The Fight for America's Alps

What future do we want for what remains of wild America, and to whom shall it be entrusted? This question boils at the heart of conservation polities, and nowhere more hotly than in the growing controversy over the magnificent North Cascades in Washington. The author of this report on the tangled struggle over the Cascades’ future is editor in chief of Houghton Mifflin Company, a director of the Sierra Club, and the author of ROADLESS AREA.

by Paul Brooks

IMAGINE, if you can, Hector and Achilles agreeing on a bipartisan committee to decide the future status of the plains of windy Troy. This will give you some idea of the historic precedent that was set when the Secretaries of Agriculture and Interior appointed in 1963 a five-man study team to produce a plan for the state of Washington’s North Cascades. Often referred to as the American Alps, the Cascades are the wildest, most rugged, and probably most beautiful mountains in the United States south of Alaska. They are also the least known. Until recently, their inaccessibility has been their salvation. That time is past.

Though the study team has reported, the decisive battle over the North Cascades has barely begun. At first glance, the principals appear to be the U.S. Forest Service of the Department of Agriculture, which presently controls them — supported by the lumber, mining, and local hunting interests — and the National Park Service of the Department of the Interior, whose bid for a new park in this area has the backing of most national conservation organizations. Actually the struggle is both deeper and broader than the conventional conflict between these two bureaucracies. It is part of a much larger conservation battle which is being waged, with various degrees of intensity, from Alaska to the Rio Grande, from California’s Point Reyes to Massachusetts’ Cape Cod. Among the giant redwoods, in the depths of the Grand Canyon, on the far reaches of the Yukon, organized nature lovers are testing their political strength. The bird watchers, the photographers, the campers and the climbers are making themselves heard above the chain saws and the bulldozers. They are no longer to be shrugged off by the corporate executive and the political “realist” as a lunatic fringe. They have become organized, sophisticated, articulate. The intangible values they stand for have caught the attention of the giant foundations which are concerned with the future pattern of the good society. They have even (in the case of the Consolidated Edison-Storm King controversy on the Hudson) been given legal standing by the courts. Congressmen who want to be re-elected are forced to listen. Indeed, Congress itself has officially recognized the existence of wilderness, and the White House has gone down the line for “natural beauty.” Everywhere the conservation issue is politically hot. Nowhere, in all probability, will it be hotter during the coming months than in the North Cascades. The chairman of the study team, Edward C. Crafts, director of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, is quite explicit: “I know of nothing that I have been involved in in my 32 years experience that has been more controversial up to this point and I think the controversy is probably only beginning.”

Secretary of Agriculture Orville L. Freeman has called the North Cascades “one of the most magnificent areas in the world.” Two visits to these mountains, including a fortnight’s family pack trip last summer, have convinced me that he is right, and that there is an opportunity here for the most beautiful wilderness park in our entire national park system. Yet the eventual fate of the North Cascades concerns more than this area alone. In a stage setting worthy of the issues at stake, we are watching the confrontation of rock-bottom conservation philosophies, involving basic principles as well as power politics. Here in the last unopened corner of our country we face the ultimate questions: What future do we want for the remnant of wild America, and to whom shall we entrust it?

The Cascade range, which runs from northern California north across Oregon and Washington to southern Canada, is actually two mountain systems: the famous volcanic cones like Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier, Mount Baker; and the far less familiar mass of granite and metamorphic rock peaks between Seattle and the Canadian border. The name “Cascades” derives from the Great Falls of the Columbia, the supreme challenge faced by Lewis and Clark on their historic journey to the Pacific. “This Chanel [they wrote in their journal for October 25, 1805] is through a hard rough black rock, from 50 to 100 yards wide, swelling and boiling in a most tremendious maner.” The Columbia’s cascades have now been drowned by Bonneville Dam, but the name is still appropriate to these glacier-clad mountains, where the sound of roaring streams is a constant companion on the forest trails and where innumerable ribbons of bright water lace the steep valley walls.

