May 1951 (age 52)

Sigurd became vice president of the National Parks Association (known today as the National Parks and Conservation Association).

May 1966 (age 67)

Sigurd spent the beginning of the month in Washington meeting with heads of various conservation groups to get them to support Northern Cascades National Park in the state of Washington. He also spent time at home, working on an essay called "The Voyageurs" for the manuscript that would become Open Horizons. On May 12th he also responded to a request from National Park Service Director George Hartzog to critique a speech Hartzog was preparing. The following excerpt from Sigurd's letter shows his stand on one of the major issues of the day: should national parks be only the Yellowstone or Yosemite-type areas with outstanding natural features, or should they encompass a much wider variety of landscapes, size and degrees of wildness? Sigurd stood solidly in the camp of the expansionists:

I hate to criticize our President but I've always felt it was dangerous to keep repeating that our goal is to complete the Nat. Park System by 1972. By the way things have been held up in the Comm. on Int and Insular Affairs, it will be a lot longer than that. It's a goal worth shooting at and you might say we will try but if we don't meet the deadline we do everything humanly possible to do it as swiftly as we can.... I believe the time has come to bring into the system actual National Park Areas in the middle west and the East. To be sure the standards will not be the same as the original primeval parks of the west, nor will they be as large, but there are many beautiful areas that can be brought back to primeval significance with protection. There are many places in New England now growing up to forests that would fill a great need. Remnant shopping is what Connie [Conrad Wirth, the previous National Park Service director] called it but this remnant shopping might someday provide superlative national parks.... ...the American public has come to believe that magnificence is to be expected in any national park and this has been true. With few truly magnificent areas left except The North Cascades we will have to change our perspective and point of view. To me a fine stretch of tundra is magnificent so is a northern lake, or a swamp, or an isolated stretch of lake or seashore, or an island. You don't have to have the gigantic. It is all in the eye and the mind of the seer.