5

Wilderness and Volcanoes

A small share of the American people have an overpowering longing to retire periodically from the encompassing clutch of mechanistic civilization. . . . To them, the enjoyment of solitude, complete independence, and the beauty of undefiled panoramas is absolutely essential to happiness.

—Robert Marshall

In the United States, mountains have proven a primary domain for our changing understanding and valuation of wilderness, in part because mountains comprised our first wilderness areas. Mountains possess a psychological and symbolic remoteness as realms removed from usual human affairs, even if occasional cities or towns spread close to particular peaks. Iconic sites above and beyond human settlement, mountains are historically associated with deities and serve as threshold for divine communication if not epiphany. Late Northwest composer Alan Hovhaness, who wrote symphonies dedicated to two of Washington’s five volcanoes (Symphony #50, Mount St. Helens; and Symphony #66, Hymn to Glacier Peak), endorsed this archetypal view: “Mountains are symbols, like pyramids, of man’s attempt to know God” (Notes to “Mysterious Mountain,” 1955). Hovhaness defines the familiar motive for climbing as a fundamental desire for physical places far above the mundane. The sociability of climbing in no way lessens (though it might obscure) the old value of personal transformation, or the appeal of volcanoes or other mountains as pilgrimage sites.

Wilderness and remoteness overlap considerably as human constructs in the Northwest, as the region’s volcanoes evidence. Mount Rainier was first set aside in the Pacific Forest Reserve in 1893; Mount Hood, in the Bull Run Forest Reserve in 1892. The Forest Reserve Act of 1891 was not designed solely to set aside acreage “for the protection of timber and watersheds.” Rather, scenic values and preservation of spectacular landscapes were primary criteria years before either the USFS (1905) or NPS (1916) came into being. As President Benjamin Harrison’s secretary of the interior, John Noble, argued in a letter to the President on March 25, 1891, reserves should include areas “of great interest to our people because of their natural beauty, or remarkable features.”1 The impulse to set aside public lands in the fin-de-siècle western United States arose, in part, out of deepening appreciation of mountainscapes inspired by landscape painting and photography. Certainly, the Pacific Northwest’s most exceptional mountains provide a fascinating case history of evolving ideas about wilderness because of their status as “reservoirs of the primitive.”2

In the Northwest the notion of “wilderness volcano” developed as a result of urban growth: those snowpeaks farthest from cities or their viewsheds epitomized remoteness. As hinterland they rise in the “back” range, not the front, farther from the collective human gaze—and trailheads. These include Washington’s Glacier Peak and Oregon’s Mount Jefferson—which ironically rises right along the Cascade Crest. But no highway cuts close to it. Such judgments have abided through the past two centuries. For example, in The Northwest Coast (1857), pioneering ethnographer and diarist James G. Swan twice omits mention of Glacier Peak among Washington Territory’s five volcanoes. It existed outside his purview and that of the territory’s young, seaside towns. He underlines Glacier Peak’s remoteness by ignoring it: Glacier Peak lies farther east than Washington’s other four, a distance from Puget Sound and the Chehalis and Cowlitz River valleys. Though not a wilderness volcano like Mount Jefferson, in modern regional history Mount Adams has been labeled “the forgotten giant” because of its distance or absence from urban viewsheds (excepting Yakima’s). In the twentieth century, volcanic wilderness tends to mean distance from cars.

The formation and naming of many wilderness areas along the Cascade Crest reveals the centrality of volcanoes. Of Washington’s thirty-one wilderness areas, half are located in the Cascades and ten are either named after or next to volcanoes, or are themselves volcanic in origin (e.g., Goat Rocks Wilderness Area). Washington includes Mount Baker, Glacier Peak (third largest), Mount Rainier, and Mount Adams Wilderness Areas. Mount St. Helens poses a special case as a USFS-run National Monument since its 1982 genesis.3 Almost half of Oregon’s forty-seven wilderness areas (much smaller than Washington’s) are located in the Cascades, and thirteen tie in directly with volcanoes or are volcanic in origin. Oregon includes the Mount Hood, Mount Jefferson, Mount Washington, Three Sisters (second largest), Diamond Peak, Mount Thielsen, and Mountain Lakes (including Mount McLoughlin) Wilderness Areas.

Most Northwest volcanoes exist within a wilderness area that took its name, if not identity, from it. In the Northwest, the evolution and codification of wilderness has derived, in large measure, from the visual and psychological dominance of volcanoes. Thus, their modern history also chronicles our changing definitions and practices regarding wilderness. In recent decades volcano wilderness areas serve as a litmus test of new scholarly and popular understandings of wilderness: understandings that distort even as they revise the mid-twentieth-century philosophy of wilderness.

The volcanoes prove as much as any regional wilderness areas do that nature and culture have always existed along a continuum of habitation, and that set-aside lands never exist apart from a range of human uses. It is folly to ignore the long view of such uses prior to the twentieth century—the deep perspective of environmental history—even though, for many indigenes, volcano craters or glaciers constituted taboo zones.

The history of federally set aside lands and the evolving philosophy of wilderness also disclose a history of quantification, one result of which is a series of behaviors that quantify some if not most facets of wilderness experience. If wilderness experience, particularly within a designated wilderness area, resembles a product (or set of measurable outcomes) more than, say, a sensibility, then visitors are cast in the role of consumers. A packaged volcano climb provides one instance of pervasive wilderness consumerism since, according to one scholar, recent understandings of wilderness derive from “the logos of consumption”: human actions in wilderness resemble a form of environmental consumerism.4

In the twentieth century, the Wilderness Act of 1964 represents the great divide separating wilderness system lobbying from a legally enacted system that has been steadily added to in the past half century. After the Wilderness Act, wilderness became named and commodified through the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS). The Wilderness Act climaxed our tendency to conceive time spent in officially designated preserves as a highly sought product, since the legislation marked off a wide range of precisely measured enclosures—Wilderness Areas—that lured outdoors enthusiasts as do no other landscapes.5 The act spawned a tradition of exclusivity, one which the a priori exclusivity of volcanoes enhances. Since passage of the act, the Northwest has witnessed half a century of additions and extensions. The legal mandates of wilderness (with a capital W), which the relevant agencies are charged to enforce, often do not match ground conditions in particular backcountry or alpine zones (e.g., standard routes) on Northwest volcanoes. A yawning gap exists between legal wilderness and ground reality. What climbers or backpackers find sometimes doesn’t match what they buy into.

The habit of perceiving wilderness area experience as commodity derives in part from a much older tradition, endemic among indigenous peoples, of animating landscapes, of treating them as storied. Stories or myths arising from a given wilderness become the best means of identification—and, in contemporary thinking, consumption—as they comprise the deepest level of attachment. One environmental historian, Thomas R. Vale, argues that wilderness areas need stories because they lack the rich legacy of “place recognition” typical of most western national parks. While wilderness areas tend to be generic, many Northwest wildernesses centered on a volcano enjoy supreme place recognition. Others need stories and storytellers to stamp their identity and render them unique.6 Ideally each climber attaches personal stories to the cumulative script of a volcano. The attachment of particular lore to particular wilderness areas expresses a human history in designated wild places. With volcano wilderness areas, the obvious examples come from native stories of origins, for example the braided tale of courtship and jealousy explaining Loowit (Mount St. Helens), Pahto (Mount Adams), and Wy’East (Mount Hood) narrated by the Multnomah tribe. Certainly story embeds place recognition; it also sharpens our conception of wilderness as commodity.

The modern story of California’s Sierra Nevada range is tied to the rhapsodic journalism of John Muir and the origins of the Sierra Club, the United States’ most venerable environmental organization. Arguably the best American exemplar of the nineteenth-century gospel of mountain sublime, John Muir also best demonstrated the fundamental bond between mountains and wilderness. Muir ranged the continent’s west coast, celebrating and climbing Cascadian volcanoes (e.g., Mounts Shasta and Rainier). In his final two decades he insistently proclaimed the mountains-wilderness identity, the religion of alpine retreat and restoration, through his books and the Sierra Club that he founded in 1892 with its triple (recreational, educational, and conservationist) purposes in its charter. In his credo, he sang, “Come up into the mountains, and hear their good tidings,” mountain environments figuring as a tonic, a source of endless joy and spiritual renewal. That ethos still prevails, with varying emphases. The Northwest spinoff clubs linked mountaineering with wilderness preservation as though both activities go hand in hand. Climber Jim Whittaker’s parable of green growth, from dropping tin cans to packing everything out, epitomizes the overlap.

