Wilderness Manners ... Leave No Trace

Sig Olson approached the wilderness like a gentleman with an ingrained sense of the rights and wrongs of behavior in the woods. He was no wilderness Emily Post, but he cared deeply about relations, person to person and between man and nature. "Good woods manners," he wrote, "are an outgrowth of the proper attitude of men toward the happiness and welfare of others." Interestingly enough, he saw the frontier not as a rough and violent past but as a time when people lived by certain good, unwritten laws of conduct, which should be learned anew by each new generation of "tenderfoots."

What he deplored the most was the trashing of a campsite and of the landscape with graffiti and defacement of various sorts. He felt that campsites were sacred, ancient wilderness stopping places for weary travellers, and that they should be kept clean and welcoming to the next traveller. Landmarks "are also sacred and should never be disfigured."

Knowing the old rules and living by them, he felt, was part of the shared experience in action and belief that bound the old timers together in a woodsman's camaraderie. It was an ethic that brought to the simple woodsman the same dignity and respect that Americans have always held for the mythical image of the cowboy or the gentleman of the plains.

Years ago, he wrote an article about it titled "Wilderness Manners," which was published in the May 1945 edition of Sports Afield magazine. It is a good read but has not, unfortunately, been reprinted in any current compendiums of his articles. If you would like to read it, please write and the LPF can arrange to reprint it in the next newsletter or send you a copy.

Nevertheless, ethics is a timeless subject and thirty years later, the US Forest Service adopted an outdoor ethics code called the LTN or "Leave No Trace" program to promote minimum impact camping practices. Today the idea has become a separate organization, LTN, Inc., which represents not only the

USFS but also the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. LTN publishes trail guides tailored to various geographic regions, which help the camper and visitor to know better the philosophy of minimum impact recreation and the various do's and don'ts of how to do it.

To obtain a guide to your region, contact Leave No Trace, Inc., P.O. Box 997, Boulder, CO 80306, email: info@Int.org, or call 1-800-332-4100.

For copies to the Great Lakes Region and other information, contact Clayton Russell, Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute, Northland College, Ashland, WI 54806, phone 715-682-1223.