Sigurd F. Olson and the National Parks by Kevin Proescholdt

By Kevin Proescholdt
This year, 2016, marks the centennial of the establishment of the National Park Service. Though national parks had existed since Yellowstone in 1872, it was not until 1916 that Congress passed the law creating the National Park Service. Sigurd Olson played important
roles both in the national parks and the agency created to care for and manage the parks.

At first glance, Sig’s involvement with the National Park Service might seem odd.  Throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, he had dealt much more with the U.S. Forest Service in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, since the Forest Service managed Superior National Forest in northeastern Minnesota that held the U.S. portions of the international Quetico-Superior region that he worked to protect.

But that began to change after Sig’s successful work in the late 1940s to convince Congress to pass the Thye-Blatnik Act in 1948 and President Truman to create an unprecedented airspace reservation over what would later be re-named as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Sig’s successes brought him to the attention of the national conservation community in Washington,
DC.

The National Parks Association quickly recruited Sig to join its board of directors, beginning in 1950. He became vice president the following year, and in 1953 Sig was elevated to the position as president of the National Parks Association. In these capacities Sig was exposed to many issues affecting the national parks and national monuments. He also worked personally with National Park Service staff, including Conrad “Connie” Wirth, who became Director of the National Park Service in December 1951.

His involvement with national park issues grew, including the famous 1954 hike along the C&O Canal to save it from reconstruction as a highway, the proposal to dam and flood Dinosaur National Monument along the border of Utah and Colorado in the mid-1950s, hiking
in Olympic National Park in Washington state with Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in 1958, and many more.

In 1959, Sigurd resigned as president of the National Parks Association, but later that same year Interior Secretary Fred Seaton appointed him to the Advisory Board on National Parks, Historic Sites, Buildings and Monuments. Sig served on this influential board well into the1960s. During the Kennedy Administration, Interior Secretary Steward Udall also appointed Sig as Udall’s consultant on wilderness and national parks in addition to serving on the National Parks Advisory Board. (Udall also tried to recruit Sig to become the director of the National Park Service, but Sig demurred.)

From these posts, Sig played an enormously important role in identifying and visiting potential new national park sites, including field trips across the country and up to Alaska. This work came to fruition as new national parks like Canyonlands National Park were created in the 1960s, and years later in the monumental 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), which protected many of the areas Sig and his colleagues had identified in the 1960s. Closer to home, Sig also played important roles in the creation of Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota, just west of the BWCAW. Sig, in fact, is even credited with proposing the name of this new park as Voyageurs. So Sig’s role with the national parks was quite extensive and critically important, and  something well to remember in this centennial year of the National Park Service.

—Kevin Proescholdt is the conservation director for Wilderness Watch, a national wilderness conservation organization (www.wildernesswatch.org). His most recent book, Glimpses of Wilderness, is a collection of essays set in the BWCAW and Quetico that illuminates some of the values and aspects of the wilderness experience. The book is available at www.kevinproescholdt.com.

The Wilderness Sings in China, Too

By David Backes
Published in the Summer 2016 LPF Newsletter, page 7

Excerpts from Sigurd’s writings have been published in a variety of languages, including Russian and Arabic, but a Chinese company is the first to publish a complete translation of one of Sigurd’s books. SDX Joint Publishing Co. in Beijing has published a Chinese edition of The Singing Wilderness, and sent me several copies just in time for the Listening Point Foundation annual luncheon in St. Paul on April 9.

It was a long time in the making. I was contacted by the publisher in the summer of 2010, and there were several exchanges of emails but communication was difficult and spotty. Once they published it, they were supposed to send me copies for the LPF, the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute, and the Olson family. I never heard from them after 2010, and wondered if they ever finished it.

That fall of 2010, at my annual conference of the North American Association for Environmental Education, I met and became friends with a young Chinese woman, Yan Zhu, who was starting a doctoral program in Florida. She happened to have spent some time at Wolf Ridge, and so she knew of Sigurd Olson and had read The Singing Wilderness. She was excited to learn that a Chinese publisher was interested in making available a translation.

After years of no communication from China, we both wondered what had happened. This past December Jo Jo (as friends call her) finished her PhD and moved back to China. Soon after arriving, she discovered that the book had been published in 2012! Jo Jo set about learning who to contact, and making sure they lived up to the agreement to send those books. The surprise package from China arrived at my house on April 2.