The wilderness history of Northwest volcanoes includes a modern story of rivalry that does not explain volcanic origins in anthropocentric terms. Instead, USFS-NPS interagency rivalry, a sometimes-nasty tale, includes the history of several contentious terms, above all “use.” The use game chronicles, as much as anything, the region’s wilderness history. In the twentieth century’s first half, the USFS led the federal effort to articulate and expand wilderness, though government regulations were often in conflict with premier mountaineering clubs. In the second half of the century, the NPS took the lead position in the articulation and establishment of wilderness, as the USFS was perceived to be the handmaiden of the timber industry giants such as Weyerhaeuser and Boise Cascade. The modern story of wilderness includes, at its core, the famous term, “untrammeled”—which Howard Zahniser, chief architect of the Wilderness Act, borrowed from his friend, Northwest activist Polly Dyer—and the subsequent concepts of “wilderness thresholds” and “de facto wilderness”: recent variations on a theme that carries special regional resonance.7

On their website the Mazamas, founded only two years after the Sierra Club, proclaim their longstanding legacy of conservation lobbying. In their first decades they became known as “pragmatic environmentalists and regional boosters” who, in keeping with a prevailing national ethos, regarded the mountains as a primarily moral force. This late nineteenth-century ethos survived, with modifications, for generations because of growing concerns about perceived (or actual) ill effects of cities, categorized as “the other.”8 A century ago anxieties about urban life, for old and new urbanites, derived from their physical distance from natural landscapes such as mountains or forests or rivers. Growing numbers of outdoors advocates celebrated natural environments as a vital corrective to the increasingly crowded, mechanical conditions, if not debilitating influences, of the city.

The migration to the city (and after World War II, the suburb) explains, as much as anything, the accelerating attention to and advocacy of wilderness as set-aside domains removed (and remote) from one’s normal life. The biggest single engine behind wilderness preserves was the massive road-building program accompanying mass-produced automobiles in the period after World War I. Many feared that roads would penetrate the forests and climb the shoulders of mountains—precisely what born-again developers such as Seattle’s Asahel Curtis, famed photographer and co-founder of the Mountaineers, wished.9 And roads were built accordingly—for example, the Mowich Lake and West Side roads in MRNP, the state highway to Austin Pass on Mount Baker, or the McKenzie Pass highway in central Oregon—but they didn’t reach mountain fastnesses or volcano craters (with a couple of exceptions like CLNP’s Rim Drive, or Newberry Crater just to the east in Oregon).

The wilderness lobby included more than middle- or upper-class urbanites, furthermore. Other forces made the case for curbing road building precisely as Americans took to the roads—and the mountains—in their Model As and Ts. The growing popularity of auto tourism in the 1920s forced the issue of access: in a familiar pattern, often those most recently on the road argued most loudly for limits to road building in the mountains. Auto tourism created a new American democracy and a new debate about car access and appropriate restrictions in the mountains. Critics included labor unionists who motored and camped along the Columbia Gorge–Mount Hood loop as eagerly as any other tourists. Unsurprisingly, blue-collar workers advocated for wilderness alongside more affluent city and town residents. Revolted by increasing evidence of trash, many unionists, in the words of a labor historian, “helped create a new debate about wilderness” because they wanted early USFS restricted areas “preserved for those who were willing to invest the time and energy into packing their way in.”10 This “new debate” rested upon a dilemma, as preservationist voices were themselves part of a new, mass affluence codified by the 1928 Republican campaign ad claiming their policies had put “a chicken in every pot. And a car in every backyard, to boot.”11 And with that car, everyday folks took to the mountains even as some among them argued that cars should be parked and backpacks mounted.

The Northwest history of wilderness ironically records a receding remoteness as the road system thickened. The volcanoes got closer thanks to the thick, capillary system of USFS roads built to support massive logging; at the same time, the sense of wilderness receded in some locales because of greater proximity occasioned by those very roads. For some, quicker access diluted the perceived purity of wilderness. The Mountaineers sounded warnings about an expanded road system in MRNP, for example, almost a century ago, precisely as Model As and Model Ts chugged up the Ricksecker road en masse. After all, MRNP was the first national park to allow cars. One member, George Vanderbilt Caesar, published an article in the October 1927 Saturday Evening Post against NPS road building: “Why . . . should the Government incur enormous expense to encircle the wilderness with roads?” That question resonated across the century, gathering force as it pointed up apparent contradictions between road access and wilderness.

In 1928 another Mountaineer, Edward Allen, drafted a position paper calling for designated wilderness areas within MRNP. Allen subsequently claimed the Department of the Interior accepted his paper and designated seven areas within the Park as “wilderness territory,” which precluded infrastructure and allowed hiking and horse packing. But there is no evidence of Interior adopting and implementing any such plan: it existed only on paper.12 Nearly half a century would pass before wilderness areas had legal definition and force at Mount Rainier and other volcanoes. That lag is tragically commonplace. The Caesars and Allens comprised minority voices until the 1960s.

The foregrounding of wilderness provides a vehicle through which to assess development pressures in MRNP and elsewhere. Additionally, the appeal of wilderness explains early USFS “primitive areas” within national forests and, through their changed mission after World War II, the diluted categories, “wild area” and “limited area,” which could be redefined or shrunk given sufficient economic (e.g., logging) pressure. For example, the USFS “created a Glacier Peak-Cascades Recreation Unit of 233,600 acres, or 360 square miles” back in 1931, but primary extraction activities like mining and logging were still allowed.13 Preservation interests battled “getting the cut out” particularly as timber harvests spiked before midcentury.

Within MRNP, the Mountaineers insistently opposed resort plans championed by founding NPS director Stephen Mather along Mount Rainier’s base. Some voices directly opposed the early NPS program to bring the crowds to the parks in their own “motors.” Such dissent flew in the face of NPS promotional philosophy. Mather wanted to bring the masses to the parks to build advocacy; at MRNP the Mountaineers feared the damage wrought by crowds (such as evidenced at the early Camp of the Clouds) and regarded Asahel Curtis’s proposal for perimeter highways as a disaster. The fact that MRNP adopted a master plan in 1929 (the first national park with such a development plan) did not lessen the anxiety of those favoring preservation and opposing extensive amenities infrastructure. The master plan expanded the Rainier National Park Company’s (RNPC) monopoly concessions role in three locations and included investment by at least four railroads. There was little reason to believe that a big hotel-and-cabins resort at what became known as Sunrise (on Mount Rainier’s northeast side) would not be built, but Mather died, the railroad CEOs backed out of the deal, and the Great Depression ended any subsequent investment interest.14

Asahel Curtis as booster and the Mountaineers as preservationists embodied the conflicting voices of tourism and wilderness preservation, respectively: voices that contend through the present, given NPS and USFS foundational commitments to both access and resource preservation. By the late twentieth century, these commitments clashed in many alpine locations. The philosophy of open access—infrastructure intended to serve industrial tourism—presumes wilderness, and experience therein, as a consumable commodity; preservation resists consumerism in some respects even as it accedes to it in others. While the work of preservation entails detailed surveys and mapping a variety of resources and values, all the boundary-drawing holds out the possibility of unquantifiable experience “inside” intimated by John Muir, poet Gary Snyder, and many others.

One baleful offshoot of mountain auto tourism was tin can trash: the detritus of picnicking and camping that extended along trails and onto summits. For many, throw it out replaced pack it out. Those willing to pack their way in formed an increasingly articulate and powerful minority who governed the philosophy of wilderness in the next generation. For increasing numbers, access meant (and means) staying seated as much as possible.

The 1928 Republican campaign claim exposed a profound critique of consumerism and ambivalence about modernism—and solitude in the mountains. The emergent philosophy of wilderness constituted a “recreational critique” since forces of commercialization in the outdoors decreased the perceived “publicness” of natural spaces.15 Of course “public natural spaces” were often domesticated to the extent of trails, bridges, campsites, and the like: the very act of drawing boundaries around wilderness quantified it, and rendered experiences inside as potential commodity. This infrastructure resulted in tin can trash and boosted the cause of wilderness advocates. Local advocates were represented in the USFS by Aldo Leopold and, even more, Bob Marshall: legendary hiker, one of the founders of the Wilderness Society (1935), and eloquent publicist for designated wilderness who led the agency in advocating and expanding USFS’s early “primitive areas” and forest reserves.

Marshall’s article, “The Wilderness as Minority Right” (1928), shaped American attitudes about wilderness as much as any document of this period because of his leadership position, even as his essential claim, based on his own solitary habits—“the enjoyment of solitude, complete independence”—ignored mountaineering realities of most climbers and legitimized an ambivalent idealism that later climaxed in the Wilderness Act. The history of regional mountaineering attests that climbers rarely achieved complete independence. Most are not solitaires stamped in the same mold as that virtuosic cross-country trekker and climber, Bob Marshall. That climbing is predominately social (however small the party) does not preclude the experience of solitude, if not complete independence. Yet solitude proved uncommon both on volcano routes and summits: though feelings of conversion or personal transformation remained individual, they typically unfolded within groups. The relation between the personal and the social context has grown far more elusive in the era of mass mountaineering.

The network of highways that transformed the American landscape in a generation accelerated the wilderness debate and further pressured the USFS to expand its poorly enforced system of primitive areas. In 1939, just months before his death at age thirty-nine from heart failure (on an overnight train from Washington DC to New York City), the visionary Marshall proposed a 795,000-acre Glacier Peak Wilderness, which was not acted upon; instead, the USFS proposed a smaller “limited area, identifying its natural values for future study.” After the stall and delay it would take generations for this wilderness volcano and its environs to receive the protection Marshall proposed. Marshall and others of like mind mounted a critique against mechanized recreational access that continues unabated.

