Forest Outings By Thirty Foresters

If we do not allow a democratic government to do the things which need to be done and hand down to our children a deteriorated Nation, their legacy will not be a legacy of abundance or even a legacy of poverty amidst plenty, but a legacy of poverty amidst poverty.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, in an address May 22, 1939.

PAYING GUESTS . . . We come now to a difficult question, and delicate. If, as has been here maintained, the final crop of a land is the spirit of its people, some account must be taken of psychological changes that follow when a piece of country running short of soil, timber, minerals, and other natural resources begins more or less frantically to seek transient paying guests; to sell them space, sun, air, and service.

The changes that follow are no less real because they are for the most part intangible. A continuing, and at times overwhelming, influx of summer or seasonal visitors may do more harm than to run up store prices and rents and raise local standards of living to peaks from which most of the natives can only stand afar and envy.

If it is vacation time, most organization camps are filled with underprivileged youngsters. CAMP SEELEY, SAN BERNARDINO NATIONAL FOREST, CALIF. F-200596

A restless tide of relatively rich outsiders, continually ebbing and flowing, maintaining separate standards as to habitation, costume, and social mores, may disrupt the spirit of a rural or forest neighborhood, wound local pride, and in the end demolish native values. However intangible the forces at work, no discussion of public recreation in a democracy can ignore their rapid spread.

Walls of pride between pleasure buyers and pleasure vendors seem especially likely to rise around the private pleasure grounds of very rich people and their resorts. But much the same thing may happen, in a measure, even in a forest environment. In A Further Range, a book of poems, Robert Frost tells in sharp, unforgettable accents of a crude roadside stand set up by a New England woods farmer trying to earn a little extra money from the swishing tourist transients:

A roadside stand that too pathetically plead,
It would not be fair to say for a dole of bread,
But for some of the money, the cash, whose flow supports
The flower of cities from sinking and withering faint.
The polished traffic passed with a mind ahead,
Or if ever aside a moment, then out of sorts
At having the landscape marred with the artless paint
Of signs that with N turned wrong and S turned wrong
Offered for sale wild berries in wooden quarts,
Of crooked-neck golden squash with silver warts,
Or beauty rest in a beautiful mountain scene.
You have the money, but if you want to be mean,
Why keep your money (this crossly) and go along.
The hurt of the scenery wouldn't be my complaint
So much as the trusting sorrow of what is unsaid:
Here far from the city we make our roadside stand
To ask for some city money to feel in hand
To try if it will not make our being expand,
And give us the life of the moving pictures' promise
That the party in power is said to be keeping from us

Sometimes I feel myself I can hardly bear
The thought of so much childish longing in vain,
The sadness that lurks near the open window there,
That waits all day in almost open prayer
For the squeal of brakes, the sound of a stopping car,
Of all the thousand selfish cars that pass,
Just one to inquire what a farmer's prices are.
And one did stop, but only to plow up grass
In using the yard to go back and turn around;
And another to ask the way to where it was bound;
And another to ask could they sell it a gallon of gas
They couldn't (this crossly): they had none, didn't it see? . . .

Parts of rural New England are now so overrun by summer people who stay, with few exceptions, apart from the native life that it hardly seems like rural New England there now, until frost. Good! you may say; New England like any other part of our country, can stand an infusion of outside views, ways, impulses; and the mixture is likely to prove helpful. Perhaps, but throughout New England in general, as elsewhere, communion between hosts and paying guests is not invariably as free and friendly as we have found it, on the whole, at forest camps. Camping out, people get together. But when money comes into the equation, and the host collects, it's a trade, and "The guest (or customer) is always right."

The more money involved in the trade, speaking generally, the more completely and definitely is the class line drawn. In the highest priced resorts of New England, the southern Alleghenies, in Florida, in the Rockies, and on the coast and desert, space, sun, and air are sold to the rich in the European manner, with urbane, frock-coated men at desks sending drilled, uniformed American boys scampering, bowing, to answer bells and say, "Sir." Most of them do not like the work, but they need the money.