The translator is Cheng Hong, a professor in the foreign languages department at Capital University of Economics and Business, in Beijing. She has taught English there for more than 30 years, and during a period in the mid-1990s as a visiting scholar at Brown University in Rhode Island she developed an interest in nature writing and eco-criticism. She has one book of her own about British and American nature writers, called Tranquility is Beyond Price, and has published several translations, including Sigurd Olson’s The Singing Wilderness, John Burroughs’ Wake-Robin, Henry Beston’s The Outermost House, and Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place.

Her husband, by the way, is Li Kequiang. Li just happens to be Premier of the People’s Republic of China—the head of China’s government.  He took that office in March 2013.

Early Years of the Olson Home

Editor’s note: In the following article, written in 1996, Sig’s son Robert recalls details of the Olson family home in Ely. This home, recently purchased by the Listening Point Foundation, now provides many opportunities for the Foundation to advance Sig’s legacy of wilderness education.

Sig and Elizabeth moved from the Rapson House on Harvey St. up to the new house on the hill south of town in August 1934. There are no letters about the move, but it must have been hectic because it was at that time of the year that the Border Lakes was going full blast, which meant a twelve-hour day, seven days a week. I remember absolutely nothing about the move although I was nine and old enough to have know what was going on. My only recollection is that Sig was happier about the move than Elizabeth. She remarked many times how she missed being in town and seeing the children walking by on their way to school. I think I found it a great adventure and looked forward to living out of town near the woods and fields.

The house was not totally unfamiliar to me anyhow. I had visited there many times with my little friend Ricky Bang who lived there with his sister (name forgotten) and parents, Dorothy and Luther Bang. Bang worked for one of the mining companies and had a dreadful temper. They used to call him “the terrible tempered Mr. Bang” after a cartoon character of the period.

The house itself, which was built in 1928, was only half finished. The upstairs was without a bath and more like an attic than an upstairs. That is where the Bang children slept and must have half frozen to death in winter. The setting in 1934 was bleak. The house was set in the middle of a grassy field studded with piles of rocks, piled up, presumably, by someone who had once farmed it. There was neither shrubbery nor even trees in the yard except for three small box elders planted in a line just to the east of the house. On the other hand, it had a great view over town and no other buildings between it and the woods across the field to the south. The only tree that I can remember was the beautiful clump of birches in the middle of the field back of the house, which now appears to be dying.

The carpenters must have been busy that summer. When we moved in, the upstairs had been finished in its present dimensions so that Sig Jr. and I had a proper bedroom to ourselves. This is the room which Sig used for a bedroom for many years. Elizabeth’s bedroom was used by Sig for work and writing.

We shared the hill then with only one neighbor, Florence and Pete Peterson who owned the brick Dutch colonial house just to the West. They owned Peterson’s Fishing Camp on Hoist Bay of Basswood Lake, and Pete was partner with Sig and Wally Hanson in the Border Lakes Outfitters. Relations between the families were close and for the most part cordial. The families socialized together, attended the same church, hunted ducks together, and cross-country skied during the winter. A few years later, the Chinn family, also members of the Presbyterian Church and part of the mining community, built a new house to the west of the Petersons. Jim and Merle Call built next to us sometime after the war. It was all very neighborly and cozy.

The writing shack began as the family garage, which was located to the right of the entryway approximately where the big spruce now stands. The garage was converted into the writing shack in 1937 at a cost of $150 and moved to its present location. The work was done by Border Lakes employee Alex Peura of Winton. A set of clothesline posts completed the backyard and served to suspend many a deer.

The new garage was added to the main house in 1938.

These were the years when Sig converted the raw material of his surroundings into the yard as you now see it with the stone walls, shrubbery, and trees. Elizabeth had wanted a landscaper to do a design for the yard along conventional lines, but Sig would have nothing to do with that nonsense. He wanted to landscape the yard in native shrubs and trees and along informal lines, so there was much hauling in of spruce, maples, birch and even a scrub oak from the woods (see “Scrub Oak” in The Singing Wilderness). Hauling in the rocks and piling them into the stone wall was a labor we all pitched in on. We rejoiced at what we had done and Sig describes his thoughts and feeling in “Stone Wall” also in The Singing Wilderness. The only drawback for me was that for many years I had the job of mowing and trimming the lawn, which included clipping by hand the grass that grew up between the rocks in the wall, a real chore.

