In Yosemite Valley, circa 2005. Carsten was proud to have visited all of the
great western parks/Cristi Lien, Carsten Lien Family Archives
A prominent figure of Seattle, Washington, Carsten Lien grounded his career in business and government with a love for Olympic National Park. Alfred Runte recounts how Lien fought to save the park after observing that it had been logged. The result was a history of the park disclosing the controversy of saving old-growth forests from the National Park Service itself. The book is again available as Olympic Battleground: Creating and Defending Olympic National Park. (Second edition, reissued. Seattle, 2014)
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My friend Carsten Lien was shocked. "What do you mean you've never been to Olympic National Park?!"
After endorsing the first edition of Olympic Battleground, published in 1991, I had noticed we were practically neighbors. Ever since, we had been meeting regularly in north Seattle at our favorite coffee shop. "I can't believe it!" he repeated. "All this time I thought you had seen the park!"
Simply, because we had repeatedly discussed his book, he thought for sure I had seen the park. Well, no, I was finally confessing in the spring of 1993. In my defense, I reminded him I had also just published a major book on Yosemite. "I have been spending all of my spare time in California." He knew better than to accept that excuse. "I am taking you, and we're going now," he said, adding: "Tell Christine we need at least four days."
He would ask his wife Cristi to plan the same. "I just heard a whopper," he told her that evening. "Al Runte let drop over coffee today he has never been to Olympic National Park!"
Yes, I was in Carsten's doghouse. How could anyone have lived in Seattle for 13 years -- especially a historian of the national parks -- and have postponed a visit to the one place he knew to be heaven itself?
He certainly believed the park had changed his life. Born in Seattle of Norwegian-American parents on March 24, 1926, he had grown up in the shadow of the Olympic Mountains, enchantingly spread across the city's western horizon. The peaks became even more exciting after he joined the Boy Scouts and got to climb a few. His troop made base camp at Camp Parsons, itself grandly situated on the Olympic Peninsula. Every summer opened with a fresh adventure, "creating memories that will last a lifetime," as the camp's website still proudly reads.
By the age of 15 he was already an Eagle Scout. Although scouting offered no higher rank, he spent the next 50 years perfecting his skills as a skier, backpacker, hiker, and mountaineer.
It was still to Olympic National Park that he always returned, believing it to be the finest wilderness in North America. And no wonder. Established in 1938, its mountain ranges tiptoed from glaciers all the way down to the sea, the last amazing miles through river valleys lush with old-growth rain forests. As amazing, much of it had survived the logger's axe.
The National Park Service should have been proud of those forests. Instead, World War II threatened the giant trees. The Park Service itself had acquiesced to land swaps and other shenanigans meant to nibble away at park timber.
For the moment, Carsten remained oblivious to most of it, having signed on to become Ensign Lien in the U.S. Navy. On patrol in the North Pacific, his ship was often at the mercy of towering seas. "One day we lost an engine and its propeller," he recalled. "It was touch and go for two days until we got that engine back up and running. Had we lost the other screw, we would have been helpless and capsized immediately."
The story was vintage for Carsten's generation. In spite of adversity the country had persevered, and now deserved an even better government to meet the future.
Ranger Carsten Lien
Discharged from the Navy in 1947, having risen to lieutenant, junior grade, Carsten intended to complete his studies at the University of Washington. First he needed a summer job. Instinctively, he scanned the announcements at Olympic National Park, and much to his amazement saw an opening! If he could board a bus immediately, the park needed a summer ranger on the North Fork of the Quinault River. He was to be assigned to the North Fork Ranger Station, conducting both front country and backcountry patrols.
There Carsten would begin the journey leading to the principal question in his book. Who would ever log a national park -- especially this national park, intended for the protection of old-growth forests?
Even more intensive logging had been proposed, targeting especially Douglas fir. The latest rationale came straight from the lumber industry, now mining the postwar recession. Without a constant stream of logs from the park, regional mills would be forced to close.
