Forest Outings By Thirty Foresters

So for one the wet sail arching through the rainbow round
      the bow,
   And for one the creak of snowshoes on the crust;

And for one the lakeside lilies where the bull moose waits
      the cow,
   And for one the mule train coughing in the dust.

Who hath smelt wood smoke at twilight? Who hath heard
      the birch log burning?
   Who is quick to read the noises of the night?

Let him follow with the others for the Young Men's feet are
      turning
   To the camps of proved desire and known delight.

Rudyard Kipling,
The Feet of The Young Men,
from Five Nations, 1903

Trees give peace to the souls of men—Nora Waln, Reaching For The Stars, 1939.

TO SEEK LONE PLACES for purposes of meditation or diversion is for the most part a civilized idea. The idea does not generally occur to most people of races and nations in the primitive stages of their development, and the idealistic religious significance which many tribes and races have attached to trees does not as a rule attend the very first struggling stages of human history.

Only when life has become more settled, more complex, more ritualized; only as civilizations ripen do we find record of Confucius writing of China's spiritual commentaries in the friendly solitude of sacred groves of trees, or of Una guarding the woods of the Pharaohs and finding solace there.

City people can get out into the country now far more easily with 30 or 90 horsepower propelling them at the governed pressure of a restless foot. PIKE NATIONAL FOREST, COLO. (top); PISGAH NATIONAL FOREST, N. C. (bottom) F-27900 (top); F-350104

Primitive man was as much a part of the forest as the trees and grass and wild animals. He fought the wolf and bear for his life. He captured game and fish that he might live. From the trees he wrested shelter and fuel. Storms, flood, and fire threatened his life. He lived precariously in the forest because he had to.

To medieval and to early modern men of the western world, even after cities had grown great, the forest was still an unfriendly, threatening background, an enemy. Deep woods were something to be ventured into, not enjoyed. Outcasts from society fled to the forest and lived as part of it, as had primitive man. On the wilderness early mankind depended for necessary game, fish, and vegetable products. It was mainly a source of primitive survival to be conquered, not of civilized pleasure, to be conserved.

This modern age was well under way before the forest had been subjugated enough to make it a place for sport or pleasure. The King's forest, reserved and protected for the sport of monarch and nobility, was perhaps the earliest scene of forest recreation. But hunting was a distinctive prerogative of royalty, denied with force and punished by death to the commoner. Hunting by the nobility was strongly utilitarian, for animal husbandry did not then produce meat in quantity. Hunting, too, gave a stage, a theatre on which nobility might display the warrior's virtues. The rituals and forms, the specialized language, the trappings of the royal hunt in the middle and early modern ages were, like those of their contemporary institution of chivalry, designed as a theatrical back drop against which individual prowess might be paraded. The fair, the festival, the fiesta were the earliest uses of the forest by the common man for pleasure. Venturing in the mass from the crowded security of walled city into the spaciousness of the outdoors, the individual found opportunity with relative safety for outlets denied him in his accustomed life. The festival was only in part native to the forest, but it is historically of some importance as the original form of mass recreation out of doors.

Here in America as the virgin forests were subjugated, as order, safety, and the rule of law were established, as white men, escaping in some part from the never-ending labor of the pioneer, acquired means and leisure, natural outdoor recreation began to exert appeal. First came hunting and fishing for sport rather than sustenance; and later, the festival, the camping party, the picnic as a brief escape from the congestion of the city or the endless chores of the farms.

The Indians really had a fairly satisfying American civilization working long before we came. It grew variously and slowly from this soil and weather. It included (among the Iroquois) such devices as women's suffrage and a league to enforce peace. These first Americans worshipped the omnipotence of natural forces and were governed by natural laws. Their widely various systems of government were never completely worked out or final. In many ways the discipline and punishments imposed were savage and unreasonable. But what of ours?

Wild Indians, as we call them, did not have to drive themselves hard all day long and beg jobs or stand in line for a hand-out or relief. They did not have to do such things merely to fill their stomachs, to support their hearts, to clothe and shelter from the weather themselves and their young. They had learned as a race long before we came here to carry themselves with a certain natural freedom, to govern themselves in respect to codes of individual dignity. It is one of the ironies of American history that the idea of relaxation, sport, and release from care, along with worship in the open, was rather widely and generally practiced among the Indians that we whites set out with such ferocious zeal to dispossess and civilize.

