Monday, Jul. 04, 1977

Bumper to Bumper In the Wilderness

By Peter Stoler

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

Louie Jiles, 20, of Marietta, Ga., does not have Novelist-Naturalist Wallace Stegner's way with words. But he shares Stegner's feeling for the wilderness areas that have been preserved in the country's National Parks. "I just want to get out in the woods," explained Backpacker Jiles as he descended to the Cades Cove section of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park after a hike along the Appalachian Trail last week. "You don't hear the sound of cars there. I guess you would call it an escape."

But not as much an escape as the parks used to be. Once they were the special province of a handful of outdoor enthusiasts, Appalachian Mountain Club types with heads full of Thoreau, Sierra Clubbers high on the words of John Muir. Now the 37 National Parks are in serious danger of overcrowding. In 1957 only 68 million people visited National Park Service lands. Last year 268 million came. This year the figure should top 279 million. The West's drought has reduced Yosemite National Park's normally thundering Bridalveil Fall to a gauzy trickle, left the Colorado River so dry that white-water boatmen in Grand Canyon National Park have been stranded on rocks usually submerged in foaming rapids, and stripped Glacier National Park's 10,448-ft. Mount Cleveland of its usual snowcapped grandeur. Pollution from a nearby coal-burning plant has clouded the once crystalline air in Utah's Bryce Canyon National Park. But despite these drawbacks, Americans keep coming in search of scenery, silence and, yes, even sanity.*

But the parks' growing popularity has led in many cases to the same kinds of congestion their users are trying to escape. Weekends frequently find the roads leading into Yosemite every bit as clogged as urban freeways; those who fail to make advance bookings often find accommodations unavailable. Reservations at the elegant Ahwahnee, the most luxurious of Yosemite's lodges, must be made at least six to eight weeks in advance. Campsites are usually crowded to capacity. Mule trips from the rim of the Grand Canyon to its floor must be booked months ahead; so must boat trips down the Colorado. But large sections of the parks remain unspoiled. Mesa Verde is steeped in silence so profound that it is palpable; hikers in sections of Olympic National Park can sometimes walk all day without encountering another party.

A uniquely American idea, the National Park system owes its origins in large part to Henry Washburn, surveyor general of what was then the Montana Territory, and to Judge Cornelius Hedges. Washburn and Hedges had heard the tales brought back by Mountain Men John Colter and Jim Bridger of the Yellow Rock region of what is now the northwest corner of Wyoming.

The trappers spoke of smoking hills, springs that spewed torrents of boiling mud and water, and cliffs of black glass. In 1870 Washburn and Hedges decided to have a look for themselves. What they saw so impressed them that they decided the region had to be preserved. On March 1, 1872, legislation establishing the 2-million-acre Yellowstone National Park--first in the country and the world--was signed into law by President Ulysses Grant. Now the National Park Service, created in 1916, administers a 31-million-acre empire likely to double in size once Congress acts to acquire additional parkland in Alaska.

The variety of that domain is nearly infinite. Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, one of the westernmost, boasts a steaming crater, a heat-blasted desert and flows of black lava that lead down to the warm Pacific off the island of Hawaii. Acadia National Park is as green as Hawaii Volcanoes is barren. Cool, thickly forested hills march down to the Atlantic off the coast of Maine, where the water is icy enough to turn the hardiest of swimmers as blue as the summer sky in a matter of minutes.

The parks are a challenge for the sportsman. Mountain climbers can test their endurance on 14,410-ft.

Mount Rainier, where Everest Climber Jim Whittaker took the members of his 1975 K-2 expedition for some pre-Himalayan conditioning. They can also try their skills on Yosemite's Rixon's pinnacle, a rock spire where an urban alpinist named George Willig developed the confidence that enabled him to conquer Manhattan's World Trade Center. Would-be birdmen can launch their hang gliders from Yosemite's Glacier Point for a 3,500-ft. descent to the park floor. Fishermen can cast their flies --and hopes--after the three-pound rainbow and cutthroat trout that make their homes in the mountain lakes and countless streams that crisscross Montana's million-acre Glacier National Park. River runners can launch themselves and their specially designed rubber boats down the foaming Colorado for a 277-mile run or trek into Texas' Big Bend National Park and try taking kayaks down the sinuous stretches of the Rio Grande.

Even the less active will find the parks fascinating, and why not? Viewing the strata exposed by the river in the Grand Canyon, the wind-weathered landscape of Bryce Canyon or the waterworn stalactites of Carlsbad Caverns is like looking backward through time. To watch an alligator glide through the Everglades is to see a world still unsullied by technology. Seeing a black bear beg for food beside a highway in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (the most popular in the system, with 11.4 million visitors last year) is proof that even in this age of the atom, the wilderness is never really that far away.

Unfortunately the wilderness is far more fragile than it looks. The growing interest in backpacking has intensified traffic on some hiking trails, causing serious erosion. "These are environmentally concerned people," says Tom Wilson, an N.P.S. official. "They don't chop down trees or litter. But the mere fact that they're here can wear out trails. These are fragile ecosystems."