Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington's National Parks

4 / A Road Runs Through It: A Wilderness Park for the North Cascades

4 / A ROAD RUNS THROUGH IT A Wilderness Park for the North Cascades I n the years after World War II, Americans began to understand national parks in a diªerent way. For many, a wilderness encounter increasingly meant leaving the car behind and heading into the backcountry on foot or horseback. Even the Beat writer Jack Kerouac, symbol of life on the road, felt drawn to mountains like Washington’s North Cascades, where he abandoned his car for a summer to contemplate life’s deeper meanings.1 In Olympic National Park, the Hurricane Ridge Road, completed in 1958, characterized the Park Service’s road improvement and construction program during Mission 66, which Director Conrad Wirth justified as a form of wilderness preservation. Although this road responded to a growing interest in preserving parks as wilderness undefiled by automobiles, it still promoted the ideal of wilderness as scenery viewed from a car. And thus in the 1950sand1960s,preservationistsgreetedtheParkService’smanagementplans with skepticism. Even though road developments like the one at Olympic showed some restraint, they doubted that this and other road proposals would truly protect the wilderness values of national parks. Instead, wilderness advocates believed, these projects would subject the country through which they passed to more scarring and motorists. In their disenchantment with Park Service policies, preservationists began to interpret the meaning of parks within the context of the postwar wilderness movement. More Americans, motivated by rapid changes in society and the economy, expressed concern over the loss of wild places to resource production. They campaigned to preserve nature as an amenity 105 A Road Runs Through It of life rather than as a commodity for the marketplace. Their new attitude was particularly important for national parks; it inspired preservationists to protect Dinosaur National Monument’s Echo Park, for example, from being dammed in the mid-1950s. The victory not only launched a national crusade against the damming of the West’s rivers and reinvigorated the 106 Stehekin Landing S tehekin V a l l e y Road Mount Baker Ski Area map 6. Road system of North Cascades National Park Service Complex wilderness movement, but it also suggested that national parks were wilderness sanctuaries. Parks deserved the highest form of protection.2 Unlike their predecessors, wilderness advocates in the 1960s had more legal and political power at their disposal, and they used it to pressure the Park Service to manage parks as unimpaired reserves, free of roads and cars. Especially significant was the Wilderness Act of 1964. This far-reaching and complex preservation measure established congressionally designated wilderness areas on federal land, including national parks, ensuring their permanent protection as part of a national wilderness system. More importantly , the act legally defined wilderness as a primitive landscape, uninhabited ,undeveloped,androadless.Machineswerenotallowed.Preservationists urged the Park Service to implement, if not in reality then at least philosophically , the intent of the act. They saw the agency’s response to the postwar travel boom, with the flood of motorists it brought to the parks, as flawed. Despite creating parks as “day-use areas,” the Mission 66 program seemed intent on expanding visitor facilities. Other incentives prompted reconsideration of the relationship between autos and nature in national parks. One was the nation’s waning love aªair with the automobile. Another was a rising ecological awareness. Together, they prompted many to see cars less as vehicles of freedom and a means to retreat to nature’s wonders and more as sources of pollution, urban sprawl, and congestion. Beginning in the 1960s, with a broader understanding that population growth, resource depletion, and polluted water and air would directly aªect human welfare, wilderness advocates were part of conservation ’s evolution into environmentalism. People began to consider that no quick technological fix would solve the world’s mounting environmental crisis; modern technology could not replace the vast quantities of nonrenewable resources it consumed. There were limits to natural abundance.3 From this perspective, the automobile, that potent symbol of twentiethcentury technology, was a negative agent of change that would reduce rather than advance one’s quality of life. Even national parks, where historically automobiles had carved out a diªerent relationship for people and nature, were not immune from this change in attitude. According to some critics, carsweretransformingthenaturalparadiseof parkslikeYosemiteintourban areaswiththeirnegativeassociationsof crime,noise,foulair,andovercrowding . The accord between machines and wild places, it seems, had dissolved. Although these changing...