Chapter Eight:
Controlling Development: How Much Is Too Much? (1947-1972)
(continued)
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 1970sclosing
campgrounds, and removing of the post office, gas station, and old Giant
Forest Museumonly 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 peoplesomething 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 threata 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.
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