Farewell, Prejudiced NPCA

by Drew Hanson

Areas of the National Park System are outstanding places to enjoy on foot. One organization gets a lot of attention for its efforts on behalf of the National Park Service but this writer’s 17-year experience exposes a prejudice. Following up on Mountain Majesty Bias, below is most of my October 11, 2006 letter to National Parks Conservation Association.

Dear National Parks Conservation Association,

Since 1990 I have been a devoted member of National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA). I have read, usually cover to cover, every edition of National Parks magazine and saved every one of them. Since 1990 my life list of visited units of the National Park System has grown from three to 71.

But your article “The Fourth Coast” is trying my patience and testing my allegiance. Although the article represents a long-overdue treatment by NPCA of Great Lakes and more broadly freshwater issues, NPCA’s bias against the Heartland portion of the United States still shows.

The map that appeared on page 25 was by far most upsetting. It shows Mississippi River and Recreation Area and St. Croix National Scenic River even though both are entirely outside the Great Lakes watershed, places the label for the North Country National Scenic Trail a hundred miles out of place and omits the Ice Age National Scenic Trail entirely. The Ice Age National Scenic Trail is partly within the Great Lakes watershed, the St. Croix and Mississippi parks are not.

A dozen times over these 16+ years I have written letters or emails to NPCA describing one facet or another of the national park in my backyard, the Ice Age National Scenic Trail, but not once has NPCA mentioned the Ice Age Trail (IAT) in National Parks. Here was your chance to provide some glimmer of hope for the thousands of IAT volunteers (whose VIP hours total rank in the top ten of the entire National Park System each of the past several years) that NPCA is on our side. Here was your chance to show that you pay attention to your members. But you blew this chance to provide even token recognition.

The sting inflicted by your latest anti-Heartland bias might have been less severe had you not labeled the North Country Trail (NCT) at all because the IAT and NCT are both “non-units” of the National Park System. I am perplexed as to why instead of labeling both or neither you would choose to label only one. Both the IAT and NCT are great trails and could be great units of the National Park System if treated reasonably.

Why has NPCA been so insulting to those of us who labor on this non-traditional park, the Ice Age National Scenic Trail?

Given NPCA’s record of taking my money but ignoring my pleas, I cannot help but note that my NPCA membership is set to expire 6/30/07. That gives NPCA eight more months to say something constructive about the Ice Age National Scenic Trail in National Parks magazine. Anything short of that will lead to a very disappointed member redirecting his annual donation to some other deserving cause.

Best regards…

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I never received a response from NPCA. So as promised, my membership with them ended on June 30, 2007. The 17-year stack of National Parks magazines went into the recycling bin. No sweat. My life list of National Park Service areas continues to grow without NPCA.

You don’t need to support NPCA to learn about and support the conservation of national park areas. If you want to support an organization that does fantastic conservation work in the Heartland region of the country, give to the Ice Age Trail Alliance. If you want to support an effective national or international conservation organization, I recommend The Nature Conservancy or The Conservation Fund. If you enjoy reading news about the National Park Service, a great website and list serve is National Parks Traveler, which runs balanced and informed stories about places in the Heartland and beyond.




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Conserving our Legacy of Forests

by Drew Hanson
 

A version of this article appeared a decade ago as the cover story of Mammoth Tales.

Forest areas in north central Wisconsin were permanently protected from development in 2002 under a landmark easement. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) and the landowner, Tomahawk Timberlands, led the effort to protect 35,000 acres of working forest. The conserved areas are in several large blocks.

The State’s easement with Tomahawk Timberlands ensures the following in perpetuity:

·         the land cannot be subdivided into smaller parcels;

·         development of buildings is not allowed;

·         public hunting, fishing, and hiking are allowed;

·         sustainable timber harvest can continue.

Preventing the subdivision and development of these 35,000 acres means that road densities will remain low and a more natural setting remains for critters to thrive and pedestrians to explore.

One of the bigger blocks protected by the easement is along the Ice Age Trail in western Lincoln County. A separate 1999 easement protected only a narrow strip for almost five miles of Ice Age Trail through this property. The 2002 easement, known as a forest legacy easement, adds another level of protection to a much larger area around the Trail.

