Page:America's Highways 1776–1976.djvu/504

 stones and roughest projections, and never has difficulty in sleeping without shelter unless the coyotes howl too much. He is also content with his morning bath in an icy stream and never complains of an all day and night hike to find camp, but the romance of the work gives way to the most serious problem of existence when, on a long lonesome reconnaissance a week’s travel from base, he wakes in the morning to find that a neighborly bear has visited camp, destroying his light grub pack and making away with the bacon upon which he had relied for subsistence on his return journey. If to this is added the sadness of finding that his horses have slipped their hobbles and disappeared completely, leaving him afoot, hungry, and four days from grub, his misery is complete. When a survey party sets forth with a standard camp, living conditions are usually good. The hardships are more often encountered on the long reconnaissance surveys when an attempt is made to travel with little equipment, depending upon game and good fortune for subsistence. Some sections can be traversed more easily by waiting for snowfall and using snowshoes or skis. In Alaska the dog train is useful. It is not an uncommon experience for the party to bunk in the snow without tent.

Occasionally the survey must be carried along the face of precipitous slopes and rocky cliffs where a misstep or a loosened rock would be disastrous. In such cases long ropes from above suspend the men or protect them from accident. In 1916 one member of a survey party on this work lost his life from a fall of several hundred feet on account of not taking such precaution.

In 1926, the BPR Annual Report described forest highway construction: “For the engineering features involved in their construction and the difficulties overcome these roads are not surpassed in the world.”

Today we smoothly cross these same mountain barriers on Interstate highways which are a tribute to 50 years of highway engineering progress pioneered by those engineers who made the first highway locations and carried through the design and construction of the first improved highways across the mountain barriers, tying all parts of our country together with a modern highway transportation system.

The construction of roads in national parks was an essential element of park development. Prior to the establishment of the National Park Service in the Department of the Interior in 1916, improvements within each park appear to have been the responsibility of the park superintendent, and road improvements were at best spasmodic as funds were made available, but some progress was made. Yellowstone National Park was allotted $15,000 in 1877, the first appropriation for roads in a national park.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took over the roadbuilding responsibility in Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 1883 and continued to be responsible for road construction in the Park until 1918. During this period, the basic road system was constructed. General Hiram M. Chittenden, associated with Yellowstone National Park from 1891 to 1893 and from 1899 to 1906, is credited with having a major influence on the development of the Yellowstone Park loop road system. He was one of the early advocates of building high quality roads in the Park, roads that would sit lightly on the landscape, taking advantage of the terrain by curvilinear alinement.

By the mid-1920’s, it was becoming increasingly evident that the activities of the State highway departments, the Bureau of Public Roads, the Forest Service, and the National Park Service needed to be closely correlated. In most instances, the national parks were practically surrounded by forests, and in almost every case, the approach to the parks was dependent on the construction of a main road through the forests.

In 1924 Congress enacted special legislation (43 Stat. 90) for the authorization of road construction in national parks. Following this legislation, BPR and the National Park Service worked out a Memorandum of Agreement on the survey, construction and improvement of roads and trails in the national parks and national monuments. This document and later ones established broad principles for standardizing construction of these highways and joining them with forest roads and trails, State highways, and the Federal-aid system to form an interconnected system of highways.

A statement of policy on roads was made by Director Stephen T. Mather in the National Park Service’s annual report of 1924:

It is not the plan to have the parks gridironed with roads, but in each it is desired to make a good sensible road system so that visitors may have a good chance to enjoy them. At the same time large sections of each park will be kept in a natural wilderness state without piercing feeder roads and will be accessible only by trails by the horseback rider and the hiker. All this has been carefully considered in laying out our road program. Particular attention also will be given to laying out the roads themselves so that they will disturb as little as possible the vegetation, forests, and rocky hillsides through which they are built. . ..

Under the new park road Act, work was initiated in 1925 on the construction of the transmountain highway in Glacier National Park, Montana. This project was considered one of the most important of the transcontinental highways. It was located between Lake MacDonald and St. Mary Lake and connected these two areas of Glacier National Park via Logan Pass.

By the mid-1920’s, a national system of improved highways was beginning to take form, encouraging family vacations by automobile and visits to the national parks and national forests. “See America First” was the slogan. Auto camping was becoming increasingly popular. The first automobiles had been admitted to Yellowstone National Park in 1915, and from 1918 to 1925 approximately 1.6 million private autos entered the national parks.

All but one of the major parks were west of the Mississippi River, while two-thirds of the population lived east. Director Mather wrote in 1923, “I should like to see additional national parks established east of the Mississippi, but just how this can be accomplished is not clear.”

While western parks had been created out of the public domain, the only extensive land in public ownership in the East were the number of forest reserves acquired under the provisions of the Weeks Act, which authorized the purchase of land for the protection of forests and the headwaters of streams. It appeared the only practical way national park areas could be acquired would be by donation or by purchasing land with privately donated funds. 498