If not for the Cold War (1945–1991), there might well have been a national park in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains.
Figure 1. David Simons of Springfield, Oregon, 1936–1960. Source: Bruce Kilgore.
I generally eschew counterfactuals, but if David Simons had not died at age twenty-four on December 21, 1960, after being drafted into the US Army, his passion, drive, knowledge, and persistence could have resulted in a 790,000-acre Cascade Volcanic National Park that he envisioned and strenuously strived for—and possibly much more. (At the end of this post you’ll find a copy of Simons’s map for the never-realized national park, along with some extensive commentary by me.)
A Brief But Shining Moment
In his brief time among us, Simons was instrumental in the establishment of North Cascades National Park in Washington and was just turning his focus to the establishment of a Cascade Volcanic National Park in Oregon.
Simons was born in Houghton, Michigan, on June 7, 1936. When he was five, his family moved to Oregon, first to Klamath Falls, then Eugene, and finally Springfield. As a young adult, he joined the Obsidians, the local climbing and hiking club, as well as the Save the McKenzie River Association and the Friends of the Three Sisters Society.
In the 1950s, the Forest Service reclassified the Three Sisters Primitive Area as the Three Sisters Wilderness (an administrative designation prior to enactment of the Wilderness Act of 1964). The only problem was that the agency made a clear-cut choice to drop 53,000 acres in the upgrade, including every tree wanted by loggers. The sacrificial zone was the subject of the long-running Battle for French Pete. Simons threw himself into the cause of French Pete but would die long before a triumphal victory. The debacle convinced Simons that National Park System protection was the best, if not only, way to save at least parts of the National Forest System.
From 1956 to 1959, Simons spent summers in the Cascades, taking photographs, writing, and sending letters to promote new national parks. As a founding board member of the North Cascades Conservation Council, Simons was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the establishment of North Cascades National Park in a part of the former Oregon Territory. Alas, he didn’t live to see that either, with the park being established in 1968.
In October 1959, Simons published a piece in the Sierra Club Bulletin, “These Are the Shining Mountains,” introducing his plan for a Cascade Volcanic National Park. A decade later, during the introduction of a bill directing the National Park Service to study a national park in the Oregon Cascades, Senator Mark Hatfield (R-OR) quoted from Simons’s seminal article. (See my Public Lands Blog post “National Parks in Oregon, Part 2: Multiple Failures.”) The study bill went nowhere and Simons’s vision for a Cascade Volcanic National Park soon died.
An Irreplaceable Loss to Conservation
Just as Simons was beginning to reach his conservation stride, the draft board caught up with him. He had been neglecting his studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in favor of public lands conservation. At the time, one could avoid the draft with a college deferment, but one had to keep up the grades. The Army assigned him to special warfare work (in this case, propaganda) at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. There, David Ralph Simons died on December 21, 1960, from hepatitis.
Legendary global conservationist David Brower (who said, “Polite conservationists leave no mark save for scars on the Earth that could have been prevented had they stood their ground,” my all-time favorite Brower quote) was devastated by Simons’s death. He was executive director of the Sierra Club at that time and wrote, “I don’t know how the Cascades of Oregon and Washington could have had a better friend. . . . His incisive and abundant wit—all evidence of a young man of exceeding insight, a young man of real genius. . . . We need another David Simons, but Springfield, Oregon, cannot be expected to produce another.”
On December 27, 1960, Brower wrote a memorial for Simons published in the Sierra Club Bulletin:
In odd hours of off-duty time this past year, in a barrack a continent away, he tried to bring into focus the vitally needed conservation material he had gathered. Odd hours were not enough but he tried anyway. He rode a bus across the continent and back—at his own expense—to attend an organization meeting of the Oregon Cascades Conservation Council (he was also a director of the North Cascades Conservation Council in Washington), and by letter he invigorated it. He traveled up to Washington DC on weekend passes to talk to conservationists there, and it was there that I last saw him in October—and felt from him the urgent need for still more action on behalf of the scenic resources of the Pacific Northwest.
One of the sad things is that so few people know how very much David did, including the stirring of people at least twice his age into action, and well-advised action, too. Few will know how great a loss his death means to conservation. It means that much history which should have been written, now cannot be—not in the absence of the unique combination of talents David was. But perhaps we can improvise, put most of the pieces together in some semblance of the order he would have worked out.
We can try, and Dave would like that.
Legendary Pacific Northwest conservationist and writer Harvey Manning closed out his 1975 tribute to Simons in Backpacker magazine with this:
Momentum of the North Cascades campaign was becoming irresistible, and Dave’s goal for that region was partially achieved with the creation of the North Cascades National Park. The Cascade Volcanic National Park, however, remains a dream. With Dave’s absence the movement lost critical mass.
There are those who feel Dave’s most significant contribution may well have been his example. In the Northwest no recruit to conservation is lightly dismissed by elders because of youth. Always there is the thought, the hope, that he or she may be another Simons. Since Dave’s time many a campaign has been led by men and women in their twenties, even in their teens.
Pat Goldsworthy, president of the North Cascades Conservation Council and chief leader of the victory of 1968, stresses an important lesson of Dave’s life.
