May 1949 (age 50)

This was not a good month for those trying to get an airspace reservation over the canoe country. A federal Airspace Subcommittee held a closed hearing on May 19th, and Sigurd Olson, who was one of a handful of people testifying, left feeling that the subcommittee formed its opinion long beforehand. "They do not wish any more evidence," he wrote to Ken Reid of the Izaak Walton League. "They know the story, so they feel—our move was straight propaganda and we are a typical high pressure group, trying to make a governmental agency do something it should not do."

The subcommittee would wait several weeks before voting. Meanwhile, as the 1949 tourist season opened, the Ely Fish Facts reported more planes than ever, and that "seaplanes were busy from dawn to dusk whisking fishermen to established resorts on the Canadian Border." After a Memorial Day fishing trip in the canoe country with three old friends, Sigurd Olson reported counting a plane "every eight minutes for six straight hours." Minnesota woodsman and writer Calvin Rutstrum wrote that at Ely he found "the most tragic shuttling of planes for big fish catches that I had ever imagined I would see." He reported watching fly-in parties continue fishing after they had reached their legal limit. As they caught larger fish, they'd throw the smallest "out on the water, gills torn half out. I saw in one instance 16 northerns thrown away, only three with mangled mouths having life enough to go down to possible recovery." He saw another party throw out 44 northerns at a dump, because they didn't have enough ice to transport so many fish. "The last remark I heard one of the party make as the fish were thrown in the dump," Rutstrum recalled, "was 'I'll be damned if I would clean the God-damned things anyway.' As you can see, this fishing trip was not something genuine and wholesome, but a lark where values meant nothing."

May 1964 (age 65)

Sigurd spent several days this month in Yellowstone National Park as a member of a Park Service committee preparing a master management plan for the park. He spend another day in Wausau, Wis., speaking in favor of designating the St. Croix-Namekagon Rivers as a unit of the federal Wild Rivers system. But the hardest thing he had to do in May 1964 was to publicly support the Izaak Walton League's call for a complete ban on logging in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area next to his home in northern Minnesota. His stand came in the wake of revelations that logging in the BWCA was far more extensive than many people realized. For many years Sigurd had been a spokesperson for the President's Quetico Superior Committee, which sought an international land management plan for the region that explicitly allowed for carefully controlled logging in the canoe country. When the QSC's Charles Kelly heard that Sigurd had publicly called for complete wilderness status for the BWCA, he called Sigurd on the carpet.

"This is a serious challenge to the stature of the President's Committee and something that I intensely regret," Kelly wrote on May 26. "If you and we are to go in different directions, we should have this clearly established."

Sigurd responded that he had no choice:

After all I had written and said over the years, plus my long connection with the Leauge...I simply could not refuse to stand up and be counted among those who plead for wilderness....

I sincerely hope that this will not result in breaking up the old triumvirate [Olson, Kelly, and Frank Hubachek] with so many battles behind it. After all these years, that would break my heart. Both you and Hub are part of my life and loyalty and though we may differ, it will never change my feelings for you.

In the end, while they could not agree on the logging issue, Sigurd was able to patch his friendship with Kelly and Hubachek. But this was one of the more difficult episodes of his life.