer of 1915, the underfunded CLNP was on his and Mather’s itinerary.

The approach from Klamath Falls proved as primitive a road as these two had bumped over, and they’d traversed a lot of country. Mather and Albright, with CLNP Supervisor William G. Steel and two others, spent two August days traveling Crater Lake’s perimeter, planning in detail the rim drive as a scenic narrative with the usual tourist infrastructure: pullouts, trails, accommodations. The rim drive (today’s Route 7), which would take the entire Depression decade to build, concentrated visitors on and along the road tracing the circumference of the Northwest’s largest volcano. When the Mather and Albright party departed Crater Lake, the longer road from the lake to Medford proved worse than the Klamath Falls road. Mather, known for his verbosity, found the road too much of a challenge to conversation: “He just held onto his hat with one hand and a handkerchief over his face to ward off the dust with the other.”22 Subsequent publicity sped up the rebuilding of Oregon State Highway 62, among other routes. Visitors were funneled to the lake via two access roads and the “village” near its southwest shore, and then followed its rim drive.

Roads both satisfy and inflame demand for quick access. The auto demand on Paradise—almost 250,000 vehicles per year by the late 1920s—spelled the end of the railroad by the early 1930s, and visitors to the park have never looked back.23 The White River–Sunrise road, finished in 1931, and the Stevens Canyon Road, finished in 1952, extended the park’s commitment to democratic access through further scenic narratives, though they failed to relieve the crowd pressure on Paradise. One state highway accesses Mount Baker, rising from northwest to northeast; St. Helens (before 1980) was accessible via one paved highway along the Toutle River, on the west side. Because of its straightforward standard climbing route (one considerably easier than Rainier’s), Mount Adams also became subject to mass climbs in the early twentieth century. The USFS built a dirt-gravel road and large parking lot and trailhead for those accessing its standard climbing route. Glacier Peak, like Oregon’s Mount Jefferson a so-called “wilderness volcano,” has always required a long trail approach. Visitors, including climbers, didn’t want long approaches.

The blend of big landscape composition and mountain auto tourism—with the latter’s reliance upon the funnel design and scenic narratives—is perfectly evidenced in novelist Thomas Wolfe’s Western Journal: A Daily Log of the Great Parks Trip (1938; 1951), the final, hasty production of his short life. His journey began with CLNP on June 20, 1938 and ended with MRNP on July 2, 1938, with Wolfe sprawling his tall frame across the back seat of the capacious coupe and his two companions (newspapermen) doing all the driving. The two Northwest volcano Parks thus frame this archetypal, fast journey by car of monumental western landscapes.

The bond between the volcanoes and paradisal imagery of Oregon—part of the national imaginary since the mid-nineteenth century, if not earlier—does not change over time. Claiming “unapproachable the great line of the Cascades with their snow-spired sentinels Hood, Adams, Jefferson, 3 sisters, etc.,” Wolfe rhapsodizes, approaching Crater Lake, “the virgin land of Canaan all again—the far-off ranges—infinite—Oregon and the Promised Land.”24 For a visitor in the late 1930s, paved roads were part of scenic grandeur, “the great line” and its conventionally biblical idealized application. Such motorists approached quickly but passively.

In the transportation story, access raises the bar and boosts expectations. Access changed the scale of visitation and provided the infrastructure for industrial tourism at the snowpeaks.

Particularly since the World War II period, speed and convenience became the touchstone. After all, the baby boomers famously took to the roads and the western parks en masse with their parents, and didn’t mind being jostled too much as long as they reached the mountains according to plan. When added to the core value of volcanoes—conversion, self-realization, status—quick access drives the changing human footprint on and around them. Contrary to earlier indigenous attitudes, recent visitors assume access to be an inalienable right. And we want it quick.

