Pat Buller Photography

The American Alps Legacy Project: Whose Legacy?

 

 As a third generation Marblemount resident, I believe the American Alps Legacy Project’s proposal to expand North Cascades National Park is a bad idea. The North Cascades Study Report of 1965 was, in large part, the basis for the park’s creation. This document makes it clear that “large numbers” of people were to have access to the park through infrastructure well beyond simple trails and campgrounds. This didn’t happen. Much of the public cannot access most of the park. Park expansion would decrease access to public land and alienate user groups such as hunters, mushroom pickers and dog owners. This won’t increase recreational opportunities or boost tourism. It won’t save endangered species.

Original park advocates promised numerous jobs. Where are those jobs? Eastern Skagit County has remained an economically depressed backwater through the last two economic booms.

Regarding the purported benefits of the 50-mile economic impact zone for outdoor recreation, I buy most of my expensive backpacking gear from places like REI in Bellingham. However, living in Marblemount, I cannot afford to drive 70 miles to Bellingham to work for REI’s wages. 

In 74 hours, I grossed $8,245 on a small non clearcut logging job, most of which stayed locally. Processing and reselling these logs generated even more local revenue. That same year, I put 1220 hours into my tourism-based photography “business” and lost $6,400, most of which didn’t stay local.

Park expansion will cost money while decreasing local, state and federal revenues. The park has been underfunded since its inception. AALP’s proposed park will be nearly twice the current size. Who will pay for this?

Many promises, explicit and implicit, were made when the park was created. Many of these were broken. Park expansion would break the remaining promises relating to traditional land use. These promises should be honored.

 

My name is Pat Buller and I do not believe that expansion of North Cascades National Park will serve the best interests of the general public, either in the communities surrounding the park or the public at large throughout the United States or the world. And it is far from keeping with the original “vision” of North Cascades National Park. I will explain why I believe this in the narrative that follows.

If the reader will indulge me, I would like to present a rather long biography of myself. I do not usually like to talk much about myself but I feel that I am in a rather unique position and I feel that I have had a good bit of experience in many aspects involved in this debate. I hope the reader will bear with me if parts of this letter seem to be repetitive, jump around, or wander a bit. I have tried to be as thorough as possible and have I found it rather difficult to distill my history and experience into a concise and perfectly tidy narrative.

My dad’s family came to the Marblemount area in the North Cascades in 1888. They sailed around Cape Horn to Seattle, Washington Territory in 1887 when my Grandfather was about 14. Rumor has it that they sailed around the Horn because riding a train was not enough of an adventure for my great-grandmother. They brought with them a black walnut seedling that had grown on my great-great grandmother’s grave in Pennsylvania. This tree still stands in Marblemount near Corkindale Creek. There is a story that my great-grandmother gave the town of Marblemount its present name though there is also another story about how Marblemount was named.

My paternal grandfather was, among other things, a blacksmith, a horse and mule packer and a lumberman. My paternal grandmother was, among other things, a schoolteacher. My dad worked for the U.S. Forest Service in the Mount Baker National Forest and in several shake mills before going to work for Seattle City Light and working there until retirement in 1996. My mom worked for the Mount Baker National Forest and then North Cascades National Park after it was established in 1968 until retirement in 1999 after 42 years of service.

I have lived all but 6 years of my life less than a mile from where my dad was born on Diobsud Creek (pronounced Die-owe-b-sud by native speakers, Die-owe-b-see by the earliest white people who lived here and in a variety of different ways by even later people of white and various other hues). I went to school at Concrete, the local high school, graduating in 1983. The 6 years of my life that I did not live in Marblemount were spent in the U.S. Navy in Hawaii and Guam and other points overseas. Between hitches in the Navy, I worked as a welder for a short time before going to work as a logger and I worked in logging after getting out of the Navy for good in early 1992.

In late 1994, due in large part to the lack of available federal timber as the result of the Clinton Forest Plan, the company I worked for went out of the logging business. I had the opportunity to go to college to get a two year associate degree under a plan called TRB (Timber Retraining Benefits) which was funded by the State of Washington and the federal government. This program was an attempt to retrain displaced timber workers.  I chose a degree called ‘Environmental Conservation Technology’ which was designed to train technicians for work in the field of environmental science and consulting. I chose this degree because I have always liked working outside and being active. I also had the opportunity to take some photography classes, as I had hoped to begin a photography business featuring photographs from my life’s goal of walking into every high lake in the Skagit River watershed within about a 40-mile radius of my home.

After earning my degree in the spring of 1997, I found seasonal work with North Cascades National Park doing aquatic surveys of fish, amphibians and macroinvertebrates (bugs) and, occasionally, plant surveys in the park and nearby Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. The work was great but there were no benefits, and the pay was only a little more than half what I had made logging. The working seasons were short too, so I made ends meet during the six or so months I was laid off by going back to work logging.

After working four years as a seasonal employee, I got a “term” job with the park with benefits and a longer work season, though term employees were often still laid off for part of the year. For a number of years, I was lucky enough that there was a lot of soft money in the budget to keep me working year round. Several years ago, I went to work for the maintenance division at North Cascades National Park. Recently, I quit the park to take a job with more security.

At present, my high lake project has expanded since I started college in 1995 to include every mapped area of standing water, not just lakes but also ponds and puddles within the entire Skagit River Watershed. The purpose of this is twofold: first, to create photographic records and art of these places, basically a photographic study of the Skagit Watershed and second, to take field notes of the plants and animals (mostly amphibians) that are encountered in these places. At the time of this writing, I have walked into every mapped high lake, pond and puddle in the Skagit Watershed within the current boundaries of North Cascades National Park.

I have also walked into all but a handful of these high elevation water bodies within the Baker and Cascade River Watersheds, as well as many in the Sauk, Whitechuck and Suiattle River Watersheds. These rivers all drain to the Skagit and thus are part of its watershed. To put this in a nutshell, I have been able to identify about 800 lakes, ponds and puddles in the Skagit Watershed and have been to at least 400 of these places, many of them multiple times. So, I am about half done with my high lake project. Along the way, I have stumbled across a very interesting distribution pattern of at least one amphibian species and a few rare plants.

I do not claim to know everything there is to know about the North Cascades, but, given my background and experiences, I would submit that I know as much about this place as anyone else and probably a lot more than anyone who does not live here. I am sure that some longtime residents of this area would dispute some of the things that I will say, although I am also sure many would agree with much of what I will say. However that may be, I wish to make it clear that I speak only for myself and the views expressed herein. I will also focus mainly on the effects that park expansion will have on eastern Skagit County and eastern Whatcom County within the Skagit River Watershed, the area I am most familiar with.

In 1965, a study was made in which the U. S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service and Department of the Interior, National Park Service collaborated to determine the best way to manage the lands in the North Cascades, so as to best serve the most people. This collaboration yielded The North Cascades Study Report. I doubt that this report is the be all and end all of planning for the management of public lands in the North Cascades, but the proposals which I cite have a sound basis as far as building and maintaining a local economy.  It is also my understanding that the recommendations from this report were, in large part, the basis for the creation of North Cascades National Park and, as such, were important early “visions” for the park.

In reading The North Cascades Study Report, it becomes readily apparent that the establishment of a national park in the North Cascades had been controversial long before this report was written. There was some debate about inclusion of parts of the Nooksack watershed in North Cascades National Park, but the area in what is now the Pasayten Wilderness, lower Bacon Creek, and much of the area on the Cascade River were never debated. These areas that are now being proposed by the American Alps Legacy Project for inclusion in North Cascades National Park were never supposed to be part of the original park according to the recommendations put forth by The North Cascades Study Report. The Pasayten was supposed to remain as wilderness where motorized travel would be prohibited and, as such, accessible to a rather limited number of people. The remaining areas on Bacon Creek and the Cascade River were supposed to stay as multiple use areas for recreation and timber production to meet the needs of the local economy. There were very good reasons for this which I hope to make apparent.

Though there were some objections by some authors of The North Cascades Study Report to development of some areas in the proposed park, overall, the consensus was that the park was to be developed so as to increase access for all. Consider the vision for a national park in the North Cascades as laid out in The North Cascades Study Report:

“The qualifications of this area as a National Park are not at issue. They are so outstanding that this National Park will take its place with Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon and Mount Rainier as one of the truly superlative units of the National Park System.

A major reason for recommending a National Park is that by means of access and development, the area can be made available to large numbers of people (italics mine) rather than retaining half the area in Wilderness area status, as would be done by the Forest Service.

A third reason that should be of significance locally is to bring to the area the tourism and other economic benefits that inevitably accrue in connection with a major National Park attracting visitors nationally and internationally” (The North Cascades Study Report, pg. 15).

And:

“The recommendation to establish a new North Cascades National Park is conditioned upon development of adequate facilities and means of entry into presently remote areas. This can be done by use of helicopter and aerial trams providing convenient access for large numbers of people to the spectacular and majestic mountain scenery, snow fields, glaciers and other attractions of the North Cascades” (italics mine; The North Cascades Study Report, pg. 15).

Also:   

“A condition of the recommendation is that adequate access be developed by road, trail, water, and air, including aerial tram and helicopter” (italics theirs; The North Cascades Study Report, pg. 90).

Finally:

“The recommendation to establish a North Cascades National Park is conditioned upon development of adequate facilities and means of entry so that the large numbers of park visitors can have access to the spectacular and majestic mountain scenery snowfields, glaciers and other attractions of the North Cascades. Means of access must not be limited by the National Park Service to the traditional roads and trails. This area calls for more imaginative and creative treatment, utilizing helicopters, trams, perhaps funiculars and narrow-gage railroad.” (italics mine; The North Cascades Study Report, pg. 90).

And so was born the idea of a tram up to Ruby Mountain. More on that later.

It is interesting to note that the authors of the report considered U.S. Forest Service Wilderness areas to be much less accessible to the general public than national parks as is evidenced by this quote:

“One of the most significant justifications for a National Park is that under Forest Service management about one-half of the area would be in Wilderness status where now only about 1,000-2,000 people visit per year. Under the National Park proposal, this area would be made available to large numbers of people who either do not wish, are unable, do not have the time, or cannot afford wilderness-type travel.

The volume of wilderness area use in the Study Area indicates that despite the very large area devoted to Wilderness, relatively few people make use of these areas.” (The North Cascades Study Report, pg. 109)

As is stated above, the Forest Service lands were supposed to remain as wilderness, thus accessible to rather limited numbers of people while the park was not to be wilderness and made accessible to many people. At some point after the park was established, it was decided that North Cascades National Park would be a wilderness park so about 98% of the current area of the park is now wilderness and thus accessible to rather limited numbers of people. Obviously, “One of the most significant justifications for a National Park” as stated in The North Cascades Study Report was ignored. Undoubtedly, the number of people who use wilderness areas today is greater than the number cited in the report, probably due at least in part to nearby human populations being much greater at present than at the time the report was written. However, it probably still holds true that many fewer people use wilderness areas for the reasons cited in the report.

