V
The distinction between the national forests and the national parks is essential to understanding. The national forests constitute an enormous domain administered for the economic commercialization of the nation's wealth of lumber. Its forests are handled scientifically with the object of securing the largest annual lumber output consistent with the proper conservation of the future. Its spirit is commercial. The spirit of national park conservation is exactly opposite. It seeks no great territory—only those few spots which are supreme. It aims to preserve nature's handiwork exactly as nature made it. No tree is cut except to make way for road, trail or hotel to enable the visitor to penetrate and live among nature's secrets. Hunting is excellent in some of our national forests, but there is no game in the national parks; in these, wild animals are a part of nature's exhibits; they are protected as friends.
It follows that forests and parks, so different in spirit and purpose, must be handled wholly separately. Even the rangers and scientific experts have objects so opposite and different that the same individual cannot efficiently serve both purposes. High specialization in both services is essential to success.
THE NATIONAL PARKS AT A GLANCE
[Number, 18; total area, 10,739 square miles]
| NATIONAL PARKS IN ORDER OF CREATION | LOCATION | AREA IN SQUARE MILES | DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTICS |
| Hot Springs, 1832 | Middle Arkansas | 1-1⁄2 | 46 hot springs possessing curative properties—Many hotels and boarding houses—20 bath-houses under public control. |
| Yellowstone, 1872 | Northwestern Wyoming | 3,348 | More geysers than in all rest of world together—Boiling springs—Mud volcanoes—Petrified forests—Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, remarkable for gorgeous coloring—Large lakes—Many large streams and waterfalls—Greatest wild bird and animal preserve in world. |
| Sequoia, 1890 | Middle eastern California | 252 | The Big Tree National Park—12,000 sequoia trees over 10 feet in diameter, some 25 to 36 feet in diameter—Towering mountain ranges—Startling precipices—Large limestone cave. |
| Yosemite, 1890 | Middle eastern California | 1,125 | Valley of world-famed beauty—Lofty cliffs—Romantic vistas—Many waterfalls of extraordinary height—3 groves of big trees—High Sierra—Waterwheel falls. |
| General Grant, 1890 | Middle eastern California | 4 | Created to preserve the celebrated General Grant Tree, 35 feet in diameter—6 miles from Sequoia National Park. |
| Mount Rainier, 1899 | West central Washington | 324 | Largest accessible single peak glacier system—28 glaciers, some of large size—48 square miles of glacier, 50 to 500 feet thick—Wonderful subalpine wild flower fields. |
| Crater Lake, 1902 | Southwestern Oregon | 249 | Lake of extraordinary blue in crater of extinct volcano—Sides 1,000 feet high—Interesting lava formations. |
| Wind Cave, 1903 | South Dakota | 17 | Cavern having many miles of galleries and numerous chambers containing peculiar formations. |
| Platt, 1904 | S. Oklahoma | 1-1⁄3 | Many sulphur and other springs possessing medicinal value. |
| Sullys Hill, 1904 | North Dakota | 1-1⁄5 | Small park with woods, streams, and a lake—Is an important wild animal preserve. |
| Mesa Verde, 1906 | S.W. Colorado | 77 | Most notable and best preserved prehistoric cliff dwellings in United States, if not in the world. |
| Glacier, 1910 | Northwestern Montana | 1,534 | Rugged mountain region of unsurpassed Alpine character—250 glacier-fed lakes of romantic beauty—60 small glaciers—Sensational scenery of marked individuality. |
| Rocky Mountain, 1915 | North middle Colorado | 398 | Heart of the Rockies—Snowy range, peaks 11,000 to 14,250 feet altitude—Remarkable records of glacial period. |
| Hawaii, 1916 | Hawaiian Islands | 118 | Three separate volcanic areas—Kilauea and Mauna Loa on Hawaii; Haleakala on Maui. |
| Lassen Volcanic, 1916 | Northern California | 124 | Only active volcano in United States proper—Lassen Peak 10,465 feet—Cinder Cone 6,879 feet—Hot springs—Mud geysers. |
| Mount McKinley, 1917 | South central Alaska | 2,200 | Highest mountain in North America—Rises higher above surrounding country than any other mountain in world. |
| Grand Canyon, 1919 | North central Arizona | 958 | The greatest example of erosion and the most sublime spectacle in the world—One mile deep and eight to twelve miles wide—Brilliantly colored. |
| Lafayette, 1919 | Maine Coast | 8 | The group of granite mountains on Mount Desert Island. |
Another distinction which should be made is the difference between a national park and a national monument. The one is an area of size created by Congress upon the assumption that it is a supreme example of its kind and with the purpose of developing it for public occupancy and enjoyment. The other is made by presidential proclamation to conserve an area or object which is historically, ethnologically, or scientifically important. Size is not considered, and development is not contemplated. The distinction is often lost in practice. Casa Grande is essentially a national monument, but had the status of a national park until 1918. The Grand Canyon, from every point of view a national park, was created a national monument and remained such until 1919.