With the issue simmering in the press, Carsten finished his B.A. at the University of Washington and his M.A. at Columbia University. He then taught for a year in New Rochelle, New York, and, on his return to Seattle, taught social studies for six years at Ballard High School. He loved teaching, but not the politics. Little did he realize the politics awaiting him on his return to the seasonal staff in Olympic National Park.
By the summer of 1954, the complaints were flooding in. Why are there so many logging trucks on park roads? Although management had hoped to hide the logging, even windshield visitors could hardly miss it. Attempts to camouflage the stumps had also failed along Lake Crescent and in the backcountry. Carsten personally photographed freshly cut stumps up to nine feet in diameter.
As the first line of contact with the public, the seasonal rangers got the brunt of it. Clearly, the superintendent was behind the logging and probably the regional director. Worse, the Park Service director himself had to be complicit, since the logging was so extensive.
After two more years of watching the logs flow to the mills, the seasonal rangers felt they had no choice. Someone had to leak the story before all of the big Douglas fir was gone. The superintendent then also tipped his hand. How dare those "birdwatchers," as he derided the naturalists, attempt to undermine his logging program?
A forest engineer by training, he considered that ample justification to log the park. Its old-growth forests were much too "ripe." What a "waste" it would be to leave them standing. Of course, they had endured for centuries in their "ripened" state, but that part he left out.
All of it was straight from a forestry textbook. By law, this was a national park. At least, Carsten the idealist, not to mention the Eagle Scout, could not let his disillusionment rest.
The logging eventually ground to a halt. However, what if the National Park Service resumed it -- or logged some other park? As troubling, Paul Shepard, a young professor of ecology at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, had been permanently banned from the National Park Service for his role in bringing the logging to public attention.
Principles of Management
The story taking shape in Carsten's mind was clear. He most certainly knew its theme. The public has a right to know. "All good managers think of the public," he added. "They also think long term."
They remained the convictions of his own career, beginning in 1957 with a management position in community development at the University of Washington. "I might have settled down and become the perfect bureaucrat," he recalled, "if only the logging had not continued to nag at me."
Now with a wife and family, he still found time for the university library. There he unraveled the timeless dictum of Northwest logging'keep cutting until nothing is left. Although the forestry journals called for sustained-yield management, most of the industry dragged its feet. Largely funded by industry dollars, the nation's forestry schools dragged theirs, as well. Some professor could always be counted on to shill for the industry. No mountain is too steep for a clear cut; besides, all rivers eventually silt up on their own.
As for replanting, why bother? Trees in the Pacific Northwest should recover rapidly. There would be enough time to think of replanting when the old growth was finally gone.
The short-term thinking in all of it drove Carsten nuts. Then carelessly applied to Olympic National Park, it had cost the park thousands of its grandest trees. They included practically every Douglas fir that could be reached by logging equipment clawing up riverbeds, roads, and trails. All told, at least 100 million board feet had gone to the mills, probably 150 million, his estimates showed.
Ranger Carsten Lien, circa 1954, about the time he and his seasonal colleagues discovered the logging in Olympic National Park/Carsten Lien Family Archives
His immediate response was to maintain memberships in two activist organizations, The Mountaineers (1906) and Olympic Park Associates (1948). In later life, he was proud to serve a term as president of The Mountaineers, as well as multiple terms on the board of Olympic Park Associates.
Birdwatcher in Washington
The management opportunity of a lifetime still came in the "other" Washington. Obviously, Carsten had been noticed. Organized in 1962, the new Peace Corps, headed by Sargent Shriver, was searching for idealistic candidates who would fit the prized creation of the Kennedy Administration. Shriver chose Carsten as deputy director of the Latin American Training Program.
The Peace Corps proved to be vindication for how a good government bureau operates. "Director Shriver frequently asked me to draft letters for his signature," Carsten recalled. "He wanted everything to fit on a page. Any longer, in Shriver's estimation, was a sure sign of poor management. If you were confident about the point you wanted to make, it should take no more than a couple paragraphs."