Today North Cascades National Park is not very well known, even in its own region. I frequently encounter people who live 50 miles away or less who are not aware that there is a national park here. One of the more frequent comments I get from people who live in the larger towns nearby is: “It must be nice working for the Parks Department.” At which point, I have to explain first the difference between a national park and state, county and city parks and then that this national park is less than 50 miles away. Evidently, North Cascades National Park has not taken “its place with Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon and Mount Rainier” in the regional psyche and I doubt it has gone far in the national or international psyches either.

I believe that this lack of recognition of North Cascades National Park is tied directly to lack or difficulty of access to it by the majority of the population and lack of infrastructure designed for the ease of the casual user and this is tied directly to the recommendations of The North Cascades Study Report being ignored by early park managers and the original sponsors of the establishment of North Cascades National Park.

It seems quite obvious to me that the authors of The North Cascades Study Report were well aware of the need to provide access to this area to as many people as possible and how this ties in with gaining wide recognition of an area and the establishment of a strong tourism industry there. That is why they recommended all of the developments that they did. Many facilities, such as a tram up to Ruby Mountain where everyone, no matter what their physical capabilities might be, could actually see a large part of the park in all its splendor, were supposed to have been built. It is exactly this type of thing that a visitor is looking for when they ask “Where is the park?”, a commonly asked question at North Cascades.  The well-known parks such as Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon and Mount Rainier definitely have dramatic features, but, more importantly, they have the infrastructure that allow visitors, no matter what their capabilities are, to see most or many of these features without having to mount a minor expedition.

To be sure, the infrastructure in those parks is not as imposing or intrusive as the tram or other proposed developments for North Cascades National Park; then again, the situation here is different. It is well known that the North Cascades are very rugged and access is very difficult, therefore you need the types of conveyances utilized in other rugged mountainous regions like the true Alps of Europe, if you want to provide access to any but the most hardy visitors.

A prime example of the importance of infrastructure to serve the tourist and the subsequent recognition gained by allowing access to as many visitors as possible is Yellowstone National Park. Yellowstone was our first national park, created in 1872 and, in many ways, it was the inspiration and foundation of our National Park System.

Yellowstone did not just happen. In other words, it was not simply created and through virtue of being a national park, throngs of people swarmed to it. Despite all its natural wonders, Yellowstone was pretty much in the middle of nowhere and, due to cost and time constraints, it was hard for the average person to travel to it. So an ambitious railroad and tourist lodge building program was undertaken, creating infrastructure by which anyone who could afford the price of a train ticket could go and see the wonders of Yellowstone with relative ease and, if they did not wish to sleep out in the elements, they could buy lodging.

The history that I have read about Yellowstone makes it pretty clear that this tourist infrastructure was crucial for getting people to visit the park in the beginning. Without such infrastructure, Yellowstone may have remained a fairly anonymous place in the middle of nowhere even to this day and the public support for national parks that it helped build might never have happened. Again, this is why the structures and developments were recommended for North Cascades National Park by the authors of The North Cascades Study Report and obviously, the lesson of providing as much access as possible to the general public was forgotten or ignored by the early managers of North Cascades National Park. It has either been forgotten or ignored by the current proponents of park expansion.

The closest things North Cascades National Park has to infrastructure designed for the casual user is the Cascade River Road on which one can drive to the Cascade Pass trailhead and look directly across the valley, point blank at a glacier on Johannesburg Mountain. The Diablo Overlook off State Highway 20 from which one can see a number of the peaks above Diablo Lake is another, and there is a little view up Goodell Creek from near the valley bottom at the North Cascades Visitor Center where one can see a small part of the Picket Range. Finally there is a road up the Stehekin River Valley.

With maybe the exception of the Diablo Overlook, one gets only glimpses here and there of the mountains in the park but no really broad sweeping views of the North Cascades. Ironically, some of the best broad views of the interior of the park that can be accessed with relative ease by casual visitors are from Forest Service roads at its periphery, many of which would be closed with the expansion of the park.

One place where part of North Cascades National Park gets broad, even worldwide, recognition is Mount Shuksan. I have heard claims that Mount Shuksan is the most photographed mountain in the world. I do not know if this is true, but I have seen photos of it just about everywhere, including a gym on a Navy base in Hawaii.

I think it is hardly a coincidence that almost every one of these photos of Mount Shuksan is from Picture Lake and that there is a paved road right to Picture Lake with a ski resort and other facilities nearby. One can regularly see fleets of tour buses and cars at Heather Meadows, the area around Picture Lake, on most summer days, and the resort is a well known and widely used ski destination in the winter. The development in this area, which is on the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, is very similar to what one would expect to find in the true Alps of Europe and dates back to the 1920s and a huge marketing campaign to get a tourist lodge established. Again, this or one of the subtler but still significant developments found in the more famous national parks of our nation, is what people are looking for when they ask, “Where is the park?”

Consider the true Alps of Europe where there are a number of facilities to serve visitors. I remember going on a hike with a friend from Japan. She assured me that she knew all about hiking, having traveled for several weeks in the Alps. She was very disappointed when we reached our destination and realized that there was no chalet where she could get a drink and get away from the bugs. These are the American Alps, right?

Another example that I recently learned about is Jungfraujoch, Switzerland, where visitors can ride a lift from the highest train station in Europe to the Sphinx Observatory on top of what looks like a knife-edged peak with incredible views of the Alps and their glaciers. There are also several other attractions here as well as a restaurant. This spot draws 700,000 visitors a year and small wonder as nearly anyone on the planet, no matter what their physical capabilities are, can access it, provided they have sufficient funds.

The ability of Jungfraujoch to draw 700,000 visitors yearly is probably due in large part to its being in Europe and the unique history and situation there, namely a large number of towns and villages at high elevation that have been in existence for over a thousand years. These numbers of visitors could probably not be achieved in the North Cascades. The North Cascades are not the Alps.

If we are talking about drawing enough people here in order to have a viable tourist industry, or to gain wide recognition for North Cascades National Park, we are talking about the general public, or more casual users, the largest potential visitor group. And the North Cascades has to compete with other areas regionally, nationally and worldwide that have lots of infrastructure to serve the casual user. In reality, if we are talking about the general public, the North Cascades has to compete for tourist dollars regionally with the more famous national parks, as well as theme parks like Wild Waves and Great Wolf Lodge, not to mention similar competition nationally (Disneyland and Yellowstone) and internationally (the true Alps).

Given my previous statements, it might surprise the reader to know that I am not a fan of a tram up Ruby Mountain or most of the developments proposed in The North Cascades Study Report. For my tastes, they would be rather intrusive. However, I could have certainly lived with their presence, especially if they allowed the general public to view and enjoy public lands and this in turn increased tourism activity. At this point in time, these arguments are moot anyway. With the economic woes of this country today, I think such investments in infrastructure solely for the purpose of tourism are out of reach for the foreseeable future. I am merely pointing out that, realistically, if you want to draw attention to an area and have a serious tourist industry, lots of infrastructure to serve the general public or casual user, along with a gigantic marketing budget, is needed. Given that, if you want to draw people here you need to maintain or increase access, not decrease it.

At present, there is infrastructure that allows a large percentage of the general public, basically anyone who can drive, access to public lands and get some of the best sweeping views to be had of the sea of mountains that is the interior of North Cascades National Park. This infrastructure is made up of logging roads on the adjoining Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest lands, many of which would be closed under the current park expansion proposals in which National Forest land would become part of the expanded North Cascades National Park.

Closing these roads would have the effect of making it so that it would require hours or even most of a day of walking to access areas where presently it requires a short drive with little or no effort to get some great views of the park. Even if these roads were converted to trails, many could never be made “family friendly,” and even “family friendly” trails would still be less accessible than the present drivable area. Giving these lands the designation of National Park is not going to draw more people here, because a simple name change will not change the fact that it will take more time, effort and outdoor skills to access the area.

Also, we are not talking about preventing roads from being built in these areas. We are talking about roads that already exist; most, if not all, of which were built with public funds. As long as they are not causing massive amounts of damage, why destroy them? In fact, if roads are simply closed and abandoned, the detrimental effects, such as large landslides triggered by plugged culverts, can be greater than leaving a road open and maintaining it. As road closure and abandonment is the much cheaper alternative, at least in the short term, this is a likely scenario. There are several old logging roads within the current boundaries of North Cascades National Park where this scenario has played out.

What this touches on, and what is just as important or maybe more important in the big picture than building a local tourist industry, is that the lands proposed for inclusion into North Cascades National Park are indeed public lands. Restricting access by including these lands in the park and closing roads will, for all intents and purposes, deny the majority of the public access to public lands. This goes to the very heart of the reason for even having public lands at all. As I understand it, public lands are for everyone to use, not just a few people who find themselves, often by chance, wealthy enough to afford the time or physically strong enough to access public land. Since a greater part of our population will lose access to a large part of these lands, who does the American Alps Legacy Project want to “protect” them for?

Under the proposals of the American Alps Legacy Project, North Cascades National Park would roughly double in size, but access would actually be reduced from current levels in much of the newly acquired park lands. And all of the newly acquired park lands, whether they currently have good access or not, will be placed in the one of the most restrictive use categories possible, as defined by the federal government. Inclusion within national park boundaries will put these lands off limits for people who wish to bring their dog with them, hunters and mushroom pickers, since mushroom harvest is banned in North Cascades National Park. From a tourism angle, this will even further reduce the user groups who might be interested in visiting the area and lead to less diverse, less inclusive user groups. Certainly some of the dog owners may choose to leave their dogs at home, but the overwhelming majority of hunters and mushroom pickers will just go somewhere else.

One of the concerns put forth by the sponsors of the American Alps Legacy Project is the decrease in recreational opportunities for a growing population in the greater Puget Sound area. How could a decrease in access to public lands and a ban on the activities of at least three recreational user groups be considered an increase in recreational opportunities? If they are referring to a decrease in more solitary recreational experiences away from crowds, I would recommend doing some off-trail travel. In over two decades of off-trail travel in both North Cascades National Park and the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, I have run into maybe a dozen other people.

Park expansion and the resultant highly restrictive use category placed on the lands where the park expands will have exactly that effect. It will restrict the number of people who will want to come here by presenting the narrowest possible range of activities people can partake of in the North Cascades to the fewest possible user groups, thereby greatly reducing the number of people who will be able to enjoy it. Road closures would mean that only those who are fit enough and are willing to tolerate a lot of hard work and physical discomfort would be able to use these areas. Even with “family friendly” trails, many of these areas will be out of reach of many older people, people with young children and people who literally cannot walk these trails. From the perspective of anyone trying to draw people here as a basis for a tourist industry this is problematic as it will naturally reduce the number of people who are going to want to come here.

Restricting access will serve to limit the number of what I would refer to as casual or novice visitors, that is people who are physically or mentally not capable or are not willing, or do not have the experience to do more extreme types of activities such as hiking and climbing that require quite a bit of in depth knowledge, skills and the investment in time, which sometimes involves days, needed to access or even attempt to access backcountry areas in the North Cascades. These casual or novice type people are probably the majority of people on the planet and most casual or novice type visitors will be much less likely to visit, since they will not have much to do, and they will not be able to see much beyond a few glimpses of the mountains here and there from within the park.