All this may be good business, but it has no place in the public forests. Forest Service policy has been, and will be, so far as possible, to keep public recreation inexpensive, democratic, natural. There is real need of this, not only for the sake of the millions of people who have little or no money to spend on recreation, but also as an offset to all the unnatural barriers which rise between Americans when outdoor recreation is bought and sold.

Among the great middle class, renting rooms in tourist homes, sitting on the porch and talking with their hosts, or visiting around from cabin to cabin at reasonably priced roadside cabin camps, the situation is, from the standpoint of a maintained democracy, much healthier. The great and abrupt expansion of the outdoor recreation business in this country, the growing habit of "auto-tourism," the jostling together of people from Oregon, Maine, Maryland, Illinois, Georgia, Florida, and Texas, has probably done the American spirit of democratic unity a great deal more good than harm.

THE RECREATION BUSINESS . . . Turn now for a little while to trade statistics, unsatisfying, incomplete, but definite: The American Automobile Association is authority for the statement that vacationists traveling in automobiles spent 4-1/4 billion dollars in 1936. Clover and Cornell estimate tourist expenditures at 5 billion dollars in prosperous years. Weinberger places the total expenditures for vacation travel in the United States at 2 billion dollars for 1939; and a number of other estimates of outdoor recreational expenditures have been made, most of them around 4 or 5 billion dollars.

New Mexico estimates that her tourist crop produces more revenue than does the State's mining, agriculture, or livestock industries. California considers tourist travel next in importance to her great petroleum industry. In Michigan, tourist money is exceeded only by the money brought in by automobile makers. In Florida, vacation travelers as a source of revenue are said to be several times more valuable than the State's entire citrus crop.

For the whole United States, Roger Babson estimates the monetary value of the tourist business is 11 percent greater than the clothing business, 45 percent greater than the printing and publishing business, 60 percent greater than the lumber business, 185 percent greater than the banking business, 222 percent greater than the shoe industry, 518 percent greater than the cotton crop of 1933, and equal to the giant steel and iron industry. According to the American Express Company, serving pleasure travel is edging toward second place among the leading industries of the country.

Just how much of these impressive totals for all forms of outdoor recreation can be claimed for forest recreation in general or for national-forest recreation in particular is not exactly known. A single trip often includes visits to many kinds of recreational areas. The closest possible estimates, based on all known figures, indicate that for all classes of national forest visitors, total expenditure was certainly no less than 224 million dollars in 1937. Not included in this total are other local or semilocal expenditures such as taxes on summer homes, permit fees for summer homes, taxes and license fees for automobiles and trailers, automobile insurance, winter sports equipment, and hunting and fishing licenses. Expenditures by transients numbering 106 million who passed through the national forests on main highways are not included in this estimate, although it is obvious that such forest users often stop en route to purchase food, souvenirs, and curios. It is probably reasonable to assume that in 1937 national-forest visitors spent about 250 million dollars on or near the national forests. This is about 5 percent of all outdoor recreational expenditures, assuming that the 5-billion-dollar estimate for total expenditures is not too high.

A widely quoted estimate of the American Automobile Association indicates distribution of tourist expenditures as: "Out of each dollar spent, approximately 20 cents goes toward transportation and a like amount for accommodations, 25 cents for incidental retail purchases, 21 cents for food, 8 cents for amusements, and 6 cents for refreshments." Similar estimates by other agencies indicate about the same general distribution of expenditures.

These broad estimates fail, however, to emphasize the exceedingly widespread influence exerted by the visitor's expenditures. Practically every local business enterprise benefits to some extent. Forest visitors help relieve local unemployment. They create markets for local farm produce. They are buyers of the products of what might be called fireside industries, pottery, bed quilts, homespun cloth, basketry, furniture, rugs, and novelty wooden toys and souvenirs. The presence of forest visitors stimulates rentals, and sometimes serves to lighten the local tax burden. And the tourist trade seems to remain remarkably stable through all kinds of economic weather. Even in the years immediately following the financial crash of 1929, people continued to visit the national forests in ever-increasing numbers. There was, it is true, a marked drop in the number of forest hotel and resort guests during the deepest depression years, but recovery in this particular has been surprisingly prompt and the number of campers and picnickers actually increased throughout these years. It is even possible that the drop in the hotel and resort business may not indicate a real decrease in number of visitors so much as a transfer of patronage to less expensive accommodations. The 9,848 tourist camps reported by the Bureau of the Census in 1935 was almost twice the number reported in 1933.