Almost 70% of forests in Wisconsin are privately owned. During the past couple of decades, our forests have been increasingly subdivided into smaller parcels and developed. At the same time, some companies that own forestland are being bought out by interests that do not necessarily share our love of and livelihood from Wisconsin’s forests. Should these trends continue into the decades ahead, we could expect vast areas of forests to be subdivided and developed.

The Forest Legacy Program is here to help. A private land conservation program administered by the U.S. Forest Service, the Forest Legacy Program provides financial assistance primarily for the purchase of conservation easements on forested lands. WDNR and private land trusts, such as The Nature Conservancy and the Ozaukee-Washington Land Trust, are leading the implementation of the program in Wisconsin.

The voluntary program leverages private and other public funds to provide Americans with a bigger bang for their conservation buck. In 2001, over 700,000 acres were conserved across the nation using $60 million from the Forest Legacy Program to protect forestlands with a value of $151 million.

Funding for the Forest Legacy Program is provided on a project-by-project basis by Congress.

Great Hiking Protected Near Rib Lake

Terminal moraine is the prized landform of the Ice Age National Scenic Trail. It makes for great hiking, beautiful scenery and roughly defines the route of the Ice Age Trail. But to hike the entire Ice Age Trail involves walking only about 12 miles of terminal moraine.

So the protection of a 156-acre property on the terminal moraine in Taylor County is an especially exciting accomplishment. The Ice Age Trail Alliance announced the news today in a press release. The purchase will permanently protect the route of the Ice Age National Scenic Trail through the property--part of a larger effort to create a premier hike between Rib Lake and a vast block of Taylor County Forest. Already known in Ice Age Trail circles for its August Ice Age Days, the Rustic Inn and Camp 28, the future looks even greener for Rib Lake!

Kevin Thusius, the Alliance's Director of Land Conservation, stated, "We feel very lucky to be able to protect this property so generations of Ice Age Trail users can enjoy it." The property also features an old growth stand of oak and pine.

A Grand-Pappy on the Property

The Alliance is planning to relocate the existing route of the Trail through the property. It currently runs on a wide gravel woods road but will be redesigned into a more natural footpath that allows pedestrians to enjoy the outstanding geologic features under the canopy of mature woods. A public parking lot along State Highway 102 is also planned to provide better public access to the Trail.

The property was purchased by the Alliance within the seller’s timeline with financing from The Conservation Fund’s Land Conservation Loan Program. The Alliance is seeking funds from the state’s Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program and the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund to finance the purchase and repay the loan.

"Recognizing a serious threat to the natural viewshed enjoyed by hikers on the Ice Age Trail, the Alliance swiftly developed a conservation strategy to save the historical landscape." said Reggie Hall, Director of the Fund’s LCLP. "We’re honored to provide quick financial assistance to the Alliance for this effort to preserve and enhance access to significant geographic features along the beloved scenic trail."

The Ice Age Trail Alliance is a nonprofit volunteer- and member-based organization established in 1958 that works to build, maintain and promote the Ice Age National Scenic Trail. One of only 11 National Scenic Trails, the Ice Age Trail is a thousand-mile footpath that highlights Wisconsin's world-renowned Ice Age heritage and natural resources. Visit www.iceagetrail.org to learn more.

The Conservation Fund is a top-ranked, national nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting America’s favorite places before they become just a memory. A hallmark of the Fund’s work is the deep, unwavering understanding that for conservation solutions to last, they need to make economic sense. Through its Land Conservation Loan Program, the Fund provides bridge financing and real estate expertise to help land trusts conserve historic farms, natural areas, favorite community parks and more. Learn more at www.conservationfund.org.

Ray Zillmer Retraces an Ancient Trail through British Columbia

by Drew Hanson

Most people know of Ray Zillmer as the father of the Ice Age Trail and founder of the Ice Age Trail Alliance. Fewer know that he was a prominent Milwaukee attorney, leader of the Izaak Walton League and instrumental in the State’s purchase of lands for the Kettle Moraine State Forest. In this article, we see another side of this amazing person: as an accomplished backpacker, mountaineer and outdoorsman.

