A New Campaign for the American Alps

Ken Wilcox is an author and environmental planning consultant in Bellingham. He was also the editor and publisher of Harvey Manning’s last book, “Wilderness Alps” (Northwest Wild Books, 2007).

Part 1

On May 15, 60 people gathered in Seattle to kick off the American Alps Legacy Project, a citizen-led initiative to protect as much as 300,000 acres or more of new park and wilderness lands in the North Cascades.

The last time any wild country was protected here was 25 years ago this month, when President Ronald Reagan signed the 1984 Washington Wilderness Act into law, establishing, among others, the Mount Baker and Noisy-Diobsud Wilderness Areas immediately west of North Cascades National Park. Also in that bill was the Lake Chelan-Sawtooth Wilderness, a ragged crest of mountains rising high above the east shore of the lake.

North Cascades National Park, the Ross Lake and Lake Chelan National Recreation areas, and the Pasayten Wilderness were all designated together in October 1968 with the stroke of President Lyndon Johnson’s pen. In a time of war, riots and heinous assassinations, a crowd of satisfied onlookers let out a cheer in the Rose Garden that day.

The late conservationist-author Harvey Manning claimed that the North Cascades Act of 1968 virtually saved the National Park Service from itself, rekindling the fire that had helped establish many of the great wilderness parks of the West over the preceding 100 years — Yosemite, Yellowstone, Mount Rainier and Grand Canyon, for example.

It didn’t matter that some of our most iconic national parks predate even the formation of the Park Service in 1916. The passion that moved America to set aside its most awesome natural landscapes began in June 1864, less than a year after the end of the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the bill handing over Yosemite Park to the state of California. Yosemite led to Yellowstone in 1872, and by 1899, Mount Rainier would become the nation’s fifth national park, followed by Crater Lake in Oregon three years later.

The passion for parks remained alive and well through the 1920s and 1930s, including a proposal by the National Park Service in 1937 for Ice Peaks National Park. Ice Peaks was an extraordinary vision for a grand national park that would encompass the core of the Cascade Range from Mount Saint Helens to Canada. The proposal vanished from sight when mining interests complained.

In the 1940s, a world war intervened. When it was over in 1945, some may have wondered if the creation of new national parks had run its course, or if the notion was perhaps too frivolous for a society reeling from the experience and the aftermath of war. Though Lincoln established a park at Yosemite only months after his historic speech at Gettysburg, the designation of a park at the Everglades in 1947 seemed to mark the end of the long string of great national parks. An American idea, as original as pie with apples, nearly came to a close.

When normalcy and prosperity began to return in the 1950s, conservationists, many of them hikers and mountaineers, began to huddle together in suburban living rooms plotting their dreams on maps. In Washington, they were among the few who knew firsthand what was out there, and once fully immersed in it they fell in love with it. Naturally, they wanted it saved from exploitation.

In the Pacific Northwest, the threats were real. It may be unthinkable today, but in the 1940s through the early 1950s, thousands of truckloads of old-growth timber were removed from Olympic National Park. Large dams were being proposed within the Grand Canyon. In 1930 in the North Cascades, Seattle City Light’s Diablo Dam became the highest dam in the world (soon to be outdone by Bounder Dam on the Colorado). More dams were proposed.

In those living room meetings of the 1950s, the talk focused on the more immediate threats of logging, mining and the ominous development of new roads up numerous wilderness valleys. At first, the roads were few and the wilderness was enormous, the intrusion tolerable.

But the sense of alarm grew quickly and in direct proportion to the miles of roads constructed and the acres of trees leveled. Old trails were obliterated and new roads up the White Chuck River and the Suiattle and a proposed new state highway across the North Cascades were quickly reducing the prospects for large-scale wildland protection in the region. Conservationists doubled their efforts and formed the North Cascades Conservation Council, or N3C, in 1957 to elevate the ongoing campaign for a Glacier Peak Wilderness, and later, North Cascades National Park.

Under rules originally developed by Bob Marshall, the U.S. Forest Service finally agreed in 1960 to establish a 460,000-acre wilderness area around Glacier Peak, well below Marshall’s own recommendation of 795,000 acres. But it was a hell of a start.

Marshall, a leading founder of the Wilderness Society in 1935, was known to traverse wide areas of wilderness throughout the West. He carried out much of his fieldwork on foot and often alone, sometimes covering 35 to 50 miles in a day. His last hike in the wilderness was to Cloudy Pass above Lake Chelan in the summer of 1939. Then just weeks later, he was dead, an apparent victim of leukemia. He is remembered today at the one-million-acre-plus Bob Marshall Wilderness in western Montana.

With the signing of the Wilderness Act in 1964, also by President Johnson, the Glacier Peak Wilderness became one of the nation’s first to be statutorily protected by Congress. Nine million acres of wilderness in 13 states — a total of 54 areas — were protected and meant to stay wild forever.

It’s not clear who first might have applied the term “American Alps” to the stunning mountains otherwise known as the North Cascades. An early reference comes from none other than French novelist Jules Verne. In his book, “The Begum’s Fortune,” published in 1879, Verne’s description is unmistakable, even if his geography may seem a little confused. He wrote of an “American Switzerland” in Oregon (Washington was not yet a state), “with its abrupt peaks rising above the clouds, its deep valleys dividing the heights, its aspect at once grand and wild.”

He continues: “But, unlike the European Switzerland, it is not given up to the peaceful industries of the shepherd, the guide, and the hotel-keeper. It has Alpine decorations only, just a crust of rocks, and earth and venerable pines spread over a mass of iron and coal.”