To sum up: Catering to forest tourists or visitors may not, for reasons that have been suggested, prove an unmixed benefit to the residents of small forest communities. Hunting and fishing may be less pleasant or less successful for permanent residents. Some of the visitors are noisy and unpleasant. Shady dance halls may spring up on private land near the national forests, and there may be in other ways as well a destruction of solitude and of cherished, settled qualities.

Scarification of roadside landscapes by shrieking billboards and by blatantly tasteless structures has been sufficiently emphasized, perhaps, in previous chapters, especially in the section on camps. On public land within the national forests this is not permitted. But about one-quarter of all the land within national-forest borders is private land; and the only authority forest officers may exert there is by power of persuasion.

A more general display of resentment against roadside desecration has lately become evident and has produced in many places a remarkably prompt response. The American Automobile Association, the Garden Clubs of America, and other organizations in many States have moved to rid existing highways of billboards and defacing structures, and to keep new highways free of them.

The public is by no means helpless in such matters. Bidders for public favor respond at once to expressions of public anger, if it is solidly and forcibly expressed. A great many of the aesthetic drawbacks and spiritual losses which follow the tourist swarm are entirely uncalled for. They need not be suffered if the people of the communities affected will only get together on the question, take a stand, speak out.

If the visiting tide is decently and sensibly handled, in the light of an awakened local consciousness, outdoor recreation can be made to contribute substantially to the development of generally better and more permanent rural communities. It can lead to an expansion of existing local businesses with more varied stocks, and to a refreshing pick-up in the purchasing power of local residents. It can lead to better train and bus service, to improved telephone and mail facilities, to better roads and schools, to improved medical and dental services. And it can bring rural and urban peoples together, democratically, decently, to visit with one another, and weld their spirit as Americans.

It all depends on how it is handled, and that depends, more than anything else, on resolute local defense of native values, aroused and expressed in local action.

THE ILL-TO-DO . . . Love of the deep, far woods, and a desire to find rest and peace there, is an impulse surpassing class distinctions. The man with a million-dollar inheritance and the dollar-a-day farm and mill hand may each find his greatest happiness in the peace of woodland. The major difference is that the farm and mill hand can seldom afford it.

If it is good for the rich to get a change of scene, and rest, it is also good for the poor. Unfortunately, the ability to get to the forest bears no relation to need. The public forests are there, free, open to all. But it takes some money to get to them, and some more money to subsist during a vacation there. Not much money; just a little extra money. And not everyone has that extra money.

Sometimes you will hear a man with a yearly income of as much as $5,000 remark: "I might be able to afford it, if only I were rich." Actually, he is very rich compared to the great majority of his fellow men, even in the United States today. A $5,000 income places him among the top 2-1/2 percent of our population.

Nearly half of the families or independent single individuals in this country have an income of $1,000 a year, or less. A recent study of the distribution of consumer income, made by the National Resources Committee, estimated that some 116 million people living in 29,400,000 family groups and an additional 9,700,000 men and women living by themselves constitute the national income-spending units. The total distribution of the American income ran as follows during 1935-36:

Of 39,058,300 income units in the United States, 47 percent had $1,000 a year, or less; 35 percent had between $1,000 and $2,000; 11 percent had between $2,000 and $3,000; 4-1/2 percent had between $3,000 and $5,000; and $1,000 per year spends only about $20 for all forms of recreation and $60 for transportation in a year.¹

---

¹A more complete tabulation is appended on page 293.

---

Nearly half of the consumer units of this country receive, then, an income of $1,000 or less a year. How much of that can be spared for forest recreation, or for recreation of any sort? Very little; no more, certainly, than one-tenth. Studies by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Home Economics, covering the budgets of thousands of families in urban and rural America, indicate that the average family with an income between $750 and $1,000 per year spends only about $20 for all forms of recreation and $60 for transportation in a year.