They faced what scholar Paul Sutter has called “the politics of mass consumption,” which both focused the wilderness debate and exacerbated the anxieties of preservationists about mechanization in the mountains. Auto manufacturers indirectly aided and abetted the access debate, their endless products sharpening the perception that such modernizing pressures eroded that enduring mode of American freedom manifested in large, undeveloped tracts of land, whether in the mountains or elsewhere.16 In this standard narrative, higher altitudes beyond mechanization offer individuals that ocean of freedom unavailable in their increasingly gridded lives. The wilderness vs. mechanization opposition still powerfully appeals to people who advocate quiet trails on public wildlands.

Mass visitation sometimes fueled mass illusion. Queues of recreationists, generations ago and now, approach Crater Lake, Mounts Hood, Rainier, Baker, and others in search, often, of a realm beyond themselves. The notion of wilderness as a remnant of freedom apart from modernizing pressures crystallized in the interwar generation and has remained intact, though cast in doubt by environmental historians and others. For many “the ‘publicness’ of natural spaces” meant excluding as many signs of materialistic society as possible. Thus the notion of wilderness areas as set-aside tracts that symbolize a less cluttered time, if not a timeless realm, took hold. This Theodore Winthrop legacy regards the volcanoes and their neighborhoods as time capsules removed from human agency.

A powerful though myopic nostalgia attached itself to those remote public lands. Vague notions of purity, for example of a golden age sans racial or ethnic minorities, sometimes clung to this blurry nostalgia as if these districts formed some sort of tabula rasa of national identity and promise: we are our spectacular landscapes and earliest days. Longtime tribal habitation does not exist in this subversive fantasy just as nineteenth- and early twentieth-century containment policies removed natives from most of the neighborhoods of volcanoes. The power of this nostalgia has long driven NPS policy in sundry parks. Visitors expect clean views and few or no signs of human habitation past or present, certainly nothing messy. In their study of Yosemite National Park, for example, two scholars argue that landscape aesthetics have always trumped public health concerns: received notions of packaged scenery dictate that water reservoirs, sewage disposal systems, and landfills, for instance, be hidden, screened, or located off-site.17 Visitors don’t want to see what they depend on. Nor do backpackers or climbers expect to see any evidence of past mining or logging in Glacier Peak, Mount Adams, or Three Sisters Wilderness Areas, for example.

Americans in the mid-twentieth century endorsed the wilderness proposals of Aldo Leopold and Marshall in increasing numbers, and the preservationist lobby became a powerful voice, as witnessed in the careers of David Brower, first executive director (1952–69) of the Sierra Club, and Howard Zahniser, executive secretary of The Wilderness Society. For preservationists the USFS response to the desire for more set-aside lands was tepid at best. In 1942 the USFS created the Mount Adams Wild Area (the third “Wild Area” in the state), which excluded its flanking forests. Four years later it created a Mount St. Helens Limited Area. What was the difference? Environmentalists protested these designations for their artificial tree line boundaries and instability.

The odd story of ownership within the Mount St. Helens Limited Area reveals its false boundary. As one railroad apologist reminded us, “prior to the [1980] eruption . . . few people realized that the peak fell within the boundaries of the federal land grant awarded in 1864 to the Northern Pacific Railroad to help offset the cost of its construction.”18 Yet another example of the late nineteenth-century corporate land grab, the Northern Pacific—a big promoter of Northwest volcanoes tourism—owned the southwest quadrant (i.e., square mile) of the volcano itself, one quarter of the pie. The fact that part of the Northwest’s most shapely (pre-1980) volcano, the one most active in the mid-nineteenth century, was partially owned by a railroad attested to the gutless status of this “Limited Area.” The railroad traded parts of this slice to Weyerhaeuser, who logged extensively. From the green vantage of the late twentieth century, that a piece of volcano including its summit belonged to a corporation for over a century (1864–1982) seems beyond belief.

In the Cold War generation, the USFS narrowed its vision of wildlands preservation to economic utility, other criteria (e.g., those articulated by Marshall) disappearing. The perception that the agency operated as servant of timber companies ignited environmental opposition in diverse forms. Many including the Mountaineers’ Harvey Manning judged its categories of “protection” to be worthless since the USFS could reclassify them with no public input. In 1955 all the USFS classified areas in Oregon were redrawn, among them volcano preserves such as Diamond Peak and Mount Washington, which turned into smaller wild areas.19 “Wild” meant more limited than “Limited.” Smaller wild areas would provide more contained (consumable) experience. According to prevalent thought, those two volcanoes would be detached from the forests on their shoulders as though they could be defined apart.

The volcanoes themselves were not in dispute because they lacked “value”; the big trees below them, particularly along the west slopes, were always the targets, not higher elevation zones. The timber industry wanted open access to subalpine forests girding the volcanoes and played a central role in determining wilderness area boundaries. By midcentury, widespread environmental opposition drew lines in the sand by posing alternative definitions of use: recreational uses opposed extraction uses such as industrial-scale logging. These competing definitions created, as much as any forces, the extant wilderness system subsequent to the Wilderness Act of 1964.20 Prevailing definitions control the agenda and the ground reality of wilderness, as the twentieth century’s second half demonstrates.

Organized labor sometimes backed wilderness preservation, even at the possible risk of logging jobs. In Oregon, though some labor ranks had endorsed a tram proposal on Mount Hood in 1928, others opposed more road building. A generation later, labor endorsed further protections in the Three Sisters Wilderness Area, one of central Oregon’s most contested sites enacting the debate between logging and set-aside tracts. The president of the CIO-affiliated International Woodworkers of America and a local (Eugene OR) union secretary fought to preserve the lower elevation lands added earlier to that area.21 But lumber demand reinforced the mind-set that detached the lush forests of the upper McKenzie River valley from the Three Sisters. When the USFS reclassified the Three Sisters Primitive Area into a Wilderness Area, the preserved tract shrunk by 52,000 acres, which were logged.22 Up and down the Cascades volcanoes, tree line represented for a time a false boundary, and utility in lower-elevation lands was the only criterion. By midcentury in Oregon’s Cascades, some labor interests had aligned themselves with the recreation lobby (largely middle-class urbanites) rather than the utility-driven timber companies. A broad socio-economic spectrum rallied against the powerful USFS-timber alliance that sought to “get the cut out” almost anywhere.

After midcentury, wilderness consumerism as a political lobby competed increasingly effectively against the more palpable consumerism of massive logging. As a result of the USFS’s inclination favoring rapid clear-cutting, Northwest national forests resembled a weird hybrid of set-aside preserves surrounded by industrial tree farms.23 “Tree farms,” the metaphor unashamedly reducing forests to monocultural crop reproduction, became common in the midcentury. Recreationists including climbers found their familiar trails and approaches hacked and clear-cut, and protested this prevalent national forest use. Just as northwestern national forests were being logged on a hitherto unprecedented scale, mountaineering as a sport formed a new brand of environmental activism and political lobby.24 Battle lines hardened. The three primary mountaineering clubs took on increasingly public roles as wilderness advocates, inheriting the old, failed USFS mission of expanding primitive areas. In 1952 the Sierra Club opened a Northwest chapter office in Seattle, and they fought the cramped mind-set that regarded forests as only potential lumber. Subalpine (and alpine) approaches to a volcano were increasingly understood as part of it: the wooded ridges and drainages belonged as much as glaciers and snowfields.

The Cold War provided a new imagery for the volcanoes. The attraction to mountain wilderness that blossomed after World War II suggests a facile link between personal and national identity, as though climbing expresses one’s patriotism since, according to scholar Susan Schlepfer, the nuclear family gained strength and identity in the mountains just as the nation sharpened its superpower identity: “While alpinism . . . retained its racial, national, gendered, and combative overtones through the 1950s . . . American climbers described themselves as closed-mouthed, self-contained, and self-controlled, a composite of the traditional British alpinist, the GI of WWII, and the hero of western movies.”25

Though this equation downplays the status of women mountaineers, it repositions the Marshall wilderness credo as part of the post–World War II American self-image as world leader. In this mind-set, Northwest volcanoes represent optimal remote sites where industrial modernism remains distant and the sense of rebirth prevails. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s popular books (e.g., My Wilderness, 1960) preached this gospel in its celebration of Washington’s Glacier Peak, for instance. Testing one’s mettle on a climb—whether one “conquers” or not—imitates an act of consumption, the approach-ascent-descent plot resembling a finite expenditure of planning and energy. This set of motives more closely links personal with national (or regional) identity.

Yet volcanoes were in danger of decimation below tree line, as though they could be stripped of their green skirts. Just as the USFS reduced Oregon’s Three Sisters Primitive Area in converting it to a Wilderness Area, so it proposed that Washington’s Glacier Peak Limited Area be similarly reclassified and significantly reduced in 1957. Those interchangeable terms—“primitive,” “wilderness” or “wild,” “limited”—lost currency as protected public lands. The wilderness volcano ethnographer James Swan had neglected to name a century earlier would have been stripped of its valleys and forests in what preservationists called “the starfish proposal” (1959). The proposed reduction resembled a starfish with the volcano at the center and the radiating spokes or fingers, glaciers and rock ridges: most anything below alpine parks was off the table.