The unwillingness of many people to tolerate the difficulties and discomfort required to access backcountry or even front country areas should not be underestimated. I know a lot of adults who are certainly capable of doing some pretty hard hikes but will not bother, if the hike is actually hard or they have to camp outside. These people will drive up to an area to look at the view but they would never walk there for the same purpose. This type of reason for putting up with the discomforts of insect bites, sore muscles and cold and wet or hot and dry weather can be even harder to sell to kids who have plenty of other distractions these days.

A few years ago I took a small cousin of mine out fishing. He was 8 or 9 years old and had almost no experience with the outdoors or hiking, so I tried to go as slowly as I could. Still, I heard a constant litany of “this trail is too steep” and “you walk too fast”, at which point I slowed even further. “My legs hurt.” “I’m tired.”  I can remember almost these exact words coming from my mouth some 30-odd years earlier, when my dad took me up this very same trail.

We finally made it down to the creek collecting a few bumps and bruises and not a few thorns. I thought I was going to have a mini-mutiny on my hands. Then we started fishing. Once we started catching fish, the kid was hooked almost immediately. All of the previous discomforts were forgotten in the anticipation of the bite, a fish on the line and the scramble for one flopping on the bank.

I understand that, for a number of years afterward, he always looked forward to the summer and coming out to Washington to go fishing. If several more miles of walking along a closed road had been added to our little journey, I think the trip would have ended in a meltdown long before we even got near water. And there is no way I could have sold such a trip to him, if the purpose was just to look at something whether it was mountains or flowers or trees.

I could have probably sold such a sightseeing trip, if it was rather easy to do, in other words, we could drive to look at the mountains. However, I think even such an easy trip for passive use would have been much less appealing than a chance to actually interact with the land as we did by fishing. Unfortunately, fishing season is not open year round. In the last several years, I have become aware of a big push to get people, especially children, outdoors, so they can learn and care about the natural world. In light of this, making a large block of land more difficult to access seems extremely short sighted to me.

Another way restriction of access will impact visitor use is time.  In this day and age, it seems that time is a premium for a lot of people, myself included. So, if you close roads, you increase the amount of time needed to access an area. If a given person has to spend a lot more time to get to a spot, they are probably not going to bother with it.

I recall meeting a guy in the backcountry who alternated in his conversation with me between bashing logging and complaining about lack of access. The area he was griping about not having enough access has a logging road that was closed upon the creation of North Cascades National Park in 1968. Our conversation occurred in an area accessed from a trailhead at the end of a logging road. Because there were ten or more miles of drivable road to the trailhead, this guy was able to drive up from Seattle, do his climb and get back to Seattle all in one day. If the road had not been drivable, his trip would have required a minimum of two days to do. One wonders if he would have even bothered to go up there on the day that I met him if that road had not been open. There are certainly a lot of areas closer to Seattle than the North Cascades, and if you only have time for a day trip, your options are already limited.

An important point here is that preventing people access to a given area will lead to increasingly fewer people who visit, know and care about that given place. It will become less relevant to them. This is especially worrisome given the myriad electronic distractions and alternatives of today. Over time this could lead to smaller and smaller groups of people who still care about the place. Imagine a play field where only a few people are allowed to play. How many people outside the small group who can use the play field will actually care about its welfare? Do you think this small group would be able to prevent the destruction of the play field by a much larger majority, especially if, since it cannot use the play field, that majority perceives the field’s destruction to be for its benefit?

Restricting use and access will also concentrate the types of activities not possible in the park to areas on the periphery of the park. Thus, rather than an even, dispersed pattern of use, there would be areas with relatively little use juxtaposed with areas with heavy use. In these heavily used areas, the user experience in many cases would be diminished by overcrowding. This type of overly heavy use has created a situation where one now has to get a permit, or what amounts to a reservation in order to visit some places within the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area.

An area closer to the proposed park expansion that would possibly be heavily impacted by a redirection of a lot of visitor traffic is Sauk Mountain in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. Sauk Mountain is very popular, because it is relatively easy access for people with a wide range of hiking abilities, it has sweeping views of the Cascades (more evidence that sweeping views are important to a place’s popularity), including the Skagit and Sauk Rivers, and you can bring your dog. This is certainly a nice hike, but on a busy summer day one will encounter dozens or even scores of people, many of whom bring their dogs.  For some people I know, this is just fine. I personally have nothing against people bringing their dogs along but it is not my cup of tea. The experience becomes more like an American Kennel Club outing than an outdoor experience. I can only imagine how much more crowded it would become, if visitor use were further increased because these activities were banned on adjacent lands.

The American Alps Legacy Project also claims the local tourism economy will be boosted by the expansion of North Cascades National Park and the development of several front country campgrounds in the area. This is despite the fact that such campgrounds would be in direct competition with businesses in the area that already provide these types of facilities. Somehow this is supposed to increase tourist visitation and thus create more revenue for the local economy.

Exactly how is this supposed to work? Certainly the title “National Park” will draw the attention of people who are interested in national parks. But, as we already have a national park here, this title already exists, and I seriously doubt that expansion of the present park will somehow make its title more appealing. And how will a few front country campgrounds in valley bottoms, with rough facilities, where people would be exposed to, wind, rain, sleet, snow, hot sun and bugs and where there may be plenty of trees to look at but only glimpses of the mountains, even compare with the local, national and international competition previously described?

Assuming there is sufficient infrastructure for serving the general public, the tourism business is dependent on weather and time of year. Once the passes on Highway 20 close, many fewer people come to the Upper Skagit. Even fewer come if the weather is bad. In a lot of circumstances, it is not possible or advisable to come here due to storms. As it stands, many campgrounds in this area are closed by the end of October, because so few people use them, mostly due to the end of vacations and the harsh elements that are the typical autumn and winter weather here.

Regardless of what has just been pointed out about infrastructure, name recognition and user group discouragement, let’s pretend that hordes of people were to come to use the trails, closed roads and campgrounds, regardless of season and weather. How are you going to get these people to buy something locally so that the people here in the area immediately next to the park can make some money? The scenery is free, so I do not know how you convert that into hard cash.

Other than some incidental small items, most hikers and campers are going to make their major gear and food purchases at their point of origin. This makes complete sense. You pack your stuff at home, to ensure that you will have what you need for your trip. Most folks do not want to gamble on being able to find what they need at the last minute in a small town where the selection, if it exists at all, will be low and the prices relatively high. Even where local merchants have competitive prices, and this happens more often than you might think, how is someone coming from somewhere else going to know what the prices are? or if what they want is carried in local stores until they come and look?, at which point, it is too late.

Also consider this: I live in Marblemount and I buy most of my expensive backpacking gear from REI in Bellingham and similar outdoor stores in the more populated areas. This is because the local merchants do not do enough of this type of business to stock a wide selection of gear. So the economic impact zone for outdoor recreation activities extends even farther than the purported 50 miles (the Bellingham REI is about 70 miles from where I live). But, the thing is, these activities do not benefit local merchants who live closest to the park nearly as much as they do businesses located much farther away where the population is such that there are economies of scale. These economies of scale affect both the available selection of items themselves and shipping and price of the items. The same can also be said of unprepared i.e. non-restaurant food. A lot of people stock up long before they ever even hit the lower Skagit Valley, much less the upper valley.  Backpackers and front country campers are probably also not going to make much use of hotels and motels.

Guided expeditions might appeal to some of the intensive or expert users as well as even some of the casual users, but most outfitters that I am aware of that guide in this area are not based solely here in the North Cascades. To remain viable, their business activity must be spread out over a much wider area.

I do not pretend to know much about restaurants, so the following are mostly observations. Restaurants regularly go out of business, even in the largest cities, so it seems to be a hard business to make it in. I do think the hiking and climbing crowd would tend to frequently patronize restaurants on their way back home but less so on the way to their destination and obviously not while they are in the backcountry. I think frontcountry campers would be much less inclined to make such a stop. In Marblemount, I believe there are currently five restaurants, many of which close down after deer season in October. Most of the ones that remain open are only able to do so on reduced hours. There are no restaurants in Rockport. When I was a kid, before there was such an intense effort to get the tourist dollar, I believe that there were two restaurants in Marblemount and two in Rockport that were able to keep pretty regular hours year round. There were also a lot more people here who lived and worked locally and made good money.

So how else does one earn a tourist dollar? It seems to me that the margins on the businesses I mentioned previously are pretty slim. It seems most owners of businesses such as stores, hotels, motels and restaurants in the area do okay for themselves and their families, but they are not getting rich by any stretch of the imagination. Some are even able to hire employees, but, with some exceptions, these employees’ wages are at the lower end of the scale, again, due to the slim profit margins involved in these businesses.

While the revenue generated here is important and I see people getting by on these wages all the time, I hardly think this is the engine of a robust economy. I do not wish to demean or diminish in any way this underpaid and underappreciated type of work, but seriously, how many people out there are going to tell their kids to go out, work hard to get good grades to go through college to work on the wait staff at a restaurant? Or in a convenience store? It has always been my understanding and impression that most jobs in the tourist industry are famously low paying, even in the multi-million dollar Colorado ski industry, where there is lots of infrastructure to serve the tourist and attract people.

So when I hear claims of a thousand jobs added to the local economy made by supporters of the American Alps Legacy Project, I have to ask, what kind of jobs? In other words, what exactly are these jobs? Where? What is local? At what wages? Do you, that is, the proponents of park expansion, do this type of work? Would you encourage your children to get into this line of work as a career? Will these jobs support a family? Living in Marblemount, I could not afford to drive to Bellingham to work for REI at the wages they pay. And the people at REI are not stupid. I do not see them committing economic suicide any time soon by opening a store in Marblemount or even Concrete. I have a hunch that not much of the $22 million promised in increased personal income is going to fall anywhere near eastern Skagit County.

When I was laid off from my job with the National Park Service in the winter of 2010 to 2011, I did a little logging job on some forest land that my family owns. I did not do a clear cut. I removed about 50 percent of the trees over part of the logging area, maybe 10 to 20 percent in the remaining area, and replanted the openings that were created.

For a total investment of 74 hours of work, I grossed $8,245, of which $1400 went for rental and operation of logging equipment, $2250 went to pay to haul the logs to the mill, $1100 went to the State of Washington in the form of taxes and insurance, $1400 went to wages, leaving a net profit to us, the land owners, of about 2,000 dollars. The rental and hauling money went directly to local business owners and by local, I mean the Upper Skagit Valley, 11 to 25 miles from where the trees were harvested. The wages and profits stayed in the upper valley as well. And at least part of the forest excise tax benefited the local school. In addition, once the logs had been hauled to the mill in the lower Skagit Valley, more people were paid living wages to saw them into lumber.