The Cascades arc “new” mountains, not yet worn down by erosion; their pinnacles and knifesharp ridges are still being chiseled by the ice. Of moderate height, from eight to ten thousand feet, they seem much higher as they rise sheer from deep valleys near sea level. The classic eastern approach is by boat up fjordlike Lake Chelan. This spectacular body of water, fifteen hundred feet deep (the bottom is below sea level), was formed during the Ice Age by the glacial gouging of a valley subsequently dammed by a moraine. For fifty-five miles it cuts its way into the heart of the North Cascades. Little wonder that as early as 1906 (ten years before the founding of the National Park Service) a mountaineering group urged that Lake Chelan and the surrounding mountains be made a national park. Thirty years later, a committee of the Park Service itself reported that “the area is unquestionably of national park caliber, is more valuable used as such than for any other use now ascertainable.” Why, then, wasn’t a North Cascades National Park created years ago? The answer lies in the tangled history of our public domain.

Without some knowledge of what has gone before, the struggle for the American wilderness, including the Park Service—Forest Service feud, is as incomprehensible to the average sane American as ’Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? would be to the average sane Eskimo. A hundred years ago the American Forest was being plundered on a scale we now find inconceivable. Millions of acres were acquired by the railroads and timber interests through political chicanery and outright fraud. The slogan was “cut and get out.” The first effective opposition to this looting arose in the eighteen sixties and seventies, when the park idea took hold under the leadership of men like John Muir and Frederick Law Olmsted. In the late eighties the federal government established a Division of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture. Shortly afterward, the Forest Reserves (later called National Forests) were set up under the Department of Interior. This was the situation when Theodore Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency. One of his first acts was to urge Congress to transfer the Forest Reserves to the Bureau of Forestry in the Department of Agriculture, “to which they properly belong. The present diffusion of responsibility is bad from every standpoint.” Roosevelt was further influenced by the fact that his trusted friend Gifford Pinchot, a man of integrity, with courage to fight the lumber barons, was head of the Bureau of Forestry (later to be renamed the U.S. Forest Service). The Transfer Act was quickly passed. T.R. and Pinchot went on to set aside 132 million acres of Forest Reserves — land to be used, but only under government supervision. Large-scale conservation had been born.

Thus matters stood in 1916 when, despite opposition by the Forest Service, the National Park Service was established in the Department of the Interior. Its purpose was to administer the national parks, monuments, and Indian reservations already in existence (beginning with Yellowstone in 1872), to keep them “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations,” and inevitably to recommend additions to the park system as need arose. Since most of the available areas of national park caliber were (and are) in the national forests, new parks must be carved out of the Forest Service empire, and thus transferred from Agriculture to Interior. Each such attempt has been a casus belli. But never has the “territorial imperative,” as the old instinct is now fashionably called, been more nakedly displayed than in the Forest Service’s opposition to a national park in the North Cascades. In the case of the baboon, ethologists tell us, the mere baring of the huge canine teeth is generally enough to make the invader retreat. The situation here is perhaps more subtle, and the conditions of the jungle make behavioral studies much more difficult.

The Cascades light, however, clarifies one essential point: the character of the contest (aside from mere possession of territory) has changed in the last fifty years, as America has changed. Great conservationist though he was, Gifford Pinchot was curiously blind to any “use” of our forests beyond the purely utilitarian; the preservation of wilderness for its aesthetic or spiritual qualities was not his concern. Since his time, the Service that he founded to control the lumber interests has become more and more their spokesman. Yet today, the Forest Service is forced to recognize that recreation is a valid forest product which is, moreover, getting the political support that government empires live and grow on. Meanwhile, the Park Service has seized for its own the popular slogan of recreation. Under that banner it has been carrying out “improvements” elsewhere in its domain that make its most loyal supporters uneasy about its plans for the North Cascades.

THESE are some of the questions and confusions that I carried with me when my family and I set out last August for our two-week camping trip, by horse and pack mule, into the “American Alps.” This time we entered not by way of Lake Chelan, as we had four years earlier, but by Washington Pass at the northeastern edge of the range. It is a sudden, dramatic entry compared with the leisurely journey up the lake; in a matter of minutes one is surrounded by sharp rock peaks, with glimpses of high snowfields beyond. To the wilderness lover it is also jarring. Here is the beginning of a cross-mountain road, the first to be cut through this hitherto roadless area. There is something almost obscene in the power of modern technology to subdue the landscape; no slope is so steep, no rock is so hard, but it yields at last. Not till we had turned off the main trail, with its ominous surveyors’ ribbons, and climbed up to a high mountain tarn did we sense that lifting of the spirit that comes on entering the true wilderness.

