CAMPS 97 



Let us, as many of them are doing, drive on. The car, climbing rapidly 

 the smooth upswinging road, passes a portal post quietly announcing 

 reentrance to the White Mountain National Forest. The racket subsides. 

 Peace falls again on the eye, ear, and spirit. The road climbs smoothly on 

 now through still woods, clean and beautiful. And it may be that what 

 you take for primeval forest far extending is really only an undisturbed 

 roadside or buffer strip. For this national forest, like all 161 of them, is 

 subject to multiple use. A considerable native population that does not 

 draw directly on the tourist trade must keep right on making a living here- 

 lumbering, woods farming, stacking and shipping pulpwood; or gathering 

 wild ferns, shipped and stored on ice, to provide a natural frame for the 

 hothouse flowers which many other workers in the urban floral trade 

 make a living selling, all through the winter. The products of the national 

 forests are widely diversified. The problem is to see that one use does not 

 get in the way of the other and spoil the resource. These roadside or buffer 

 strips are designed to preserve the scenic value of the resource, and even 

 to enhance it in places. Here and there where the view is especially gor- 

 geous, landscape architects have selected and CCC boys have opened 

 vistas through the woods, and the traveler may look across countless miles 

 upon great ranges seemingly undisturbed. 



The 17 developed camp sites on this forest take various form from the 

 nature of their location and are of widely varied sizes, according to the 

 expected use load. Some of them far off the main beaten roads provide 

 only from 6 to a dozen sets, each secluded from the other, around some 

 protected water source, with some sort of jointly used toilet facilities, 

 unobtrusive in design, nearby. A set is a parking place for a car, with 

 tent room, a large open-air fireplace with a cooking grate, and a combina- 

 tion outdoor dining- and living-room table, with fixed benches. These 

 tables vary greatly on both camp and picnic grounds the country over, 

 and the set or outdoor apartment is variously arranged around them, as 

 furniture is in rooms of various shapes. 



In all, the Forest Service has installed 23,000 overnight camp sets on 

 its 161 different forests, and 30,000 picnic sets with no special provision 

 for overnight camping. This sort of camping is more or less only a pro- 



