August 1948 (age 49)

In August 1948 the American Forestry Association held one of its annual Trail Riders wilderness trips in the Quetico-Superior canoe country. Sigurd agreed to represent the conservation group and lead the 10-day excursion. The Forest Service considered the trip very important for public relations, especially because this was the first Trail Riders trip to the area since 1941, and so the agency assigned its official photographer to accompany the group. Other Forest Service officials took turns spending time on the trail, flying in to join the canoeists. The Forest Service also agreed to have its fire patrol planes watch for distress signals as they passed over the Trail Riders.

Two days before the party of 31 was to begin its trip, Sigurd received a call from the American Forestry Association's Washington, D.C. headquarters, asking him to change his route to one that was 100 miles longer: a huge addition to a 10-day trip. In the little time left, Sigurd and Superior National Forest rangers worked out a new schedule. Worried about imposing so much extra hauling on the large number of women and elderly in the group, Sigurd asked the Forest Service to fly in some of their gear and leave it along the route. That request would come back to haunt him and the agency, as would other Forest Service flights made during the Trail Riders trip. Sigurd and the agency were, after all, at the same time campaigning to ban airplanes from the wilderness. Several months later, a group of Minnesota pilots put out a booklet that attacked the proposed ban and used the Trail Riders trip as an example of hypocrisy on the part of Olson and the Forest Service. (The USFS photo is taken from the trip. Sigurd is in the center, putting in the canoe.)

What made it even more embarassing for Sigurd was that his wife, Elizabeth, who went along on the Trail Riders trip, had been flown out of the wilderness after breaking her ankle on a portage. The pilots' booklet said it was "noteworthy" that "the airplane rendered urgently needed transportation to an immediate family member of one of the chief proponents of the ban."

As far as the American Forestry Association was concerned, the Trail Riders trip was a huge success, but Sigurd certainly must have wished it never happened. Furthermore, as he wrote to a friend shortly afterward, he knew that the party's large size "destroyed for the participants any true primitive experience they might have had."

August 1963 (age 64)

Sigurd began the month thinking about writing a new book. Alfred Knopf was after him to begin a new one, a book that would follow up on the great success of The Singing Wilderness, Listening Point, and The Lonely Land. Runes of the North, which was in press, was not quite as good as his first three and some of the forthcoming reviews would be lukewarm. Knopf may have sensed this. "I feel that your next book is enormously important and one that must be right out of the top drawer," he said. Sigurd also saw it as an important book, because he thought it might possibly be his last: he was 64 years old, for one thing, and conservation work was increasing taking up more of his time, so much so that it was bothering him. In fact, it would be six years before this next book would be published, under the title Open Horizons.

"The important thing," he wrote on looseleaf paper on August 7, "is now to get started on something, so I can get the feel of writing again. This is all important and vital to my peace of mind. No hurry, just keep working away constantly. Unless I am working, my enthusiasm wanes. For a sense of accomplishment I must start." Two days later he wrote about his ideas for the book, an autobiography that he tentatively titled "The Echo Trail":

A chronological narrative of one human being's response and growing, expanding appreciation of nature, from the child's first awareness of plants, birds, and animals through a young man's outdoor life, ending with the reflection of the mature man on his role in the natural order....Imagine this will not be a fictional sort of thing, although it could be, using any boy rather than yourself....You do not have to be too autobiographical as to time and place but concentrate on the out of door experience solely. Forget the school, the teaching, the deanship which do not contribute to the major idea, make this a chronology of your own development and growth of feeling.

Later in the month, from roughly August 17 to 24, Sigurd canoed the Allagash River in Maine, along with National Park Service advisory board chair Frank Masland and Ted Swem, the chief of new park planning with whom Sigurd had explored parts of Alaska in July. Joe Penfold of the Izaak Walton League also joined them. Sigurd and the others came away from the trip advocating the protection of the river's wildness. In 1966, the Maine State Legislature established the Allagash Wilderness Waterway along a 92-mile stretch of the river; it became the first state-administered component of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System.