The Mountaineers, Mazamas, and Sierra Club mounted a national publicity campaign, advocating a holistic, ecosystem wilderness area a generation before this paradigm gained wide acceptance. They depicted the proposed Three Sisters and Glacier Peak Wilderness Areas in stark terms with fingers of snow (i.e., glacier) and rock, and everything below and between the fingers marked for logging. David Brower of the Sierra Club, with his gift for memorable phrase, called the Glacier Peak area “a Rorschach blot designed to bring out the worst in a highly guilty subconscious,” and he forecast “a symphony of destruction.”26 The starfish shape constitutes an apogee of abstract thinking, of divorce from any recognition of any connectivity.

By the 1950s, both the national and regional population increasingly understood and endorsed the value of these volcanoes: value extending far beyond the trees below the glaciers. The fact that the Three Sisters and Glacier Peak existed far from any big city only increased their value as alpine hinterlands, thanks to the gathering national wilderness campaign. For example, the October 1959 Sierra Club Bulletin published David Simon’s essay, “These Are the Shining Mountains,” which contained “a proposal for a Cascades Volcanic National Park” based on central Oregon’s rich volcanic region—the richest in the lower forty-eight states—and centered on the Three Sisters. But the young advocate died the following year and his proposal died faster than the “Ice Peaks National Park” proposal a generation earlier.27 Such sentiment resurfaced, however, in the 1970s.28 These volcanoes as hinterlands added to the generic appeal of mountains as remote settings. David Brower’s baleful “Rorschach blot” interpretation of the Glacier Peak “starfish proposal” galvanized the wilderness lobby to further work to fulfill Robert Marshall’s expansive wilderness area proposal. In Washington the North Cascades Conservation Council (N3C), founded in 1957 with a twenty-four-member board of directors, became the most effective local lobby advocating for Glacier Peak and Mount Baker as wilderness preserves.

Sierra Club and N3C lobbying strategies made a Northwest “wilderness” volcano a national cause célèbre. By the 1950s the Sierra Club had grown adept at using photography as a centerpiece in its lobbying strategies. In this case, its publications included aerial photographs of clear-cuts near the volcano as well as Ansel Adams art photos contrasting old growth forests with stump fields from recent logging and the glaciers and rock ridges just above. Environmentalists across the nation knew about Washington’s Glacier Peak, in the fabled North Cascades, and continued logging and mining activity just below it.29

Anyone tramping in the Cascadian or Olympics foothills or the Oregon coastal ranges in the mid- or later twentieth century knew the visual scars of clear-cutting, let alone the comprehensive damage it occasioned. The USFS Glacier Peak Wilderness Area (1960), at nearly 450,000 acres—little over half of what Bob Marshall had proposed twenty-one years earlier—just didn’t cut it. The lobby for a national park in the North Cascades grew in size and voice.

The Northwest volcanoes as optimal wilderness enjoyed a powerful Washington, DC ally in Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, a Yakima, Washington, native whose example and writing influenced the passage and extensions of the Wilderness Act, as many wilderness historians note. He extended the wilderness argument championed by Muir, Marshall, and others, and publicized Washington’s two less visible volcanoes through his own frequent backcountry travels. Douglas knew his outdoors better than most DC insiders before or since, and his backpacking, books, and articles consolidated his influence. Because of his background, writings, and charisma, Douglas was known far beyond DC.

Douglas rhapsodized about Glacier Peak a la Muir, calling its glaciers and streams “pure distillation from a true wilderness.” “Glacier Peak,” he wrote, “is not visible from any major highway. Foothills hide the alpine area. The peaks are locked into a remote area that is a true recluse. This inner realm is remote and exquisite. Man did not plan it that way. The Glacier Peak area is a wilderness by sheer accident. Civilization so far has passed it by.” His short sentences and metaphors boost his rhetorical effect and align his argument with standard early- and midcentury wilderness philosophy. Douglas recast Marshall’s interwar ideal wilderness as sanctum sanctorum, site for solitude and independence: “The Glacier Peak area, if left roadless and intact, will offer perpetual physical and spiritual therapy. For its rugged nature—its steep canyons, forbidding glaciers, and knife-edged ridges—will be a magnet to those who have daring and fortitude.”30 Volcano wilderness as ideal testing site of selfhood links early climber testimonials with Cold War patriotism, and this macho-colored mentality survives in more muted forms.

Douglas appealed to all who construe public wildlands as domains beyond property and profit: “Glacier Peak nourishes restless man and helps keep him whole. This is a matter of the spirit beyond the expertise of appraisers of property.”31 That appeal underlines the abiding conviction that outdoors experience, volcano or otherwise, possesses values far beyond economic value. And that truth is repeatedly ironized by our contemporary habits of environmental and wilderness consumerism.

The backpacking Chief Justice proves an excellent case study for mid- and later-century regional wilderness lobbying, one whose advocacy made him a spokesman for baby boomers. His aptly titled My Wilderness: The Pacific West appeared midway (1960) through the eight-year gestation of the Wilderness Act. In it Douglas extolled Mount Adams, which he watched growing up and from a later home in Glenwood, Washington. He lamented that since his younger years, this alpine park had been desecrated: “The loss of Bird Creek Meadows to the wilderness is symptomatic of the transformation going on in most of our far-western forest areas. I have seen in my lifetime a wilderness of trails remade into a maze of roads. There is hardly a place these days a jeep will not reach. The network of roads is so vast and intricate that almost every wilderness area is threatened.”32 The demand for quick access trumped trail maintenance as USFS roads, like capillary roots, spread ever closer to tree line at several volcanoes.

The fact that these meadows, like all of Adams’s eastern flanks, is Yakama Reservation land received no comment, as if their ownership or presence doesn’t matter. That omission is in keeping with the regional tendency to erase longtime indigenous presence in volcano neighborhoods. In fact the Yakama Nation Mount Adams Recreation Area (1972), the only section of the reservation open to non-tribal members, includes recreational infrastructure such as trails and campgrounds that are maintained by the Nation for public use.

Douglas voiced a nature-culture dichotomy that in the past generation has been discarded by environmental historians (e.g., William Cronon, “The Trouble With Nature,” 1995) and wilderness users. Yet his “machine age versus freedom” opposition, an inheritance from Marshall (among others), remains attractive for many however suspect its romanticism. An ardent preservationist, Douglas reacted instinctively against the coming “windshield wilderness,” deeply fearing the network of USFS roads. Douglas understood that a tough choice needed to be made, given the culture of cars and convenience: “The struggle of our time is to maintain an economy of plenty and yet keep man’s freedom intact.” Like many since his time, he believed roadless areas the solution.33 For Douglas “an economy of plenty” exists in opposition to “man’s freedom” rather than along a continuum with it. Plenty of room for dispute, though Douglas may have been prescient given today’s abundance of illegal ATV and ORV use.

The neo-romantic equation of wilderness with freedom matched that familiar alpine ocean of freedom and credo of personal transformation. But the machine versus freedom dichotomy created some popular misunderstandings about the meaning of “big-W” wilderness, whatever its legal definitions and management practices. Some misconceptions, deriving from lists of restrictions, claim official wilderness precludes multiple uses. Those who equate wilderness with “locked up,” for instance, insist that public lands, alpine or forested, should be accessible by machine—by staying seated, behind a windshield or not. Machine creep means using our bodies less.

For many, such machine creep signifies an unacceptable marker along the nature–culture continuum. According to his biographer Mark Harvey, Howard Zahniser, chief lobbyist for the Wilderness Act, realized that wilderness boundaries also meant sustaining what is wild inside them. In wilderness landscapes, natural processes—volcano ecosystems, for instance—should be more conspicuous than human activity. Zahniser championed wild lands for their spiritual as well as scientific values: modes of knowledge (e.g., mystical or animist) exceeding human measure. Those subscribing to his eclectic outlook know that natural processes include rather than exclude human cultural production. During the eight years Zahniser worked for the Wilderness bill (1956–64), he conceived wild lands not as static precincts apart from human activity, but primarily as “rich havens of biodiversity” that should remain “a home for the wild.”34 Mountain wilderness reveals, as much as any, systems in flux rather than some timeless realm, as popular misinterpretations would claim. And the flux—the wildness—includes human beings in tune with their bodies and the natural world, as testimonials such as Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild (1990) eloquently insist.

The Wilderness Act’s most famous sentence succinctly defines wilderness: “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” The act’s most famous word came from Sierra Club officer (and Mountaineer) Polly Dyer, who described the ocean tracts of Olympic National Park as “untrammeled.” Though the Makah lived here (and nearby) for centuries, human presence remains minimal in this vibrant seascape. The manifest geologic power of the contact zone, where the world’s largest ocean meets the northwestern corner of the continental United States, represents a steadier version of the geologic power promised by the region’s most exceptional mountains.