Indians, then, were the first users of our forests and wide spaces for developing purposes of civilized recreation. Small family groups or even whole tribes moved from one section of the forests to another with the seasons to pick berries, to fish, to gather wild rice, or to hunt wild game; and while they were on such outings they would often combine sports and diversions with the practical job of getting enough to eat.

Even in recent years on the Columbia National Forest in southern Washington as many as 1,500 Indians from 9 different tribes have gathered at the Twin Buttes tribal grounds to pick and dry wild huckleberries and at the same time enjoy horse racing and other native games. This has been an annual event "since the days of my grandfather's grandfather," one old chief said. The Crow Indians hold annual games and conclaves. In the Southwest, the Indians often have dances and fiestas.

The whites were for the most part a shrewd, dry, earthy, practical people engaged in soil-bound occupations. For 300 years they pushed ever westward through forests and over plains and mountains, seeking new lands, new wealth, new homes. Such pioneer diversions as there were did not separate people but drew them together. They worked alone. They had their social fun together. They hunted and fished, not altogether for pastime but often in deadly earnest for food, and their methods were more notable for death-dealing than for sporting qualities.

Forest use by the white man for general recreation dates, naturally, earlier in the East than in the West. By 1803 recreation travel in the forest areas now embraced in the White Mountain National Forest became so heavy as to warrant the building of a pleasure resort near Crawford Notch, and the first summit house on Mount Washington was erected in 1824. In those early years of the nineteenth century numerous hiking clubs were formed in New England. Early records and historical writings of the great Southwest, of California, and the other Western States tell of many people seeking relief from the tropical summer heat of the valleys in the adjoining forests and mountains. There they fished, hunted, or simply rested in the cool shade of the woods and beside lakes or streams.

BRIGHAM YOUNG'S PIC-NIC . . . Among the more interesting of early accounts of recreational use is one from the records of the Mormon Church in Utah. The Mormon pioneers arrived in Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, and it is recorded in their Journal History, a daily record of their activities, that on August 21 of that year a party climbed Twin Peaks, lying between Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons on what is now the Wasatch National Forest.

Again on July 18, 1856, Brigham Young, president of the Mormon Church, issued the following invitation, and a copy of it was printed in the local Deseret News:

Four hundred and fifty people attended this picnic. These records also note that campfires must be "all well put out" and that special roads were built to reach the recreational area.

SCATTERED BEGINNINGS of recreational use on lands now embraced in the national forests had increased considerably by the time the actual setting aside of these forest reservations was begun in 1891. Large areas of western forest lands in the Rockies, the Sierras, the Cascades and lesser mountain ranges soon were included in what were then called the forest reserves. In 1897 laws were passed for their administration. In 1905 they were transferred from the Department of Interior and placed under jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture and provision was made to use the resources inherent in the lands in accordance with the broadest concept of conservation—wise use of all the resources in the interests of all the people.

In 1907 the name was changed from "forest reserve" to "national forest." This was done to avoid any implication that the resources were locked up, not for use.

Lands immediately adjacent to settlements or within them had been set aside for the recreation of the people, very much earlier, as far back as colonial days. The Battery and Bowling Green in New York date from about 1621. Boston Common was bought by the city fathers in 1634. Five parks were laid out by William Penn in the early days of Philadelphia. The areas so reserved were for common pasturage, for play, for social gatherings, and were to be protected against destruction by the selfish few.

It appears then that even under the stern compulsions of our early colonial days these provisions for play as well as for work held the element of public responsibility. The subsequent development of municipal, county, State, and Federal parks and forests throws rich and varied sidelights on our advancing civilization.

The story of our municipal parks alone is an account of endless brave attempts to provide rural peace and beauty for city people, of the progressive development of concentrated mass use, of the progressive urbanization of the parks into amusement and playground centers, and often of the eventual overwhelming of the park or forest by the city.