Consider what this means in terms of a family of four, the most common consumer unit. The head of the family generally will have to pay street car or bus fare to and from his job. The greater number of working days, the more fares he will have to pay. The wife will expend at a minimum several dollars in transportation during the course of a year. The children may have no private transportation cost getting to school, but they will do some traveling outside of school hours. When all this is added, it is easy to see how $60 can be spent for family transportation without leaving anything over for pleasure trips.

Again, the $20 which is the average annual recreation budget has to be distributed over 365 days. This allows only 5-1/2 cents a day for the whole family's recreation. Even a movie is a strain on such a budget. The normal cost of stopping in the forest would be prohibitive, even if the cost of reaching the forest did not generally present an almost insuperable obstacle.

That is the first cost of forest recreation—transportation. With four people in a car, the cost, including gas, oil, maintenance, and depreciation averages around 6 cents a mile, or 1-1/2 cents a person per mile. The lowest railroad coach rate is 2-1/4 cents a mile; the average bus rate is 1-3/4 cents a mile. And neither railroad nor bus would generally leave a person precisely at the picnic ground, campground, or other development that he might want to visit. Groups may occasionally hire a bus at reduced rates; this is being done more and more. But by no means now known is it possible to cut individual transportation costs to the forest much below 1-1/2 cents a mile.

Assuming a transportation charge of 6 cents a mile for a group of four, a table in the appendix indicates how the population of this country is distributed with respect to the cost of getting to the nearest national forest boundary and back. The national forests are more widely distributed than any other public lands. But most of them are "far from the madding crowd" at its thickest, so far that only about one-third of the population of this country can make the round trip to any national forest for less than $10; and for another one-third the transportation cost will be more than $20.

The strain imposed by even a $10 transportation charge upon half of the country's population, with an income of $1,000 or less a year, has been noted. The hard fact is, under present conditions, transportation cost alone bars a large portion of this country's population from using the national forests for recreation.

For those who can afford to go, what does it cost? Only general estimates are possible. To drive from 15 to 20 miles for a family picnic costs more nearly $2 than $1 for a family of four. This counts in costs of wear and tear on the car. Almost the entire cost is for transportation. The cost of the food would be approximately the same as at home.

For camping, the cost runs a little higher; one has to be equipped with tents, blankets, mosquito bars, and so on.

What of summer homes, built by special permit on national-forest lands? Rent for the site is small, but the permittee has to put up the building. Amortization on the cottage amounts on the average to $70 per year, annual maintenance runs roughly $35, the annual permit fee averages $15, and taxes probably also average $15. With about 3 weeks of use for a family of four, a fair average for national-forest summer homes, this would amount to $1.50 a day for each individual in addition to transportation. It is a cheap vacation, as vacations go, but far beyond the means of most Americans. As for private resorts, on or near the forests, the lowest charge runs around $2 a day for bed and board per person, or $8 a day for a family of four.

Who, then, can and does use the national forests for recreation? More than 32,000 forest visitors filled out questionnaires in 1937; and more than 25,000 of them, heads of families or independent individuals, stated their incomes.

In sum: 18 percent were persons with $1,000 a year, or less; 49 percent had between $1,000 and $2,000 a year; 22 percent, $2,000-$3,000; 8 percent $3,000-$5,000; only 3 percent were persons with more than $5,000 a year.²

---

²The complete returns are compiled and appended on page 293.

---

The figures indicate that moderately poor people make the most use of the national forests for their ease and pleasure, but that relatively few of the poorest, who perhaps need it most, are able to do so. It is not the purpose here to contend that forest recreation is indispensable for all that great bulk of our population, nearly half, who have less than $1,000 a year. Multitudes of people have lived and died without ever getting near the forests. But it is suggested that if, by either public or private arrangements, ways could be found to diminish personal costs so that our very poorest people may have forest vacations, or outings, this might be sound social policy. Cost cutting may be accomplished in a number of ways: (1) By a reduction in public transportation rates; (2) by the establishment of forest camps or parks nearer great centers of population; and (3) by an increase in the number of privately supported organization camps.