“Trammel” and “trammeled” show a long etymological history (OED), one in which metaphorical meanings emerged more recently in the nineteenth century. For Zahniser untrammeled meant unfettered, tracts beyond human control and social restriction “where one might tramp on foot for long periods of time” alone, and where one would not impact wild animals and plants.35 The Wilderness Act captured an idealized notion of wilderness in which one hikes (or climbs) indefinitely apart from others, relishing solitude. This scenario ignores the long history of humans in mountain landscapes, and does not match route conditions for most Northwest volcano climbers. More often than not, climbers tramp where others have tramped before. And tramp on plants and too near animals.

In the relatively affluent 1960s, the Wilderness Act privileged one kind of public lands over others and unwittingly ramped up the habits of wilderness consumerism. The desire to buy the right gear effortlessly extended itself to actual experience within the exclusive, higher-altitude tracts of the mountain wilderness areas. The fact that backpackers (or day users) are visitors suggests we’re much more absent than present, and absence increases our desire and the perceived value of our limited time “inside.” Big-W wilderness areas, embodying that idealized, mostly sans-human view of wilderness, came to resemble a top-end product like a luxury car or five-star restaurant. Just as advertising ramped up diverse strategies to target increasingly affluent markets, the Wilderness Act, with its exclusive land tracts, created an analogous consumer desire for outdoors enthusiasts with at least some discretionary income.36 The myriad additions to the original National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS) only boost their collective status and allure. Given their promotional literature, consumer demand rises steadily. These places are special and so are those within them. People craving sustained hinterlands experience want the best, and high altitudes, with their guarantee of high status, are worth the cost.

The Wilderness Act included Washington’s Glacier Peak, Mount Adams, and Goat Rocks Wildernesses in the National Wilderness Preservation System. Within this system, the zones surrounding Glacier Peak, Goat Rocks (centered on an ancient volcanic cone, the volcano prominent two million years ago), Mount Adams, Mount Hood, Mount Washington, Three Sisters, and Diamond Peak enjoyed protected status; Mount Jefferson was added in 1968 and Mount Baker, not until 1984. Among these, Three Sisters and Glacier Peak form the largest big-W areas, Three Sisters at 286,708 acres, and Glacier Peak including over half a million acres—roughly three quarters the size of Marshall’s original proposal. Official wilderness areas replaced the spineless, three-category USFS system, as appropriate and illegal uses were clearly spelled out.

During the 1960s, as interagency rivalry heated up over wilderness leadership, the wilderness mission passed over to the NPS. Since World War II the USFS had lost its earlier leadership role in designating and enforcing forest preserves. Generally speaking, recreation, let alone preservation, mattered far less than resources extraction. With what appears as extraordinary myopia, the USFS tried to label recreational activities within wilderness a “single use” though they advocated “multiple use”—a cover for accelerating timber cuts. By the mid-1960s, wilderness advocates turned this rhetorical strategy on its head, defining various modes of wilderness recreation at Glacier Peak, Three Sisters or elsewhere as “multiple use” whereas logging constituted “single use.” Environmentalists prevailed in the semantic battle once they owned “multiple use.” This strategy remains a potent weapon.

Ironically, the North Cascades National Park (NCNP), signed into law in 1968, included neither northern volcano (Glacier Peak and Mount Baker), nor Washington’s spectacular inland fjord, Lake Chelan. The intricate regional relationship between national parks and volcanoes had ended: once again Mount Baker and Glacier Peak failed to make the grade in the NPS. That year, the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area was expanded to include more forest in two west slope drainages (the Suiattle and White Chuck Rivers). Looking back in old age, longtime advocate Harvey Manning angrily recalled that “All of Mount Baker, the Cascades’ whitest volcano up high and greenest volcano down low, and part of Mount Shuksan, often regarded as the most beautiful mountain in America, and most of their enclosing Nooksack River and Baker River valleys were left to multiple-use.”37

Politics once again trumped long-term local planning, as Senator “Scoop” Jackson’s NCNP boundaries had little to do with those of the leading preservationist lobbyists. Evidently another volcano national park in the Northwest mattered not at all in DC: “The Mountaineers, the Sierra Club, the N3C, and allies had devoted a dozen-odd years to a detailed, thoughtful proposal. There is no evidence Senator Jackson ever gave it a look.” Manning borrowed a symbol from high classical art to record the outrage many felt in 1968: “A national park in the North Cascades that lacked its highest mountain was like Venus de Milo without a head. A national park lacking the entirety of ‘the magnificent pair,’ Glacier Peak and Mount Baker sculpted a very incomplete Venus.”38 It would take until 1984 for both volcanoes and environs to be officially protected as wilderness.

In practice, the new system of wilderness (NWPS) reflected as disjointed a series of agendas as the earlier USFS “system,” though by contrast it retained statutory authority and ground power. Once wilderness became institutionalized in federal bureaucracies, both its philosophy and enforcement lacked single purpose though acreage grew steadily. We got a lot of official wilderness but no clear, unified system. If the pre-1964 history of wilderness under USFS authority revealed “conflicting political ideological meanings,” the new National Wilderness Preservation System created a similarly decentralized, hodgepodge system without a clear administrative philosophy. As environmental historian Thomas R. Vale states, it “cobbles together wild landscape reserves overseen by different federal agencies with different administrative regulations. In spite of proclamations to the contrary (Wilderness Society 1984), it is no more coherent than the National Park System, and arguably less so.”39 Northwest wilderness areas sometimes reflect this de facto tradition of different federal agencies administering “their” acreage according to their own traditions and management philosophies. Most conspicuously, the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument (1982) is administered by the USFS (one of a handful of national monuments) as a special category within the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.

Following the Wilderness Act debate sharpened between recreational interests and resource extraction interests, with Glacier Peak posing a case study. After all, as one mountaineering scholar has noted, mountains retained their “natural moral authority” just as wilderness carried rich cultural meanings.40 These values have not changed. Those “cultural meanings” repeatedly played out on Northwest volcanoes since 1964.

In the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area, the act’s mining exception grandfathered extant mining claims and allowed new claims (in any wilderness area) for twenty years—that is, 1984. The Kennecott Copper Corporation owned a big claim on the shoulder of Plummer Mountain, just northeast of the volcano. Company surveyors called their tract the “Golf Course” as though it were their own playground: a telltale metaphor that reveals the chasm between private, upper- or middle-class privilege and set-aside tracts around volcanoes. For increasing numbers, such a corporate inholding was unacceptable, even sacrilegious.

Eleven years after Douglas’s My Wilderness, literary journalist John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid (1971) spotlit this wilderness volcano debate through its extended profile of Sierra Club’s David Brower (“the archdruid”). The book provided balance in its three essays by pitting, in each, Brower with an ideological foe. Yet Encounters advanced the cause of wilderness. In “A Mountain,” first panel of the triptych, McPhee, Brower, geologist Charles Park, and two others backpack east to west, from Holden and Lyman Lake to the Suiattle River Road just north of Glacier Peak. At the Wilderness Area boundary, McPhee reflects the dichotomy captured by the Wilderness Act, paraphrasing the sign: “‘Take one more step and, by decree, you will enter a preserved and separate world, you will pass from civilization into wilderness.’ Wilderness was now that definable, that demonstrable, and could be entered in the sense that one enters a room.”41 The ostensibly rigid distinction, which has been increasingly subverted in scholarly and popular understanding, makes the case for wilderness consumerism. When we hike past a Wilderness Act sign we enter the most fancy, most exquisitely appointed room, the one generally reserved for special occasions. McPhee’s ironic paraphrase sets the stage for his essay’s debate: should Kennecott Copper be allowed to drill and dig for copper inside the Wilderness Area (exercising the twenty-year exception for mining)?

Encounters memorably records the clash of contrary mind-sets and sensibilities and, while being fair to the Charles Parks, it tips the balance in favor of the David Browers. The book appeared just one year after the country’s first Earth Day, as mainstream America turned greener. Before the mid-August 1969 backpack trip, McPhee had been advised by an NPS friend, “The Glacier Peak Wilderness is probably the most beautiful piece of country we’ve got. Mining copper there would be like hitting a pretty girl in the face with a shovel. It would be like strip-mining the Garden of Eden.” Those brutal images stack the deck and reverberate in the set piece descriptions of the volcano the writer cannot avoid, from Cloudy and Suiattle Passes and then, from famed Image Lake—the latter, Glacier Peak’s iconic view, matching Mount Hood from Lost Lake, or North and Middle Sisters from McKenzie Pass.

Fig. 9. Glacier Peak from Image Lake. The most iconic view of Washington’s “wilderness” volcano. Courtesy of “Image Lake and Glacier Peak” by Norm Hodges is licensed under CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Image_Lake_and_Glacier_Peak.jpg.

In the view from Cloudy Pass—one of those “scenic climaxes,” in Brower’s phrase—McPhee echoes his NPS friend: “In the central foreground of the view that we were looking at from Cloudy Pass—was the lode of copper that Kennecott would mine, and to do so the company would make an open pit at least two thousand four hundred feet from rim to rim.”42 Using standard lobbying hyperbole, Brower claims such a pit could be seen from the moon. The remainder of “A Mountain” plays variations on this dark “scenic climax”: the image of a towering volcano skirted by glaciers, drainages, forests, and parks, with a potentially giant hole gaping front and center.