That same year I lost $6,400 on my photography business, much of which came directly from my own pocket. And that year should have been a good year. I got a small contract worth $2300 dollars early in the year to create a presentation, actually the only one in the history of my business where I was paid a competitive wage for my time, so I had a $2300 advantage that I did not have any other year. My photography business suffered these losses despite what I would conservatively estimate to be about 1220 hours invested into the endeavor, about 800 hours of which were spent by my mom, at no charge to me or my business, operating a gallery where my photographic prints, notecards and other products featuring my photos were sold. Some of my products were also carried a number of other, mainly local, businesses during this time. The gallery where my mom worked would have closed long ago but for the fact that the people who staffed it, like my mom were retired and so it could get by as long as they made enough revenue for rent. They could not have paid anyone wages.

Significantly, most of the money I lost, or spent if you will, since we are talking about what could only be characterized as a hobby, went to businesses in Bellingham, Seattle and as far away as Texas, well outside of this community and any tax dollars generated went with it. Truthfully, I need to revise my previous statement about wages from my logging job staying in the Upper Skagit since those wages went to me and many of them went to support my photography habit.

In fact, in the 16 years since I have been trying to sell my art I have never made money. My yearly losses have ranged from several thousand dollars to $10,000. Early on, I was only able to sustain these losses by working during my seasonal lay offs from the park in one of the only other well paid jobs available to me locally: logging. I had, at one point during this period, begun making preparations to build a house, but this was abandoned when these funds were shifted into the photography. The thought was that all of the photos I was taking were an investment that would pay off when I finally got my break. I am now sitting on several closets full of plastic laden with images of some of the most remote areas of the North Cascades, all recorded over the last 16 years. For all intents and purposes, these photographs are worthless in that I cannot buy a house or a more reliable piece of farm equipment with them. In hindsight, the whole idea of making such a business work, given the yearly losses, seems overly optimistic or even delusional.

How could this be? Photography and art in general are usually perceived, at least it seems so to me, as being very noble endeavors, especially when promoting the natural world. And logging, as nearly as I can tell, is perceived by many in the general public as being a destructive, reprehensible occupation.

The story behind my photographs: a guy attempting to walk into every high lake that drains to the Skagit River, 3000 square miles of some of the most rugged terrain on earth, all without using advanced navigational tools like GPS, in Converse All Star Chuck Taylor tennis shoes, seems like a marketing no brainer. It should have sold itself. So I thought and so I continue to be told.

Over the years, I have given any number of presentations on my work, for free or for very little compensation. I hoped that, in addition to bringing attention and recognition to this area, the word would get out about me and my work, theoretically helping my business. Over the years, I have had a lot of people tell me how interesting, intriguing, cool etc. they find my project and story. As I have previously stated, this has not translated into any significant source of revenue.

Unfortunately, my mom and I do not have the marketing savvy, time, personality, infrastructure or budget to get the job done to the point where the photography will even pay for itself. This is not helped by the fact that most people, even a lot of people who have lived here for a long time are not familiar with the more remote subjects of my photographs. During most presentations of my work and the places I have been, which are all within the watershed of the Skagit River or nearby areas, roughly a 40-mile radius as the crow flies from Marblemount, I am often greeted with blank stares and question upon question about the location of a particular place. These questions come from local and non-local people alike.

It seems that, in order to sell art at a storefront in the Upper Skagit to someone who is not from this area, the potential customer first has to know where the North Cascades and Marblemount or Concrete (the location of the gallery) are located. Then they have to have the time, funds and reason to come here. This visitor is probably not going to come if the weather is bad and is even less likely to come once the pass closes and Highway 20 becomes a dead end. When you do get them up here, you then have to somehow get them to stop. Then you somehow have to convince them to buy something that represents a place completely unfamiliar to them and that they do not really need in order to conduct their day to day life. Many of the sales we make are to local people who either know the area and want a particular photo or who know me or my mom personally. Unfortunately, there are not enough people living here to base this type of business on local customers alone.

I have some photographs of Gabriel Peak, Elijah Ridge, Red Mountain and Mount Logan under the dramatic light and dark skies of a series of rolling thunderstorms. All of these mountains are partly or completely within the current boundaries of North Cascades National Park. These photographs were gained at no small effort and risk to myself. It took me 8 solid hours of walking, over half of which was off trail, to gain the ridge where I took these photos. I was 36 years old at the time and in very good shape. But at the end of that first day, my legs were wobbly and, at times, I was literally slobbering from exertion. This was the first day of a three day trip that would see me beaten, bruised, scratched, bitten, stung, and soaked by sudden thundershowers. I had to dodge lightning, I nearly stepped off one cliff by accident, and I had to navigate two other cliffs through some very sketchy spots.

These photographs have enjoyed lukewarm to tepid sales. To begin with, people do not really need these photos to meet their daily needs. In other words, they are not going to go hungry, lack shelter, or get wet and cold, if they do not have them. Much has been said about the “spiritual” or “aesthetic” needs of people, but most people will look after their physical needs long before they look to these others.

These photos have to compete locally with images of Mount Shuksan, Mount Baker, Mount Rainier and others that everyone is familiar with. Globally, they have to compete with things like the Matterhorn. I know that when I buy a souvenir or some other item that represents a place that I have visited, I want either something that I myself have seen or that everyone recognizes. Large numbers of people are familiar with Mount Shuksan, Mount Baker, Mount Rainier and the Matterhorn, because it is very easy to get to points where you can see them.

The number of people willing or even able to go to the efforts I just described to get to the spot on that ridge where they could see Gabriel Peak, Elijah Ridge, Red Mountain and Mount Logan is vanishingly small. This holds true for much of the area within the park because access is very limited and difficult in many places. Therefore, not many people are familiar with them and they are less significant to the majority of the public. This makes it hard to sell anything associated with them.

What is really a great irony from the point of view of trying to sell these photos of Gabriel Peak, Elijah Ridge, Red Mountain and Mount Logan is the fact that the ridge where I took them is about four miles south of Ruby Mountain. So, had there been a tram on Ruby Mountain, almost anyone, no matter what their physical abilities were, could have seen what I saw on that trip. In fact, they could have seen a lot more as Ruby Mountain is a lot higher than the ridge I was on.

This would have served to make the area familiar to a much greater number of people and therefore make not only this place but my photos and anything else related to this place relevant to a greater number of people. This would, in turn, have increased the recognition of this area, drawn more people and increased my chance of sales. As it is, the number of people able to access and see this area is very limited and the place remains obscure and abstract to most people, if they think of it at all. My mom, who worked for North Cascades National Park for 29 years has never seen the views to be had from Ruby Mountain except from the air. Again, I am no fan of the idea of a tram up Ruby Mountain and I think the time that this was even a possibility is long past, but realistically, these are the things that build robust tourist industries.

I have used photography in this example and art has its own unique issues involving subjectivity and the value of a given piece of art with which someone selling regular goods such as gear, food, drinks, gas etc. does not have to deal. The issue of trying to use something that is largely unknown like the North Cascades as a draw to an area without also having a massive, prolonged marketing campaign is something shared by anyone who does business here as is the natural disadvantage of having no economies of scale.

Contrast the experience I had trying to sell art to tourists with my logging job. The logs, or more accurately wood fiber, I produced and sold had value because they were a commodity. Other people needed them in order to meet their basic needs. For example, someone somewhere had a hole in their house, or needed some paper to write on, or needed a piece of furniture or needed to attend to hygienic needs. So these people, from every walk of life, across this country and the world, young or old, rich or poor, couch potato or fitness junkie, whether they loved the outdoors or detested them, went out and bought some lumber or a table or some writing paper or toilet paper. And they did not need to know where Concrete or Marblemount or the Upper Skagit or the North Cascades were and it did not matter if Highway 20 was closed or if the weather was good or bad. They only needed to know how to get to the nearest place, a hardware or lumber or grocery store or other business, that sold what they needed. As for me and my family, we did not need to have a website, or a blog or any kind of marketing budget to get into this global market, in fact we regularly get solicitations from people wanting to buy our timber.

This has local as well as global significance. Since most of what I produced on my last logging job was red alder and most of that was exported to China, the Chinese lumber buyer did not need to know where it came from in order to access it, they only needed to know how to contact the American lumber seller. I would hope that even the little bit of wood fiber that I produced in an environmentally responsible way went to help fill a demand that would otherwise have been met with wood fiber from a more ecologically sensitive tropical forest where environmental responsibility was perhaps not even a concern.

When was the last time you heard anyone disparage a carpenter? Who would? They build the things that we all need and use every day from houses to furniture. When was the last time you heard someone disparage a logger? Since this seems to be a perennially popular dogma, I would guess not too long ago. Well, without the logger where would the carpenter get the lumber and other materials to build the things we all need and use every day?

Let’s be straight about it. Logging is hard, dangerous work, consistently ranking at or near the top of the list as the most dangerous occupation in the U.S. For a young person, logging can be kind of fun and exhilarating. Danger is always present and there is a sense of pride that you can do a job that not everyone can do, judging by the people who try it for a week, or even a day and then quit. But there comes a time when it is not much fun anymore. Maybe that is the day in your late twenties when you wake up to go to work and there is a cold, wet, sticky half rain, half snow falling and your fingers are stiff and sore and you have to have your wife, if you have one, help you put your socks on because your back hurts so badly you cannot bend over.

I do not think I know anyone who has logged for any length of time who has not suffered physically from it. I worked with a man who had his back broken twice. I worked with another who had lost his leg and another who had his pelvis crushed. I myself am named after an uncle who was killed in a logging accident and a lot of other people I knew or know of were killed in logging accidents. These people are not doing this for fun.

So you have to ask: Why do they do it? Loggers are not brutes and ogres who delight in destroying forests, either for the sheer pleasure of it or at the behest of gigantic evil timber companies. For the most part, they do it because it is a means to make a living. It is a means to make a living because, for the reasons already explained, what they produce has a value in general society.

As for the mythical big timber companies raping public land for profit alone, most of the logging operations in this area that I ever knew of that depended on federal timber were small to maybe mid sized businesses. These businesses employed from one or two to several dozen or several hundred people at good living wages. I do not ever recall one of these businesses moving their headquarters to another state or offshore in order to get a tax break. I do not recall any of these businesses demanding tax breaks from state or local governments either. For the most part, these small logging outfits supported their communities in many other ways beyond just providing jobs. As nearly as I can tell, these were the types of small businesses that one hears about constantly in the news as being crucial for having a sound economy. Many of these businesses quit operating with the implementation of the Clinton Forest plan and lack of availability of Forest Service timber. And, as I hope I have made abundantly clear, these timber industry businesses have always been vital for generating wealth in rural communities in this region.

The clearcut logging units one sees nowadays are mostly, if not completely on private land or lands owned by the State of Washington and not on U. S. Forest Service land. On Forest Service land in the area of the North Cascades, timber harvest is now a rarity, even that which employs environmentally sound practices such as thinning.

So society’s demands for wood fiber are being met mostly from private timber land and the private timber land that is currently meeting our needs and demands is owned by the so-called big timber companies beholden to shareholders far away. For those who would cast blame on these private timber companies, I would again point out that they do what they do in order to meet the needs and demands created by all of us and these needs and demands are not only being met on their lands here but in a number of other places in the U.S. and internationally. We can see what is going on here locally. Even on the private timber land, which has fewer restrictions than Forest Service land has and more pressure for profits, there are riparian leave strips and other environmentally responsible forest practices. What is happening in the other states or countries where our needs and demands for wood products are being met?