For me, the lore of the old house is that it was in that house that the family matured and came to define itself. It was during those years that the Olson family established its traditions, memories, and way of life. The house was small and cramped (775 square feet of floor space). But it always seemed to be full of fun, comfort, security, and friends, at least from the boys’ point of view. Both Sig and Elizabeth had their problems, Sig with a place to get away to work free from telephone and friends, Elizabeth with a cramped little kitchen and tiny closets. Every inch of space including the basement was put to use. Cousin Curtis Uhrenholdt expanded the family for a couple of years (1939-1940) so that Elizabeth had to feed a family of five on the dining room table set against the living room staircase. The boys and Curtis filled the upstairs. Sig and Elizabeth slept in the downstairs bedroom. Fortunately (for all concerned) Sig now had his writing shack where he could get away.

The Porch was built during the summer of 1954 by Harvey Tjader, Esther’s older brother. It was never called anything else. Credit for actually doing it should rightly go to Elizabeth. They had talked about adding another downstairs room for years but Sig never took the time to do anything about it. Finally, Elizabeth put her foot down and made it happen. Much pleasure and congratulations all around when it was finished.

It transformed the house, added a stunningly beautiful new room, and provided the increasingly necessary space for entertaining as Sig became more and more involved with the conservation community. In a way, the Porch marks the end of one, mostly family, life and the beginning of another life of affairs.

Sigurd Olson and the 1978 BWCAW Act

Thirty-five years ago this fall, on October 21, 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act (Public Law 95-495). This new law ended a rancorous three-year fight in Congress over the future of the BWCAW, provided important new wilderness protections for the canoe country, and settled once and for all the decades-long question that the Boundary Waters was indeed a wilderness.

Sigurd Olson would later call it the most important achievement in his half-century of wilderness conservation on behalf of the Boundary Waters. And Sig played an incredibly important role in the struggle to pass this legislation. Not only did he play the role of leading elder statesman for the wilderness cause throughout those years, utilizing his myriad contacts to promote the BWCA Wilderness bill, but Sig personally testified at the
Congressional Field Hearing held in Ely in July of 1977.

At this point in the public debate, two competing bills had been introduced dealing with the BWCAW. Rep. Jim Oberstar’s bill would have removed about 400,000 acres from wilderness in the heart of the BWCA and turned it into a National Recreation Area where logging, motorboats and snowmobiles, resorts, and other developments would have been allowed. The competing bill introduced by Rep. Don Fraser would have made the BWCA a complete wilderness—no logging, no mining, no motorboats, no snowmobiles.

Three members of Congress came to Ely for the field hearing: Oberstar, Fraser, and Rep. Bruce Vento, a freshman member of Congress who chaired the hearing on behalf of the Subcommittee Chair, Rep. Phillip Burton of California. Though only in his first term in Congress, Bruce was the only Minnesotan to serve on the full House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee (which included Burton’s subcommittee), and Phil drafted Bruce to chair the two field hearings in Minnesota.

The Boundary Waters issue was very hot politically, of course, and the Ely field hearing reflected that stormy nature. Over 1,000 people jammed into the auditorium where the hearing was held. Parked logging trucks sat outside the building. A dummy dangled from the boom of one truck, with the names of Sigurd Olson, Bud Heinselman, and the Sierra Club pinned to its shirt.

Inside the hearing, when Bruce Vento called Sig’s name to testify, the auditorium erupted in yells, boos, and jeers. For long minute after minute the yelling continued, preventing Sig from speaking. Vento tried gaveling the crowd to order, but to no avail. The foot-stomping and yelling continued. Oberstar and Fraser also tried to bring the crowd to order, but with similar results. The yelling was so intense and continuous that Vento turned to an aide and asked if there was a way out the back of the auditorium in case violence erupted. Finally, however, Vento gained control of the crowd and it quieted. Sig then delivered this testimony in favor of the Fraser bill.

The testimony accompanying this article is from Sig’s presentation copy of his testimony, with his hand-written deletions and additions, so this version is the way Sig presented it. Most notable is the moving final paragraph of this testimony, which was hand-written onto his typed statement and which I remember Sig delivering, all the more remarkable and eloquent given the tense and angry atmosphere in which he gave it.

—Written by Kevin Proescholdt, national conservation director for Wilderness Watch, a national nonprofit wilderness conservation organization (www.wildernesswatch.org). He wrote about Sig’s testimony in the book he co-authored with Rip Rapson and Bud Heinselman entitled Troubled Waters: The Fight for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Kevin also serves on the LPF’s National Advisory Board.