ACQUISITION by the Government of certain lands now held in private ownership may tend in time to meet greater needs of accessible outdoor recreation for people of small means. Sometimes only a small obstructing tract need be acquired in order to throw open fully to the public a much greater area. Again, units of land large enough to provide something more than city-park diversions may be taken over and thrown open, fairly near large centers of population.

For example, in Big Cottonwood, Little Cottonwood, and Mill Creek canyons on the Wasatch National Forest, only 10 to 20 miles from Salt Lake City, enlargement of the existing forest camp and picnic grounds is not at present possible because from 60 to 95 per cent of all sites suitable for such use are privately owned. Acquisition here would give needed outings to additional thousands at the cost of only a gallon or two of gas.

A like situation prevails in other national forests. On the Angeles and Los Padres National Forests near Los Angeles, the bulk of the available flat-land suitable for overnight camp and 1-day picnic sites is in private ownership and is held for use as lodges and summer homes. Likewise, in the Sacramento Canyon, where a main highway passes through the heart of the Shasta National Forest, it has been possible to develop only one campground for public use because the Government owns no other usable land in the canyon. So, again, in the Pike and Roosevelt National Forests near Denver, Colo., the Government at present owns almost no bottom land in the canyons most suitable for picnicking and camping, and nearest town.

Similar instances could be cited on many other national forests, some of them fairly near crowded centers, some remote. The ones to which many more needy people might travel, if the way were opened, are the ones that most concern us here.

In a Virginia national forest, where a public campground encircling a small lake has been opened, the area, easily accessible to a large city, is already overcrowded. It is impossible to make more space for the public without acquiring for the public benefit two small tracts of submarginal farm land in a narrow creek bottom. If the Government could buy those two farms (totaling only 410 acres), the public could then be given free access to an entire watershed of more than 5,000 acres.

Often, in addition to barring woodland areas from free public enjoyment, small private holdings, resolutely held, bar public access to the shores of lakes, to natural winter sports, playgrounds, and to fishing streams. Many of the sites so pre-empted are not far from crowded cities. It is, indeed, where the impulse to seize upon private outdoor pleasure grounds is strongest that the Government is most likely to be balked in efforts to throw open for free use wider forest pleasure grounds.

ORGANIZATION CAMPS are the most promising mode of low-cost forest recreation now developing. Scattered throughout the tens of millions of acres of national forests are tiny constellations of cabins clustered in friendly fashion about larger buildings. Sometimes the setting is beside the tumbled, broken waters of a mountain stream, sometimes on the shore of a quiet lake or among the big trees of the high country. Flying northward one may catch glimpses of them over the hundreds of miles of California forests, and on the slopes of the Cascades. One may come upon them in the Rocky Mountains, the Ozarks of Missouri, among the new national forests of the Lake States, or up in New England. Southward, one may pick them out in the Alleghenies and throughout the Appalachians to the Gulf of Mexico. If it is vacation time, most of these camps will be filled with youngsters. To these clustered cabins thousands of boys and girls are brought, from cities and villages by both public and quasi-public organizations and given the joys of a forest vacation.

Often such camps are turned over for a part of the season to organizations of older people, and families come for recreation together. Those built by cities and restricted in use to the citizens of the municipality usually have more adults than young people.

Organization camps began very simply with a few sleeping tents and a mess tent. But tents deteriorate rapidly. In a few years the cost of permanent buildings can be sunk in canvas with nothing left to show for the expenditure. Permanent mess halls were first erected, but soon permanent cabins were added. With these developments came improvement in water supply and sanitation. As experience grew, the standard camp plan became the multiple-building type, consisting of a mess hall and recreation hall, with sleeping accommodations in bunk houses or cabins. Cabins, however, are being favored as time goes on. They generally shelter four to six people, with a cot or bunk and a small chest of drawers for each.

An example of good structures and lay-out is Camp Seeley on the San Bernardino National Forest about 75 miles from Los Angeles. Under a special-use permit from the Forest Service, it was built and is operated by Los Angeles for its citizens. It has been so efficiently operated that in 1936 it furnished vacation opportunities at very low cost to 2,734 individuals for a total of 20,342 days and made a surplus over operating expenses of $1,041.98.