From the most rabid industrialist to the most rabid environmentalist, we all use wood fiber every day. A casual examination of my house, which is framed with wood, reveals a multitude of items also made of wood or wood fiber: tables, chairs, bookshelves, cabinets, writing paper, toilet paper, books, magazines, a piano, a guitar, a fiddle, drywall, trim pieces and cardboard. I would guess most people’s houses and workplaces would contain many similar items. All of these products were made from trees in a forest somewhere. Do you know what forest or forests the products made from wood and wood fiber in your house came from?

If the reader finds it distressing to suddenly realize that their lives are being supported by the pillaging of forests, consider this: wood is a wonder substance that is biodegradable, recyclable and non-toxic, unless it has been treated. Best of all is that it is renewable and can be harvested sustainably with goals of retaining wildlife habitat and aesthetics among other things, while reducing habitat fragmentation. In other words, there are many methods of timber harvest that do not involve clearcuts. If the wood products used in the preceding example came from a forest in the Pacific Northwest, that forest is growing back at this very moment as long as it has not been paved over, taken over by noxious weeds or made into a field.

Consider also all of the items in your house and mine that we use to meet our everyday needs that are not made of wood. Any metal tools, electrical wiring, piping or the components of the computer that I am using to write these words came from a hole in the ground, where toxic residues were often created, where the trees, if there were any to start with, will have a hard time getting re-established if, and when, they get the chance. Anything made from concrete like the foundation of my house also came from a hole in the ground. Plastics or any other petroleum derivatives came from some sort of hole in the ground as well and were transported to a processing site at the risk of a toxic spill. If these petroleum derived items burn, they are toxic. Many of these things can be recycled but, once they are extracted from a site, they cannot be replaced in any realistic time frame.

Ironically, timber harvest is one of the more benign ways by which we can acquire the materials to meet our needs and, at least in the Pacific Northwest, it is even more wildlife friendly than organic farming. Small animals such as mice and voles are very important as the base of many wildlife food chains. Fields are very hostile environments to most smaller animals native to the Pacific Northwest because they are adapted to heavy forests. They need a multitude of structures like tree cover, brush, logs and stumps where they can hide, travel and gather food while avoiding predation. Even in clearcuts where the tree cover has been removed, brush, logs and stumps remain that these small animals use. And, more importantly, timber harvest practices can be modified to be much more wildlife friendly than clearcuts.

The soil ecosystem is also left intact after logging whereas it is highly modified or destroyed under non-forestry type agriculture. Considering this and the fact that you do not have to do a lot of cultivation or fertilization to get a forest to grow back, provided you have a reasonably long forest rotation, forestry is probably the ultimate in organic means to meet many of society’s needs. I am not seeking to disparage farmers here. I have a small farm myself and I regularly eat things grown on farms, so I am making no claims of being some blameless saint. I am well aware that my existence in this world has a price that is paid by other organisms.

The forests in the Pacific Northwest are some of the most resilient in the world, having the capacity to establish or re-establish themselves on mineral soils left after disturbances such as forest fires and landslides and in dry, bare abandoned stream beds, and after logging. In fact, some shade intolerant species like Douglas-fir need disturbances in order to perpetuate themselves.

The resilience of these forests lends itself to sustainable harvest practices. There are numerous examples of sustainable harvest practices in this area, including Bacon Creek, and there are many others from second-growth redwoods in northern California, to the forests of British Columbia and beyond. The possibilities for sustainable timber harvest are vast and can include such goals as wildlife habitat retention and the minimization of habitat fragmentation as well as aesthetics and many others.

There are many references for such practices that go back decades if one cares to look. For the more scientifically minded reader, I would suggest a book titled “Creating a Forestry for the 21^st Century: The Science of Ecosystem Management, Edited by Kathryn Kohm and Jerry Franklin. Consider that, since this book was written in 1997, our technology in the fields of GIS and GPS have grown at what seems like an exponential rate, making it easier to meet the goals of many of the forest practices described in it and makes even better forest practices possible. I would also recommend “The Fragmented Forest” by Larry D. Harris written in 1984 and “Wild Logging” by Bryan Foster written in 2003. This last book has a foreword in it by Jack Ward Thomas, the main architect of the Clinton Forest Plan.

There are many other sources for responsible, sustainable timber harvest practices if one cares to look. The U.S. Forest Service in cooperation with Oregon State University manages the H.J. Andrews experimental forest, where many of these ideas were developed and continue to be developed. The Washington Farm Forestry Association, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources as well as the Natural Resource Conservation Service are among many other organizations and agencies with materials and information created with the lay person in mind. For a region that seems to pride itself on being so tech savvy and on the cutting edge of environmental awareness, proposals such as the American Alps Legacy Project’s seem to me to be rather 19^th Century approaches to 21^st Century problems that have many other possible solutions in the 21^st Century.

It is understandable that someone who has only lived here a few years might think that the forests they see have always been here. But every forest we see today, even the ones with trees that are hundreds of years old, was preceded by another forest that was destroyed by fire, windstorm, disease, flood or some other disturbance. In the case of younger forests, these disturbances also include logging.

All of these present day forests will, at some point, whether it is a year from now or 500 years from now, be destroyed by something and a new forest will in turn take their place. This is a process that has been going on since the first forests were established on mineral soil here after the Continental Ice Sheet retreated about 10,000 years ago.

A good example of this process of nearly wholesale destruction and regeneration is the mountainside behind my house. This area burned from Jackman Creek all the way to Bacon Creek, 10 to 15 miles, in the mid-1920’s.  Much of what is being proposed for “protection” on Bacon Creek by the American Alps Legacy Project is in this old burn. I know this mountainside burned because my grandparents and their family and neighbors saw it. You can still see evidence of it today if you know what you are looking at. Some of the trees that grew back after this burn have now reached a dbh (diameter at breast height, basically the diameter at the base of the tree) of 3 feet or more. I have heard this forest wrongly described as old growth by people who should know better.

The fact that our forests are so resilient is made more difficult to grasp for the general public when confusing terms like “Baker River Rain Forest” or “lowland rain forest” are used in the sales efforts for The American Alps Legacy Project. Even after my education in environmental science, when I hear the term “rain forest,” I automatically think of tropical rain forests. But tropical rain forests are very different from the temperate rain forests found here in the Pacific Northwest, as is well known among scientists such as biologists, foresters and ecologists.

One way that tropical rain forests differ from temperate rain forests is that, for a number of reasons, the trees in tropical rain forests do not get reestablished very easily following large scale disturbances, especially when much of the biomass is removed such as after logging and burning. As has been pointed out, our temperate forests are actually adapted to large scale disturbances such as fires, floods and landslides and readily establish on mineral soil with little or no biomass present with some shade intolerant species like Douglas-fir requiring these disturbances in order to get established.

In the year 2000, I was part of a crew that surveyed the Baker River for the U.S. Forest Service from Baker Lake to the current park boundary. We encountered an area where the stream had shifted through a small patch of old growth Douglas-fir and red cedar trees 5 or 6 feet in diameter and probably many hundreds of years old, toppling maybe a dozen of them. In their roots were rounded river rocks and gravel. These trees had gotten established on a bare gravel bar four or five hundred years ago and, I guarantee you, new trees were already being established on the bare gravel and cobble in the dry channel that the river abandoned when it shifted to flow into this new channel.

Tropical rain forests also differ from temperate rain forests in biodiversity. Over half the plant and animal species in the world live in tropical rain forests. The species diversity in the tropics is generally much higher and much more localized with many more endemic species (species that are found only in very small areas maybe a few square miles or less and nowhere else in the world).  The ranges of some of these endemic species are small enough that the entire population of a given species may be compromised with one logging event. Since many tropical species are not as adapted to large scale disturbances this can result in extinction.

In the Pacific Northwest we have fewer species that typically have ranges that cover hundreds or thousands of square miles. There are certainly endemic species that live in the Pacific Northwest but these species are also adapted to deal with large scale disturbances such as floods and forest fires, that timber harvest practices can be adapted to mimic. So, while there certainly is biodiversity in the Pacific Northwest, it is not comparable to the biodiversity found in tropical areas.

Many of the areas on Bacon Creek, the Cascade River and the North Fork Nooksack River have already been logged and replanted with the idea of a renewable resource in mind. When my dad worked for the U.S. Forest Service 50 years ago or more, he planted trees in many areas, including Bacon Creek and the Cascade River. Many of these trees are now close to 2 feet dbh, but they are not old-growth by any stretch of the imagination. Yet under the proposals of the American Alps Legacy Project they would be permanently removed from the land base available for forestry.

Since most of the logging in these areas occurred in the days before a lot was known about the environmental impacts of different logging practices, more potentially detrimental practices were used. Even with that history, these areas are still being proposed for “protection”.

Obviously, whatever damage was done, it has not been irretrievable, and modern forest practices would minimize or eliminate much of the damage that occurred in the earlier eras. For example, the “lowland rainforest” on the Baker River is probably within the riparian zone of the river. So, even if there were proposals to begin logging old-growth again, which is highly unlikely due to litigation and other factors, this area would be a riparian zone set aside and, as such, it would be off limits to timber harvest for perpetuity under modern forest practice rules.

American manufacturers in prime locations near supplies of raw materials and shipping hubs have been going out of business or moving overseas for years due to competition on the global market. No one is insane enough to build a factory making widgets in far eastern Skagit County. This would involve transporting the raw materials a long distance to the middle of nowhere, paying someone to manufacture the finished product and then transporting it back to a population center. The overhead would make such a business untenable in a regional market much less the global market. These factors make timber, a resource abundant in eastern Skagit County one of the few economically viable products in this area.

Eastern Skagit County, where the impact of removing large areas of forest available for timber harvest would be greatest, is already an economically depressed area. It seems very short sighted to me to prevent such communities from making a valuable product that would benefit not only themselves but the entire world. I think it would be much better to focus our efforts toward helping people in places such as eastern Skagit County to develop a sustainable forestry industry, instead of crippling their ability provide for themselves by putting even more federal timber off limits. This sustainable industry would allow such areas to be less dependent on money from an outside economy that does not really need anything else besides the timber that these areas have to offer.

Our leaders seem to spare no effort to increase the economy of the more populated areas immediately adjacent to Puget Sound even though every increase in population and economic activity likely puts more stress on endangered species such as the Puget Sound orca. Many of these same leaders seem to think nothing about denying substantive economic opportunity in rural areas where a minority of our population depends upon resource extraction for their livelihood. It is also interesting to me that we, as a society, would celebrate the return of manufacturing of things such as cars and steel to the United States but not timber products. Many of the sponsors of park expansion will cash in on the population growth of the greater Puget Sound region which they seek to “protect” the North Cascades from while denying economic opportunity to rural communities through this very “protection”. It seems to me that this is a social justice issue as much as anything else.