THE GRANITE NATIONAL PARKS
GRANITE'S PART IN SCENERY
The granite national parks are Yosemite, Sequoia, including the proposed Roosevelt Park, General Grant, Rocky Mountain, and Mount McKinley. Granite, as its name denotes, is granular in texture and appearance. It is crystalline, which means that it is imperfectly crystallized. It is composed of quartz, feldspar, and mica in varying proportions, and includes several common varieties which mineralogists distinguish scientifically by separate names.
Because of its great range and abundance, its presence at the core of mountain ranges where it is uncovered by erosion, its attractive coloring, its massiveness and its vigorous personality, it figures importantly in scenery of magnificence the world over. In color granite varies from light gray, when it shines like silver upon the high summits, to warm rose or dark gray, the reds depending upon the proportion of feldspar in its composition.
It produces scenic effects very different indeed from those resulting from volcanic and sedimentary rocks. While it bulks hugely in the higher mountains, running to enormous rounded masses below the level of the glaciers, and to jagged spires and pinnacled walls upon the loftiest peaks, it is found also in many regions of hill and plain. It is one of our commonest American rocks.
Much of the loftiest and noblest scenery of the world is wrought in granite. The Alps, the Andes, and the Himalayas, all of which are world-celebrated for their lofty grandeur, are prevailingly granite. They abound in towering peaks, bristling ridges, and terrifying precipices. Their glacial cirques are girt with fantastically toothed and pinnacled walls.
This is true of all granite ranges which are lofty enough to maintain glaciers. These are, in fact, the very characteristics of Alpine, Andean, Himalayan, Sierran, Alaskan, and Rocky Mountain summit landscape. It is why granite mountains are the favorites of those daring climbers whose ambition is to equal established records and make new ones; and this in turn is why some mountain neighborhoods become so much more celebrated than others which are quite as fine, or finer—because, I mean, of the publicity given to this kind of mountain climbing, and of the unwarranted assumption that the mountains associated with these exploits necessarily excel others in sublimity. As a matter of fact, the accident of fashion has even more to do with the fame of mountains than of men.
But by no means all granite mountains are lofty. The White Mountains, for example, which parallel our northeastern coast, and are far older than the Rockies and the Sierra, are a low granite range, with few of the characteristics of those mountains which lift their heads among the perpetual snows. On the contrary, they tend to rounded forested summits and knobby peaks. This results in part from a longer subjection of the rock surface to the eroding influence of successive frosts and rains than is the case with high ranges which are perpetually locked in frost. Besides, the ice sheets which planed off the northern part of the United States lopped away their highest parts.
There are also millions of square miles of eroded granite which are not mountains at all. These tend to rolling surfaces.
The scenic forms assumed by granite will be better appreciated when one understands how it enters landscape. The principal one of many igneous rocks, it is liquefied under intense heat and afterward cooled under pressure. Much of the earth's crust was once underlaid by granites in a more or less fluid state. When terrific internal pressures caused the earth's crust to fold and make mountains, this liquefied granite invaded the folds and pushed close up under the highest elevations. There it cooled. Thousands of centuries later, when erosion had worn away these mountain crests, there lay revealed the solid granite core which frost and glacier have since transformed into the bristling ramparts of to-day's landscape.