from Lake Helen down, the country was thoroughly looked over, and it was decided to abandon all the old trails and build the new trail up the river. Several switchbacks had to be used to get up on the first bench, and then for half a mile a very good piece of trail was built, about half of which is on a seven per cent grade, and the rest is 15 per cent. From here for about one-quarter mile around the shore of a lake it is level. From the upper end of this lake to the crossing below Lake Helen some short pitches of 15 per cent and several switchbacks were used, but a majority of this trail will not exceed 10 per cent. Just below Lake Helen it will be necessary to cross a patch of snow, which will always be there. From Lake Helen to the top of the Pass, a distance of 14 miles, a good trail was built, and an effort was made to avoid all soft spots and build the trail away from places where the snow lies longest. One-quarter mile is 15 per cent, the rest averages less than 10 per cent. At the top of the pass we stopped; no work was done on the west side. Barrier Rock proved to be a very difficult piece of work. The rock laid in floors, tapering to a feather edge on the overhanging side, and when a tread was blasted out these floors would slide off. This was repeated several times before a tread was obtained that would hold, and a short pitch exceeding 20 per cent had to be used. During the month of August thunderstorms were numerous, and during the latter part of September the nights were very cold. The crew were dissatisfied and trouble was experienced in getting them to stay with the work. Three months of this class of work is too long for an average crew to stay, and as no men could be hired to continue the work the crew had to be disbanded. JOHN M. HUGHES, Foreman Muir Trail BEQUEST TO THE LE CONTE MEMORIAL LODGE Mr. James B. Wade, who died in 1916, bequeathed the sum of twentyfive dollars to the Joseph Le Conte Memorial in Yosemite Valley, to be used in the maintenance of the lodge. FOLLOWING JOHN MUIR'S CASSIAR TRAIL After leaving Mount Robson last summer, Miss Nettleton and I returned to Prince Rupert and continued up the Inside Passage to Skaguay. We were unfortunate in having cloudy weather, and except for one glorious day at the Taku Inlet, the high mountains remained persistently hidden. Even under such conditions, however, each day brought a succession of beautiful pictures that made the trip one long to be remembered. At Skaguay we took the White Pass Railway as far as Lake Bennett. We had planned, earlier in our trip, to return afoot over the old trail of '98, but were so discouraged by reports that bridges were out and the trail obliterated, that we gave up the idea. Much to our disgust, we found too late that this was only the usual wet-blanketing that every traveler suffers who attempts to set foot off the beaten track. From the car window we could follow the trail almost every step of the way, and though slides had occurred and a bridge was gone, in August, at least, neither stream crossing nor trail presented any real difficulty to any one accustomed to trail travel. At Skaguay I parted with my traveling companions and took an American boat down to Wrangell. Five years ago, when Mr. Muir began work on "Travels in Alaska," my aspirations were turned toward the Stikine River, and I determined to take the first opportunity to follow his old trail. Opportunity came this year when I met Mrs. Winifred Hyland, trader, fox-farmer, outfitter for big-game hunters, and adviser and court of appeal to at least a hundred Indians. On her invitation I promptly abandoned family and friends and started trustfully alone on the hundred-and-fifty-mile journey up the wild and lonely Stikine. A boat runs up once a week during the scant five months of the year when the river is open. Mine was a tunnel boat about forty feet long, with a powerful gasoline engine which forced her slowly but surely up against the powerful current. It took us from Tuesday morning at ten until Thursday morning at nine to go up, though we made the return journey in ten hours. Travel is not heavy on the Stikine now. Forty years ago, Mr. Muir says, nearly two thousand miners went up the river in a single summer. This year I doubt whether there were more than fifty people in all. Despite the war, eleven big-game hunters went; one family from Oregon settled up river; one mine was in operation with six men from "outside"; two or three soldiers came back from the war; a new schoolmaster and a new doctor arrived. I myself represented the whole bulk of tourist travel-considerably less than a hundred and fifty pounds I hasten to say. The river trip is marvelously beautiful. Mountains, all of them snowy and glacier-hung, tower from four to eight thousand feet above the river. The shores are densely forested, for the most part with hemlock and tideland spruce. The most remarkable of the glaciers, the Great Glacier, breaks off at the river brink in a colossal wall three miles in width. Telegraph Creek, trading post and center of population for a district of some fifty thousand square miles, I made my headquarters. The whole district at present numbers only about thirty whites-it has sent twentynine men to the front. During the first part of my stay here I made day trips in all directions and two short camping trips-one across the Stikine, the other thirty-five miles downstream, near the Jackson cabin. Captain Conover, a neighbor on the Clearwater, seven miles away, who has lived on the river for twenty years, offered himself as guide, and with him I went canoeing through rapids, mountain climbing, and biggame hunting with a kodak. We saw six bears and eleven goats, but unfortunately secured no pictures. During my last three weeks in the country, with a half-breed girl as companion, I traveled with three Indians and a Hudson's Bay Company packtrain over the old miner's trail to Dease Lake, seventy-five miles northeastward from Telegraph. We crossed the Arctic-Pacific Divide into Mackenzie River headwaters, journeyed by scow thirty miles down the lake, and then afoot took a "knapsack" trip some twenty-five miles further, packing our outfits on the backs of three dogs. To carry a pack upon one's own back would be to lose caste utterly in the eyes of the Indians. We visited the one mine now in operation on Thibert Creek and continued on with our novel packtrain to the base of Defot Mountain. I had planned to climb it for the view to northward of which Mr. Muir speaks, but a snowstorm prevented and we had to hasten back to Dease Lake the next day to meet the last outgoing packtrain of the season. I was the first white woman, so they told me at the mine, who had ever traveled in that region "for fun." MARION RANDALL PARSONS ECONOMIC DESTINY OF THE NATIONAL PARKS [Passage from an address by J. Horace McFarland delivered at the National Park Conference, Washington, D. C., January, 1917] I insist the time must soon come when instead of having national parks created by accident or through the devotion of some interested man, we must have a system of national parks