Dedication

This first issue of The View from Listening Point is dedicated to Sigurd and Elizabeth Olson shown here outside the cabin door at Listening Point during the summer of 1980. (Photo by Richard Frank in "Leave it to the Bourgeois" by Frank Graham Jr., published in Audubon, November 1980.)

This year, 1999, has been Sig's 100th-birthday anniversary (April 4) and has been marked by several observances and celebrations.Outdoor writers and journalists have written commemorative articles in major regional papers. KBJR-TV, NBC affiliate in Duluth, featured Sigurd Olson on a two-night special made-for-TV program. Friends of the BWCA Vice Chair Becki Rom published a memoire in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Executive Director Kevin Proescholdt published an excellent article in the Friends of the BWCA Spring-Summer newsletter BWCA Wilderness News, and is putting out a magazine-style booklet celebrating Sig and his legacy jointly with the Wilderness Society.

The Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute has sponsored special events near Sister Bay in the Door County peninsula of Wisconsin, where Sig lived as a child and wrote about in The Singing Wilderness; at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin where Sig grew up and went to school; and at Ely, Minnesota near his beloved Quetico-Superior canoe country, where Sig and Elizabeth lived for the rest of their lives. The Institute has published a beautiful collector-class, 16-page booklet on Sigurd Olson and his legacy. The final and culminating event of the year will be the "Wilderness Horizons" conference to be held at Northland College, September 23-26, 1999.

The Sigurd Olson family and close friends celebrated the centennial by launching the Listening Point Foundation to which the Olson family donated Listening Point with two clear objectives: to preserve the historic and natural integrity of Listening Point for the pleasure and inspiration of future generations, and to carry on Sigurd Olson's wilderness legacy.

Sig and Elizabeth have been well remembered this year and will always be a part of Listening Point.