A lake in such a setting almost compels the term “American Alps.” It lies, green-blue and crystal clear, at the bottom of a cup in the mountains. Steep talus slopes, mottled with dark clumps of Alpine fir and bright patches of snow, rise straight from the water’s edge, evidence that the lake is deep as well as cold. A slightly gentler incline, leading to a pass between the peaks, has built up enough soil over the centuries to be covered now by grass, low shrubs, and a variety of wild flowers that make a mass of color visible even at a distance. Only the meadow near the outlet is level enough for a tent. Here a tiny stream winds along the valley floor. Fallen trees and debris have dammed it every few hundred yards along its course, creating a chain of shallow grass-margined ponds, at first glance almost like the work of beavers. The turf is moist and heavy, bright with red splashes of monkey flower, thick clumps of blue Northern gentian, and the delicate white Western anemone. The only trails are deer trails, the hoof marks deeply imprinted in the occasional spots of bare mud. Far up the mountain a marmot whistles, and another answers (reminding us of the story of the city girls who were swimming skinny in the presumed privacy of a remote mountain lake and panicked at these sudden wolf whistles from the shore). From the foot of a rockslide comes the strange little squeak of a “rock rabbit.” The pika, as he is properly called, is shy but curious. Wait but a moment in silence, and he will emerge into clear view to look you over.

The full beauty of a mountain lake, however, can be realized only from above. Next morning when the early fog had blown out of the valley, we set out on foot up the trail to the pass. Beginning in a jumble of giant rocks, it rose in a series of switchbacks through fir groves and brushy clearings to emerge Anally into the full sun. Wild flowers were everywhere — the cool blue of lupin, the flame of the Indian paintbrush, the purple mountain daisy, with its sunlike yellow center. As we ascended, the flowers became smaller and seemingly brighter; the more delicate white bell heather mingled with the red variety of the lower slopes. Hummingbirds darted among them. From the very tip of a solitary Alpine fir a Clark’s nutcracker (a crowlike bird handsomely patterned in gray, jet black, and white) was cawing hoarsely. Peterson’s Field Guide describes his habitat as “high mountains; conifers near tree line.” He is as much a part of the open country as the gray jay or whisky jack is of the boreal forests.

At the top of the pass we were in fact at tree line. The few remaining white spruces hugged the ground like junipers. In the shadow of the rocks lay fields of “red snow”: a mysterious alga that makes the white surface seem lightly brushed with bloodred. Through the pass on the far horizon appeared a vast panorama of snow-clad peaks, the highest sliced off below their summits by a blanket of cottony cloud. On the sheer face of the nearby range the broken thread of a bright cascade led the eye upward to its source in a tiny emerald lake. The forest below showed a curious pattern of darkand light-green vertical stripes; through the binoculars one could see that these were not the result of lumbering — for this is still virgin land — but of old snow and rock slides, the bright green being a carpet of new growth where the big trees had been sheared away. From a narrow ridge above the pass our lake came back into view below us: a tiny deep blue disk, shadowed and remote, like the sky-reflecting mirror at the bottom of a well.

One charm of the North Cascades is their infinite variety. A national park would have something for everybody. Two days later we rejoined the main trail along the creek, which leads for mile after mile through a dense, dark forest of fir, spruce, cedar, and hemlock. Only the shade-tolerant flower can grow here, like the pipsissewa, with its delicate spike of pinkish blooms. Stream crossings were hazardous. Twice a laden pack mule fell flat in the mud, raising fears of broken legs. But the only result was condensation of our food supplies as raw eggs merged with the jam and the peanut butter. A deep forest is a silent place, but here — as in the Olympics, the Great Smokies of Tennessee, the Green Mountains of Vermont — a winter wren sang his canarylike song as we made our campfire. The evocative notes stretched across the miles and the years to link together those scattered moments of wilderness experience, so transient in time, so enduring in memory.