In the postwar boom period, the National Park Service’s Mission 66 program formalized the typical visitor’s brief experience as a day trip with quick planned stops marked by pullovers, signage, a visitor center, and other amenities. The auto-based plan codified, in some respects, Mount Rainier’s meanings for visitors from midcentury through the present. For the baby boomer generation, overlook plaques and informational kiosks providing a little history, geography, or geology with visuals became the tangible signs of Rainier’s story. Pullouts with chosen vistas packaged and conflated educational and aesthetic occasions, and proved the durability of nineteenth-century “heritage” tourism. What tourists behold forms part of national if not personal identity.

Even more baby boomers took to the hills in station wagons rather than with boots. Visitors drove when and as they wished, their numbers increasing in proportion to the regional in-migration of the twentieth century’s closing decades. By the 1960s in MRNP, parking was a serious problem at both Paradise and Sunrise, and planning efforts to disperse traffic to lower elevations met with little success. Folks wanted to get higher, reach the end of the road, and a 1960 photograph of Sunrise shows a jammed parking loop, station wagons positioned at various angles. In 1967, 479,525 vehicles entered MRNP carrying 1,805,863 visitors. The cumulative result made Paradise, or Mount Hood’s Government Camp, sometimes resemble a suburban mall. Traffic issues have only grown worse in succeeding decades. A scant generation later, with thousands on Mount Adams’s standard, South Climb route, Gifford Pinchot National Forest Roads 8040 and 500 winding past Morrison Creek and Cold Springs campgrounds to the trailhead resembled a long thin parking lot, vehicles snaked at odd angles off the mountain road. The congestion imitated an urban intersection with traffic backed up for blocks, clear passage proving a challenge.

Fig. 4. Part of the parking area at Paradise—“paved Paradise.” Mount Rainier National Park’s most crowded location. National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior.

Of course, it’s not just auto traffic that’s paved Paradise and created a series of problems including parking. Concentration and carelessness have beaten up the scenery. Early twentieth-century damage from loosely regulated camping at Paradise grew, by the century’s final decade, to include battered meadows showing shortcuts and ruts, and scars elsewhere from other past uses. The damage illustrates a story of unchecked access, insufficient preservation, and perhaps incompatible uses. A welter of mitigation and restoration activities has been underway there for a generation or more.

This array of impacts occurred once the hikers, campers, skiers, day-trippers, and climbers reached the volcanoes in vehicles. A long Seattle Times story titled “Anything But Lonely At The Top,” (August 7, 1994) scrutinized the cumulative impact of cars in MRNP, a legacy of the midcentury driving tour paradigm. The title unwittingly describes the wide summit scene as well: both road’s end and climb’s end reveal crowds. The byline and inside title don’t mince words: “We’re Wearing Out Our Welcome at Mount Rainier” and “Backup on the Road to Paradise.” In the 1980s alone the number of cars increased drastically, with fewer in each car and those folks less likely to leave their vehicles for any length. The pattern continues in the Mount Hood National Forest in the early twenty-first century, as its Strategic Stewardship Plan (2006) reveals a tendency toward day use by urban visitors: “The average length of stay measured in 2003 was 6.7 hours.”25 MHNF wilderness areas are used similarly to urban or state parks in the three-county, metro-Portland region.

This disturbing trend of quick thick visitation exacerbated an attitude present since the late nineteenth century: the tendency to treat these notable peaks as extensions of urban space. The data also suggest an increased embrace of cars’ enforced passivity as well as the changed meaning of a visit. Both imply a greater disconnect from sustained, palpable outdoor experience, though the legions of hikers, backpackers, and climbers attest to the contrary. It’s not just that people get there fast, but most look around and depart soon. Two end-of-century realities at MRNP include increasing entrance fees and full parking lots, notably on summer weekends. But raising entrance fees every year or three contradicts the NPS commitment to open access. Crowd containment costs money, and personnel costs to keep the roads and facilities open and clean grow, though budgets do not.