Through shifts in focus, McPhee writes a fairy tale scene that depicts our instinctive, archetypal greed for precious minerals. Against the insistent panoramas, the backpackers temporarily shift their gaze to a three-inch galvanized pipe, “Kennecott’s Drill Site No. 3,” amidst the alpine parks that comprise the corporation’s “Golf Course.” The canny writer plays panoramic and close-up views off one another allegorically, as the party had been scouting, like the corporation, for copper: “The beauty of the mountain across the valley was cool and absolute, but the beauty of the [copper] stone in Park’s hand was warm and subjective. It affected us all. Human appetites, desires, ambitions, greed, and profound aesthetic and acquisitional instincts were concentrated between the stone and our eyes.”43

Temptation and distraction, the hot beauty of copper diverts us from the cool beauty of white volcano. Under the Winthrop volcano, McPhee symbolized the painful challenge of the mining exception and exposed the mutually exclusive values of wilderness preservation and of resource extraction: the latter, abiding under the absurd, archaic provisions of the 1872 Mining Law and periodically appearing under the guise of “conservation,” “multiple use” or, more recently, “wise use”—a semantic sleight of hand that sanctions continued extractive uses of hitherto designated wilderness. The twentieth-century regional history of wilderness, as idea and fact, shows the volcano’s “beauty” increasingly dominating the “beauty” of a resource (forest stands as lumber, or a potentially rich copper vein).

In the parable, background insistently trumps foreground as the meaning of copper dissipates before the meaning of volcano. Under any volcano, everyone feels its pull. The glow of copper faded against Glacier Peak: “We were as close to it as we would ever be. It was right there—so enormous that it seemed to be on top of us, extending upward five thousand feet above our heads. ‘That’s the sort of thing that draws people into geology,’ [Park] said. ‘Geologists go into the field because of love of the earth and of the out-of-doors.’ ‘The irony is that they go into wilderness and change it,’ Brower said.”44 Kennecott never developed an open pit copper mine near Washington’s wilderness volcano: Washington Congressman Lloyd Meeds told N3C leader Phil Zalesky that its Miner Ridge claim and plans “would never happen.” Too much political pressure had mounted against it. Encounters did not determine Kennecott’s decision though it undoubtedly sharpened the debate even as it enhanced wilderness advocacy.

McPhee’s nuanced presentation has proven a standard narrative in the intervening decades. The narrative includes ironic compromises, for instance, infrastructure within wilderness areas: folks want “untrammeled” but want trails, bridges, rock fire rings, pit toilets, etcetera. But not bulldozers, let alone open-pit mining. On the descent west along the Suiattle River, McPhee reduces the scarred images of a USFS trail “improvement project” to the sight and sound of a bulldozer, questioning the presence of the dozer tearing up ground within an established Wilderness Area. In Park and Brower’s final clash about this Wilderness Area’s optimal use, the former asserts “copper” and the latter, “blueberries”—food for bears and other critters including human visitors to the area.45 The whimsical contrast defines fundamental differences in renewable vs. non-renewable resources and scale, copper symbolizing that “ascendency of the machine” derided by preservationists.

The notion of private property or ownership at the volcanoes strikes me as bizarre, yet with at least four of the peaks, including Glacier, competing claims in some periods reflected wildly diverse agendas. With two wilderness volcanoes, modern notions of wilderness superimposed themselves, with contrary results, over much older tribal jurisdictions and traditions. The fact that Washington’s southern two volcanoes faced potential corporate development on or above their slopes strains credulity, given widespread regional sentiment about the snowpeaks and the seismic change in concern over wilderness protection after 1964. Yet a wedge of Mount St. Helens (mostly unforested, hence “useless”) remained in corporate hands until 1982. And before the NWPS, Mount Adams was also under some mining threat, as its crater area contained sulphur deposits that had been prospected. The volcano was federally owned, and yet mining could have occurred near its summit.46 In this absurd scenario, a volcano would have been mined at its crater, holes upon hole. This interest was not retired until 1984. In retrospect, this appears as far-fetched as the earlier tramway proposals for Mounts Hood and Rainier.

Yet the federal ownership of Adams is recent. Native American treaties signed in 1855 that recognized fourteen tribes established both the Yakama and Warm Springs Reservations. The former was created for the exclusive use of the Yakama; the latter was for the Warm Springs, Wasco, and Paiute tribes. The southwest border of the former includes at least 40 percent of Mount Adams, the boundary running through the false summit and summit. Almost all of Mount Adams’s eastern side (including at least four glaciers, its hardest climbing routes, and William Douglas’s beloved Bird Creek Meadows) belongs to the Yakama Nation. The Mount Adams Wilderness Area (1964) overlays it, so it and the Yakama Nation Mount Adams Recreation Area (i.e., the reservation’s southwest corner) are co-administered as wilderness. Mount Adams—Pahto—has been part of Yakama lands for millennia. Ironically overlooked in the settlement of jurisdictions, this relatively recent wilderness philosophy overlaps tribal lifeways, many of which whites imitate and call “preservationist.”

South of the Columbia River, Oregon’s Warm Springs Reservation contains the eastern half of Mount Jefferson, the Mount Jefferson Wilderness Area (1968) bisecting the volcano. An older tribal claim bested the late 1960s effort to include all the Mount Jefferson environs within wilderness. The historical irony pits long tribal habitation against the recent commitment to volcano set-aside lands. From the vantage of Yakama or Warm Springs peoples, Pahto and Seekseekqua, respectively, are the opposite of hinterland, and wilderness volcano means nothing. In practice the tribal government manages its alpine zones in concert with wilderness area mandates. No discernable differences exist between Adams and Jefferson in terms of tribal management: in these cases, joint management does not reveal contrary agendas or activities.

With the region’s most famous pair of volcanoes, wilderness legislation was superimposed over a national park and a premiere ski area that had seen myriad other uses, and these contrary traditions yielded contrary outcomes. In the 1970s popular support for the NWPS increased as advocates sought to enlarge extant wilderness areas and add new ones. In MRNP eight years after the Wilderness Act, NPS officials completed a wilderness proposal covering all park backcountry excepting the Paradise–Camp Muir corridor: the first half of the oldest, most popular climbing route and a popular day hike. This thin slice of the pie has for a century received greatest use. The proposal took sixteen years to pass Congress, but in the interim, staff proactively managed backcountry as de facto wilderness and tried to lessen ongoing development plans.47

“De facto wilderness,” something tantamount to but less than official wilderness, became a common management designation in the region in the 1970s and 1980s, just as wilderness became a key component of “resource management.” The policy palpably responded to public demand. By 1988, 97 percent of MRNP became categorized as wilderness: for one generation now, the park is almost entirely wilderness yet given its density of visitation, “wilderness” has been stretched, in some spots, well beyond the 1964 definition.

To get a handle on wilderness use in MRNP, researchers developed the concept of recreational carrying capacity, which included both ecological and psychological components.48 The concept has crucial interdisciplinary reach but traditionally, field researchers had studied the former components but not the latter. The blend of ecological with psychological dimensions drove the backcountry plan circulated in 1973. Recreational carrying capacity factors us into the equation and reflects wilderness as a basic resource management issue, as though it were a measurable entity like big-W wilderness. This concept assesses specific traits ensuing from the act and attempts to quantify a moving target: how many is too many? The answers seem hopelessly variable and subjective, beyond the reach of some quantifying matrix. The plan primarily affected horse- and backpacking parties, and the restrictions resemble those subsequently adopted by wilderness areas throughout the region.

At Mount Hood, the codification of wilderness had to accommodate the long presence of downhill skiing, in which recreational carrying capacity features far higher numbers. Over 25 percent of Mount Hood National Forest is designated wilderness area and its core, the Mount Hood Wilderness Area (1964), currently 67,320 acres, encircles the volcano—with two exceptions. The differences in wilderness areas within MRNP and MHNF dramatize different agency (NPS vs. USFS) philosophies of use and traditions of lands protection or restriction. Most of the Mount Hood Wilderness Area extends westward from the summit (i.e., some of its hardest climbing routes), encompassing subalpine forests. On its south-southwest side, a narrow non-Wilderness Area corridor extends upwards nearly to Crater Rock. The high volume symbolized by Timberline Lodge and ski hill, with its high Palmer Chairlift, signifies uses antithetical to the act. Similarly, a larger wedge on Hood’s southeast slopes, a slice of pie that also doesn’t reach the summit, was and is excluded to accommodate big Mount Hood Meadows, a destination resort for several decades.