Commodities are a more reliable way to create wealth than tourism. Giving up a commodity as substantial as timber for something as uncertain as tourism, especially if there is no infrastructure to serve the tourists, is a bad trade. In other words, tourists do not have to come here and they do not have to spend money while they and everyone else uses forest product every day as has already been noted. Timber and timber sales revenues are still important to the more populated areas these days, though they are not as big as they once were. However, for the reasons explained above, in rural areas, timber and timber sales revenues are crucial. If we remove these lands from the timber base permanently and thus forgo the revenues to be had from those lands, we will actually end up spending money in order to decrease revenues to local, state and federal governments. This is a luxury that currently no one can afford and one that rural communities like eastern Skagit County will probably never be able to afford. This begs the question: Where is the money coming from to pay for all of this? More importantly: Who is going to continue to fund this in perpetuity?

It seems that the authors of The North Cascades Study Report understood the importance of a timber base as a source of revenue for rural communities well. One part of this report that seemed to have a wide consensus was maintaining a certain level of revenue from the timber base not included in the park or wilderness areas. I quote:

“A second condition (of the recommendation to establish North Cascades National Park) is that the enabling legislation retain the status quo with respect to distribution of National Forest receipts between affected counties.” Italics theirs (Page 90, The North Cascades Study Report).

It was noted at several places in the report that the land remaining in the timber base should not be managed to maximize profits but rather in a responsible way with all other resources and user groups kept in mind.

It should be noted that the timber industry certainly has its ups and downs so it is not perfect. But, for the reasons explained earlier, it will probably never go away. Also, the environmentally friendly forest practices that I referred to do not generate as much revenue as the old forest practices but would still contribute substantially more to the local economy than tourism alone, with the added benefit for tourism that access would be maintained to many areas while aesthetics could be maintained.

In this day and age we have the means to use our forests to meet our needs and, at least in part, the world’s needs for wood fiber in an environmentally responsible manner. We live in a global world and there is a global demand for timber products. Do we want to try to meet at least some of those demands from our resilient Pacific Northwest forests on public land and not under shareholder pressure for profits? Or do we want to shift demand onto other areas like tropical rain forests that are more fragile and where global biodiversity is more likely to be adversely impacted?

Climate change is happening. Though some would still deny this, I would argue that it is undeniable because that is what the science says. Where is the science that says it is a better overall environmental practice in a global economy to set aside forests in the Pacific Northwest at the expense of forests in the tropics? I find it rather disheartening that people who think that all timber harvest is bad and must lead to environmental destruction cling to these beliefs with much of the same dogmatic thinking characterized by those who deny climate change.

From a global perspective, it is truly a tragedy that we, in a country that has the wealth and has technology to conduct timber harvests sustainably and under environmental regulation, would forgo using the timber of our forests, especially in areas that are not old-growth, at the expense of more fragile forests and ecosystems in other areas around the world in countries that are often poor and have little or no environmental regulation.

If it seems that I have belabored the point about forest resources and strayed a bit off topic, it is because I wish to make perfectly clear that there is no free lunch. All of us are, in part, responsible for the extraction of any number of resources worldwide. If we do not think about this carefully and instead respond to our problems with emotional reactions to buzz words like “lowland rain forest” and “biodiversity,” important ecological terms that run the risk of becoming cliché when loosely applied, in this case, in order to sell the proposals of the American Alps Legacy Project, we will continue playing a global game of resource extraction whack-a-mole. I recently had the experience of building a small chicken house. The lumber I used to build it, in sight of millions of feet of unused standing timber, was cut in a forest somewhere in Canada possibly even in the far northern reaches of the North Cascades. It was then milled in a Canadian sawmill and shipped here. No matter where the timber was cut, many of the same species that are native to the North Cascades live in Canadian forests and need habitat there as well. How is this an environmentally sound practice? Is this how we really want to go about getting our resources? Where is the science that says expansion of North Cascades National Park is absolutely crucial for saving any endangered species?

The concerns put forth by the American Alps Legacy project are about a growing population in the greater Puget Sound area and its demands for resources. Well, how are we going to meet these demands? Coal generation even with the new clean coal technology is notoriously dirty. Natural gas is much cleaner than coal but it still causes significant amounts of air pollution. Nuclear power is highly controversial with a significant downside of long lasting hazardous waste. Alternative clean energy sources such as wind, tidal and solar power show a lot of promise but no doubt will have significant environmental impacts as well, especially when scaled up to meet the needs of large populations. Another alternative is to let the greater Puget Sound economy contract, which I do not seriously think is a viable option.

Hydropower is not perfect and there are certainly environmental tradeoffs involved with it, but it is one of the cleanest energy sources that is currently available to us. Power is also a commodity that almost everyone uses without even thinking about it, providing robust revenues for local economies. Energy is also very important for the regional economy.  Cheap, abundant energy in the greater Puget Sound area has made it possible for aluminum plants and thus Boeing’s large scale aircraft manufacture to thrive here. This reliance on cheap, abundant power extends beyond these manufacturing industries to supercomputer companies like Cray.

Many of the environmental impacts of hydropower are now well known and, by employing this knowledge and new technologies, many of the environmental impacts of hydropower can be reduced. For example, large dam projects are not always required for power generation and better machinery and equipment can maximize production by more efficiently converting the potential energy in water into power, making smaller projects possible. This is not to say that hydropower projects in the future would be perfect but they may present the best possible solution for the energy and pollution problems of that time. And such projects would be a definite economic benefit to local economies.

Energy is probably going to continue to be very important to the regional economy in the future. The proposals of the American Alps Legacy Project would prevent future hydropower projects in the North Cascades. I personally would not want to see a lot of streams in this area dammed willy nilly, especially if these projects were not very carefully thought out. I strongly oppose any project that would cause the extinction or extirpation of any of our salmon runs and I would note that there are robust state and federal laws already on the books to prevent this. Many of these laws are the result of the knowledge gained from past experiences and, as a result, the projects built in the past that proved to be so detrimental to salmon would not be built today. I hold out hope that things such as energy conservation and newer clean energy sources will be able to meet the demands of a growing population. Unfortunately we cannot see the future. So if the clean alternatives to hydropower do not emerge in the future, it does not make any sense to remove hydropower as an option for meeting the energy needs of the future at this point in time.

Another concern outlined by the American Alps Legacy Project was demand for water from a growing population. We already have many effective ways of getting people to comply with water conservation efforts. If these are finally exhausted, are we going to import water? From where? If people elsewhere want to import our water and this is prevented, what then stops them from moving here for the water? If we reach the point where the population is desperate for water, the water will be taken no matter what designation or title the lands hold. I think it would be much better to get ahead of the problem and make sure we do not reach the point where people are that desperate.

Another issue brought up by the American Alps Legacy Project is wildlife migration corridors. If one cares to look at current maps of the North Cascades, there is already just such a corridor of interconnected parks and wilderness areas extending almost the entire length of the North Cascades from the Skagit Valley Provincial Park in British Columbia through North Cascades National Park and the Pasayten Wilderness to the Glacier Peak Wilderness to the Henry M. Jackson Wilderness. These areas are set aside from development and logging and even motorized vehicles.

The one interruption in this north to south corridor that does have significant development is the State Highway 20 corridor which goes east to west and Seattle City Light’s Skagit Hydroelectric Project which are currently in the Ross Lake National Recreation Area which will soon be renamed the North Cascades Recreational Area. Seattle City Light’s Skagit Project far predates North Cascades National Park and it will not be dismantled, nor will Highway 20 if North Cascades National Park is expanded to include the Recreation Area. Beyond the activities necessary to operate these two projects, no further development such as logging or mining is allowed in the Recreation Area. So if the Recreation Area is included in North Cascades National Park, it will be a change in name only, resulting in no additional habitat being added.

As has been noted earlier, hunting would be banned in the former Recreation Area but this would only affect species such as black tailed deer, mule deer, black bears and grouse. These species are common enough that the State of Washington allows them to be hunted. Killing an endangered species such as a grizzly bear, wolf, wolverine or northern spotted owl, for that matter, is just as illegal outside a national park as it is inside a national park. To be sure, a poacher in a national park would be subject to a few more laws such as hunting inside a national park or discharging a firearm inside a national park that would apply inside the park but these would hardly deter someone intent on illegally killing an endangered species.

If a species is common enough that the State of Washington allows it to be hunted, that probably means this species is successful at migration and dispersal under current conditions including habitat availability and hunting pressure. So the hunting ban on common species that would occur with the inclusion of the Recreation Area into the park would not have any significant impact on wildlife populations and would do nothing for endangered species.

The rest of the area proposed for addition to North Cascades National Park would merely widen the currently existing corridor and not extend it. Since the Pasayten area is already a wilderness area and protected under some of the most restrictive land use rules, there would be no real gain here as far as a migration corridor is concerned.

As has been noted, much of the remaining area outside of the Pasayten Wilderness proposed for inclusion in the park has already been logged. Ironically, locking up these areas, which could be managed for multiple use and much less intensive timber harvest, leaving larger more mature forests after harvest, would lead to more pressure for intensive timber harvest on adjacent lands, leaving less mature, even less suitable habitat for species that need mature forests on these adjacent lands. Where is the science that says the lands proposed for inclusion in the park are critical habitat for any endangered species?

A tragic example of this diversion of pressure for resources occurred on U.S. Forest Service lands in the 1970’s or early 1980’s when a road building ban in roadless areas was instituted in an effort to protect these roadless areas. The timber harvest pressure was shifted to areas where roads already existed, resulting in high road density and overharvest in those areas. The resultant environmental degradation was the basis for much of the anti-logging, anti-Forest Service outcry that persists even to this day, even though, as has been noted, the Forest Service is harvesting very little timber these days.

The Pasayten Wilderness Area is just that, a wilderness area. The rules of the Wilderness Act are already nearly the most restrictive land use rules possible, prohibiting any development such as roads, motorized use and logging activity within this area. The only significant difference that expanding the park’s boundaries to include this area would be to create an out and out ban on hunting here.

Since mushroom collection is prohibited in North Cascades National Park,  this practice would be banned in all newly acquired park lands as well. Finally, dog owners would be prevented from bringing their dogs with them.

The area that is now the Pasayten Wilderness was never proposed for inclusion in North Cascades National Park by The North Cascades Study Report. Expanding the park to include this area would only serve to discourage the three potential user groups that have previously been mentioned from visiting here. It would also put hunting outfitters who have historically used this area out of business here at least for the hunting season, adding another drag on local economies. There may still be demand for outfitters to pack into the area for sightseeing but hunting season is generally after the summer sightseeing season and, as such, would provide an important extension to the outfitter’s season. Banning hunting not only in the Pasayten but the other areas proposed for inclusion into the park would also serve to alienate hunters in general and hunters are traditionally big supporters of conservation efforts. 