Each of our wilderness areas has its distinctive high country. In the southern Appalachians it is the mysterious openings in the climax spruce-fir forest, fringed with flame azalea, known as “balds.” Alaska’s Mount McKinley Park has its rolling tundra. In the North Cascades, as elsewhere among the Northwest ranges, the peculiar glory of the terrain at timberline is that sky-pasture known as a “park.” No wilderness area is more welcoming to the camper, but none, alas, is more fragile, more vulnerable to overuse. When at last we left the river valley and turned on to a steep trail up the mountainside, we passed a sign: “NORTH CASCADE PRIMITIVE AREA Mechanized Equipment Prohibited.” This was off bounds for scooters or “tote goats,” those new destroyers of wilderness peace and forest trails. The narrow path now led us up the long slope to the tableland above in an apparently endless series of switchbacks, so steep that we seemed to be riding among the treetops.

A “park” implies human origin. In this wild high country, climate and altitude have achieved the same open, almost ordered landscape: specimen trees bordering a level expanse of lush grass, beds of wild flowers so dense one hesitates to walk among them, long vistas leading the eye to snow-capped peaks. Down the center of this boggy swale a small stream meanders between banks of shining moss in a succession of miniature oxbows, suggesting a great river as seen from the air. Compared with the secret world of the forest below, life here is everywhere on display. A spotted sandpiper teeters along the stream bed, a marsh hawk quarters the meadow in search of mice, spruce grouse burst like bullets from among the evergreens. Mule deer watch us in apparent concern, and at night we hear the thumping of their hooves beside our tent. At dawn we wake to the wail of coyotes.

When eventually we emerged on the western edge of the wilderness, we felt that we had only begun to know these mountains. Here are worlds within worlds. We soaked ourselves in the rain forests of the western slopes, fished clear rivers for rainbow trout, watched water ouzels in the milky glacial torrents, and made a day-long climb to a mountain lookout. And everywhere towering above us was still another world: the rock walls and Alpine peaks that make the North Cascades a paradise not only for the camper but for the true mountaineer.

PARADISE today; unless we act quickly, paradise lost tomorrow. Like the Hawaiian Islands before Captain Cook, the North Cascades have survived intact through an accident of geography. The tides of change have flowed around them. But with the coming of the highway, the bulldozers, the chain saws, the scooters, the “fatal impact” has already begun. There is no sense in pretending that they can remain frozen in time: “Forever wilt thou love,/ And she be fair!” The question is not how to stem the tide but how to control it. Whom can we trust?

The Forest Service, which now administers the entire area, has a ready answer: “Trust us.” Propaganda and political pressure are being used to support their claim. How valid is it? The question is relevant not just to the Cascades but to our entire wilderness system.

Unlike the Park Service, the Forest Service has from the outset been concerned with the use of our natural resources rather than simply with their preservation. In the early days of abundant land, however, its chief function was custodianship. Later, as resources dwindled, the Service became more and more engaged in management — that is, in manipulation of the environment. And its management policies have subtly changed, in fact if not on paper. The Service’s much admired policy of decentralization gives maximum responsibility to the regional foresters. Ties between Service personnel and the local community are strong. Twenty-five percent of the money from timber sales is returned to the community for the support of schools and roads. On the face of it, all this sounds fine. But there is a built-in hazard. Working as he must with the leading citizens in his area, lunching with them at Rotary or the Kiwanis Club, the Forest Service official develops personal friendships and a common point of view — the view, in almost every case, of the local lumbering and mining interests. “No villain need be”; we are dealing here not with personal corruption but with the far more difficult problem of attrition through accommodation, the erosion of a theoretical ideal by the ceaseless pounding of practical politics.

“Trees must be cut down,” say the lumbermen. The Forest Service has a somewhat subtler approach. Yet as Grant McConnell, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, pointed out recently in the Nation, the Service, generally recognized as one of the ablest and most independent government agencies, has gradually “had to accommodate itself to the interest groups whose activities it was supposed to regulate” — that is, the lumber industry. The cat has become custodian of the canary.

Countervailing forces are of course at work within this complex empire. The very concept of “primitive areas” and “wilderness areas” first developed within the Forest Service itself during the nineteen twenties and thirties. The greater part of Wild America is still administered by its highly professional personnel, whose morale and technical competence are probably as high as those of any branch of the federal government. For reasons such as these, the claim of the Service to the North Cascades has had the support not only of commercial interests but of many conservationists who fear the developments that a national park might bring. Until recently, these groups still hoped to reach their goals through working with the Forest Service administration.