After reading the diary of the explorer Alexander Mackenzie, Ray Zillmer later wrote, “There was always with me the thought that I must take the overland pack trip of Mackenzie.” The 1792-93 journey Mackenzie and his nine comrades took across Canada was the first recorded transcontinental crossing of North America north of Mexico—twelve years prior to Lewis and Clark’s voyage of discovery.

The area of Mackenzie’s travels that most captured Zillmer’s imagination was in the mountains of western Canada. Since there were no guidebooks of the route and not even large scale topographic maps of the area, Zillmer wrote letters to all who might have useful information to help him plan a trip through the still wild country. He found scant reliable news. The manager of a remote lodge near Bella Coola wrote, “This is an extremely arduous trip, the trails are not well defined and the country only very thinly populated by Indians.”

At roughly 250 miles, the route crossed the Telegraph Range, Nechako Plateau, Coast Mountains and parts of present-day Tweedsmuir and Kluskoil Lake provincial parks. No one since Mackenzie had duplicated his route.

Ray Zillmer

During the 1930s-40s, Ray Zillmer built an impressive mountaineering resume in British Columbia. He joined the Canadian Alpine Club in 1931 and solo hiked around the Drummond and St. Bride glaciers in 1933. In 1937, he and a Swiss alpinist set-up a temporary base camp for 30 climbers on the snow-slopes of Mt. Collie at 9500 feet. For 1938, he made it his mission to retrace the footsteps of Mackenzie on an ancient trail between the Fraser and Bella Coola rivers.

Lorin Tiefenthaler

Accompanying Zillmer would be a young Lorin Tiefenthaler, also of Milwaukee. Zillmer described him as, “more than six feet in height, over two hundred pounds in weight, strong, healthy, considerably younger than I, and a splendid companion. He had never been in the western mountains before and was without any experience in backpacking, but he learned quickly.”

Zillmer’s description of their journey was published in the 1938 Canadian Alpine Journal—the primary source for this article.

The two men set out from Prince George, British Columbia on June 28, 1938. One of Zillmer’s “greatest concerns was to locate the Mackenzie trail where it left the Fraser”. After some searching, they found, “a faint trail. It was 4.30 p.m., we were not in condition, our packs were at their heaviest, and the way to the plateau above was very steep, and, just as Mackenzie did, we found the next hour the hardest on our trip. Hereafter we were to have many experiences such as Mackenzie related in his diary.”

Ray Zillmer's hand-drawn map of his 1938 trek

Chief among the similarities was the scarcity of water. While they could sometimes see lakes and rivers in the distance, they found little water to drink during their first few days. The first night they found only “a small, stagnant, shallow pool among the trees. It was full of debris, mosquito larvae, and tasted of decaying vegetable matter. I strained it through a clean cloth and drank it. Lorin could not bring himself to drinking it. We had only soup and apricots. We expected to be sick that night from the water. However, we slept well, and the next morning we enjoyed a meal cooked with this water.”

There were important differences between the Zillmer and Mackenzie expeditions as well. “Whereas Mackenzie travelled with Indians most of the time, met them almost every day, and learned the route from them. We saw no Indians until the twelfth day, and no whites on the entire trip.”

Another difference was the forest. During Mackenzie’s time, the route was well established by trading between interior and coastal people. But Zillmer found, “there was much more timber than in the time of Mackenzie, so that we had almost no open views. This made the task of following the route more difficult.”

Near their crossing of the Euchiniko River, for instance, they faced several confusing route options. Hours later it turned out they chose the wrong option. Zillmer recounted, “For less than a day we had been off his trail, but now we were on it again.”

They carried no gun but Zillmer did have a fishing pole. On their second evening of fishing for their supper Zillmer wrote, “With a casting rod of which the top section was missing, and a small bass plug, I fished three pools adjoining fast water. Approximately twenty casts netted fifteen bites and ten rainbows weighing about two pounds each. On one cast I caught two fish on the two hooks of the plug. I never fished after that for it was too easy, and besides, we did not have time for it.”

Along the way there was a lupine-rich alpine meadow, traversing a one-foot ledge across a cliff, views of snow-capped peaks, part of a day negotiating three canyons, several waterfalls and other trials great and small.

Of the final days of the trek, Zillmer wrote of the downward descent, “our toes were constantly pressed against the front of our shoes. As a consequence, both of us lost the nails of our big toes. Our feet were badly swollen and blistered. Lorin lost thirty-two pounds and I fourteen. However, we had not experienced cold weather as we had expected from Mackenzie’s account.”