Frederick Law Olmsted, still remembered for his pioneer work in laying out Central Park in New York City in 1853 and for subsequent work in other cities, considered that a true park was "a place where the urban inhabitants can, to the fullest extent, obtain the genuine recreation coming from the peaceful enjoyment of an idealized rural landscape in rest-giving contrast to their wonted existence amidst the city's turmoil."

He did excellent work, but most city parks today must of necessity fail to meet his definition. The city-park movement has had to concentrate on children's playgrounds, on neighborhood parks and playfields of rather ugly facilities, with professional and semiprofessional leadership furnished for playground games.

This has necessarily changed the character of some of the earlier city parks planned by Olmsted and other pioneer national planners. If Olmsted could see Central Park in New York City now on a hot Sunday, the spectacle of our progress might sadden him.

You cannot bring the country into the city and keep things countrified. But city people can get out into the country now far more easily with 30 or 90 horsepower propelling them at the governed pressure of a restless foot. So now the cities are making parks and human refuges out from town. Robert Moses, of Mayor La Guardia's administration in New York City, fighting to give the people there a little more natural relief, is fighting for something really needed.

Reconsider this simple statistic: Only about 1 percent of all our vast ocean shore line and Great Lakes shore line is publicly owned. All the rest is hedged with signs, actual or implicit: Keep Out—Or Pay. Much the same thing is generally true inland, of all the little lake shores, bayous, fishing streams, and the more accessible pleasure groves surviving.

Denver, Colo.; Phoenix, Ariz.; and Fort Worth, Tex., now manage forest parks for their citizens. Boston, Mass.; Cleveland, Ohio; and 294 other American municipalities even in 1935, at the last general count available, reported 514 parks with 129,941 acres outside their city limits.

TOWN, COUNTY, AND CITY FORESTS . . . One of the earliest town forests was that of Danville, N. H., set aside in 1760, and managed by the parsonage committee. For a century and a half it has been a successful venture, furnishing both forest products and income. Other New England towns had town forests; they are a characteristic feature of public forestry in the Northeast, and the idea has spread somewhat, until now there are some 1,500 community forests throughout the United States. Usually they are small forests set aside to protect town water supplies, provide opportunity for constructive use of relief labor, furnish fuel wood for the town's relief cases, and building materials for municipal projects. They are locally important for recreation as well but are not likely to provide important outing areas for people living in the greater cities.

Of more recent origin are a number of forest municipal camps on public lands, often on the national forests. Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Sacramento, Calif., have established such camps. County parks and forests are a development of recent years. As municipalities, even the largest and wealthiest, were compelled to reach farther and farther to obtain land at an endurable cost, they ventured more and more into the area of primary concern to county government, and the park or forest project became naturally a county affair. There was also the thought that the cost might thus equitably be distributed among all the people seeking recreation there.

Essex County, N. J., started its system of parks in 1895. A neighboring county, Hudson, began a similar system in 1902. These were the pioneers. Farther west Milwaukee County, Wis., started in 1910; Cook and DuPage Counties, Ill., in 1913. The total area in such parks and groves now exceeds 100,000 acres in more than 400 different tracts. And some of the great cities those in which the county is overshadowed by the city have formed metropolitan district parks. New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Los Angeles, for instance, seek thus to achieve larger units of planning. They try to protect the spaciousness and natural beauty of the site, but it is uphill work, in view of the human load which generally must be carried by readily accessible public woodland.

The effort is to provide, as the Milwaukee County Park Commission states, a place "to get away from the harshness and crude lines and noises of the town . . . to return frequently to the soil again for invigoration and refreshment."

Most of these places are godsends but it is virtually impossible to maintain within or at the edge of a great city anything approaching naturalness and spaciousness. The reasons are plain. Nearness to the city generally means high-priced land and this means small, pinched-off pleasure grounds. Pressure of demand means intensive development and this calls for forms of amusement that will handle large numbers of people to the acre. Development creates further use, and here we enter upon a mounting spiral of intensification and congestion. The horns of the dilemma are familiar and evident: First, such parks or forests must generally be readily accessible to obtain popular political support and to be usable. Second, their very proximity tends to defeat their stated purpose.