Sig Olson’s Testimony

July 8, 1977

My name is Sigurd F. Olson, my home Ely, Minnesota. I support the Fraser Bill (H.R. 2820) whose purpose is to eliminate all adverse uses from the BWCA and give it complete wilderness status.
I have worked for some 50 years toward building an appreciation and understanding of what wilderness really means. I have served as a consultant to the Department of Interior through several administrations, served on numerous commissions and advisory boards and in that capacity have become familiar with most of the wilderness regions of the United States, Canada, and Alaska.

I have crisscrossed the BWCA and its adjoining Quetico Provincial Park by canoe countless times since my early guiding days, but also the Northwest Territories of Canada, have worked closely with Canadians such as the Quetico Foundation of Toronto, having to do with the preservation of the BWCA and the Quetico as well as other lake and river areas as far north as the Arctic Tundra.

I have worked with citizen groups, such as the IWLA and Wilderness Society and others, and know how people feel, and have cooperated closely with all major conservation organizations across the country toward the goal of preserving wild and natural areas.

Many threats have plagued the area over the years, road programs, power dams, airplane and fly-in resort developments, the acquisition of private land, logging and mining, and I realize now that had any of these issues been lost there would be no wilderness in the BWCA today.

The BWCA and Quetico Provincial Park across the border comprise over two and a quarter million acres, the largest area of its kind in the world. People come from all over the U.S. and even foreign countries to enjoy the tranquility, beauty, and peace of this unique Lakeland wilderness.

Opponents of the Fraser Bill claim the economy of Northeastern Minnesota would be adversely affected. The mainstay of its economy is mining, an industry doing very well outside the BWCA. There are millions of acres for commercial logging outside the wilderness, a third of the Superior National Forest’s three million acres. In this lower two-thirds there is plenty of room for snowmobiles, motor boats, logging and mining. Studies show that resorts and canoe outfitting employ many people and bring in millions of dollars, all of them benefitting from their proximity to the BWCA and its wilderness lure. Once the wilderness is gone, the real meaning of the BWCA will be lost forever.

I am opposed to the Oberstar Bill cutting out some 400,000 acres of prime wilderness canoe country and converting them to recreational use, a permanent tragedy for this long fought-over region which belongs to all the people of America.

President Carter in his Environmental Message to Congress said, “The National Wilderness Preservation System must be expanded promptly before the most deserving areas of federal lands are opened up to other uses and lost as wilderness forever.”

I endorse this statement as do millions across the country. The Fraser Bill (HR 2820) supports President Carter’s view. The time for action and immediate passage is now. No further studies or surveys are necessary.

This is the most beautiful lake country on the continent. We can afford to cherish and protect it. Some places should be preserved from development or exploitation for they satisfy a human need for solace, belonging and perspective. In the end we turn to nature in a frenzied chaotic world, there to find silence—oneness—wholeness—spiritual release.

Please make this statement a part of the record.

Sincerely, Sigurd F. Olson

Celebrating the Wilderness

Marking the 50th Anniversary of the passing of the Wilderness Act (September 3, 1964). 

Read this informative story on MPR and listen to the live interviews.

Celebrating 15 Years

A decade and a half ago Bob and Vonnie Olson and some of their bighearted friends dreamed and worked the Listening Point Foundation into existence. That founding group included Chuck Wick (still Vice President of the Foundation today) Dave Peterson, Milt Stenlund, Sigurd T. Olson, Dave Zentner, David Backes, and Randy Pachal.

It was their vision that as long as the sun and rain fell on an iconic little finger of granite and greenstone in the Quetico-Superior, it would be protected—as a place others might visit to find a little of what Sigurd F. Olson had found there, and as a source of inspiration for dreams of their own. The second part of the vision was to nurture and promote Sigurd’s lifelong passion of wilderness education, the timeless value of wild things and wild places in a modern world.

Today, there are many grateful beneficiaries of these efforts. The rocky point, still sheltered by white and red pines, still reaches unencumbered into the waters of a clear, north woods lake. Waves still wash over ten thousand year-old glacial striations at its tip. The simple footpaths that Sig and Elizabeth so often walked remain much as they were, leading nowhere in particular but to a better understanding of one’s self and one’s place on this earth. The enormous guardian boulder, covered with lichens, mosses, and ferns, still guards the point and the rough little Finnish cabin that Sigurd built there.