In the past generation the notion of “carrying capacity” has received increasing scrutiny as a management tool, and national park researchers have extensively studied its validity for plant and animal systems as well as human visitors. But carrying capacity is problematic, in part because it’s a shifting target. Given the crowds at places like Paradise or Timberline, some argue for a return to public transportation systems, claiming considerable public sentiment in favor. Such systems are popular in Glacier and Rocky Mountain National Parks, for example, though they garner some criticism at the latter according to research surveys. Any calculation of optimal vehicle loads and distributions within MRNP or MHNF with its ski hills is extremely difficult because of the number of variables, and because “optimal” might be a sliding scale over decades. While the idea of fixed limits, in cars or on trails, seems the best solution, it flies in the face of the American commitment to unrestricted access. Recreationists resist rationing.

The old Tacoma Eastern Railroad track has been extolled as “an heirloom,” “a dedicated corridor with its own perspectives on Rainier and its own rich history.”26 This track forms another example of what the NPS calls “cultural history,” an earlier mode of mountain tourism worthy of preservation as another resource. A master scenic narrative, it runs from Tacoma to Ashford, the town closest to the MRNP’s primary, southwestern entrance. Some would like this railroad to run again after almost a century of silence since Tacoma Eastern veterans have testified that “it is the best way to approach the Mountain.”27 Enthusiasts advocate its gradual, unfolding approach that depends upon the slow time of a century ago. Whatever its attractions (above and beyond nostalgia), it seems a hard sell in a world marked by instant and immediate. Also, MRNP planners must devise and implement comparable mass transit for visitors inside the Park, perhaps something comparable to Glacier National Park’s famous fleet of open-top “Red Jammer” buses, according to park websites “the oldest touring fleet of vehicles in the world.” The thirty-three 1936–‘39 vintage Red Jammers haul sixty thousand tourists per season. This new-old Tacoma Eastern Railroad proposal faces challenges, though, including overcoming the modern paradigm of personal convenience, which has reconfigured the meaning of access.

While Northwest volcanoes remain highly sought destinations, with notable exceptions their status as destination resorts has diminished by the late twentieth century. Mount Rainier National Park is a test case in contrary agendas, and review of its twentieth-century management philosophy discloses an initial expansion and subsequent contraction of that tourist definition.

Asahel Curtis, famed Northwest photographer, embodied as much as anyone the development credo, to the point where he eventually parted ways with several organizations he had played central roles in (e.g., the Mountaineers) because they did not advocate his full-speed-ahead infrastructure agenda. Younger brother of the nationally known photographer, Edward Curtis (from whom he was estranged), Curtis wanted paved roads in all four of MRNP’s quadrants, for instance, and in retrospect his simultaneous preservationism and expansionism appear untenable. He wanted Rainier for personal transcendence and Rainier for big tourism, and saw no contradiction between these. Emergent MRNP philosophy, defining the volcano and park as an “artifact of culture” or treasure (like the Tacoma Eastern Railroad, more recently), increasingly checked the commercial view (e.g., Rainier National Park Company) of the Park as a commodity bank.28 Descendants of these contrary views define contemporary tensions and behaviors at other volcanoes. Though the former paradigm prevails for the most part, new versions of commodification have emerged.

Sometimes desires conflict in the convergence zones. Mount Rainier remains largely a day-use park, one conducive to one-stop visitor centers, picnics, and quick nature walks. One segment of the public demands more amenities; another demands more wilderness and traffic control. The fact that these segments are often the same only reveals a governing paradox in MRNP management history. As though we’re descendants of Curtis, we want “virginal” nature and creature comforts, untrampled alpine meadows and lattes and, always, quick access—like convenience stores. In the bottleneck we naïvely want it both ways.

Mount Rainier National Park also exemplifies changing modes of recreational tourism at Northwest volcanoes, since they’re primary sites for sustained physical exercise in varying forms. The earlier leisure resort paradigm sponsored some activities and infrastructure plans incompatible with volcanoes. Dog sledding proved a short-lived novelty in the 1920s, as did a nine-hole golf course a few years later; in the early Depression years, not enough affluent golfers drove to Paradise with their clubs. Plans for a tramway were rolled out in the 1920s and again in the late 1940s but none was built. Nor any chairlift, though in the years before and after World War II, public interest pressured park officials to build one above Paradise. NPS officials also faced considerable political pressure from Washington State business interests and Senators Warren Magnuson and Henry Jackson to construct a high-rise hotel in the early 1960s, but they held firm against it.29 But concessionaire business was so good at Paradise that park management failed to disperse tourists elsewhere. Folks wanted the end of the road, the higher elevations.