“Young people, and older ones too, forever are coming to me wanting to help but saying they’re too ignorant to be of any use. Well, I tell them about Dave. I tell how, at the age of 20, he’d never seen the North Cascades and in two years was the person we all looked to as our expert on what should be done to preserve the area. I tell them to do as he did: spot a need that isn’t being filled, pick a subject without an expert—and become the expert, become the leader, learn by doing.
“Age doesn’t matter. Neither does sex or previous experience. All you have to have is the feeling, the dedication.
“There still are plenty of wilderness valleys nobody in conservation circles knows much about, and marshes, ravines and beaches near or even inside cities nobody ever has given proper attention. The North Cascades, a nation, the whole world are full of places waiting for the one special friend who will make the difference.”
Dave Simons is the proof. You don’t have to be old to be wise.
At Simons’s memorial service, the Presbyterian Reverend D. Hugh Peniston said:
Often people say “No one is indispensable,” but this is not true. Every human being is unique, but when a person discovers the real purpose of his life, the unique purpose for which it seems he was created, he becomes irreplaceable, and there is no one else who can fill the gap which he leaves when he dies. I suppose only a few people really discover this purpose, but to do so is the richest satisfaction of life. David Simons discovered it in a few short years, thus going beyond many who have not discovered it in a long lifetime.
David Simons’s Legacy: Map of the Proposed Cascade Volcanic National Park
In “National Parks in Oregon, Part 2,” I wrote of the failed attempt to establish a Cascade Volcanic National Park. I wrote that I had never seen a map and then speculated on what it might have included, based on what I had read. After reading my blog post, Oregon conservationist and Sierra Club Oregon Chapter historian Ron Eber promptly sent me a copy of David Simons’s map (Map 1), a map I had long heard of but had never seen.
Map 1. The proposed Cascade Volcanic National Park map drawn by David Simons in 1959. Source: Ron Eber.
Some commentary on the map:
• The Mount Jefferson Primitive Area (labeled 1 on the map) was established in 1930. It was somewhat expanded into the Mount Jefferson Wilderness in 1968. Approximately 6,800 acres were added in 1984. More could be added.
• The Upper McKenzie River (labeled 2 on the map, with no outline) was also proposed to be part of the Cascade Volcanic National Park. A narrow corridor along much, but not all, of the McKenzie River was protected as a wild and scenic river in 1988. The McKenzie Wild and Scenic River is ripe for expansion, including tributary streams.
• On February 5, 1957, the Forest Service converted the Three Sisters Primitive Area (labeled 4 and 5 on the map), established in 1937, to the Three Sisters Wilderness (just 4 on the map). In doing so, the agency lopped off 53,000 acres so the timber could be clear-cut (labeled 5 on the map and outlined with a dashed line). Later, Congress included 45,000 acres of greater French Pete in the Three Sisters Wilderness. While the acres overlapped, we lost some of the original 53,000 acres. However, we got even lower-elevation emerging old-growth forest that was never in the Three Sisters Primitive Area.
• As political mitigation for lopping off a portion (labeled 5 on the map) of the Three Sisters Primitive Area when upgrading it to the Three Sisters Wilderness Area, at the same time the agency established the Mount Washington Wild Area (labeled 3 on the map) and the Diamond Peak Wild Area (labeled 7 on the map). The two new wild areas had no commercially valuable timber.
• The area around and including Waldo Lake (labeled 6 on the map and outlined with a dashed line) was a Forest Service “Limited Area.” Roading and logging were deferred pending further study for possible protection as a wilderness, wild, or primitive area. Congress designated the North Fork Middle Fork Willamette as a wild and scenic river in 1988. Waldo Lake became an Oregon Scenic Waterway in 1989.
• Prior to the enactment of the Wilderness Act in 1964, the Forest Service had administratively allocated certain lands to wilderness, wild, or primitive area status. A wilderness area and a wild area were managed as wilderness, with the former having to be larger than 100,000 acres. A primitive area could be of any size and didn’t have as many restrictions as a wilderness or wild area.
• Significant parts of the proposed national park remain roadless and should be added to existing wilderness areas or be made new wilderness areas.
• Many of the free-flowing streams are still free flowing (the “Cougar damsite” in Simons’s 1959 map is now damned by the US Army Corps of Engineers) and are worthy of wild and scenic river status.
• Local Sierra Club activists in the Keep Waldo Wild campaign are proposing “75,000 acres of the Waldo Lake area” as either additions to the Waldo Lake and Three Sisters Wilderness, or as a Waldo Forest Conservation Area—a wilderness-lite designation that allows mountain bikes. The proposal offers no protection for the roaded portions of the Waldo Lake area, nor for Waldo Lake itself. (But heck, even the current Waldo Lake Wilderness doesn’t include Waldo Lake.) One cannot be certain, but I’m reasonably confident that if Dave Simons were alive and kicking today at eighty-four years of age, he would exhort today’s Sierra Club to go for more, much more (so too would Dave Brower).
• Oregon conservationists should ponder the Simons boundary with an eye toward establishing a comprehensive network of both overarching national whatever (recreation, monument, protection, whatever) areas with underlying wilderness and wild and scenic river protection where possible—and, of course, their imaginations should not be limited by Simons’s 1959 boundary!
For More Information
• Manning, Harvey. “You Don’t Have to Be Old to Be an Elder,” Backpacker, Spring 1975, 55–59, 84–89.
• Highlights of Mt. Baker History Reading from Monday Night Campfire. Obsidians, Eugene, OR, 2004.