Carsten's meaning relative to the Park Service would become clear, nor did he waste this opportunity. Now living on the doorstep of the National Archives, he grabbed every chance to go there he could get, specifically to examine Record Group 79, the official papers of the National Park Service.
Fortunately, the superintendent responsible for logging Olympic National Park had not heeded the one-page rule. For every logging contract he presented a careful tally of exactly what had gone to the mills, including photographs of individual trees and loads. Since every higher-up had received the tally, it was finally clear that the director had indeed approved. It was just as clear, in Carsten's estimation, that the director had been meticulous about deflecting the blame.
Now Carsten's note-taking --and Xeroxing -- began in earnest. Along with Park Service records at the National Archives, he exhausted the collections at the Library of Congress. Anything relevant to the Olympic Peninsula --even in the most tangential way -- he read in pursuit of "the story."
Even so, the book would have to wait. More years of public service followed, including directorship positions with the Department of Labor and Stanford Research Institute. At Labor, he managed inner-city programs for Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty; at Stanford, he directed an eminent research team in the social sciences. In between, he held another executive post at the Westinghouse Learning Corporation and, after Stanford, returned to Seattle as senior vice president of Washington Mutual Savings Bank.
After five years with Washington Mutual, Carsten spent three years as a consultant before accepting the position of vice president and corporate secretary at Recreational Equipment, Incorporated (REI). Although his last position, he recalled it as his favorite. REI's product line was all about the great outdoors. It followed that every sale the company made encouraged people to protect the wilderness. Nothing pleased Carsten more.
The Book
Finally, it was time to retire and write his book. In 1985, he accepted a position through the College of Forest Resources as visiting scholar at the University of Washington. The Institute for Environmental Studies later extended the appointment and offered him an office. Here he could remain disciplined and close to the library as his writing progressed.
However, privately he knew the score. The College of Forest Resources, let alone the National Park Service, was not about to like a book suggesting that forestry was pseudoscience. No sooner had he submitted his completed manuscript to the University of Washington Press than its reviewer flatly rejected it. "Obviously it went to someone in the College of Forest Resources," Carsten said, "not a preservationist."
Of course, he had always known what he was up against. Practically everything written about forests in the United States ended with their commercial value. Histories of the national parks ended much the same. Most emphasized the founding directors of the Park Service, Stephen T. Mather and Horace M. Albright. Carsten was among the few authors thinking critically about the Park Service -- and the politics of forestry -- in the modern era.
It was all the more imperative that his research be exhaustive, whether of the past or present. How had the problems he described come to be? Indeed, some of the best parts of Olympic Battleground set the stage in the 19th century. What had Northwest forests looked like before 1900, and how, through fraud and misappropriation, had most of the richest fallen into private hands?
In 1956, Carsten Lien photographed this recently cut Douglas fir at La Poel on Lake Crescent. The stump measured 9 feet across. The picture appears on page 288 of Olympic Battleground.
Certainly in Olympic National Park, the express mission of the National Park Service was to bring that history to a close. That's it, folks. Old-growth logging over. The 1 percent of old growth remaining in the United States is hereby preserved for the future. Future generations deserve the right to see what those forests looked like before our pioneering nation cut them down. Simply, now that the nation had lost 99 percent of its original forests, the government had an obligation to save the pittance that remained.
With that conviction, just before leaving the White House in March 1909, Theodore Roosevelt had proclaimed the heart of the Olympic Peninsula as Mount Olympus National Monument. Then its 600,000 acres had represented a fairly even split between lowland forests and mountainous terrain.
The logging industry refused to accept the split. In 1915, with added pressure from the Forest Service, President Woodrow Wilson eliminated most of the forested half. And then the smoking gun. The Park Service would later agree that Wilson's boundaries were more than adequate should the monument be made into a park. Even then, the Park Service did not want the rain forests.
Carsten found that mind-boggling. Why would Park Service management agree with the U.S. Forest Service? Their missions were diametrically opposed. As for not wanting the park, why stop with Mount Rainier? Must everything in the national park system be just a "sample" of wilderness?
