This article strikes home to me because I was born and raised in Oregon. My summers as a youth were spent leaving behind waffle stomper tread marks on the dusty and muddy trails of Diamond Lake, Lake of the Woods, Emigrant Lake, Howard Prairie, The Applegate River, the Rogue, as well as playing in the snow of Mount Ashland, and beach combing near Harris Beach and Gold Beach.

My seventy-nine-year-old mother now lives virtually in the shadow of what used to be Mount St Helens which isn’t too far from the northern reaches of the national parks of the Cascades in Northern Washington of which this article is referring.

Regular readers of this forum might remember that I have stated often my favorite places include Southern Oregon and Northern California’s beaches and the grand coastal redwoods and the river glades they overlook. I am very accustomed to tramping through forests and grew up knowing that I was blessed to have been born and raised where I was, in North America’s great northwest region.

But, traipsing through the woods is not only mine or my Oregon, California and Washington neighbors to enjoy. This is a right that belongs to all reasonably responsible Americans, and beyond.

All though I feel that we are all a little spoiled in getting around in our cars to within yards of a trail head, to not have this relative luxury would leave most of the national parks of the great northwest pretty much isolated from any of the citizens for whom they are reserved. And, what about fire fighting and regular maintenance? Thus my feelings.

If the national park service can not find the funds to keep the roads open at any price, then what good is our national park service? They become nothing more than zoo keepers. The park becomes little more than a giant zoo which is perpetually closed to the public; a condition that many would probably not mind.

One of the problems with this, beyond the obvious one that public lands without any public on them is rather obtuse, is that the national parks charter specifically states that the whole reason the parks were set aside was "...for the benefit and enjoyment of the people."

I therefore put forth the idea that funds be taken from whatever areas they are currently serving to properly fulfill the high priority of road and trail maintenance. Obviously, some sort of oversight committee or board must make that decision, but someone is certainly not making that decision now. They should, and soon.

Roads and trails are not merely bothersome and labor intensive projects meant for the pesky lookie-loos who stumble through the government land. They are Prime Directive One.

Stu Marks
Editor

The Way In: The Future of Access to our National Parks

Remember the floods and windstorms of late 2006 that wiped out trails and washed out access roads to national parks and forests throughout the Cascades and Olympics? They were just the latest storm events to ravage Washington's public lands. And they likely won't be the last.

The washout on the Dosewallips River Road. By John Woolley.