Clearly, some of those activities or plans typify cities rather than volcanoes, and in retrospect they appear stunningly naïve, not unlike Asahel Curtis’s plan for a highway across the northern tier of the park, from the Carbon River Road to what became the Sunrise Highway above the White River canyon.

How we reach the volcanoes influences how we play near or on them, and hardtop roads and mass-produced autos exponentially increased the possibilities and the illusion that volcanoes extend urban or town recreational space. The chairlift controversy at MRNP’s Paradise in the 1940s evidenced the surging popularity of downhill skiing, a new sport that concentrated people far more than hiking or climbing. By the 1930s at least three volcanoes attracted new masses equipped with long boards and poles. “Being on the slopes” came to mean something distinct and prized. Mount Rainier became, along with Mounts Baker and Hood, the birthplace of Northwest downhill skiing.

Local businesses unsurprisingly capitalized on the new sport: the activity, product lines, and advertising unfolded symbiotically. In MRNP’s first three decades, visitors had snowshoed and cross-country skied into the park in increasing numbers, and the first ski jumping tournament took place in 1917. Outing clubs (e.g., the Mountaineers or Seattle’s Rainier enthusiasts known as SOYPs or “Socks Outside Your Pants” in the 1920s) promoted skiing, as did Seattle-area businesses like Eddie Bauer, K2 Skis, and Frederick & Nelson, which made and sold ski clothing and equipment.30 Once Americans took to downhill skiing, Paradise, Timberline and the other Hood hills, and Mount Baker quickly turned into winter meccas. Seattle and Portland manufacturers and clubs eagerly supported a new sport that quickly caught on.

During the bottom of the Depression the new snow sport, like horse racetracks and screwball comedy pictures, provided new excitement and relief from the pressures of daily life. In April 1934, the first of the annual Silver Skis races—a downhill race from Camp Muir to Paradise, and just short of a vertical mile—took place above Paradise, and this event continued through 1941 (excepting 1937), publicized, some years, by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and CBS Live Coverage. Late that year, the National Ski Association approved using part of the Silver Skis course for national slalom and downhill races the following spring. The course dropped from Camp Muir to a finish line near the Paradise Inn. Because this event served as Olympic ski team trials, it drew thousands of visitors—and potential new skiers. The National Ski Association’s interest and sponsorship inevitably boosted skiing’s glamour. Within four winters, Paradise proved the hottest spot in the region for skiing.31

The region’s leading pair of volcanoes reveal opposed responses to the sport of skiing. Speed of access, it turns out, anticipates the happy speed of skiing. Ski resorts usually recapitulate the funnel design, with hill traffic—whatever the fan of runs and terrain—converging at the bases of chairlifts, themselves nearby the central lodge and parking lots beyond. Downhill skiing represents a high-density use of restricted terrain, and with its six resorts, Mount Hood is the region’s most skied volcano. At Mount Rainier downhill skiing surged in popularity until the winter of Pearl Harbor. By then NPS philosophy nixed further infrastructure supporting the sport, since this institutionalized sport created crowds committed to their sport rather than the terrain beyond the area boundaries. In some cases skiers headed north to Mount Baker’s ski hill, on its northeast side, where snowfalls were (and remain) legendary.

Before and after World War II, skiers flocking to Mount Hood had a choice of slopes. On its southwest side the Multorpor ski area’s first facilities opened in 1928, merging with Ski Bowl in 1964. On the north side, the Cooper Spur ski area opened in 1949: a “Jump Hill” had been built by 1938. On the east side, Mount Hood Meadows, which grew to become Oregon’s second largest ski resort, opened in 1966, its phases of expansion marked by continual controversy with conservationist groups and the MHNF.32 And at Timberline, Northwest downhill skiing pioneer Otto Lang—handsome young Austrian-American whose example captured the European glamour of the new sport—founded a ski school in 1938, just two years after doing so at Paradise.33