The story leads on through a very destructive depiction of large-scale mining, where instead of “the gentle murmurs of insect life” and the call of a “herd-boy,” we are asked to imagine “the heavy sound of the steam hammer,” and echoes of “the muffled explosions of gun powder.” The ground is ready to collapse into a vast network of underground mining shafts, and “dreary roads, black with cinders and coke, wind round the sides of the mountains … . Not a bird nor an insect is to be found, and a butterfly has not been seen within the memory of man.”

The N3C, of course, would be aghast. Jules Verne’s warning, silly as it might seem to those who know that there are few recoverable coal and iron deposits in the North Cascades, might have been taken more seriously a century later, when the Kennecott Copper Company announced plans for a large open-pit copper mine inside the Glacier Peak Wilderness. An entirely readable account of that scary episode is told by John McPhee in his “Encounters with the Archdruid,” the druid being Dave Brower.

David Brower, the first executive director of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth and the Earth Island Institute, was an early and lifelong board member of the N3C. In 1958, he produced “Wilderness Alps of Stehekin,” a 30-minute film that effectively made the case for a new North Cascades National Park. The film was as rich in scenery as it was in Brower’s poetic descriptions of the landscape — looking up, for example, to watch “the old contest between the crags and mists.”

The documentary, “Monumental,” released in 2004, profiles Brower’s prominent role as the mid-20th-century successor to John Muir in leading the movement for new national parks and wilderness in the West.

Brower’s “Wilderness Alps” seemed to offer an invitation to journalists to report on the campaign to the protect the North Cascades as a great cause for America’s public lands. The media responded with stories about these Wilderness Alps, raising the bar slightly to these “American Alps,” where an entire nation could more readily imagine something “at once grand and wild.”

Sunset Magazine, The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and dozens more published supportive stories about a land that relatively few Americans even knew about until then. The Seattle media was slow to catch on, but eventually did and by the mid 1960s, some cautiously supported the idea of a new park in the North Cascades. Most kept quiet or leaned against.

Thousands were moved by the Brower film and over the next several years tens of thousands of people signed petitions in support of the new park. Since the lands involved were within the national forests, the U.S. Forest Service, as an agency of the Department of Agriculture, was not eager to hand them over to the National Park Service, an underling of the Department of Interior.

The rivalry between the two agencies, one preferring the trees in a vertical disposition, the other horizontal, led the Kennedy administration to insist that his two respective Secretaries find the means to work together, which led to the creation in 1963 of the North Cascades Study Team. The study team’s job was to “explore all the resource potentials” in the North Cascades. Politely, but firmly, the agencies argued over various scenarios, but both agreed that the towering spires of the Picket Range, which was nearly impossible for most mortals to access, could be protected.

The Park Service suggested a new Mount Baker National Park and redesignation of the Glacier Peak Wilderness as national park. To the Forest Service, it was just a big land grab, though they did agree to the idea of a large wilderness area, under Forest Service management, extending from the Pickets to the Pasayten. The gap eventually narrowed, with the Park Service letting go of Mount Baker and Glacier Peak and the Forest Service finally agreeing to a new National Park from the Picket Range to Lake Chelan. A joint recommendation was issued in 1966.

The N3C approached Senator “Scoop” Jackson in 1967 and asked for his support in moving a national park bill through Congress. He responded two-fold. He might be able to get them the park they really wanted, which was more ambitious than what the study team had put forward, but it would take some years to do it, and he could offer no guarantee of success. Or they could accept a scaled-down park that significantly compromised the dream, but was more consistent with the study team’s recommendation. “Get up a parade [of public support],” he said, “and I’ll lead it on in.”

The N3C struggled with the choice and then agreed to accept Jackson’s offer. The book, “Wilderness Alps: Conservation and Conflict in Washington’s North Cascades,” by Harvey Manning and the N3C (2007), offers the following observation:

“Far from perfect, the [Jackson] bill offered the best opportunity yet to get something moving for the North Cascades. Already a decade had passed since the NCCC was formed to guide the campaign; it had been twenty years since the last large national park, the Everglades, was created; twenty-seven years since the Ice Peaks National Park proposal was quietly filed away; fifty years since the first big push to establish a park at Mount Baker; over sixty years since the Mazamas adopted a national park resolution at Chelan; and seventy-five years since the first park was proposed for the North Cascades, also at Chelan.”

There were still countless hurdles to overcome, but Jackson was astute enough to know they could be negotiated. Boundaries were drawn to reduce conflicts with the timber barons, to accommodate hunters, and to provide some elbow room to Seattle City Light so it could pursue its dam ideas.

As the campaign neared success, Governor Dan Evans offered critical support for the new park. On October 2, 1968, President Johnson signed the bill. A signing pen was later delivered by Jackson to Patrick Goldsworthy, the N3C’s chairman of the board for life. Today, at 90, Goldsworthy remains thoroughly immersed in N3C’s affairs and still chairs the board meetings.

Harvey Manning seemed to regret the 1968 compromise and offered his “apologies to the year 2000.” He wished they could have won a larger park and protected more of the pristine country east, west and south of the 1968 park. “We tried to save you as much as we thought possible,” he wrote.

Needless to say, it’s a different world today and maybe that larger park is now possible. The American Alps Legacy Project believes it is and is working to add some of the last unprotected wildlands to the existing national park and wilderness areas of the North Cascades.

You can learn more about the current proposal and contribute to the cause by visiting http://www.americanalps.org. §

We’ll describe that vision for completing the park and wilderness areas of those “Alps” up there in the North Cascades.