IN MY OPINION: Park status would harm Hood
You want to turn Oregon's tallest peak into another Yosemite? Didn't think so
Sunday, April 25, 2004
Paul Keller
If you want to destroy our beloved Mount Hood, transform it into a national park.
Abandoning Oregon's highest peak and its traditional Gifford Pinchot- inspired national forest and national scenic area into a Department of the Interior motorized maze -- and subsequent haze -- of infrastructure would be a blasphemy to our mountain's pristine spirit.
But beware. Some among us have become far too "makeover" prone.
This includes the authors of "A Mount Hood National Park?" (The Oregonian, April 11). Their essay's theme: Let's make Mount Hood a national park to forever preserve it. But such a bureaucratic blunder would actually cut open our mountain's ecological soul and bleed out and squander its centuries-old serenity.
Forever.
Ever hear of loving something to death?
Erect those "National Park" signs and the automobiles and motor homes will come. And come and come and come.
The traffic jams and pollution that have endangered the natural health and vitality of California's Yosemite Valley -- thanks to the constant clarion call of overdeveloped Yosemite National Park -- is a prime example.
Why do you think the powers that be and the environmental community, after years of study and discussion, wisely opted not to make Oregon's Steens Mountain a national park?
Do we really want to bedazzle and bedeck Mount Hood's already spectacular landscape with miles and miles of new paved roads and accompanying paved trails?
The Mount Hood National Forest and Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area offer countless campgrounds and thousands of miles of trails and roads inside the same natural Cascadian splendor that called to Lewis and Clark.
From the rugged Bull of the Woods Wilderness, to the magnificent alpine wonders of the Mt. Hood Wilderness, to the National Scenic Area's geologic allure along the mighty Columbia River -- it's all already out there waiting for us.
I can drive less than 10 minutes from my home right now, park my car and penetrate ancient canyons where cougar and elk and wolverine tracks still lead me back into shadow.
You can, too. And so can that couple and their kids from Schenectady.
But make this a national park and we'd all probably be fined for such extemporaneous communing with nature -- free pleasure.
The pro-park faction worries that the Forest Service will log Mount Hood's scenic environs. This agency did harvest large quantities of timber during the decades following World War II. But times have changed.
In conjunction with the National Environmental Policy Act, the Mount Hood National Forest's current "Forest Plan" identifies the remaining minimal acres of trees that could now be potentially harvested. Most of this plan targets the thousands of acres today's Forest Service is rightfully protecting and preserving.
Another flawed justification for converting Mount Hood's wilderness into a taxpayer-supported national park is the economic gain it might bring local businesses. Sorry, but our westside Cascadian hamlets -- from Alder Creek on up to Rhododendron -- would not prosper from a Mount Hood National Park any more than they do from the Mount Hood National Forest.
When your community is a quick hour away from the state's largest metropolitan mecca, you're not a destination area. You never will be.
The national park proponents also complain that Mount Hood has been "logged, gouged and scraped." If they think metamorphosing our beloved mountain into the virtual megalopolis of an overdeveloped national park wouldn't renew the logging and gouging and scraping of Oregon's predominant peak, they're shamefully shortsighted.
I say keep your darn hands off Mount Hood's beauty. It doesn't need a makeover. It never will.
Paul Keller of Rhododendron is a former editor of the Sandy Post and news editor of the Gresham Outlook. Throughout the late 1970s, he served as the Oregon Journal's Mount Hood correspondent. He also has worked as a hotshot firefighter, wilderness ranger and writer-editor for the U.S. Forest Service.