January 1951 (age 51)

In 1950 Sigurd had become convinced that Ernest Oberholtzer's vision of a treaty protecting the wilderness qualities of the entire Rainy Lake watershed of Ontario and Minnesota was impossible to achieve. There was no way the province would agree to dominion regulation of nine thousand square miles of its territory, especially when the treaty called for similar regulation of just five thousand square miles in Minnesota. Sigurd had traveled northwestern Ontario, had seen the unpaved streets of the towns, and had been heckled by chamber of commerce members when he spoke of the proposed treaty. The residents of these towns wanted to participate fully in postwar prosperity. They were determined to develop their natural resources and demanded a highway to connect them to Port Arthur and Fort Frances. Oberholtzer's treaty seemed to restrict them to perpetual frontier status.

Late in 1950, Sigurd wrote a new draft that narrowed the focus of wilderness preservation to the region's interior, and especially to Quetico Provincial Park and the Superior Roadless Areas. To most people, the term Quetico-Superior had come to mean this core area of a little over three thousand square miles, rather than the nearly fifteen thousand square miles defined by Oberholtzer. Since 1927, when Oberholtzer had first proposed an International Peace Memorial Forest and generated support from the American and Canadian Legions, logging camps and mines and roads and towns had in many places intruded upon the wilderness of his memory. Olson wrote the new treaty draft to better reflect political reality. In doing so, however, he permanently damaged his friendship with Oberholtzer (shown at right below in 1935), who wrote to him on January 4, 1951:

That proposal...violates the whole Q.S. program as fostered these many years. It also entirely misinterprets the action of the various Legion bodies in both countries from the beginning until now....It would take too long now to go over again all the developments and documents of the past twenty-five years bearing upon these points. I have already repeated them to the point of boredom....Personally I am ready to give anything that I have left to avert a settlement in the border region that runs counter to the well-established understanding of the Quetico-Superior program.

Frank Hubachek and Charles Kelly, on the other hand, who had enlisted Oberholtzer in 1927 to lead the Quetico-Superior movement, agreed with Olson and eventually convinced Oberholtzer to accept a change in language that still gave a special recognition to the wilderness of Quetico Park and the Superior Roadless Areas while retaining the original goal of a more extensive peace memorial forest. They could not, however, convince Oberholtzer that they had to accept the Port Arthur-to-Fort Frances highway, which would cut right through the heart of the watershed, in order to build enough support for the treaty in northwestern Ontario. Oberholtzer did not publicly break with his friends, but it hurt him to see his lifelong dream slowly whittled away, and he nursed a growing distance between himself and Olson.

January 1966 (age 66)

Sigurd spent time this month working on the master management plan for McKinley National Park. Outdoor America magazine published an article of his called "Indiana Dunes Revisited."