The cabin itself looks completely unchanged, but thanks to ongoing efforts at maintenance and refurbishing is actually in better shape than ever before. Cedar shake shingles have been replaced, with many of the old ones finding their way to walls and dens of Listening Point admirers around the country. Stonework and masonry has been re-done, every stone catalogued and lovingly replaced exactly from whence it came. Logs have been treated to prevent damage from weathering and insects. The old wood stove is occasionally fired up and LPF board meetings held around the old pine table, where new dreams are dreamed and new plans laid. And the objective of preserving the Point and the cabin has been furthered greatly by establishment of a conservation easement with the Minnesota Land Trust and listing of the property in the National Registry of Historic Places.

Hundreds of visitors indeed still come to the Point every year, guided by Chuck and Executive Director Alanna Dore, or other volunteers. History is imparted, along with a deep sense of place and timeless values.

Visitors often remark on the feeling of something like a pilgrimage, a sense that it is somehow vital that such a place exists, and that other places like it be preserved and appreciated. Perhaps, as they listen to the song of a white-throated sparrow or the breeze through those pines, or the call of a loon from out on the lake, they think of Sigurd’s words, “Everyone has a Listening Point somewhere.”

Meanwhile, the goal of wilderness education has been furthered in countless ways. Membership has increased tenfold, with newsletters like this one keeping folks abreast of LPF activities. Every spring a popular Sigurd F. Olson birthday luncheon is held in St. Paul, with speakers like Jim Brandenburg, Will Steger, and Don Shelby. In the last three years a similar evening dinner has been held in Ely so that folks from the North Woods can attend without traveling so far. The Foundation has sponsored “Paddling With Sig” canoe trips and “Writers In The Wilderness” writing workshops. The BBC hosted a worldwide broadcast on wilderness from the Point, and this spring and summer an exceptional SFO exhibit is in place at the International Wolf Center—”The Legacy of Sigurd F. Olson: Wilderness, Writing, and Wolves.” Educational outreach materials like the booklets, “The Story of Listening Point” and “Sig Olson’s Wilderness Moments” have been produced and distributed, along with a “Singing Wilderness” teaching packet.

And of course in the digital age we now have a lovely website and even a Facebook page.

All of these and many other balls are kept in the air largely through the passionate efforts of Executive Director Alanna Dore, who never knew Sig, but who feels a spiritual kinship so deep that it shines through in all she does, and that permeates the work of the Foundation. Sig would have liked A.D.

Also to be credited in all this work is a fine Board of Directors who take time out from their busy lives to see that Bob and Vonnie’s founding vision is fulfilled.

So, the pines on Listening Point still sing in the wind, the cabin snuggled safely beneath as always. The rocks and plants and trails are as they were, and people come to listen and see and feel, sensing and absorbing things that a wilderness philosopher thought important. And ripples that wash upon the ancient rock shore are reflected by ripples that wash outward into the world, ripples of the thoughts and words and actions of Sigurd F. Olson, who wrote: “Listening Point is dedicated to recapturing (the)
almost forgotten sense of wonder and learning from rocks and trees and all the life that is found there, truths that can encompass all…. I must leave it as beautiful as I found it. Nothing must ever happen there that might detract in the slightest from what it now had.”

We’re working on it, Sig. We’re working on it.
—Douglas Wood (President of LPF)

“Wilderness Canoe Country: Minnesota’s Greatest Recreational Asset”

By Sigurd F. Olson
published in Naturalist, 1967

The Value of Wilderness

The wilderness canoe country is northern Minnesota’s greatest recreational asset. Outside of its beauty, uniqueness, historical significance and fishing, it has a quality that other lake and forest areas do not possess, its primitive character. This is the magnet that draws people, the fact that here alone in the Midwest one can still see country as it looked before settlement. Should this quality disappear, it would lose what millions have come to cherish in a land where wilderness is fast becoming a rarity.

Conservationists have been trying to save this quality of the BWCA for almost half a century. The efforts have been many, no matter what the threats, and the objectives always the same. The road program of the twenties, the power dam proposals, the raising of water levels and the logging of the shorelines, airplanes and airplane resorts, all had they not been curbed would have destroyed in each case the wilderness itself.

When one pictures what could have happened had one of these gone through, the dams of a great power complex, submerging lakes as deep as eighty feet along the border, drowning islands, rapids, waterfalls, beaches, and campsites, destroying forests and creating vast swamps and ugly sloughs far inland, there would have been little to protect today.

Greater use, however, brings its own hazards to the wilderness, especially when it means mechanization in the form of outboard motors, snowmobiles, and other craft or vehicles. It is my firm belief that mechanized use of any kind in this small area is
destructive of wilderness values and that it should be strictly regulated and in time eliminated entirely.

