August 1950 (age 51)

The summer of 1950 slipped quietly away. Ontario officials added to the woes of fly-in resorts by ordering them to remove their boats from Quetico Park. This applied mostly to two American resort owners on Crooked Lake, who had 22 boats cached on a number of Canadian lakes. Sigurd spent time in Washington, talking with State Department officials about strategy for obtaining a treaty with Canada to manage the Quetico-Superior region, and helping push through $150,000 in appropriations to buy resorts. The purchase program was going well. Over the past three years, using both Forest Service money and a fund provided by the Izaak Walton League, conservationists had reduced the 117,500 acres of private land within the modern-day Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to 32,300 acres. The land acquired included six resorts and 11 private cabins. Only seven interior resorts remained, and conservationists hoped to use the $150,000 just appropriated, plus $275,000 remaining under the federal government's initial appropriation, to buy as many of these as possible before the air ban took full effect in 1952. "The resorts involved are now in a position where they cannot build or improve," Sigurd wrote, and he fought for high appropriations because "our obligation to the resorts affected is to buy them out" before the air ban could impose serious hardship on the owners.

August 1965 (age 66)

Sigurd spent much of the month in Alaska, studying park problems and visiting his son Sig Jr. and his family. The first part of the month Sigurd was at Mount McKinley National Park with the National Park Service's advisory board. (The photo at left was taken during the board's meeting in the park.) Assistant Interior Secretary Stan Cain wrote in his report:

Several of those going to Denali first had a full day to ramble around the hills of the Outer Range immediately north of Denali. Here the overlook to the north and west over the flat country and south across Moose Creek toward Mt. McKinley naturally led to speculations about the boundary of the Park and ideas for development within it. Especially, perhaps, because of the presence of the great wildlife biologist, Adolph Murie (who was awarded the Department of the Interior's highest honor at Cap Denali the Distinguished Service Award) and Sigurd Olson, an old hand with the Arctic wilderness and sage adviser to the National Park Service, talk turned to what could and should be done to improve the Park and its usefulness.

In 1991 the novelist and conservationist Wallace Stegner (pictured below), who in 1965 chaired the Park Service advisory board, added this memory in a letter to me:

Also in Alaska at that time was Adolph Murie, brother of Olaus Murie, who took us out to observe some fox dens, and was with us when we went out to Camp Denali. We were supposed to go to a dinner thrown by the McKinley Station concessioner, but Sig, Marion, and I all thought we wanted to see the park, not the concessioner, and we took most of the Board with us. The concessioner, Hummel, a bad one, was mad, but we were not much disturbed by his wrath. On the way out to Denali we saw grizzlies grazing like cows in the long grass, and caribou streaming across the river valleys, and moose rising like prehistoric beasts out of the dim waters of ponds. While we were at Denali Ade Murie heard from some miners outside the park boundary that there was a sick mother bear with a cub out there, and that the cub had been chased by miners trying to capture it. We walked over across the tundra and found the bear, Ade, Sig, and I, as I remember but the cub was nowhere to be seen. The sow bear lay in the brush and wheezed, ignoring us, and was obviously not long for the world.