In the quarter century following the end of the Second World War, Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks repeated the same cycles of development and concern that had occurred in the two decades before the war. Again, as recreational use of the parks grew rapidly, the Park Service found itself without adequate funds to meet the demand. Again, when funds were finally forthcoming, this time through Mission 66, they were invested almost entirely in visitor facilities, and again, as the period drew to a close, the realization grew that preservation of the critical features of the two parks would require far more than just new and better bathrooms and campgrounds.

Nowhere was this cycle of retreat, renewal, and reappraisal more apparent than in the developed sequoia groves. In the early 1950s, tight budgets and continued resistance from the Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks Company forced abandonment of the two-decade dreams of restoring Giant Forest to a more pristine state. When the Service allowed the felling of the leaning tree at Giant Forest Lodge in 1950, it in effect also felled its own efforts to limit additional human impacts within the grove. Accepting all the problems that had been unacceptable to park planners and managers in the 1940s, the Service learned once again to live with Giant Forest's congestion and mediocrity. Not until after the concession company finally changed hands in 1966, did the Park Service succeed in making even the smallest improvements in what everyone agreed was a deplorable situation. And even then, improvements of the late 1960s and early 1970s—closing campgrounds, and removing of the post office, gas station, and old Giant Forest Museum—only cleared the way for another wave of concessioner investment in upgraded dining facilities and new motel rooms.

The only bright spot in sequoia management during this period came from the long-needed initiation of sustained ecological research into the status of the Big Trees. Within a few years, work begun in the mid-1960s by Richard Hartesveldt revolutionized the Service's understanding of what was necessary for the long-term preservation of the groves. Ultimately, Hartesveldt's fire ecology research would synergize with the Service's acceptance of the Leopold Report and changing public perceptions of environmental priorities to lead the Service in completely new directions. In 1971, however, as the Park Service completed a new and very cautious master plan for Sequoia and Kings Canyon, the biggest changes still remained in the future.

In the backcountry the postwar years witnessed a recreational revolution unprecedented in the history of the two parks. In a few short years beginning in the mid-1960s, fifty years of backcountry management schemes were rendered almost useless by the arrival of the backpacking baby-boom generation. In the years after the war, the Service focused largely on controlling the impacts of past and present grazing and on undoing the old habits of burying garbage and the like. Suddenly, as the 1970s began and backcountry use skyrocketed, the Service rushed to respond to new and different problems, carrying out experiments with limiting people—something it never had the nerve to try elsewhere in the parks. At the same time the Service wrestled with how much of its backcountry to formally designate as wilderness, a legislative requirement of Congress that drew no clear and focused response from the agency. Here was a chance to clarify the agency's wilderness management directions and reconcile once and for all how the remainder of the parks were to be developed or preserved. But, the final recommendations represented merely a cautious mixture of Colonel White's prewar land management decisions and the input of numerous interest groups.

In the postwar era the world surrounding the two parks changed quickly also. Nowhere was this more evident than in the three surrounding national forests. During the postwar decades Sequoia National Forest began at last to execute the full mission that had been identified for it decades earlier. In the lands surrounding the parks this took largely the form of logging, especially on the Sequoia Forest's Hume Lake District. By 1970 logging had begun to approach the parks' boundary for the first time since the turn of the century. Perhaps even more threatening to the biological integrity of Sequoia was the proposed ski resort development in Mineral King Valley. As endorsed by the Sequoia National Forest in the late 1960s, this development would have placed as many annual visitors in tiny Mineral King Valley as were then visiting all of Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks. And nearly all of those visitors would have come to Mineral King by crossing the park on a modern highway cut through a major sequoia grove. How these visitors would affect the park, in both winter and summer, the Park Service had just begun quietly to consider. In public the agency had nothing whatsoever to say, exactly the instructions it had received from the Nixon Administration. The protection of the park's interests instead fell largely to political groups like the Sierra Club.

Only in the true high country, it seemed, were the boundaries of the parks relatively safe from threat—a situation confirmed by the creation of the John Muir Wilderness, which bordered Sequoia and Kings Canyon on the east and wrapped around the northern end of Kings Canyon. Elsewhere, in the Hume Lake country, along the foothill western border of Sequoia, in the Mineral King region, and eastward across the southern side of Sequoia, the Park Service watched silently as the modern world crept ever closer.

In the two and a half decades following the war, it is possible to suggest that the Park Service lost its way as it attempted to protect the two parks. Certainly none of the numerous superintendents who revolved through showed the vision or the strength of Colonel White. In a larger sense, of course, the Park Service of the 1950s and 1960s reflected accurately the temper of its times in its commitment to facility development and its hesitance to upset resolved situations. But nagging at the Service throughout the period, and increasingly as the 1960s ended, was the realization that the status quo would not ultimately succeed. In the sequoia groves, increasing scientific evidence clearly pointed out the consequences of overdevelopment and fire suppression. In the backcountry, with the onset of the 1970s, some sorts of use limits were beginning to be set. And on the surrounding lands? Well, that would have to be someone else's battle, perhaps the public's. Luckily, and in fact as the 1970s began, the American public had begun to show an attitude shift that would revolutionize its expectations of national parks, and allow the resolution of many of Sequoia and Kings Canyon's most pressing issues.