But there it was, imbuing every record he had touched, and that a research effort spanning 30 years. As proposals for a 900,000-acre Olympic National Park began to jell, its biggest opponent was the Park Service itself. No national park should contain commercial timber, the agency indeed sounded like its rival. Only the Forest Service was prepared to manage timber sales, again, as if every stick of old growth on the Olympic Peninsula should in fact head to market.
The Cultural Problem
Carsten laid the problem squarely at the feet of Stephen Mather. For all the accolades Mather had received as the Park Service's "founding" director, he was never a preservationist. He rather believed in tourism, and because of that instilled Park Service management with a "playground mentality." Mather in fact promised the Secretary of the Interior "a business administration." Given a choice between roads and wilderness, wilderness was the last thing Mather wanted.
After all, the national parks were primarily scenic spectacles --samples-- of America. Because forests had little to do with those spectacles, any kind of forest would do. At minimum, a fringe of trees was needed to "frame" the natural 'wonders' on which the eyes of tourists were inevitably fixed.
Thus Mather kept setting up the Park Service to fail insofar as protecting wilderness was concerned. Carsten's most damning example was predator control. Rather than heed the Organic Act, Mather called for the extermination of all wildlife he did not like. Every "bloodthirsty" animal needed to be eliminated from the parks before hapless deer, elk, and moose could thrive.
Nor could Mather's prejudice against predators be explained by the absence of better science. Even as the Park Service was being approved, the distinguished zoologist Joseph Grinnell, writing in the journal Science, had warned the Interior Department against the excesses of predator control. Besides, what tourists wanted to see only grazing or browsing animals? Mather rejected all of it, expanding bear-feeding shows in Yellowstone, Yosemite, and other parks just to prove what the public "wanted."
In 1989 Carsten ran for mayor of Seattle, placing sixth in a primary field of 13/Carsten Lien Family Archives
You can imagine the coffee Carsten and I consumed while debating those points. As I reminded him, the national park idea -- not just Stephen Mather --was then fixated on monumental scenery. With the exception of the giant sequoias -- also considered monumental -- biological conservation had come late to every park.
Mather was not the only one hawking for tourists. As often, preservationists joined in the campaign. They were also desperate for bodies -- visible justification -- for keeping the parks intact. Only people enjoying themselves'and yes, spending money'might possibly dull the political power of resource interests bent on grabbing back the parks.
"But the national preservation groups grew out of it, Al. The Park Service never did. How else do you explain its failure to evolve as the agency spelled out in the Organic Act?"
I had to agree that Mather's obsession with tourism caused the national parks to be overbuilt. "That's one symptom," Carsten added, "but consider the whole disease. Mather was too busy appeasing railroads, automobile clubs, and chambers of commerce to insist on a national constituency for the parks. Local interests always think of the parks as an economic engine. Nowhere does the Organic Act insist on that. It clearly says 'unimpaired'."
"But Mather thought he was building a national constituency," I argued. "People from all over the country finally got to see the parks."
"Yes, but Mather left it there. The next step was to educate the public that the national parks in fact are national. The Grand Canyon belongs to the entire country, no matter what Flagstaff thinks. Instead, Mather allowed a disparate assortment of local interests to insist the parks serve them. Allow it? Again, he encouraged it. This set up the National Park Service for failure every time it needed to say no."
"In Olympic National Park, it needed to say no to the loggers. In the first place, they had no right to log a thing. The rain forests were protected by law -- and for the nation. 'Unimpaired' did not allow the cutting of a single tree -- let alone the thousands that were actually cut. Instead, the Park Service kept bending to local opinion until it wound up saying yes to the mills."
"Today, think snowmobiling, overflights, mobile homes, and ATVs. What do they have to do with preservation? Nothing. There is nothing in any of it that says the national interest. A strong Park Service would have taken every one of those 'inventions' to the country. Preservation should decide what is appropriate access, not the latest frivolity demanding access."
