October 1953 (age 54)

In 1953, as Sigurd Olson took over the presidency of the National Parks Association, the parks were suffering tremendously from fiscal neglect. During World War II federal funding for the parks had dropped to 20 percent of prewar spending. Funding had increased after the war, but by 1953 was still below 1940 levels, despite the fact that the number of park visitors had more than doubled. Roads were crumbling, buildings were deteriorating, water and sewage systems were failing. Park rangers were grossly underpaid, heavily overworked, and often lived in wretched tar-paper shacks built by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression and meant to last just five years.

Bernard DeVoto, a conservationist and historian of the American West who also was an outspoken Harper's Magazine columnist, wrote in the October 1953 issue that the situation was hopeless unless Congress was willing to make available huge emergency appropriations. He estimated a quarter of a billion dollars was necessary. He assumed Congress would not comply:

Therefore only one course seems possible. The national park system must be temporarily reduced to a size for which Congress is willing to pay. Let us, as a beginning, close Yellowstone, Yosemite, Rocky Mountain, and Grand Canyon National Parks--close and seal them, assign the Army to patrol them, and so hold them secure until they can be reopened....If [their] staffs--and their respective budgets--were distributed among other areas, perhaps the Service could meet the demands now put on it. If not, additional areas could be temporarily closed and sealed, held in trust for a more enlightened future.

The current Congress didn't comply, and the parks remained open, but one result of the article was an increase in donations to Sigurd's group, the National Parks Association. And the more enlightened future DeVoto referred to, with a hefty increase in park spending, would come in the 1960s, and as a friend and advisor to the Park Service and Interior Department, Sigurd would be in the thick of a golden era of park protection and expansion.

October 1968 (age 69)

On October 12, Sigurd writes to a Princeton Theological Seminary student:

...all religions, all creeds and faiths, all the teachings of the wise are all the same. No matter what faith you may embrace, they all lead up the same path. All moderns need is to realize this and not try and conform to any set pronouncements or interpretations. I often think that the trouble with religion is theology and theologians who have more faith in words than in feelings and deep perception.