January 1952 (age 52)

As the Truman Administration drew to a close, Sigurd used his influence to get an addition to Olympic National Park. Two years later he wrote about it to a conservationist friend:

I can tell you a little story about that and I wouldn't worry too much about the PR and the local yokels. When this gang of objectors are through we will still have a park with the only seacoast connected with a mountain range on the continent. We worked hard on that one and it took as most of these things do a lot of effort. Just about the last thing Harry did officially was to sign the proclamation. It was done the last few days he was in the White House. The proclamation had been lost on official desks for months. The Chamber of Commerce, Nat. had seen to that and other potent groups. I sat down with my old friend Russ Andrews [White House staff member] trying to figure out what to do. Finally Russ got on the phone started tracing from desk to desk, finally found it and issued an order to shoot it over to the White House pronto. It came a galloping and Russ saw to it that Harry put in john henry on there and that was that. I looked over that area with considerable pride last summer, realizing that if there was anyone to shoot it should be me. Time will tell. I know that it was a good move.

January 1967 (age 67)

Sigurd was working on his book Open Horizons, and his first draft of the chapter "A Mountain Listens," which he completed this month, gives an opportunity to discuss how his wife, Elizabeth, helped him. She read his manuscripts and jotted down notes of things that bothered her. Sometimes it would be a matter of correcting Sig's memory about some detail, such as the fact that Charley Laney did not have a dog team. Other times she would point out where he was repeating himself. Sometimes she pointed out phrases that she didn't like, such as "pay off" and "plumbed the depths". Sometimes her criticism was general: "paragraph too romanticized," or "over written" or "don't understand". She could be quite critical, as her following notes on "A Mountain Listens" show:

First paragraph is really too--in the theater it would be called "corny"...."over written" too too much.... [In a later portion she writes:] You were not mature enuf to come to this conclusion.