On their 16^th day, they reached Bella Coola where they recuperated for a week. Taking special comfort from a rustic Tweedsmuir Lodge, Zillmer wrote, “Our clothes were rags, so we wore clothes kindly loaned us until we were again completely outfitted a few days later. I have always wanted English flannels and here in this outpost I got them, and they were altered to fit me by a daughter of a pioneer settler of the valley, a settler who had come from Wisconsin, my own state.”

From Bowling Pins to Land Conservation

by Drew Hanson

As a boy, I heard a story about a maple woods that was in the family long ago. The woods were handed down from one generation to the next until all the grandest old trees were cut down. The story ended with how the maple trees were turned into, of all things, bowling pins.

The story stuck with me and in my mind the woods slowly took on an enchanting quality.

I grew up in rural Marinette County, where my dad’s family has been since the Meyers arrived during the Civil War. Some of them survived the Great Peshtigo Fire of 1871. The land where my parents built the home where I grew up was part of another family line—farmsteaded by my great-great grandparents, the Kellers. Other family lines, like the Jaegers and Hansens, had farmsteads nearby.

Going through the Marinette public schools, quite a few other kids were what my grandparents called shirt-tail relation. So when I left college at UW-Marinette to attend UW-Madison, I joked that I needed to leave town so I wouldn’t accidentally marry a cousin.

Years later I was searching microfiche for old family stories in newspapers at the State Historical Society Library in Madison. There I found a story from 1896 of my great-great grandfather Jaeger who was delivering milk when the horse pulling the wagon lost all composure at a railroad crossing. Jaeger was thrown to the ground, the wagon badly damaged and the horse injured so that it was shot on the spot. Not the sort of thing you see today, eh?!

More satisfying, though, were the small news items that mentioned the place Hansen Maple Grove or just Hansen Grove. It was noted as a meeting place for church and school groups to gather for picnics and as the residence in the obituaries for some family members. This was the maple woods of my family lore and judging from the stories, it was a place that must have held special meaning for not only my ancestors but for their neighbors too. It made me proud.

Thrilled, I soon visited. But today it is a different place—nothing enchanting or grand about it. A private home stands in the middle. As a place for family and neighbors to gather, relax and recreate, Hansen Maple Grove is gone. It is like a ghost town—only a ghost woods. It would be easy to blame the landowner for the loss of that woods but they probably had few options. We should assume they needed the money from the harvest of those big trees. They did what they needed to do and they had every right to do it.

As a place shared with the community, Hansen Maple Grove existed for about a half-century. It was a time, at least in northeast Wisconsin, before public parks and public picnic grounds. In the vastness of rural America in those days, neighbors let neighbors walk through each others’ woods.

Out of my combination of pride and sadness came a motivation to be a conservationist, to do my small part to help other places like Hansen Maple Grove be around for hundreds of years or more. In a world that is changing faster all the time, we need to be conservative about land and water by conserving special places for generations to come.

When my ancestors settled Wisconsin a century and a half ago, the state was still dominated by nature. Today it is increasingly dominated by highways, powerlines, subdivisions, mowed lawns and No Trespassing signs. Fortunately, today we have public parks and picnic areas and several options to help save other special places.

Two of the more important of these options (sometimes we think of them as tools) are conservation easements and the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program.

A conservation easement is a legal agreement between a landowner and a land trust or government agency that permanently limits uses of the land in order to protect its conservation values. It is the most traditional tool for conserving private land and offers flexibility in crafting the terms. It allows landowners to continue to own and use their land, and they can also sell it or pass it on to heirs. An easement may apply to all or a portion of the property, and need not require public access.

The Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program was created by the Wisconsin Legislature in 1989 to preserve valuable natural places and wildlife habitat, protect water quality and fisheries, and expand opportunities for outdoor recreation. It accomplishes these through the acquisition of land and easements, development of recreational facilities, and restoration of habitat.

If Hansen Maple Grove had existed during today's era of conservation easements and the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program, there is no guarantee the landowner would choose to conserve their land instead of trading it for bowling pins. But one thing is certain: these tools give landowners options.

If you are a private landowner, options are good things.