WAYS AND MEANS 263 



Similar instances could be cited on many other national forests, some of 

 them fairly near crowded centers, some remote. The ones to which many 

 more needy people might travel, if the way were opened, are the ones that 

 most concern us here. 



In a Virginia national forest, where a public campground encircling a 

 small lake has been opened, the area, easily accessible to a large city, is 

 already overcrowded. It is impossible to make more space for the public 

 without acquiring for the public benefit two small tracts of submarginal 

 farm land in a narrow creek bottom. If the Government could buy those 

 two farms (totaling only 410 acres), the public could then be given free 

 access to an entire watershed of more than 5,000 acres. 



Often, in addition to barring woodland areas from free public enjoy- 

 ment, small private holdings, resolutely held, bar public access to the shores 

 of lakes, to natural winter sports, playgrounds, and to fishing streams. Many 

 of the sites so pre-empted are not far from crowded cities. It is, indeed, 

 where the impulse to seize upon private outdoor pleasure grounds is strong- 

 est that the Government is most likely to be balked in efforts to throw open 

 for free use wider forest pleasure grounds. 



ORGANIZATION CAMPS are the most promising mode of low-cost forest 

 recreation now developing. Scattered throughout the tens of millions of acres 

 of national forests are tiny constellations of cabins clustered in friendly 

 fashion about larger buildings. Sometimes the setting is beside the tumbled, 

 broken waters of a mountain stream, sometimes on the shore of a quiet 

 lake or among the big trees of the high country. Flying northward one may 

 catch glimpses of them over the hundreds of miles of California forests, and 

 on the slopes of the Cascades. One may come upon them in the Rocky 

 Mountains, the Ozarks of Missouri, among the new national forests of the 

 Lake States, or up in New England. Southward, one may pick them out in 

 the Alleghenies and throughout the Appalachians to the Gulf of Mexico. 

 If it is vacation time, most of these camps will be filled with youngsters. 

 To these clustered cabins thousands of boys and girls are brought from cities 

 and villages by both public and quasi-public organizations and given the 

 joys of a forest vacation. 