Opponents of such regulation point at Canada, saying it permits airplanes, airplane resorts, and unrestricted motor boat use, that we have lost business now going north. This may be true to a certain extent, but it must be recognized that the BWCA is only a million acres whereas Canada has hundreds of millions of acres of forested lakes and waterways accessible by air.

Due to its relatively small size, the BWCA cannot stand such types of use. Canada due to its vastness can absorb it. However, Ontario has banned snowmobiles in all its provincial parks including the Quetico as detrimental to wilderness values, fish and wildlife.

No one likes regulation, but regulation is mandatory when large numbers of people use any area. Fifty years ago there were no highway patrols, or stop and go signs, nor was there any need for zoning in towns and cities. We did not need regulations then but we do now. The BWCA as a part of a national forest needs such protection through zoning if it is to be properly administered and protected.

As our population increases, and it may double by the end of the century, with more leisure time and better transportation
facilities, pressures will become greater and greater. Our responsibility today is to plan as wisely as we can to preserve
the wilderness character of an area that belongs not only to us but to every man, woman, and child in the United States. This is
not a local issue but a national one, and whatever is done must reflect the needs of all the people. Our obligation is a great
one, to preserve this area unchanged for coming generations who will need it far more than us….

The Local Economy

The canoe outfitting business is a substantial and important source of income to the area. For some years I ran the Border Lakes Outfitting Company at Winton and know from personal experience that canoe parties leave good U.S. dollars not only with outfitters, but with motels, hotels, restaurants, gas stations, and stores.

A prominent local outfitter recently had his parties fill out a questionnaire as to the actual money spent on canoe trips, the final figure averaging about $40.00 per person. If this is a normal expenditure and there are 50,000 people going into the canoe country annually, it will amount to $2,000,000. There are indications that this figure might well be doubled and the U.S. Forest Service estimates that some 250,000 people use the Boundary Waters Canoe Area each season. For those who believe that canoeists leave little money, such figures are hard to contradict.

Camping as a form of recreation has exploded all over the United States. With better equipment, more leisure, and improved access, whole families are taking to the road and nothing will stop the trend. It is like the boom in skiing and the phenomenal growth of ski resorts. People have discovered that this is the best and most economical way to enjoy the country and canoe trips are part of the pattern. That is why they come in ever-increasing numbers and will continue as long as the canoe country retains its character as the only lake wilderness of its kind in the United States.

Multiple Use and Zoning

The concept of Multiple Use is a sound one and a major premise in management of the U.S. Forest Service. Only when it is understood, however, that all uses must not be practiced on every acre does it accomplish its true purpose. In the
congressional act establishing this broad concept, wilderness is specifically recognized as a legitimate use in all national forests.

One fact that is usually overlooked is that the Boundary Waters Canoe Area is only the upper third of the Superior National Forest and that the balance of over two million acres of land and water can be used for recreational developments of all kinds in accordance with Forest Service planning and protection, scenic roads, resorts and lodges, snowmobile trails, free outboard motor use, timber utilization and mining. In this much larger part of the forest all such utilization is possible.

The slogan of “Saving our Wilderness through Multiple Use” is sound only in the proper application of the concept, but is absolutely erroneous if it means the kind of management and utilization allowed in the rest of the forest. The wilderness was here long before white men came, needs no logging or mechanized use to survive, only protection. Those who believe that through a continuation of timber harvesting and other adverse uses the wilderness can be saved violate the true concept of zoning.

Correctly interpreted, the idea of zoning the canoe country for wilderness use and relegating all other uses to the major part of the forest is the only hope for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. If it is to remain unchanged and inviolate this is the only course and not too much to ask for the American people.

Preserving Listening Point

 

You can help preserve this historical site!

The passage of time and the weathering effects of the elements are taking their toll on the Listening Point structures. In 2009 Sig’s cedar dock needed to be replaced. Last year we restored the cabin’s iconic stone steps and a section of the fireplace hearth. In addition, the entire stone foundation of the cabin was rebuilt. Exactly re-positioning each stone required a special touch and know-how. Now Sig’s sauna is showing signs of decline.

Listening Point was the key to Sigurd Olson’s heart and soul. For a quarter century it provided him the insights, inspiration and perspective that helped him to become one of the leading literary and conservation voices of his era.