They have been disappointed. In the Cascades, the Forest Service speaks too often with the voice of the lumber industry. Only such areas are recommended for preservation as are good for nothing else; wilderness, in other words, is synonymous with wasteland. When in doubt, keep it out of the wilderness system: “It may be useful someday.” Those who use this argument ignore the fact that the trees in the high country are worth more as scenery than they are as board feet of lumber; otherwise they would have been grabbed years ago. Industrially speaking, these forests are marginal. Yet the cutting goes on. By the nineteen fifties, the chain saws were beginning to reach the narrow valleys and the higher slopes. Protests by conservationists were met, in the words of one patient worker in the field, with “intransigence and contempt.”

As frequently happens with great organizations when they come under fire, the Forest Service has countered criticism with a public relations campaign to justify the status quo. Madison Avenue has entered the woods. The campaign is built around a time-honored and superficially plausible slogan, “multiple use.” On some of the most scenic roads in the North Cascades, we found signs reading: “CASCADE RIVER WATERSHED MANAGED FOR MULTIPLE USE Recreation — Wildlife — Forage — Water — Timber.” In one “timber sale area” the visitor is thus informed that the cutover land will provide forage for deer, and anyway, that $37,500 from the sale was returned to the U.S. Treasury. My favorite sign, however, is the one which, after assuring the reader that the stumpland in the foreground is being replanted, draws his attention to “the snowy peaks in the background,” which are “enjoyed by many wilderness travellers. This is another example of multiple use in your national forests.”

There is no virtue in multiplicity unless the “uses” are mutually compatible. The New York Times is not promoted on the grounds that in addition to being read it can also be used for lighting fires and for wrapping fish. Logging and scenery do not go together, even when one is instructed to lift one’s eyes from the desecration at hand to the snowy peaks on the horizon. The mere listing of words like “water,” “wildlife,” “timber” is a meaningless incantation. Dams (if that is what is meant by “water”) may provide some types of recreation and may also destroy a wilderness. Wildlife (as contrasted with mere numbers of deer to be hunted) achieves its maximum variety and interest in those biotic associations which have been least altered by man’s management. Management for multiple use tends to be management for the maximum dollar return, which is to say, for salable timber — this in a nation that no longer has a shortage of timber, but that will soon be facing a shortage of wilderness.

For all its propaganda, the Forest Service in the area has not proved itself worthy of this particular trust. Is the answer, then, a national park? If so, how big and where? This time a solution is being sought through official collaboration rather than through trial by combat between the Forest and Park Services. On January 28, 1963, the Secretaries of Agriculture and Interior wrote a joint letter (familiarly known as the Treaty of the Potomac) to President Kennedy, initiating what they called “a new era of cooperation.” Recognizing the urgent need for more recreation areas, it guaranteed that “neither Department will initiate unilaterally new proposals to change the status of lands under jurisdiction of the other Department.” In short, no grabs. A joint study of the North Cascades was recommended as one of the first projects under the new treaty.

“The hard core of the issues before the study team,” says the report, “was whether there should be a new national park established in the North Cascades. Almost equally difficult questions involve the conflicts between timber utilization and recreation, and between mass recreation and dedication to wilderness. . . . This report docs not reflect unanimous views, because unanimity was not reached.” The outcome was perhaps predictable. Two members were in favor of continued Forest Service administration, two recommended a substantial national park, and the chairman cast his vote for the compromise of a smaller park, together with establishment of new wilderness areas under continued jurisdiction of the Forest Service. Conservationists are not ecstatic over this compromise; but for the most part they are, with some trepidation, putting their weight behind the report.

The problem of exact boundary lines is far too complex to go into here, and anyway, maps mean little unless one has been on the spot. For example, the North Cascades Conservation Council points out the urgent necessity of “stopping the logging damage in the scenic heartland around the Glacier Peak Wilderness.” These are just words until you see the desecration, as we did, in one of the most spectacular wild valleys in all North America. Logging or mining an area like this is like ripping the corner off a classic Chinese landscape painting. Again, when you take that unique boat trip up Lake Chelan, you realize that its shoreline is a national treasure. A park can preserve this country, but not if the projected developments go through: roads, chair lifts, helicopters—the works. “One of the key considerations,” says the report, “was that the recommendation for a park be conditioned upon its being developed for mass recreation use.” Well and good, within limits; conservationists have never assumed that the national domain was their private preserve. But where will it stop? Even more disturbing than specific development proposals is the philosophy that appears to lie behind them. Because “the volume of wilderness area use” (as the study puts it) in the North Cascades has hitherto been comparatively small, we don’t really need to save so much wilderness after all. This is a compound fallacy. The rate of use is going up so fast that the study team’s figures are already obsolete. And in the nation as a whole, everyone knows that we are going to need more wilderness, not less. Such shortsighted reasoning ignores the whole concept of trusteeship. “Development” is a nonreversible process. Are we to leave our descendants no power of choice?