Another example of an organization camp is that operated by the 4—H Club of Crooked Lake on the Ocala National Forest in Florida. This was built as a CCC camp, but when the number of camps was reduced, the Forest Service issued a special-use permit to the 4—H Club, which remodeled and rebuilt it.

The camps are often on land not owned by the Government. On private lands within the boundaries of the eastern national forests are hundreds of organization camps and summer camps for boys and girls, run for profit.

The widely varied organizations that have availed themselves of the opportunity to establish camps on the national forests fall, roughly, into five classes:

1. Municipalities. California is most advanced in developing municipal vacation camps, with 12 of them now in operation on national forests there.

2. Social nonprofit organizations. By far the largest users of camps in national forests. Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Campfire Girls, Young Men's Christian Association, Young Women's Christian Association, 4—H Clubs, and the Salvation Army all have camps.

3. Restricted membership clubs and organizations. These include church, fraternal, and social groups, and farm and labor organizations. Some of these maintain camps for children or provide low-cost vacations for adults.

4. Hunting and fishing, hiking and skiing clubs—also of restricted membership which maintain a simple or sometimes an elaborate lodge where members may pursue the sport which is the single purpose of the club.

5. Boys' and girls' camps run for profit as business enterprises. At most of these camps the charges may seem very moderate. The municipal camps have weekly rates of about $8.50 for children and $10 and $12 for adults. Camps run by such groups as the Boy Scouts, Y. W. C. A., and 4—H Clubs charge from $6 to $8. But even this as a vacation expenditure puts the camp beyond the means, as a rule, of families in the lowest income brackets with $1,000 a year or less.

At a number of forest camps run for underprivileged children in Florida, the cost has been reduced by buying a large part of the food through the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation. Food cost for each child has thus at times been brought as low as $2.50 a week. Even here, in order to give the neediest children their outing, organizations such as Rotary and Kiwanis have put up the money to pay for the food and to get the children, by bus, out to the forests and back home.

There are now 548 Organization camps on the national forests, and they are of inestimable value. The camps on the San Bernardino in California alone gave forest outings for a week to 16,853 boys and girls in 1936. There has been a tendency lately on the part of labor groups to join in supporting organization camps for their members and young. But for all the good will in the world, it stands plain the country over that even organization camps most carefully planned and economically conducted can seldom stretch funds far enough, or find money enough, to give forest outings to the neediest.

We have considered thus far only the need of such outings for the poor but healthy. The need of making available sun and air in our forests for the poor and ailing is one that must also be faced, in time. When poor people face physical crises, the universe is a cruel machine. They may survive with the aid of clinics, hospitals, and operating tables, but when the worst is over they must go back to their homes and to inadequate care at a critical time in their illness. For people such as these there should in time be developed camps and retreats where, in the quiet and healing of the forests, health could be restored. Leased to charitable organizations, welfare associations, or to public health clinics, such forest retreats would lessen for the poor some of the horrors of physical disability.

At Deer Lake in the Ocala National Forest in Florida last year, an experiment began. On the shores of this lake with its facilities for bathing, boating, and fishing is now a camp having a maximum capacity of 140 persons. It was designed by the Forest Service and built as a W. P. A. project. It has a mess hall, recreation hall, lavatory buildings, 14 squad huts, and a director's cabin. The buildings are simple and substantial. A 200-foot well furnishes excellent water. The sanitation equipment is of the best engineering design.

Open for rental by any civic or nonprofit organization, it has characteristics which the Forest Service believes should be typical of the organization camps for low-income groups. Controlled by the Forest Service, a public agency, and with bookings for the full season allocated among various organizations, it makes efficient use of the recreational possibilities of an area rather than limiting the use of the area by giving a special-use permit to an organization which will use its camp for only a short time each year. Under Federal control it will be possible to erect more substantial buildings and influence more effectively the architecture and planning of the lay-out, thus avoiding the unsightly camps that are likely to result from the efforts of organizations operating with meager funds. Most important, it seems that the Government can so construct such camps and turn them over to use by groups of the people who will use them at much lower vacation rates than now prevail.