The Listening Point Foundation Board of Directors has created a fund dedicated to the long-term maintenance of the Point. If we are able to raise $15,000, a generous supporter has agreed to match that amount. To date, individuals have given more than $9000 toward this goal. Now, we need to hear from you! Would you please consider donating to the Listening Point Preservation Fund today, thus doubling the impact of your investment in the Point?  Just click the Donate button at the top and fill in the amount at PayPal.

With your help, we can preserve the natural and historic integrity of Listening Point in perpetuity, so that it can continue to serve future generations as a place of inspiration and a symbol of wilderness, just as it did for Sig.

Wild Islands of the Shield

by Sigurd F. Olson

One day in the Far North we fought a gale on Black Bear Lake of the Churchill River in Saskatchewan. It was a glorious sunny day and along the muskegs the air was alive with the screaming of gulls and terns, a day that made up for the drenching storms, treacherous rapids, and portages we had known for a week.

Black Bear was a magnificent body of water, the shores high and rocky and covered with the dark green of jackpine and spruce, the valleys in lighter shades of aspen, birch, and willow. In places, the glaciated shores of the Canadian Shield were silvery grey with caribou moss and some of the rocks were splashed vividly with orange. Then we passed through a narrows, left the mainland with its vistas and waves, and found ourselves in a veritable maze of islands and intricate channels where it was still and reflections were all around us.

Here was a different world, a world removed from bold headlands, purple horizons, and winds, and as we paddled on, our minds became part of it and we sensed the mystery and charm of all islands, a sense of being part of something permanent and unchanged. Here was silence and shelter.

Toward late afternoon we drifted toward a small spruce-grown island a few miles from a rapids we must run or portage the next day.  There we decided to camp.

No one, as far as we could tell, had ever stopped there before, no axe marks or scuffed moss, no blackened stones of an old fireplace. We were possibly the first and felt like intruders coming to a sacred place. We left no mark of our passing, built a small fire in a rocky cleft near the water’s edge, pitched the tent on a level spot thick with sphagnum in an opening among  the spruces, tying the tent ropes to two small trees, anchoring the corners with rocks, careful not to disturb the lichens growing on them. We would leave our sanctuary as we found it, clean and unchanged.

It was an untouched microcosm, this island. The great fires that were in constant evidence on the mainland all over the north, through some miracle had passed it by. After supper we sat on a flat ledge above the fire and looked out over the islands around us. Hemmed in as we were, there was no sunset, but the sky above was angry with swirling black clouds streaked with yellow that could mean wind in the morning. It was good to be on an island again — almost like being on a ship at sea.

The deep sphagnum in the spruces proved that nothing had changed for a century or more and its ecology had reached a stage of permanence rare in northern latitudes. Even though the shores of the big lake seemed relatively unchanged by recent burns, few places were as pristine as this. On this tiny pinnacle of hard resistant granite that had survived millions of years of erosion and glacial polishing, time had stopped.

Around us were many islands, little ones no larger than rafts, slivers of rock rounded by the glacier like the backs of black surfacing whales, crooked ones with beaches tucked into quiet bays, larger ones with cliffs and spruces pinnacled against the sky. You could lose yourself quickly here, for channels led to hidden places no other eyes had seen. Their solitudes were ours alone.

All islands of the Canadian Shield, wherever they happen to be in the Quetico-Superior or the Far North, have this sense of remoteness and genius of place that makes them seem different than ordinary terrain. Here one finds a sense of perspective and of being more intimately involved with all life and undisturbed ecological progression than anywhere else, a becoming  art of the cosmic cycles that govern all. This is one reason they are important, but there are other reasons, too, reasons more than beauty, remoteness, or charm. It is a better understanding of the intimate interrelationships of all forms of life upon them. Only through the building of knowledge from the microcosm beneath the forest floor to the inter-dependence of all things growing upon them can we really become aware of their true value.

The work of an ecologist like Miron Heinselman and others who have devoted their lives to the study of habitats and living forms in all their complex relationships, helps us know what any island means. Only by knowing their uniqueness can we be successful in preserving them. The Nature Conservancy in preserving some untouched islands in the Superior National Forest and on Lake Superior, the cooperation of the U.S. Forest Service, the Department of Natural Resources of Minnesota, and the vital interest of environmental groups will make this possible so people of the future will be able to see what they looked like before our coming.

Donne said, “No man is an island unto himself.” No truer words were ever spoken, for any island is a part of the whole. By knowing an island you know all wilderness.