SO FAR, the vocal opposition to a park has been for the wrong reasons. Virtually every national park has been created in the face of militant local opposition. In almost every case the mood has changed to acceptance and even to enthusiasm within a few years. The basic graph is simple. Lumbermen, miners, cattlemen with grazing rights, hunters and trappers, real-estate speculators all protest that a park would be the ruination of the country. Once the park is established, money begins to flow in from out-of-state tourists, new businesses spring up in the neighborhood, land values rise, and large sums of federal money find their way into the local economy through the development and administration of the park itself. The tax rate goes down, and the park is now considered the salvation of the country. Government study indicates that this process of acceptance generally requires from five to fifteen years, depending on the time lag between establishment and expenditure of funds for development. One of the bitterest lights took place in the late forties over the acceptance of a Rockefeller grant for enlargement of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Yet in Teton County, where the opposition centered, both property values and tax revenues approximately doubled in the eight years following enlargement of the park.

A North Cascades National Park would doubtless be an economic boon to the region. Conservationists are worried on quite other grounds. As it enters its second half century, the Park Service is being criticized as never before in its history. The sharpest criticism comes not from economic interests that want to exploit the land (though they may oppose some specific Park proposal) but from those who want to save it. “The amazing thing,” comments a leading conservation writer, “is that the present administrators of the national parks are actually encouraging an overuse which, if continued, will see the destruction of the national parks in our time.” Recreation in the root sense of the term — the re-creation of the human spirit — is, of course, a principal purpose of the parks. Confused with outdoor entertainment, on the other hand, it can be fatal. The great buildingprogram “Mission '66'' was superseded even before its target date with a term as ominous as it is contrived: “Parkscape.” If this means anything, it means an official policy of altering the natural landscape. The other current slogan is “Parks Are for People.” Again meaningless, unless it means that mass use is the ultimate objective, no matter how destructive to the environment. Politically this may be sound doctrine; you can’t win support in Congress by saving wilderness for voters still unborn. Yet conservationists may be forgiven if they fear the Park Greeks bearing gifts. The Horse, they say, rings hollow. Are there bulldozers in its belly?

If these fears are unfounded, if this apparent shift of values is only a momentary lapse in a great tradition, the Park Service has a unique opportunity to correct the record. Not only is every existing park now being restudied under the Wilderness Act, but here in the Cascades a new park in matchless wilderness country may soon be born. There is yet time to revive the practical idealism that has made our park system a model for the world. By “zoning” within the parks, by establishing recreation areas outside the parks, we can still save unspoiled those areas where wilderness is the highest “use” of all. As Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall put it, “ The status we give our wilderness and near-wilderness areas will also measure the degree of our reverence for the land.”

No other spot in America better qualifies for such treatment than the North Cascades. Most conservationists are fighting for a North Cascades National Park because they know that the Park Service can save the heart of this country if it wants to. They distrust the Forest Service’s Johnnycome-lately espousal of conservation when a park became a possible alternative. Those who love this country as it now is realize that the worst the Forest Service can do is incomparably worse than the worst the Park Service can do. Specifically, they foresee under continued Forest Service management a major copper-mining operation in the very heart of the matchless Glacier Peak wilderness, inadequate protection of the core area north of Lake Chelan, debasement of the scenic values at the north end of Lake Chelan itself. In backing the national park proposal, however, they like to think that they are not just choosing the lesser of two evils. Beneath the frequently forbidding exterior of an ambitious government bureau, they see the enduring principles that have made the National Park Service our greatest defender of natural beauty. They trust that the Service will have the courage and the foresight to produce a plan for a true wilderness park. If it does, there is still hope for the American Alps and for the other priceless remnants of wild America.