YOUR FOREST LAND 9 



plenty of complex and clamorous amusements available to most people out- 

 side the forests. The forests offer a wide variety of retreats from strain and 

 tension, with a chosen degree of solitude. 



THE MAIN IDEA of those who have to plan recreational use for the forests, 

 is to fit their plan into the guiding policy of multiple-use, and to keep things 

 natural. That is not as easy as one might think. Millions of Americans have 

 lately discovered the national forests as a natural retreat and playground. 

 On summer week ends and holidays, especially, the people in their millions 

 have learned (as one sardonic western forest officer expressed it) "to take 

 to the open road in a closed car and return to the breast of Nature and 

 litter it up with banana peels and beer cans." 



This remark may sound a shade inhospitable. Such, really, was not the 

 mood of this forester, still in his forties. He started work with the Forest 

 Service at a time when, if a party wanted recreation, they simply went out 

 into the forest and made a fire and caught some fish, and cooked them, and 

 slept in a throw-down camp. Then automobiles were invented and were 

 made cheap, and the thundering human herd on rubber tires entered the 

 forest to rest and play. 



You could not let them make fires now, at random. Many would be 

 careless, and the fires would spread, destroying timber, destroying cover, 

 incinerating perhaps ten or a dozen of these carefree forest visitors them- 

 selves. Fireplaces, camp or picnic tables, pure piped water, and sanitary 

 toilet facilities had now to be provided; yet things had to be kept natural, 

 or as natural as possible, lest the visiting throng destroy the very beauty 

 and simplicity and quietude toward which with a deep and restless yearn- 

 ing they swarmed. 



All this was somewhat bewildering to old-time Forest Service men who 

 knew about trees and sheep and game and cattle, and knew what to do 

 about overgrazing, but who had never been trained to handle an overload 

 of humans, unobtrusively. They have learned. Now they "salt down" as 

 cattlemen say, attractive and secluded byspaces, so that people will spread 

 out in their outings, and not stomp the cover bare at some one central 

 glade. Where denudation of the cover does take place, and soil erosion 