What is to be gained here? Given the laws already protecting endangered species, how is a hunting ban going to further protect any endangered species? Again, black tailed deer, mule deer, black bears and grouse are not threatened or endangered species and hunting threatened or endangered species is already prohibited whether one is inside or outside a national park. Where is the science that says banning hunting in lands that are currently U.S. Forest Service Wilderness or in the Recreation Area around Highway 20 will save any endangered species?

If one was thinking of using wildlife as a draw for ecotourism, they should think again. The types of charismatic megafauna that most people will want to see like deer and bears do not appear on cue in these mountains. In fact, in the many years I have spent traipsing through the backcountry of the current park, I have seen fewer deer than I have in the human modified landscapes where hunting is allowed. I also typically see as many bears outside the park as inside the park.

If you want rely on wildlife to draw tourists, you need something similar to Northwest Trek, which is basically a zoo, where the situation is very controlled and a visitor will be guaranteed to see some animals. Quite obviously, this is not an option in a national park. Do I need to point out that Northwest Trek, where one is guaranteed to see animals and does not have to hike miles to do so, would be overwhelming competition with those seeking tourist dollars from wildlife viewing in the North Cascades, especially if access is restricted in the latter?

I think The American Alps Legacy Project greatly undervalues the knowledge about all of the areas proposed for inclusion into the park that will be lost upon implementation of a hunting ban. To use a resource in the wild, you need to know quite a bit about it. You need to understand the organism’s habitat requirements and behavior whether it is a mushroom, berry plant or animal. These habitat requirements and behavior are often closely tied to a given place as well. So, if you ban uses such as hunting in a particular place, you will lose information specific to that place.

To successfully hunt a given animal species you need to know that particular species’ needs and habits and how it uses or is constrained by the landscape. I learned a lot about plants before I ever had any formal education in botany by watching deer. The plants they ate were important to me because deer were important to me. This encouraged me to learn more about plants. A seminal book of the conservation movement, A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, was written from the perspective of a hunter hunting in his back yard.

While out hunting, I become very aware of things that I would probably otherwise ignore and often these things have nothing to do with the particular animal that I am hunting. Following or seeking game more often than not, takes me to places where I otherwise would not have gone. The hunt provides the motivation for this. For instance, I might walk quite a few miles to hunt deer but I would not go the same distance just to look at them.

Hunters also learn many things about the animals they hunt that would not be readily obvious to the casual observer such as if the animal has any external or internal parasites. These would only be obvious upon close inspection of the dead animal or while field dressing or butchering it. This is important information for wildlife biologists because things like parasite loading or the occurrence of new parasites may be important for the general health of a given animal population and may even be tied to climate change.

As a group, hunters provide another set of observers of the environment from a unique perspective not shared by other user groups.  These observations can be a gold mine to the enterprising biologist who could harness them to gather data on wildlife and the environment rather cheaply.

I have seen several check station programs over the years that required hunters to present deer that they had harvested to have their teeth checked. I believe the data gathered was used to check on aging and maybe nutrition in given deer populations. A study of grouse was conducted in a similar way, the hunter being required to drop off a wing from each grouse harvested for analysis. And every year hunters are required to file a harvest report with the State Department of Fish and Wildlife, giving, among other things, a rough idea of game animal populations in each game management unit.

While this data does require staffing check stations and processing and interpreting data, it is still pretty cheap compared to hiring biological science technicians to collect this data as is done in a national park, assuming there is money in a budget somewhere to hire the technicians. Similar studies in a national park require funding to pay someone or several people to go out in the field for days, weeks or months to gather data in addition to paying for the normal data processing and interpretation. In areas where hunting is allowed you have hunters gathering data for free. In truth, hunters are actually paying the State of Washington to gather data on game animal populations since they have to buy licenses and tags and are required to make harvest reports.

As stated previously, these harvest reports are collected every year by the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife. As far as I know, similar studies within the current boundaries of North Cascades National Park are rarely done. Since black tailed deer, mule deer and black bears are not threatened or endangered species and are quite common, they are usually ignored by most managers in the park.

So it is ironic that we probably have a better idea of deer and bear populations outside the park where they are hunted than we do inside the park where they are not. And it cost a lot less to find this out. It should be noted that, with hunter harvest reporting, we are dealing only with game species and there are numerous other species out there that are not included in these reports. To this point, the game and non-game species live in the same environment, so what affects the one species will likely affect the other, for example, drought conditions will affect all species in an area, though some more than others.

The information gathered from hunter reports is broad and general in scope. It does not replace intensive studies aimed at particular game or non-game species but it can be used to get a general picture of the environment and could be a good basis for more intensive studies. In addition, if it was desirable, individual hunters using an area could be contacted and insights gained as to if and how game animals are using an area differently from year to year. This information could then, at least to a degree, be extrapolated to other species.  Hunters could be asked to watch for and report a particular species of interest even though it is not a game species. Remember, these people are more likely than the average hiker to leave the beaten track so they probably have more information about off trail locations.

On a personal level, hunting in the North Cascades is what I could maybe best describe as a multi-dimensional experience. As I explained earlier, I not only have to know an animal’s habits and how it is using or is constrained by the landscape, what it eats, where it travels and hangs out, I have to move as quietly as I can and be hyper vigilant. This is all happening in settings that would have been familiar to my dad and grandfather. It is almost as if I can feel their presence and the presence of countless relatives and friends as I walk in their footsteps, seeing mountains in all of their moods and smelling the vegetation and hearing the water and feeling the same cold wind on my cheeks the way that they all did in this place. And all of this for the purpose of feeding myself directly from this land.

For me, hunting is not all about killing but killing is an important part of it. Taking a picture with a camera is not the same as hunting. With almost every deer I have ever killed, there was a pause for solemn reflection and thankfulness and I have always felt a responsibility to kill the animal in the most humane way possible. I am always sad for the deer but I am also very happy to have just secured a bunch of food. There is also a kind of satisfaction here, again not with killing something, but with the fact that I knew enough and was quiet enough and even sometimes lucky enough to secure my own food. There is a deep connection to the cycle of life, as I am confronted directly with the real cost of my existence on this planet. This creature died so I could eat. And someday I, in turn, will die. The reality also hits that now I am going to have to work my tail off to get all this meat home and processed. This is much different than buying my food from the store.

I have, on occasion, hunted in other areas but the experience is not the same. At least for me, using the same place as my forebears and friends in traditional ways, creates a very deep, meaningful connection to the land. Everything is familiar and fits together. I know the stories about the place and they make sense. When I tell a story passed down from my dad or grandfather or old friends it, is more real because I have experienced many of the exact things that they experienced.

I have certainly visited the area within the current boundaries of North Cascades National Park that my forebears and friends traditionally used but these experiences tend to be much more watered down or flat and two dimensional to me, even boring in some ways, because the ways I can use these places is so restricted. In the park I feel like a tourist in a museum in my own backyard, always looking in from the outside but never really part of things.

The areas on Bacon Creek and the Cascade River proposed for inclusion into North Cascades National Park make up the majority of my hunting grounds. I typically hunt close to my home, usually traveling less than 20 miles. Though I have not done this with any intention, this seems to follow closely the growing movements that advocate obtaining and using local resources as well as reconnecting to the land. Expanding the park boundaries in the proposed area would ban hunting in most of my traditional hunting grounds, having the ironic effect of forcing me to go farther afield and use more resources, to hunt in places strange to me while at the same time losing touch with the places nearest my home. This does not seem to square well with the recent trends to try to keep resource use local.

It would also have the effect of forcing more people onto the remaining land available for hunting, at which point it would become less of an experience of communing with nature and my ancestors and more of an experience of jostling with other hunters. I also know quite a few people who still depend on game meat as a major part of their diet. These people probably will not starve if hunting opportunities become less available, but it will certainly make it harder for them to make ends meet.

With my family, the tradition of using the land in the North Cascades goes back over one hundred years; with many others I know this tradition goes back many decades. This is a mere drop in the bucket for someone of Indian ancestry whose traditions and connections to the land stretch back for millennia. Obviously, Native Americans, who were here first and have used the land for thousands of years, belong to a different culture. However, there are other cultures in the North Cascades, made up of the people who came much later than the Indians but who chose to either stay, or at least continue to use rural places such as this. These rural cultures are both unrecognized and undervalued by the dominant culture at large.

Rural culture is more subtle and difficult to notice if one is not familiar with it and it results from people actually making a living from the land and the land itself acting on these people through geography, climate, weather patterns, isolation and available resources, among other things. This process forms a culture distinct from the dominant national or urban culture, though it is often heavily influenced by these dominant cultures.

I think this is missed by a lot of people I see who come here from the dominant cultures and want to know how to become a local. I think they do not realize that you cannot read books, take college courses, or even get a degree. There is no magical rite of passage to instantly become a part of this culture. If you are not born into it, you have to put in time, years or decades, of not only physically living in a rural place full time but also making a living in that place, to become a part of it or to even begin to try to understand it. Since my history here stretches back farther than a lot of recent fads, this rural culture is what western Washington means to me, not coffee or grunge music or even the Space Needle. And this is what I longed to return to over my six years in the U.S. Navy spent in Hawaii and Guam.

As I previously stated, my personal history and culture in the North Cascades stretches back over one hundred years; for others I know, it stretches back nearly as far or even farther. In this day and age when I hear so much about connecting people with the land, the act of expanding North Cascades National Park would actually sever many of the intimate connections between the land and these people who never left it. These people arguably have a deeper connection to this land than almost anyone else outside of Native Americans.

I feel expansion of North Cascades National Park would be detrimental to the rural culture in the North Cascades that depends very heavily for its existence on the ability to use local resources. What is the significance of an act that will go a long way toward snuffing out a culture, already heavily stressed, which was actually shaped by this place? Isn’t this culture also part of this place? Doesn’t this culture and all of its insights about this place deserve at least a chance to exist? When we talk about the American Alps Legacy Project, whose legacy are we talking about? The majority of the proponents of this project do not live here and never did.

Recently my mom came across one of my paternal grandmother’s journals covering her life experiences in Seattle and Marblemount in the period between 1911 and 1914. Much of it was written in Latin, Greek and French as well as English. Presumably my grandmother was well acquainted with the romance languages due to her training as a school teacher. Though none of us could understand the Latin, Greek and French text, we did not throw the journal away. We instead provided it to the cultural resources people at North Cascades National Park so it could be scanned and archived and the information included in it would be assured, or at least have a very good chance to get passed on to future generations. And at some point, the Latin, Greek and French can be translated, so English speakers can understand it as well. I believe the rural culture here in the Upper Skagit is a lot like that journal. This culture has knowledge and insights about this place that someone who is not from here might not understand immediately, but this is no reason to throw it out.

I personally do not think this rural culture necessarily warrants “protection” but it at least deserves a fighting chance. A shift to a largely tourism based economy, and a weak one at that, with much of the nearby landscape that a rural culture needs to be able to use in order to continue to exist essentially becoming a museum, would preserve only a watered down version of this culture and its history if these are preserved at all. This is not a fighting chance. It is more like a coup de grace, without the aspect of mercy.