Mount Hood displays, as no other volcano, antithetical traditions of low-density and high-density uses. Symbol of Mount Hood skiing, Timberline’s Palmer chairlift, extended to the 8500-foot level in 1978 and rebuilt in 1996, is the most conspicuous, and highest, chairlift on the flanks of a Northwest volcano. The chairlift ends near the standard, south climb route and by the mid-1990s, conflicts between the skiers and climbers resulted in the standard route moving to the east of the groomed ski runs above Silcox Hut. In the twenty-first century’s first decade, almost two million people visited Timberline annually for skiing, dining, and sightseeing; approximately 154 thousand drove to Ski Bowl, Summit, and Cooper Spur ski areas; and over double that number patronized Mount Hood Meadows.34 Almost half a million annual participants demonstrates that skiing is far and away the most popular activity on Oregon’s most popular mountain: an activity showing, at times, an urban density within an “arctic island” otherwise remote, sparsely populated, and set aside. In the past generation, Hood has also been a key site in the fast growth of snowboarding. Particularly during winter season, a few slices of Hood reveal traffic patterns similar to that of Portland’s Pearl District, or downtown Eugene.

At Mount Hood, however, lower-density is relative. Mount Hood’s standard climbing routes are less daunting than Rainier’s (e.g., much less elevation gain), and for a variety of reasons it has been climbed en masse longer than Rainier. But for decades, Hood’s standard, southern route, with a bottleneck near the summit, has been subject to a range of traffic problems, given the volume of climbers ascending and descending. The picture sometimes resembles the Timberline ski runs below: evidence of the twentieth-century story of regional mountaineering, which echoed the rush of skiing.

Better roads and faster cars led to fast skiing and far more climbing. The downhill skiing scene in its first generation foreshadowed the surging popularity of climbing soon thereafter. During the Depression, while Civilian Conservation Corps crews built much of MRNP’s infrastructure, a faction of the Mountaineers—initially a minority group, made up of younger, talented climbers who chaffed at social protocols—began to assume control of the Mountaineers’ programming and philosophy (prominent among this group was Lloyd Anderson, who founded REI in 1938), and what is sometimes called the Northwest school of mountaineering was born. Climbers sought European equipment, new challenges (such as new routes), and much smaller climbing parties of two to four people.

In the following generation, more and more graduates of the Mountaineers’ climbing course took to the other volcanoes and nearby non-volcanic peaks. More climbers from elsewhere flocked to the Cascades and Olympics. The Mazamas’ climbing course, begun later, grew similarly. Climbing the Mountaineers’ “Six Peaks,” (the five volcanoes plus Mount Olympus), once a status badge within the club, became only a prerequisite, a list to surpass as soon as possible. Common routes saw more traffic.

Of all user groups, climbers (whether Mountaineers or not) take on the biggest, most physical challenge at the volcanoes. Summiting numerous peaks embodies the status tourism that became primary as the mass sport evolved.

The acceleration of mountaineering’s popularity, in the Northwest and elsewhere, goes hand-in-hand with the story of shifting technologies and ever-improving equipment: lighter, stronger, safer, just like local ski manufacturing. And in the oldest advertising parable, newer means better; older is suspect at best. The complexion of climbing shifted as the baby boomer generation pursued the “glacier gospel,” and by the 1960s, with new gear and new techniques, the definition of “average” climber and “average” achievement had risen a notch. By the 1980s both the number and affluence of climbers had fundamentally increased.35 Sharp population increases, which included hordes of “gear hounds” and “gear geeks,” resulted in standard routes on Northwest volcanoes sometimes mimicking congested highways. And among these hordes, more tackled the volcanoes’ hardest routes: Rainier’s Willis Wall or Hood’s Sandy Glacier, for example.