In the past generation, conflicts between wilderness advocates and commercial interests surface when Mount Hood Meadows has filed to expand. For example, in the 1980s it was “planning a city,” in the words of venerable Mount Hood historian Jack Grauer, in a “wild, scenic” location within MHNF. The big environmental organizations (e.g., Sierra Club, Mazamas) stepped in to oppose and litigate if necessary; in 1988 a local organization, “Friends of Mount Hood,” was created in part to oppose any further resort expansion plans.49 Study of the Mount Hood Meadows website, however, suggests that the resort has always been a leader in environmental stewardship. Antithetical narratives flourish.

At Mount St. Helens a grassroots lobby contended with a regional timber giant but gained an unexpected boost after the 1980 eruption. Unsurprisingly, the argument for preservation emphasized its famed beauty (as the most shapely of the Northwest volcanoes) and its modern recreational history at the big lake below its north-slope forests. In the 1970s a local environmental group seeking to designate Mount St. Helens a national monument gained force. Two articles in National Parks Magazine (December 1963, May 1968) advocated for a national monument, since most local folks valued outstanding scenery and recreation over small timber revenues for the USFS.

Local environmentalists re-formed the Mount St. Helens Protective Association in February 1977, as Weyerhaeuser demanded continued access to the volcano’s lush lowland forests—years after a comparable, timber-driven “starfish” proposal for Glacier Peak was rejected. Support expanded rapidly since several generations possessed indelible memories of youth camps or lodge vacations at Spirit Lake. To preserve the setting for future generations and halt further logging, many lobbied their congressional delegation.50 The big lake, part of its identity, had functioned as a rustic destination resort for generations: a volcano and lake had together provided the kind of life-changing outdoors experience that shines undimmed in the memory of participants, who remain fiercely loyal to that experience and setting. Legions of regional residents were not about to see the woods near “their” lake and volcano stripped away. At yet another volcano, recreation battled resource extraction.

Recreation and logging had long existed in opposition below St. Helens. The former uses approximated 1960s wilderness philosophy (excepting motorized boats); the latter “single use” did not. In 1977, the USFS undertook “RARE II” (“Roadless Area Review and Evaluation II”), as mandated by the Wilderness Act and legal challenges to RARE I, and completed its work in January 1979, recommending an additional fifteen million acres be added to the NWPS. Because of subsequent legal challenges, RARE II was mostly voided. RARE II, incredibly enough, did not list St. Helens or environs for wilderness designation. By 1979, though, the era of massive clear-cutting was ending due to increasing environmental activism in the press and courtroom.

The May 18, 1980 eruption of St. Helens increased preservationist pressure, given the precedent of Mount Lassen National Park in northeast California, where massive eruptions in 1915 led to a national park in 1916. By 1981 the local protective association, with endorsements from several state and national environmental organizations, proposed a 216,000-acre monument; timber interests recommended a forty-thousand-acre monument in the blast zone only. Same old battle lines. The resulting National Monument compromise (May 1982), 110,000 acres, is closer in size to timber’s small proposal than the protective association’s expansive one. And ironically, the protected area would be managed by the USFS, which had lost its historic lead in wilderness preservation. Use regulations partially imitate Leave No Trace practice, though snowmobiles, for example, are permitted off-road. This National Monument contains, inconceivably, no official wilderness, which distinguishes St. Helens from almost every other Northwest volcano. Yet a restricted zone circumscribing the volcano is off limits due to St. Helens’ rumbling and dome building in its center. This is de facto wilderness without people.

In the year of the United States Bicentennial the USFS underwent a paradigm shift in management philosophy due to passage of the National Forest Management Act. Because of this act ecosystem management rather than resource extraction became the primary criterion in forest planning. Finally, holistic planning began to replace the kind of abstracted line drawing that lacks every kind of knowledge except current extraction practices and profits. Ecosystem management overlaps considerably with wilderness preservation, and this act nudged the agency closer to its historic mission of preserves. Clear-cutting (e.g., below St. Helen’s western slopes) would be out. Henceforth, the Service saw the forest, not just the trees. Since that seismic shift, mountain wilderness has increased. In 1984, because of bipartisan support from Washington’s and Oregon’s congressional delegations, Congress passed a supplemental Wilderness Act—the Washington and Oregon Wilderness Acts, respectively—which expanded Pacific Northwest Wilderness Areas acreage more than any year since 1964. For example, Oregon’s Diamond Peak Wilderness Area was expanded to 52,337 acres.

In Washington, the northernmost volcano that also visually dominates southwestern British Columbia finally became official wilderness. The Mount Baker Wilderness Area, at 117,900 acres, unsurprisingly highlights the volcano as the icon of is southern portion. The wilderness area includes fourteen glaciers and over ten thousand acres of ice. The local grassroots lobby, the Mount Baker Wilderness Association, advocated for a 240,000—acre wilderness based on their extensive field research.51 As at St. Helens, they got roughly half of what they asked for, sixty years after Washington National Forest was renamed Mount Baker National Forest and a decade after it had been combined with the Snoqualmie National Forest. A national forest, and later a wilderness area, again took their name and identity from a volcano. By 1984, then, virtually all Northwest volcanoes had become official wilderness.

Yet preservationist pressure increased as the majority population began to identify themselves as moderate environmentalists. Mountaineers writer Harvey Manning’s Washington Wilderness: The Unfinished Work (1984), with gorgeous photography by Pat O’Hara, fit the winning Sierra Books coffee table format that in the preceding generation had proven as potent a lobbying weapon as any in middle-class America. Manning’s inside cover featured a big state map and detailed thirty “proposed additions” to extant wilderness areas including acreage west of North Cascades National Park (NCNP); west, south, and east of Glacier Peak Wilderness Area; northwest, southwest-south, and east of MRNP; and north, west, and south of the small Mount Adams Wilderness Area (46, 353 acres).

Congress got the message, at least a bit, since it enlarged Glacier Peak Wilderness Area (1984) for the third time in twenty years, adding acreage that had been controversial sixteen years earlier, when NCNP was created.52 Within a generation the environmental lobby carried the day around Washington’s wilderness volcano. A new Wilderness Area, which Congress named after the late Senator Henry Jackson, bordered the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area on the south. Factoring in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area just north of I-90 (Snoqualmie Pass), a big chunk of the Cascades north from Snoqualmie Pass to Canada became official wilderness. That’s an extraordinary achievement that provides an alpine playground for several lifetimes. With the creation of the Wild Sky Wilderness Area in 2008, which is contiguous to the Henry Jackson Wilderness Area, and protects even more subalpine west slope forest (along the North Fork, Skykomish River), Robert Marshall’s 1939 vision was finally realized. It only took three generations, as broad coalitions (and bipartisan support) “finished” the “work” in the North Cascades as elsewhere.

The greening of the regional population inspired additional categories of protection, “wilderness thresholds” and de facto wilderness (e.g., Mount St. Helens National Monument). Wilderness thresholds, or buffer zones, define national recreation areas and their relationship to contiguous national parks. These recreation areas provide the infrastructure for motorized visitors and recreationists.53 With wilderness thresholds, high density recreation abuts big-W wilderness, as is the case on the south and southeastern flanks of Mount Hood. Though not legal wilderness, as management strategies wilderness thresholds present alternatives or buffers and, in the woods or above them, usually provide experience comparable to what backpackers expect in wilderness areas—even if not every wilderness area rule is observed.

In the Northwest, both preservationists and mining prospectors or timber cruisers focused increasingly on de facto wilderness: those areas adjacent to official wilderness.54 This attention diffused, to a limited extent, the tradition of exclusivity characterizing big-W wilderness. Washington’s Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area (1976) exemplifies de facto wilderness coupled with citizen initiative in its genesis. This mountainous region, directly east of the greater Seattle metro area, received broad-based citizen coalition support for permanent protection. When enough recreational and other interests demand wilderness protection for tracts contiguous to legal wilderness areas, de facto wilderness gains validity and becomes a transitional stage; a good example of this is what happened with almost all of MRNP between 1973 and 1988.

Farther north, North Cascades National Park (NCNP), which spreads east of Mount Baker and north of Glacier Peak, comprises a new national park entity, a “park complex” dependent upon “wilderness thresholds.” At NCNP, a highway (Rte. 20, the North Cascades Highway, 1972) runs through it, bisecting the park and providing “scenic narrative” infrastructure—vista pullouts, signage—and amenities characteristic of mid-twentieth-century management emphases (e.g., NPS’s Mission 66). Drivers transiting this threshold gain a slight taste of this park’s identity. Most don’t quit their vehicles for more than eight hours, and Mount Baker and Glacier Peak can’t be seen from the highway: a relatively low-altitude corridor, an artery from which day hikers, backpackers, “through hikers” (i.e., Pacific Crest Trail backpackers) and climbers travel out and up, into the myriad lakes, glaciers, and jutting peaks of the “park complex.” In 1988 Congress designated about 93 percent of the NCNP complex, along with the adjacent Glacier Peak (southwest) and Pasayten (east) Wilderness Areas, as the Stephen Mather Wilderness to ensure additional mandated protection. Though the percentage is not quite as high as in MRNP, almost all of this big block of mountainous, north-central Washington, including its two volcanoes, is dedicated wilderness. That’s a significant grassroots and legislative accomplishment, a claim to fame in the Evergreen State. No windshield wilderness here.