STATE PARKS grew first from a patriotic wish to preserve historical places of the American Revolution. Washington's headquarters at Newburgh on the Hudson, acquired in 1849, and Valley Forge were the first State parks of importance. From the standpoint of forest recreation the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees, ceded from the public domain by act of Congress in 1864, are important. Passed during the throes of the Civil War, and at a time when the national philosophy was that all the public domain should be passed to private ownership rapidly and under the most liberal terms possible, this act provides evidence of a dawning change of sentiment.

The Yosemite Valley had been discovered by Capt. Joseph Reddeford Walker in the spring of 1851. The next decade brought growing and none too scrupulous use, and the location of several private claims in the valley. It was a jewel of a place, and the desirability of defending it in its own natural setting for the common enjoyment became plain. In 1864 the efforts of "various gentlemen of fortune, of taste, of refinement," led Senator Conness to obtain the act granting the Valley and the Big Trees to the State of California. These natural wonders were to be managed by a commission, and the thought was that such beauty should be held and developed for public use, resort, and recreation, and should be inalienable.

Almost at once the commissioners had trouble. They had trouble getting funds to care for the growing crowds. The unfortunate results of toll-road permits which they had to grant because of lack of public money made more trouble, and the growing encroachments of destructive sheep grazing on the surrounding unmanaged public domain (the State park was only 56 square miles in area) presented still another problem. John Muir, a great naturalist, led a movement to create a national park surrounding Yosemite State Park. Congress did so by an act of October 1, 1890— another legal landmark in the conservation movement.

All sorts of reasons seem to have entered: The commissioners' headaches; the zeal of that prophet of Nature, John Muir; and the thought that since all America was apparently out to see this lovely piece of primitive country, and stomp all over it, the whole country, not just California, ought to take over recreational administration of the area, and foot the bill.

Conflicts in jurisdiction also entered; and the net of it was that in 1905 California re-ceded its State rights as to the Yosemite Valley natural attractions to the care and management of the Federal Government. Meanwhile the original pattern of State parks to preserve historic places was gradually being extended. Mackinac Island and Fort Mackinac (formerly Fort Michilimackinac) were set aside in 1885. In 1889 Massachusetts set aside seven different properties. As early as 1867 New York State moved to recapture into public ownership and prevent further defacement of the lands adjoining its supreme natural wonder, Niagara Falls. This was finally accomplished in 1887. The Niagara State Reservation was New York's first State park. Also, as early as 1873, New York pioneered in the practice of holding tax-reverted lands for forest and parks. Of the some 1,600,000 acres of land included in State parks in the United States in 1938, New York had about 189,000 acres. These figures do not include lands in State forests. In point of vitality, effectiveness, and self-sufficiency, the State-park movement in New York has been exceptionally successful.

Younger States also have developed effective programs. To the west it is mainly an intelligent effort to fit State parks and forests into inclusive principles of democratic use. The California State-park program is a conspicuous attempt to fit a State-park system into the whole set-up of public forests and parks of all kinds, and to make the State parks not only a worthy system in themselves, but also a working part of the whole system of public recreational lands.

Most of the other States now have State parks or State forests. They are of varying types, managed by differing kinds of State agencies. The emphasis in most States is toward furnishing reasonably but not closely accessible opportunities—for city people in particular—to enjoy forest or beach recreation. But a thinning down of natural qualities by progressive dilution with mass amusements is nearly everywhere discernible.

STATE FORESTS are generally more extensive in area and less intensively developed than State parks, which are usually small protected areas of natural beauty. Problems of recreational use and resource management in State forests and national forests are similar.

Public parks, whether local, State, or national, are as a rule devoted exclusively to recreational use. Commodity utilization of timber, grass, minerals, game, and water is not allowed. This is the single-use principle. Public forests, on the other hand, generally allow managed use of commercial timber, forage, water, and mineral resources, with recreation accorded its proper place. And individual uses, including recreation, are given exclusive place on limited areas. This is the principle of multiple use.

State forests antedate national forests. In State forests operated for multiple use there are now some 13-1/2 million acres. In the Lakes States, where large areas of cut-over and once wrecked forest land have been acquired by the States through tax forfeiture, State forests are especially important. The New England States, New York, and Pennsylvania are also well represented with State forests; and in the West—Idaho, Montana, and Washington have moved toward consolidating through exchange with the Federal Government the remnants of their grant lands. Nation-wide, almost 750 different State forest units are scattered over 39 States. These units average much smaller than national forests or national parks do, but many of them are strategically located close to large population centers.