all over the land in order to accomplish the upbuilding of patriotism. . . . Congress now has spent a gigantic sum on the national parks-nearly a quarter of a cent per person a year. If it would spend a half cent per year per person for parks, I think Mr. Mather would think the millennium had arrived. And if I cent per person per year was provided, he would be unable to comprehend all that could be done for our national parks. Yet Philadelphia spends $1.40 per person for park purposes; Milwaukee, 93 cents; Pittsburgh, 53 cents. Why should not the United States spend a whole penny for each of us annually in our national parks? Let me put it in another way. The United States spends the gigantic sum of $700 a day on its vast areas of marvelous natural wonders; Philadelphia $655 on her little bit of most inadequate park area; Milwaukee gets away with $1,076; and even smoky Pittsburgh spends $862 per day on her parks, which Pittsburgh knows is better than extending cemeteries and providing more policemen. We need extension of the sort of national park promotion we have recently had. Indeed the kind of management that has been going on the last eighteen months in the National Parks Service is so near business management that I do not see how it can have happened in Washington. Here are Mr. Mather and Mr. Yard, business men, actually managing national parks as if they were a business enterprise. It is extraordinary; but I wish it might be extended, and that we might have a whole lot more of it, and that they might be given money, much real money to do the job, such as Mr. Schwab would give them if they were working for the Bethlehem Steel Corporation. I am not throwing mud at Congress, because Congress does the best it knows how, and we who elect its members are the responsible persons. When we get around to having a budget in the United States and working with it like any business man, then we will get plenty of money for parks; but I do not want to wait so long. This appropriation of I cent apiece for every inhabitant of the nation ought to come right away, this session; and it should be an automatic, continuing, annual appropriation of I cent apiece. That would mean the automatic increase of the support in proportion to the population. . . . "The economic destiny of national parks" is to promote patriotism; but there is another aspect to it. If we want to be a little bit calculating -and Americans are sometimes said to be a little sordid-then, the economic destiny of the national parks is to bring a tremendous amount of money into the United States from abroad. I wonder if you realize that the one great natural wonder of the United States which is most attractive, and which is not yet safe until it becomes a big national park -Niagara Falls-is estimated to produce $30,000,000 a year of travel revenue outside of any power use that has been taken from it. Niagara Falls is easily accessible and is visited by 1,500,000 people each year. There is one truly tremendous travel revenue possibility for the United States-a possibility beside which the doings of Switzerland in attracting visitors might sink into insignificance. Indeed, Switzerland could be lost in Rocky Mountain Park. If we are willing to provide the conditions and facilities, the handling of the national parks becomes a purely economic proposition; an investment, not an expense. But the greatest of all park products, Mr. Chairman and ladies and gentlemen, is the product of civilization, the product of patriotism, the product of real preparedness, the product of manhood and womanhood, unobtainable anywhere else than in the broad, open areas which alone the nation can provide. There, ladies and gentlemen, is a product which we must promote and which we must have, and everything we can do and everything we can spend which will increase the facilities of the United States for intensifying our all too feeble national spirit for increasing the fervor and vigor of our spirit of devotion to the countryevery such thing we can do is thoroughly worth while. That is then, ladies and gentlemen, the "economic destiny of the national parks" of the United States. HON. J. ARTHUR ELSTON, House of Representatives, Washington, D. C. May 8, 1917. Dear Sir: At a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Sierra Club held in San Francisco on May 5, 1917, the secretary was requested to state to you its position in regard to certain proposed changes in the boundaries of and administration of the Yosemite National Park. It has been brought to the attention of the board that a petition has been presented to the park authorities which, if adopted by Congress, would cut out of the park a large section, about 100 square miles, throwing the same into the forest reserve. This includes the region in the vicinity of Moraine Meadows and Buck Camp, and in fact includes the entire upper basin of the South Fork of the Merced River, part of the basins of the Illilouette River and main Merced. The object of this petition is to open the area to grazing. The Board of Directors of the Sierra Club is unalterably opposed to any changes in the present boundary of the park, and considers the present proposed change particularly objectionable, as it eliminates some of the finest alpine regions, and also because the suggested boundaries follow section lines only, and not natural barriers which could be properly patrolled. It has also come to the attention of the Board of Directors that a movement is on foot this year to have the United States Government throw open the Yosemite National Park to stockmen for the grazing of sheep and cattle, due to the possible shortage of foods consequent upon war conditions, and particularly because of the shortage of feed in California this year. The directors feel that no sentiment should stand in the way of so vital a matter as the food supply in the face of so mamentous a situation as now confronts the people of this country, and would not oppose such a movement, disastrous as it might be to our great park, if it were absolutely necessary. But they are not convinced that it is absolutely necessary this year. The whole forest reserve is now open to grazing, and the small region within the boundaries of this national park, which has been carefully preserved for the past twentyfive years, could not appreciably affect the situation. There are certain stock-grazing interests which for years have been trying to get these privileges within our national park, and are using the present crisis as a leverage to accomplish their purpose. The directors beg of you to look into these matters with great care, for once the precedents are established it will be difficult to change them. Very truly yours, WILLIAM E. COLBY THE ASSOCIATED MOUNTAINEERING CLUBS of NORTH AMERICA In May, 1916, nine clubs and societies with common aims associated themselves in a bureau, with headquarters in New York. The membership now numbers ninety-two, comprising about 16,000 individual members, as follows: American Alpine Club, Philadelphia and New York. American Museum of Natural History, New York. |