I have often been told that I am lucky to live in such a beautiful place. It is not so simple as that. You cannot live on beauty alone, drinking it in like some kind of heavenly manna to provide sustenance. You need to be able to make a living of some kind. This is as true here as it is anywhere else in the world. I think this is not understood by many people who are just visiting or vacationing here for a day or even a week or two. Until you try to make a living in a place, independent of any outside revenues, you can escape a lot of the realities of what it actually takes to live in that place. Living with the realities of a place is the basis for the formation of the  culture that I have previously mentioned. For me, and a lot of others that I know, part of those realities meant, or still mean, logging and other timber related work in order to make a living here.

I could maybe understand expansion of the park and the subsequent death of my culture and way of life if it was the only means to save some rare organism that lived nowhere else in the world, but this is not the case. This action will not save any species that does not also occur outside the current boundaries or the proposed expanded boundaries of North Cascades National Park.

I could have done a lot of things with my life but I chose to remain here, the only home I have ever really known and the only one that my dad ever knew, at the cost of many foregone opportunities. The tradeoff for this lack of opportunity and the hardships of semi-isolated rural living was the ability to continue to live in my culture where the world made sense and I was most comfortable, staying connected to the land and using it in traditional ways. I worked in the woods logging, doing hard, dangerous, honest work to make a living. When it looked like that was going to go away, I went into environmental science while trying to build a business based on tourism, both of which are occupations probably considered to be more “righteous” by the public at large.  But I found it difficult to make a living here in these lines of work without the financial support available to me through periodic logging jobs.

In the past, I have given as freely as possible of my photographs and stories, gained at no small risk and expense to myself, to aid conservation efforts. I have also freely given my wildlife observations, again gained at no small risk and expense to myself, to managers from the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife, so they might put this information to its best use. Since many of my observations involve rather obscure animals, such as amphibians, in some rather obscure places, I have a feeling that many of these observations are the only information that exists at all for a lot of these places.

This does not mean that my wildlife observations are not important. Amphibians are very sensitive to changes in the environment and are likely to be impacted by, among other things, air pollution, solar radiation and climate change. My observations are on a landscape scale, at present covering roughly one-third to one-half of the Skagit Watershed and adjacent areas. Since most of these observations are from 2000 feet in elevation and above, this is a lot of information on some very sensitive animals in areas that are likely to show significant changes due to climate change. As temperatures rise, habitat conditions will probably change as well, moving farther up in elevation. So the animals I have been observing are likely to move up in elevation or maybe even disappear.

I feel that I have made at least a decent, if not significant, contribution to the knowledge available about this place, the North Cascades, knowledge that could be used in monitoring or conservation efforts, among other things. Ordinarily I would not even bring this up. I only do so because I wish to make a point. This point is that, if I had not been able to live the life I did, being able to use the land and being able to make a living from this land, none of my obscure amphibian observations from remote locations in the North Cascades would have happened. My project grew organically out of the traditional ways of using the land and the insights that this brought melded with some college education. It was based much more on the traditional use because I actually lived here rather than the college education which was more of an afterthought, though an important one. I think expansion of North Cascades National Park and heavy restriction of the ways people can use these lands will make it difficult for someone from the next generation to live as I have and know the land as I have come to know it.

I feel I have given this new direction in my life an honest try, but it, at least the tourism side of it, is looking more and more like a bottomless hole down which I throw money and I see nothing in the future that might change that. My contributions to environmental and conservation causes may not have been as grand or significant as the contributions of others, but, as I have stated, many of my contributions came at no small expense or physical risk to me. I feel I have given all I can afford to give and then some. Unfortunately, I have been less and less able to give so freely as I have watched my financial resources dwindle.

In light of this, it is rather depressing to me that the sponsors of the American Alps Legacy Project, most of whom do not, and never had to, make a living here would be making these proposals, which will go a long way to gutting my way of life. These proposals have only a passing basis in economics, science or intelligent use of natural resources and no basis at all in history or common sense. For the most part, the fate of these sponsors is not tied in any way to what happens in the North Cascades. Whether the park is expanded or not, these folks will go about living their lives somewhere else with maybe an occasional visit to the North Cascades. I have nowhere else to go. As I have stated, I have no wish to go anywhere else, and I cannot simply pick up and go to some other place where I have a family history extending back unbroken for 124 years. I use myself as an example here but I think it would be the same for someone originally from somewhere else who has invested decades of their life here.

It is also apparent that, with some exceptions, most of the major sponsors of the American Alps Legacy Project and their partner organizations have not had any significant interactions with the people who actually live in the North Cascades and eastern Skagit County beyond selling their proposals. As I have stated, I have lived here all of my life and have never heard of most of these people before. I do not see them at Marblemount Community Hall functions. They are not, to my knowledge, on the local volunteer fire departments, or local charity organizations and I do not see them sponsoring events or activities in local schools.

All of this makes me very skeptical about conservation efforts in areas that I am not familiar with. This feeling is not helped by a number of broken promises made to the people who live here by the original sponsors of North Cascades National Park, some of whom are current sponsors of the American Alps Legacy Project.

I was not old enough to remember or care about the details and agreements that were hammered out with the establishment of the park but it has always been my understanding that one of the deals that was made was a promise that there would continue to be a recreation area around the Highway 20 corridor and Ross Lake and that hunting and certain other traditional uses were to be allowed to continue here. This was one of the concessions by which the park was sold to those who opposed it, including a lot of people living here locally. With the inclusion of this recreation area into the park, this original agreement would be reneged upon. I think even proposing this area for inclusion into the park constitutes a broken promise and it is very telling of the worth of these people’s promises.

The tram on Ruby Mountain was another broken promise. I do not know exactly if the promises for a tram were explicit or implicit but I do know that someone had gone so far as to have an artist’s conception of it drawn up and toured around the various local communities in an effort to sell the park. I rather suspect that this drawing and the recommendations of The North Cascades Study Report were put forth in the efforts to sell the park as some vague, truthy, overly optimistic projections. The reality was completely different. Once the deal was done and management of the lands changed from the U.S. Forest Service to the National Park Service, the Park Service managers decided that a tram on Ruby Mountain did not fit with their plans for this new park and it died right there.

As I have pointed out, this tram had a very sound basis for not only building a robust tourist industry and gaining recognition for the park in a rugged area but also for allowing a wide spectrum of the general public to be able to access public land. The promises of this tram made by the original proponents of North Cascades National Park and the recommendations for it and the other developments made by the authors of The North Cascades Study Report were ignored and the people living in eastern Skagit County paid an economic price for this.

It is my understanding that there were all kinds of promises of jobs that went with the selling of the original North Cascades National Park. I have not been able to come up with hard numbers of the jobs that were promised but I believe that these too were vague and overly optimistic projections. Where are those jobs now? More accurately: Where have those jobs been? Eastern Skagit County has languished as an economically depressed backwater through the last two booms in the national and regional economies, presumably when many of the people who were enjoying the benefits of those booms had lots of money to spend out here.

Obviously, “the tourism and other economic benefits that inevitably accrue in connection with a major National Park attracting visitors nationally and internationally,” whatever these may be, are not enough to keep very many folks here employed with good jobs after the area has suffered such economic hits as the Clinton Forest Plan.  By the way, the lack of available federal timber and subsequent decline in revenues to local, state and national coffers that resulted upon the implementation of the Clinton Forest Plan is something of a preview of what will happen if North Cascades National Park is expanded to include Forest Service lands that are currently in multiple use status as is proposed.

The people in the rest of the nation and even the world have also paid a price for the disregard for the original recommendations for infrastructure in that many of them who have traveled here have not been able to see and enjoy much of the land that belongs to all of us. As I stated earlier, I am no fan of a tram on Ruby Mountain but I think what happened in this situation is also pretty telling about the worth of the promises and projections of the American Alps Legacy Project proponents and their predecessors.

The people who lobbied so hard for the park, in part using the tram as a selling point, failed to lobby for it once the park had been established. Something like a tram is a definite, obvious, measureable thing that was reneged on. With the current proposals by the proponents of the American Alps Legacy Project, the promises are much more vague and there is no budget to pay for them, making real the possibility of an unfunded mandate. An unfunded mandate that has already happened is North Cascades National Park itself.

This park was never fully funded, leaving its managers to make do with a small base budget that is supplemented with a patchwork of soft money. This is no fault of the park’s managers. From my experience, these people are hard working and dedicated to the mission of the National Park Service in general and North Cascades National Park in particular. But every year, they have to scramble for money to keep things going. These people have had to make many hard budget decisions every year, even when the rest of the nation was enjoying flush times. Somehow funding for North Cascades National Park fell through the cracks after it was established. I see nothing in current park expansion proposals that would remedy these past funding shortfalls. And I see nothing in these expansion proposals that will help park managers, who are already struggling to make ends meet, manage a land base that would be nearly double its current size.

The proponents of the American Alps Legacy Project say one thousand jobs and 22 million dollars will be created if North Cascades National Park is expanded in accordance with their proposals. Not one of these jobs is described or defined, and it is unclear exactly who will benefit from these jobs and where these benefits will occur. As I have pointed out, the majority of benefits from the kinds of economic activity that tourism generates, given the proposed minimal tourism infrastructure, will probably not occur in eastern Skagit County. And these jobs will maybe show up in 30 years. This is almost impossible to measure, if anyone remembers or is even around to care in 30 years.

Once the park expansion happens, conversion of lands into national park status will be permanent. If all of the promised jobs and money do not materialize, this land is not going to go back to its original designation and, given the actions of their predecessors and human nature in general, I seriously doubt that the current proponents of park expansion are going to be out passionately lobbying congress on behalf of local communities. Those people who live in eastern Skagit County and anywhere else impacted by the park expansion and any associated unfunded mandates will be on their own.

There have certainly been benefits to this area from having a national park here, though I do not believe these have been at anywhere near the levels originally envisioned and promised. I also understand the reasons for national parks and I am glad we have them. But enough is enough; for the reasons I have explained, I believe expansion of North Cascades National Park will not save any threatened or endangered organism living in the North Cascades and it may actually contribute to harming species diversity on a global scale. And it will not benefit human society in general, from the person who lives at the park’s borders to the person from far away who only has a short time to spend here.

From my point of view, it seems the sponsors of the American Alps Legacy Project seek to carry on the legacy of their predecessors in the North Cascades. This legacy is one of pie-in-the-sky schemes that ignore history and common sense that are sold with hollow, broken promises. People from across the nation and even the world have been short changed because of this and the people who actually live in the North Cascades in eastern Skagit County have borne the brunt of the resulting economic consequences. As I previously stated, the Ruby Mountain tram and the other developments are probably no longer viable, but there were other promises, either implicit or explicit, that were made to the people who lived here when North Cascades National Park was originally established. These were that traditional uses such as hunting were to be allowed to continue in the Recreation Area and that Forest Service lands such as the Pasayten were to remain in Forest Service Wilderness status where hunting is allowed, and that other Forest Service lands on Bacon Creek and the Cascade River were to remain in multiple use status where hunting, recreation, timber harvest and other traditional uses are allowed. These promises can still be honored and they should be honored.

Sincerely,