October 1957 (age 58)

Sigurd's efforts in Ely to help combat false impressions about the new wilderness bill appeared to be helping, and on October 2 Sen. Hubert Humphrey wrote to thank him. "You are doing a wonderful job of getting across the true provisions of this bill to the people of the Ely area," he said. Humphrey also agreed with Sigurd's diagnosis of their mistakes: "You are a hundred percent correct in saying that much of our trouble is a direct result from our lack of ground work in the local area. Keep up the great work Sig, and let me know if there is anything I should be doing." You can see his letter and other related ones from late September and early October here. For background context, read this excerpt from A Wilderness Within.

October 1972 (age 73)

Sigurd attended the annual meeting of the Wilderness Society's governing council early this month in the Adirondacks. It is evident that the increasing emphasis on legal skirmishes in modern environmentalism, and the increasing bureacracy, is beginning to wear thin with him. In the notebook containing the meeting's agenda, Sigurd doodled a picture of an elephant's head. Then, next to it, he wrote, "The same perennial idea as of former years, possibly 25 all told. Here I sit out of place as always, wasting time, hours and days and months and years when I should be writing. I am 73 a few years left. Have I any right to do any more." He also expressed his frustration in a note that he passed to fellow board member Jim Marshall: "Jim: We strangle ourselves with words, make mountains out of molehills, exchange simplicity for complexity. God save us."