July 1950 (age 51)

Sigurd Olson knew that a long-term program of positive, Canadian-driven publicity was essential to preserving the Quetico-Superior wilderness. As a start to that end, he arranged a July 1950 Quetico Park canoe trip with three members of the Toronto Anglers' and Hunters' Association, including the group's secretary, John Mitchele. Sigurd hoped to get them excited enough about wilderness preservation in general, and Quetico Park and the idea of an international treaty to manage the wilderness on both sides of the border, that they would start building grassroots support through their organization.

Mitchele took Sigurd's idea one step further: he invited an Ontario journalist named Fred Bodsworth (pictured at right). At the time, Bodsworth, who eventually became one of Canada's best known nature writers, was just beginning to break into the magazine market, and he hoped to write about the trip for Maclean's, which was then Canada's equivalent of the Saturday Evening Post. Bodsworth recalled years later that "Maclean's approved the idea, gave me some expense money, and I went along and spent two weeks paddling bow in a canoe and talking with Sig in the stern."

The experience, he said, changed his life. Bodsworth, who had grown up along the shore of Lake Erie in a small Canadian fishing port, had never taken a wilderness trip before. Nor had he met anyone like Sigurd Olson:

He had the scientific underpinnings, he could talk about lichens and forest succession and the mineralogy of rocks, but he also had another entirely different functional level of bush lore expertise. He could look at a lake and know right where to go to get a couple of fast lake trout for supper while the rest of us pitched tents. He could find his way across an invisible portage that had not been used for a couple of years, find the salt or tea in a food pack amid a muddle of a hundred other little packets, and knew exactly how much wood it would take to bake a bannock. In that two weeks Sig Olson assumed for me a kind of mythic godlike caliber that mellowed a little as my experience broadened but never entirely left me.

The resulting article gave Quetico Park exactly the kind of Canadian publicity Sigurd hoped for. "The Fight to Keep the Wilderness Wild," published in Maclean's on May 15, 1951, told of the pressures that threatened the park, from road developments to the "covetous glances" of resort planners. Bodsworth also spoke of the battles waged over the years by conservationists on both sides of the border, and of the proposed treaty. He did not say anything that had not been said by American conservationists in American publications, but he wrote from a Canadian perspective and for a Canadian audience. He mentioned Olson just once in the article and identified him not specifically as an American, but as an Izaak Walton Leagure ecologist, in order to minimize the gut-level hostility many Canadians felt whenever Americans tried to influence Canadian policies. He also let Sigurd edit a draft of the article, but told Sigurd not to write his comments on the manuscript so Bodsworth could sent it on to Maclean's: "I wouldn't let them see it with another man's handwriting on it, for then they would suspect that other parties were interested in it for publicity reasons and maybe take a dim view of the whole business."

Sigurd, of course, was interested in the article for publicity reasons, but he saw the canoe trip with Bodsworth as just the beginning. On July 29, 1950, just after the trip was over and long before Bodsworth's article was completed and published, Olson wrote to conservationist Charles Kelly his vision of what could be called "canoe public relations," although Sigurd himself would not have thought of using such explicit terminology. "I feel that this first all-Canadian trip will be the forerunner of many others which will bring to the attention of Canadians the real values of the Quetico," he wrote.

July 1965 (age 66)

This quote from a letter to conservationist friend Charley Woodbury shows how his fame led to great demands on his time: "My summer has been a busy one to date. Yesterday was typical. A University of Wisconsin team came up to tape some of my reactions on wilderness to be inserted in a film the U is producing. Last night at 5:30 after they had gone a group of 17 young people from Fargo came up for an hour session on wilderness before going out on a trip. Then this morning the U team came back and have just left. What the rest of the day will bring we do not know but think we will run out to Listening Point for the rest of the day just to collect our wits. Tomorrow I go to Duluth to attend a meeting on the wilderness canoe country problems, then drive north to a Voyageur's celebration at Crane Lake, getting back just in time to get ready for a canoe trip with Tony Lovink and his wife. Right after that I go to Alaska with the [National Park Service] Adv. Board and from there to the [Wilderness Society] Council meeting in Colorado. " (The photo, taken in the summer of 1965, shows Sigurd during a lunch break with Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and National Park Service Director George Hartzog. The man in back is unidentified.)