536 



Yearbook^ of Agriculture 1949 



pense, were popular targets for the 

 visitors' guns. Ranger or guard stations 

 or storage buildings were subject to fre- 

 quent depredation. To use the deeply 

 rutted and high-centered wagon roads, 

 the earlier autoists commonly rilled the 

 ruts with rocks, which teamsters, with 

 much effort, later had to remove before 

 the teams could move their loads. 

 Thus, to many a forest officer the 

 prospect of summer visitations by mul- 

 tiplying millions was far from a cheer- 

 ful one and it seemed to him that sheer 

 self-preservation dictated that he do 

 all he could to reverse the trend. 



But against the forces behind the 

 movement, the views and the actions of 

 individual forest officers were feeble 

 and futile. The habits and practices of 

 an entire Nation were then undergoing 

 profound changes. New interests had 

 been created, new desires aroused, new 

 means to satisfy them made available. 

 To the degree that those new interests 

 and desires centered in the forests, they 

 endowed the forests with purposes and 

 functions other than the traditional 

 ones of timber supply and stream-flow 

 stabilization. A new era had been born, 

 in which a tree in place as a living 

 element of a landscape might be of im- 

 measurably greater value than if sawed 

 into boards. In the privately owned 

 forest this radical change could be 

 ignored, but in the publicly owned for- 

 est, as an expression of the public will, 

 it had to be taken into account. 



Collaterally there developed wide- 

 spread realization that the combina- 

 tions of natural interest that constitute 

 the basis of forest recreation were preg- 

 nant with economic potentialities. If 

 such an area could attract from other 

 regions a total of a thousand people 

 who, on an average, locally expended 

 $25 each, the local economy would be 

 enriched as much as by the production 

 and shipment of several carloads of 

 cattle, and with no appreciable dimi- 

 nution of natural resources. Despite its 

 brief and transitory nature, the influx 

 of visitors contributed to the market 

 for labor, services, and supplies and left 

 in the community money from outside 



sources which otherwise the commu- 

 nity would never have received. Thus 

 the recreational resources, instead of 

 being incidental and nonprofitable, in 

 time became definite capital assets and 

 important factors in the economic life 

 of the community. In many communi- 

 ties, as the mines were worked out or 

 sawmills "cut out and got out" or as 

 depletion due to overstocking necessi- 

 tated reductions in numbers of domes- 

 tic livestock, the service and supply of 

 summer visitors began to equal or even- 

 tually to surpass the other sources 

 of community support; communities 

 flourished which otherwise would have 

 dwindled or died out. 



Public sentiment and economic val- 

 ues exert pressures, especially in pub- 

 licly owned forests. It became obvious 

 that the dominant objective of the 

 greatest good for all involved more 

 than merely the production of timber 

 and of forage, that necessarily it must 

 comprehend also the conservation and 

 orderly development of that other re- 

 source. Recognition of that fact has 

 motivated most of the expansion of 

 forest recreational facilities during the 

 past quarter-century. 



In the earlier logging operations on 

 the national forests, utilitarian consid- 

 erations often dominated the esthetic 

 ones. The operation of isolated bodies 

 of timber often entailed heavy initial 

 expenditures for the construction of 

 roads, railroads, camps, and other req- 

 uisites. An economic cost per thousand 

 board feet was attainable only by the 

 removal of the maximum volume of 

 timber. Every additional thousand 

 board feet of timber cut increased the 

 economic practicability of operation; 

 every thousand feet withheld from cut- 

 ting reduced it. Even today, notwith- 

 standing shorter cutting cycles and 

 more extensive transportation systems, 

 foresters continue to be wracked by this 

 problem of forest economy. Some of 

 the then most-scenic areas in the forests 

 owed their beauty and charm mainly to 

 blocks of trees that were mature or 

 overmature and that represented large 

 monetary values ; the next cutting cycle 