In a crowd it’s hard to savor private experience, let alone feelings of conversion or personal transformation. At the volcanoes and elsewhere, something basic shifted. Over thirty years ago one scholar rued the drastic change in scale, claiming that “figuratively speaking, we are all standing in a widening circle of yellow snow”: “On a holiday weekend more people now climb Mount Rainier, Washington, than climbed it during a whole season in the 1950s. It is estimated that over 5,000 climb Mount Hood, Oregon, every year.”36 Nowadays the number exceeds ten thousand per year on these bellwether volcanoes. That widening circle of yellow snow describes the primary management challenge in the twenty-first century for popular routes on Northwest volcanoes, as it bespeaks a density of use unimagined half a century ago.

As metaphor “yellow snow” symbolizes mountaineering as a mass sport since hordes, many of whom wouldn’t have tried the snowpeaks generations ago, have eagerly caught volcano fever. The late twentieth-century legacy of “mountain glory” has meant unprecedented numbers of boots and crampons on mountains including Northwest volcanoes. Given these numbers, many have suggested carrying capacity limits, permit systems, and rationing, but such notions remain deeply unpopular.

After the 1963 American Everest expedition led by Jim Whittaker, one half of the most famous twins in American mountaineering, the popularity of Northwest mountaineering surged, and climbing became a firm feature of status tourism. Whittaker—who started as a Rainier climbing guide and was the first American to summit Everest, planting a U.S. flag atop the mountain—became a celebrity with White House access. Willi Unsoeld and Tom Hornbein, also Mount Rainier guides, were the first to climb Everest via its West Ridge route; another Rainier guide, Lute Jerstad, also summited (with sponsor National Geographic staffer, Barry Bishop). That those 1963 American climbers trained primarily on Rainier, coupled with the subsequent claim repeated by many Northwest or other alpinists bound for Everest that it provided the best stepping stone, spotlighted Rainier in a way it had not been before.

The effects of new prestige were quickly felt at Mount Rainier and, indirectly, elsewhere. Over two thousand climbers tackled Rainier in 1967; by 1974, over five thousand a year climbed; by 1994, over ten thousand per year. In 1969, 1647 climbers summited, over eleven hundred via the standard, Ingraham Glacier-Disappointment Cleaver route that includes Camp Muir; by 1982, the figure topped four thousand per year. Within one generation, from 1965 to 1985, over fifty thousand summited via the two standard routes.37 Unsurprisingly, some strong climbers pursued (and still climb) more technical routes to avoid crowds or meet new challenges, thereby mimicking the gold standard proclaimed by early climbers. That astounding figure from the Northwest’s most dominant mountain tells the tale of mass mountaineering. Presumably those thousands experienced in muted, diminished form the personal transformation that early climbers celebrated. If a profound sense of renewal or rebirth depends upon conditions other than crowds, it has become, on standard routes at least, much more elusive.

The Everest-Rainier linkage, chronicled by several histories, underscored Rainier’s status as Washington’s number one tourist attraction in a new way, one that has changed the sociology of climbing as greater numbers of amateurs, who could buy gear and sometimes guides, took to the mountains. In the past two generations, a new breed of occasional climber, who can afford the ever more sophisticated equipment, has tackled Rainier as though gaining a foretaste of the world’s highest mountain. Almost half the time, this newbie hires guides either through the venerable Rainier Mountaineering, Inc. (which Lou Whittaker co-founded in 1968), Alpine Ascents International, or International Mountain Guides. Numbers draw greater numbers.

The number of climbers summiting Rainier continued to grow in the 1990s and early 2000s. Its surging popularity continues, as the numbers show. In the new century’s first decade, the year 2000 proved the high point, with 13,114 registered climbers and 6083 successful summits, a 46 percent success rate. Curiously, the numbers on Rainier dropped about 30 percent between then and 2006, when 9154 climbers registered and 5785 summited (63%). There are several possible explanations for the downward trend, including the regional dot-com bust after 1999, but in 2006 almost as many summited as during the peak year of 2000. The October 2008–September 2009 climbing year saw 10,616 on the mountain, about a 5 percent increase over the preceding season: of these, practically 80 percent commenced at Paradise and 65 percent climbed via the standard route.38 Traffic on the most common routes above Camps Muir and Schurman (on the northeast side) has decreased little, “low impact” or otherwise. In one recent year, about two thirds of all climbers massed on one route—that narrow throat—and Camp Muir (like Emmons Flat, on the northeast) resembled a bulging, transient campground. This despite the fact that more climbers climbed harder, less common routes than ever.