East and West, to speak generally, State forests receive less attention as places of recreation than do State parks; but many of the State forests have high local value as pleasure places. Almost universally the States have opened these forests and their facilities to the public. Approximately 28 million persons visited these State forests in the last year for which figures are available, but it seems likely that still heavier loads of forest visitors will come as time goes on.

Concentrations of people, whether in cities or in open forest country, bring problems that are not easily solved. As a result of the more intensive recreational use of the lands under their direction, State foresters find themselves faced with situations comparable to those on national forests. Even with the combined efforts of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the State forestry departments, the States have not been able to provide adequate facilities. The influx of visitors into the State forests has taxed the ingenuity of State forestry organizations, most of which are small. But most State foresters have met the challenge to the limit of their resources, and plan a continued expansion.

DIFFERENCES as to recreational equipment and methods in parks and on forests, region by region, may be found on examination to arise in part from varying circumstances—different kinds of country, cover, soil, weather; but above all, from different degrees of demand or pressure exerted by the people on available recreational areas, the per-acre recreational load. The national forests are a vast stage on which escaping millions seek in their own way to play their own parts. The national parks are natural galleries around natural centers of attraction. They surround and preserve something definite for our people to go to and see. The most gorgeous parts of the Grand Canyon and of the Yosemite Valley are in national parks. So is the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky; and in Kentucky, too, a national historical park enshrines a primitive national memorial the rude log cabin in which Abraham Lincoln was born.

The genesis of the national-park movement was nonutilitarian and patriotic in the highest sense. An exceptional streak of national idealism amid an age of ruthless raiding led that group of Californians, viewing the Yosemite and the Big Trees, to realize that the best use of such gems was nonproductive in the strictly practical sense. It was 26 years, however, before the Yosemite State Park became a national park; so most writers on the subject say that the movement began on March 1, 1872, with an act of Congress creating a Yellowstone National Park. The pioneers here were the members of the Webster-Doane expedition of 1870, a most unusual group. They saw in the Yellowstone a supreme natural wonder which should be kept unimpaired and unspoiled for public enjoyment—"a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people" and moved toward, "the preservation from injury and spoilation of all timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities and wonders, and for their retention in their natural condition."

There are 27 national parks now. They cover some 9-1/2 million of our acres. Beyond that on more than 125 other scattered sites, totalling 11-1/2 million acres, the National Park Service guards and displays archaeological and historic landmarks like the Aztec Indian ruins, pioneer forts, the Lewis and Clark caverns in Montana, battlefields, military cemeteries and monuments. It also cares for the beautifully designed and tended parks which surround the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the White House, and Government buildings in Washington, D. C.

In all, the National Park Service, with a permanent, seasonal, and temporary personnel of 3,500, now administers for the public use and pleasure something under 21 million acres. Public use is heavy; in the 1939 travel year 15-1/2 million persons are reported to have visited all the various units administered by the Park Service. This may not seem an especially heavy use until you stop to consider that park crowds tend in the very nature of their outings to cluster around the more accessible centers of attraction that the park or the special site displays.

Because no general charge of admission is made, national-forest visitors are not accurately tallied. On most of the forests the recreational load is widely dispersed. It is estimated that some 32 million persons visited or passed through the 176 million acres of national forests in 1938. More than half of them were simply people driving through on business or pleasure bent. Nearly half of them were not to the same degree forest transients. They stopped to picnic, camp, hunt, hike, or simply to rest. As is true in the parks, these round-number tabulations are made in terms of "visits." In these numbers the same person may be several times or many times counted. "Repeaters," the foresters call them, these people who have found something that they seek out in quiet places and who keep coming back.

With a permanent and seasonal personnel of 5,000, more than 4,600 of whom work afield, the Forest Service plays willing host to all these millions—the venturing newcomers young and old, the repeaters, the weather-hardened veterans of the hunt and of woodlore dispersed over the greater part of 176 million acres, from year to year. With the same force the Forest Service also administers timber, forage, wildlife, and other resources of the national forests.