[box type=”info” style=”rounded”]Sigurd F. Olson wrote this wonderful island essay in 1975. It was published in the Naturalist, the quarterly magazine of the Natural History Society of Minnesota. The Naturalist did not enjoy as broadly national a circulation as had Sig’s books, so this essay has remained mostly unknown outside of Minnesota, and little known in the state.

The incident about which Sig wrote occurred on his long canoe trip in 1955 along the Churchill River in Saskatchewan. Sig wrote at length about that canoe trip in his book, The Lonely Land, published in 1961. The camping on the island incident comes from pages 139-143 of that book.

Sig wrote this essay as an introduction to this issue of the Naturalist, which focused on the Nature Conservancy. But he wrote it particularly to introduce the article that followed his, written by Dr. Miron L. “Bud” Heinselman.  Bud’s article, “Islands as Unique Environments: The Minnesota Nature Conservancy’s Boreal Islands Project,” mostly described Pine and Snellman Islands on Burntside Lake, located close to Sig’s Listening Point.

Sig and Bud had been close friends since the late 1950s. They had worked together through the Izaak Walton League on BWCA issues from then on into the 1960s, and Sig was impressed with Bud’s ecological research and understanding. In 1965, Sig recommended Bud to U.S. Forest Service officials as a forest ecologist for a new agency ecological research program in the BWCA, a position to which Bud indeed was appointed. As the years went on, Sig relied more and more on Bud’s ecological knowledge, based on Bud’s extensive field research on peatlands ecology, forest ecology, and fire ecology.

Interestingly, Sig modified his island essay somewhat from the original narrative that appeared in The Lonely Land. In the essay, Sig and his group had a lighter impact on the island than the way he wrote about it in the book. This heightened ecological sensitivity in the essay may have come about because Sig himself had become more ecologically aware in the two decades since the canoe trip, or because of Bud Heinselman’s influence on Sig’s ecological understanding, or for some other reason. Regardless, “Wild Islands of the Shield” is a delightful essay written by the fully mature writer that Sig had become by 1975.

— by Kevin Proescholdt, conservation director for Wilderness Watch, a national wilderness conservation organization (www.wildernesswatch.org). He also serves on the LPF’s National Advisory Board.[/box]

Listening Point Named to National Historic Registry in 2007

This article was published in the Summer 2008 Listening Point Foundation newsletter.

By Kevin Proescholdt

It’s official: Listening Point, the land and cabin on Burntside Lake near Ely that provided respite and inspiration for conservationist and author Sigurd F. Olson, has been named to the National Register of Historic Places.

“We are delighted by this official recognition of the importance of both Sigurd Olson and of Listening Point,” said Chuck Wick of Ely, Vice-Chair of the Listening Point Foundation and a lifelong friend of Olson’s.  “On the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Listening Point Foundation, it is a strong validation by the federal government of the importance of our work.”

“Not every property nominated makes it to the National Register,” explained Tim Rudnicki, Chair of the Listening Point Foundation. “We
submitted a lengthy and detailed application to the National Register, and our application then underwent a rigorous evaluation process. This
honor will aid our foundation in its work of preserving the Listening Point property as well as Sigurd Olson’s legacy of wilderness education.”

Sigurd Olson (1899-1982) was a nationally recognized wilderness advocate who actively promoted wilderness conservation with national organizations like the Izaak Walton League, National Parks Association, and the Wilderness Society. Though he worked on wilderness issues across the country, he worked for many decades to protect his beloved Quetico-Superior region, the international area that includes the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Quetico Provincial Park, and Voyageurs  National Park.

Olson also became one of the nation’s most loved wilderness authors. His evocative writing captured the canoe country in nine books like The Singing Wilderness (1956), Listening Point (1958), and Reflections from the North Country (1976). Sigurd Olson created Listening Point in
1956 as a private retreat. It became widely known and celebrated after Alfred Knopf published Olson’s book of the same name two years later.

The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of historic properties recognized by the federal government as worthy of preservation for their significance in American history, architecture, archaeology, engineering, and culture. The National Register was created in 1966 and is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect our significant historic places under the provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act.

The Listening Point Foundation, Inc., a nonprofit charitable organization, was established in 1998 and is dedicated to furthering Sigurd Olson’s legacy of wilderness education, and preserving Listening Point, the rugged northern Minnesota lakeshore property. The Listening Point  Foundation owns and cares for Listening Point, conducts visits for the interested public, publishes wilderness education materials, and sponsors
wilderness educational programs.