Most visitors or climbers exercise care, but some ignore or flaunt the guidelines of low-impact alpine hiking, camping, or climbing. Above those full parking lots and trash barrels at Paradise or Sunset and elsewhere, a more noxious problem flourishes. Climbers are supposed to deposit their poop in double blue plastic bags and toss the bags into conspicuous fifty-five-gallon barrels. Most do but some are careless about their shit and other deposits. An online “Mount Rainier National Park, 2006” document reports, unsurprisingly, increased problems with poop.39 In addition it states, “climbing rangers also dismantled 71 rock walls [built for tent protection] and newly established [i.e., unsanctioned] campsites.”40 The report contains a parable of mass mountaineering, which doesn’t just mean gathering rocks and building horseshoe-shaped walls for tents or bivouac sites. Those two figures—nearly seven hundred pounds of portable trash and over one hundred discarded blue bags or piles of poop from one season—describe mass mountaineering. Instead of cleaning up after ourselves, we leave deposits of our passing and others—for example, climbing rangers—must clean up our messes.

Industrial tourism, which environmentalist Edward Abbey repeatedly inveighed against and which has become an accepted critical and popular term, describes a scale and style of travel that presumes high volume (like cruise ships) and a variably elaborate infrastructure that tends to standardize the experience of touring. In an age of industrial tourism, masses come not just to but also on the volcanoes, and standard routes resemble the Chilkoot Pass scenes in Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), where the climbing prospectors, stepping hard upon one another, look like a line of ants. Some mountaineers climb for status more than personal transformation: in an era of mass mountaineering, there has been a paradigm shift. With increasing crowds climbing volcanoes, others want to join and not feel left behind.

In addition to these issues, the scene at volcano bases or high camps imitates mall food courts, and this condition rubs against the dictates of wilderness area management. Climbing parties bump against one another and tents cluster close. Such camps don’t necessarily appear along more technical routes, but signs of use remain because so little decomposes. In the parable of concentration, we accumulate evidence of ourselves. The strange yet increasingly commonplace picture of worn, crowded high camps reveals a crucial dilemma, as access to volcanoes trumps protection of resources. As one scholar remarked some years ago, this picture “is an urban problem requiring an urban solution, but the politics of wilderness cannot accommodate this solution.”41

The pressure towards standardized experience also reconceives a volcano climb as a measurable outcome, or product. Industrial tourism captures the braided regional story of auto tourism, skiing, and climbing as the human presence at volcanoes has shifted in scale. Such scale overlaps considerably with the prevalent paradigm of status tourism, wherein tourists collect experiences more for outer (i.e., social) than inner reference.

Mount Rainier or Mount Hood, as physical facts and spiritual presences, far exceed our human footprint near or on them, of course. But that imprint increasingly damages the Northwest’s most exceptional mountains, whether measured through nearby auto pollution, clogged mountain roads or full parking lots, or dirty snow or frayed plastic at higher altitudes. Most contemporary hikers or climbers, raised according to the idealism of the Wilderness Act, expect some degree of “wilderness experience,” however fuzzy the definition. For most, it means small groups or an individual experience. In some regards Dan Evans was correct in his late twentieth-century assessment: “We . . . are in mortal danger of loving [Mount Rainier] to death.”42 Clearly, the public must change their habits when visiting or climbing, just as management policy must be revised to provide urban solutions to what is primarily and ironically an urban dilemma. The Mount Hood National Forest’s Strategic Stewardship Plan (2006) repeatedly proclaims the need for new public collaborations in addressing a range of management challenges. Agency personnel cannot revise public habits on the federally protected snowpeaks without extensive public input and assistance. The solutions and restrictions that will prove most palatable and effective have not yet emerged. Given the pressures of constriction, the funnel effect, viable alternatives are hard to imagine, let alone implement.