September 1953 (age 54)

Not much to report for this month, but in a letter to conservationist Irving Clark referring to Olympic National Park Sigurd illustrates his overall view about hotels and concessions in the national parks. "On the matter of hotel and camp accommodations," he writes,

I agree whole heartedly that if possible these should be kept outside the park boundaries. Here is the last chance in the National Park System to keep such major developments on the outside. The Olympics could be unique in this respect, the only great national park with no hotels or great concessions to mar its interior.

September 1968 (age 69)

On September 13, Sigurd had a productive meeting with his friend Stewart Udall, the U.S. Secretary of the Interior. He gave Udall maps showing his suggestions for enlarging McKinley (now Denali) National Park on its north and south, as well as other land withdrawals. He described the meeting in a letter to friends:

I really think he was much impressed with the possibilities especially the proposed development at Curry instead of Wonder Lake. I also talked over with him the Copper River Program of BLM together with our hope for the Wrangles as well as Iliamna, a refuge for the Yukon Flats, extension of the Kuskokwim and Yukon Delta refuges the Kobuk Koyukuk Wilderness study of the NPS, urging protective withdrawals while there was still time. I have a hunch that he may come up with quite a package not only for Alaska but for other projects in the south 48. I told him, he had an opportunity to go out with a Blaze of Glory . All we can do now is hope and pray.

Sigurd had been part of the Alaska Task Force that the Park Service had established to study and make recommendations for creating parks in that state. In its 1965 report, called "Operation Great Land," the group recommended withdrawing roughly seventy-six million acres of outstanding wildlands in thirty-nine locations spread across the state. "Alasks must not succumb to the modern or it will lose much," the report stated in Olsonesque language. "What it has must be known and made available while still maintaining its integrity....Alaska is our last great opportunity to set aside 'reserves of significant size and grandeur,' and to save those intangible values of wilderness which it now has. The challenge is before us. The time to begin is now."

It was a landmark report, but potentially explosive at a time when half of the Alaska labor force was employed for just six months out of the year. In addition, the report recommended Park Service management of some lands that were then under the jurisdiction of other federal agencies; these agencies could not be expected to give up territory without a fight. The Park Service buried the report, and while Olson made some progress with Udall, most of what he and the Task Force recommended went unheeded. Fifteen years later, however, the recommendations of the Alasks Task Force formed the core of what historian Roderick Nash has called "the greatest single act of wilderness preservation in world history." Signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on December 2, 1980, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act protected one hundred and four million acres, more than a quarter of the state.