Wilderness thresholds and de facto wilderness function as contiguous buffer zones and quasi-wilderness, respectively. Yet in the 1980s consensus about both became suspect as Northwest logging entered a more frantic phase. At the same time, with ecosystem management as its mandate, the USFS was charged with enforcing northern spotted owl protection policies. In the 1980s and 1990s, the northern spotted owl, a threatened species that almost exclusively inhabits old-growth forests, became a lightning rod in Northwest timber wars. The subalpine zone below the volcanoes or other Cascades—or particularly Washington’s Olympics and Oregon’s coastal range—became a fiercely contested site of clashing values. At Glacier Peak, lines were drawn in the sand between environmentalists and loggers as spotted owl censuses declined. More and more people understood that extant national parks and wilderness areas—that welter of lines on maps—didn’t sufficiently protect old-growth forest ecosystems, which include valleys and watersheds, not just what’s above them.55 Ecosystem management dictated what preservationists knew all along: high altitudes cannot be detached from low, as the resources in both always comprise an integrated whole. Northern spotted owls, like volcano glaciers, belong to the old forests below the latter.

The Northwest contained the lower forty-eight states’ best stands of remaining old-growth forest and sometimes, old growth flourishes under the volcanoes. The logging industry, like many USFS old timers, was wedded to the metaphor and practice of tree “farming” as though foothills forests were a monocultural, renewable crop, like Palouse wheat or Hood River Valley apples. We’re not talking Christmas tree farms. The zeal to log and replant up to wilderness area boundaries turned some de facto wilderness tracts into checkered cutover lands both ugly and sterile—horrific visual cliché of west slope lowlands. Additionally, such practices sometimes wiped out hiking trails or climbing approaches. Anyone flying over or hiking the Cascades or coast ranges knows the crazy-quilt legacy of industrial-scale harvesting in foothills up to 3500-foot elevation or higher. Though logging companies retained forest “curtains” adjacent to roads to dupe unsuspecting motorists, backpackers and climbers approaching volcanoes through subalpine stretches (just beyond wilderness area boundaries) knew better.

So did some professional foresters. On a September 1988 hike in the Three Sisters Wilderness, two individuals, one a USFS employee, decided to found a reform-minded employee organization.56 The Association of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics was born. Their experiences in one of Oregon’s oldest and largest wilderness areas prompted the foresters to lobby the USFS to step up to the plate and manage forests holistically. A dozen years had already passed since the National Forest Management Act, and local enforcement lagged far behind, given the long, intimate relationship between the local national forests and logging companies. This internal USFS reform group played a key role in the regional debate about ecosystem management, sometimes joining forces with mainstream preservationist lobbies such as the Sierra Club, which opened a legal defense fund office in Seattle in 1987.

The notion of volcanoes as “arctic islands” misleads to the extent it splits integrated ecosystems; the precincts just below a volcano form part of it. Arctic islands constitute the backbone to regional ecosystems, with riparian zones connecting higher altitudes with sea level.57 Riparian zones represent the most biologically rich regions, as field biologists, wilderness advocates, and timber interests have always known. The metaphor of higher and lower elevations as one complex organism exposes the artificial distinctions between legal wilderness and de facto wilderness.

For example, just beyond MRNP’s southeast corner, the Highway 12 corridor is sandwiched between the Tatoosh and William O. Douglas Wilderness Areas. Ohanapecosh in MRNP’s southeast corner—along with the Carbon River entrance in the northwest corner, the lowest elevation in the park—has long featured a “Grove of the Patriarchs” boardwalk trail that crosses the Ohanapecosh River and circles a small island. Ancient Douglas firs, western hemlocks, and western red cedars prompt responses like “cathedral,” “magic kingdom,” “a sacred place.” The grove’s irresistible, anthropomorphic title describes old habits of veneration. Visitors come not to learn about the area’s one-time mineral baths or WPA camp; they come to experience the unique, intense atmosphere of old-growth forest, where tree girths and heights exceed common understanding. This island of time exists as part of Mount Rainier’s eastside glaciers and drainages that have watered it for eons. In the Northwest, other groves of “patriarchs” grow under the volcanoes and exemplify old-growth forest. From the late twentieth-century vantage, such low-elevation riparian zones are integral to the glaciers and craters above them.

While the wilderness system enjoys broad support in the early twenty-first century, most of its supporters are urban or suburban, reflecting the demographic reality of the Willamette Valley and the Puget Sound basin. Increasingly, time inside a wilderness area is determined by the wired demands and alternatives of the city. It’s a luxury. With some exceptions, use of wilderness appears an updated expansion of the traditional park picnic. Wilderness becomes quick and consumable, an outdoors alternative to high-end malls or art museums.

For example, the MHNF Strategic Stewardship Plan (2006), when highlighting the four Wilderness Areas around Mount Hood, comments upon the marked trend towards short visits. Wilderness experience in this “urban national forest” provides an odd mix, as Mount Hood “biographer” Jon Bell admits: “There are times, camped high up above Vista Ridge on the northwest side . . . when you feel solitude so wild that you forget a major metropolitan mess of more than 2 million people is little more than an hour’s drive west. On other days, you run into familiar faces on the slopes as if you were just crossing paths at a coffee shop in town.”58 The former scenario defines wilderness experience; the latter does not, yet it occurs increasingly frequently inside designated wilderness.

The same trend prevails in other Northwest wilderness areas centered upon volcanoes, suggesting a profound and troubling lag, in the early twenty-first century, between use and policy. Decade by decade, use means different activities according to different constituencies. Wilderness policy contains clear expectations about experiences, at higher or lower altitudes, in small groups few and far between; wilderness use reflects, at times, numbers and habits characteristic of high-density populations in cities. Cities contain the primary wilderness lobby, along with most mountaineering clubs and alpine rec stores. Given the rate of urbanization, the region needs its big-W wilderness areas more than ever. The further contemporary technologies remove most of us from the alpine hinterlands, the more we need them.

The notion of a wilderness area as a “form of mental rebirth,” as Howard Zahniser described it, sustains the familiar argument for climbing, especially volcano climbing. Experience on a “living volcano” or in a “living wilderness” area enhances individual and collective life. Whether such rebirth occurs during swift wilderness trips is unknown. A quickie is better than nothing, but it represents a fleeting glimpse in contrast to the backpacking or climbing celebrated by Northwest wilderness writers. Volcano climbs increasingly resemble a small, precious chunk of time we buy.

Anti-wilderness arguments past or present deride the whole notion of set-aside land as impractical and selfish, oddly enough. If wilderness boundaries create a system of public lands exclusivity, opponents claim exclusion as though official wilderness is “locked up,” unavailable to “significant”—i.e., motorized—human use. In this mind-set, passing a particular wilderness area sign signifies entering a closed space, not a living, changing domain. Such arguments are embraced by many locally elected officials. Contemporary critics of 1960s wilderness thinking rightly condemn the fundamentally flawed ahistoricity sometimes accompanying the idea of set-aside tracts. Yet in the early 1960s Zahniser, the Wilderness Act’s chief architect, sustained a more nuanced, dynamic view, noting in his diary that wilderness preservation should “remove the human trammels that keep the natural changes from taking place.”59

For anti-wilderness folks, “locked up” usually means you can’t enter or travel sitting down (excepting horseback). It rubs against a terminal love affair with vehicles, however small (e.g., ORVs and ATVs). In this respect the volcanoes (except Crater Lake/Mount Mazama) remain locked up except for occasional approach routes. We uncritically laud our ease of access even as we recognize myriad problems accruing from motors, and we prize wilderness areas as domains apart. Not all who accept the fact of wilderness areas accept the preference for quiet trails, for example. Roads of any sort separate, more than anything else, the space of wilderness from other public lands since roads assume motors. And motors—the sound of “the machine age”—subvert, for most, the purposes of wilderness: purposes that demand different modes of access. Northwest volcanoes, by their very nature, symbolize optimal wilderness since they preclude motorized access particularly above tree line.

The very act of drawing (or extending) boundaries sets up distinctions between inside and out: inside entails more special provisions if not restrictions than outside. Such boundaries separate the special from the mundane, and sponsor habits of discriminating consumerism. Time in a wilderness area, like time on a snowpeak, is prized to the extent that it is limited, fleeting. An inverse scale exists. In the Northwest, the volcanoes have played a definitive role in the unfolding story of wilderness idealism and practice. Other set-aside traditions elsewhere interpret “locked up” literally, treating wilderness as a closed room. Reflecting a stringent wilderness area philosophy, Poland’s Bialowieza National Park, in its core, illustrates a locked-up preserve far beyond our Wilderness Act, as nearly half of it is fenced and inaccessible without a park guide (it contains Europe’s last bison herds and one of its last hardwood forests). By contrast, the Northwest’s volcanoes resemble open rooms—or temples or cathedrals, to cite more apt metaphors—available via innumerable climbing routes and cross-country travel just below them. The problem, in the early twenty-first century, concerns both the density and distribution of human traffic, and that lag between traffic and the dictates of managing wilderness experience as a finite resource.