March 1948 (age 48)

Sigurd was spending most of his time this month in Chicago, in the third month of his new career as a professional conservationist. Officially the wilderness ecologist of the Izaak Walton League, Sigurd's salary and most of his duties came from the Quetico-Superior Council, an offshoot of the Izaak Walton League whose purpose was to get Canada and the US to sign a treaty zoning some 14,000 square miles along the Minnesota-Ontario border, and preserving a large portion as wilderness. In March 1948, Sigurd was spearheading the fight to convince Congress to pass a bill that would allow the U.S. Forest Service for the first time to purchase land for recreational purposes. The bill focused on the Roadless Areas (known today as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness) of Superior National Forest, where entrepreneurs were building fly-in fishing resorts on scattered tracts of private lakeshore in the middle of the canoe country wilderness. Getting this bill passed was critical, because Sigurd and the other conservationists hoped to ban airplanes from the Roadless Areas, and such a ban would be impossible if there were no means for the government to buy out the resorts.

March 1963 (age 63)

Having just paddled more than a hundred miles of the Suwanee River in Georgia and Florida, Sigurd returned to Washington, D.C., where he was spending the winter working as an advisor to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. During the National Park Service's advisory board meeting in Washington late in March, Sigurd, who was a member, proposed that the board endorse the Suwanee as the first in a proposed system of national rivers. The board agreed with him, as it did with his recommendation supporting the Park Service's efforts to protect a 180-mile section of the Missouri River in Montana as the Lewis and Clark National Wilderness Waterway.

But March 1963 was a tough month for Sigurd. For one thing, he took a bad fall, and tore ligaments and chipped the bone in his right shoulder. It would take well over a year to heal. And then there was the frustrating feeling that all his time in Washington doing conservation work was taking far too much time from his writing. He wrote on a scrap of paper on March 29: "I have about reached the end of my rope here, can hardly go on any more....The end seems endless and I must go soon or shrivel up. "