"The Park Service should have welcomed the lawsuits -- and the fights in Congress. That is how a democracy decides things. Mather instead repositioned every local interest ahead of the national interest, until the Organic Act was a sham. Long after his death, whenever localized interests rose up against Olympic National Park, the Park Service was predisposed to -- keep the peace -- by giving away the nation's trees."
I could not deny that my history of Yosemite National Park also proved his points. Starting in 1905 with the elimination of 542 square miles from the park, including most of its richest forests, opponents knew how to pound on Yosemite using localized pleas and arguments. Against the hue and cry of would-be loggers, miners, and settlers, John Muir sounded like a thief. Preservation stole peoples' livelihoods. After 1916, the Park Service bent and bent. Finally, on reconstructing the Tioga Road in 1958, the agency virtually guaranteed that regional tourist towns would have more say over Yosemite's future than the nation.
"Exactly," Carsten agreed. "And if the Sierra Club had not reminded Congress of the national interest, the Grand Canyon would have been dammed because Arizona wanted it dammed, again purely as an impetus for growth. The Park Service has no obligation to enable any of it, but that is exactly how the Park Service operates."
Into Stephen Mather's permissive culture rather than a 'protective' culture, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt thrust Olympic National Park. Suddenly, the Park Service was called on to protect something local interests again desperately wanted -- the rest of the Olympic Peninsula's standing trees and, in the case of reservation Indians, adjacent portions of the park itself.
It was too much for the Park Service to handle -- then and now. Initially the Mather Men, as they were called, remained committed to a smaller park, just as their successors would allow political correctness to nibble away at the park, as well.
The Emergency Conservation Committee
Supporting Carsten's exhaustive examination of the National Archives was his path-breaking research on the Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC). It was the ECC behind the national constituency that finally forced the Park Service to back down. It is a story not to be spoiled with a summary. Simply put, the committee gave the Park Service fits, and in truth, was the reason Olympic National Park was established and ultimately survived.
These were admittedly Carsten's heroes, led by the committee's nominal leader, the suffragist Rosalie Edge. After women achieved the vote, she increasingly identified with preservation, earning the sobriquet "hellcat" for her blistering outspokenness. As critical to Olympic National Park, she was joined by a Midwestern journalist and White House insider, Irving Brant, and Willard Van Name, a distinguished curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
"You see why the ECC was critical," Carsten remarked. "At some point, every government organization needs to be reminded of the public interest. The ECC never hesitated to remind the Park Service with a proverbial two by four."
Home. Carsten and Mount Olympus from High Divide Trail, 1978/Photo by Garth Lien, Carsten Lien Family Archives
In 1991, Carsten published his reminder as Olympic Battleground with Sierra Club Books in San Francisco. He was proud of the book, but just as sure that no one in the Park Service would ever admit to reading it. Nor would the visitor centers ever sell it. Nine years later, he remained convinced. Despite the release of a second, paperback edition by Mountaineers Books of Seattle, threats to the park only seemed to grow.
The Trip
By then Christine and I had gotten to see the park several times with the author and critic himself. As promised, Carsten had planned our first trip to be a comprehensive inspection covering its major features, and thus debates. In deference to the season, we stayed in the park's lodges and a nearby motel. However, each day he had planned a hike, and finally a visit to Hurricane Ridge. Our last day further included a drive-by of the aging Elwha River dams, "a disaster," as Carsten described them, which environmentalists hoped to see removed. Legislation to that effect, passed in 1992, still required congressional funding.
The rain forests still were key. "If you want to understand this park," he admonished, "you need to understand what it almost lost." And well might lose in the future, remained his theme throughout the trip.
"The Park Service still does not want the rain forests," he reasoned. "Consider how it virtually denies access to some of the most important areas by neglecting to maintain their roads and trails." He began by showing us the trailhead entering the Queets River corridor. "It needs a footbridge," he noted. "Without one, backpackers have to ford the river, forcing would-be visitors to do something dangerous. The next thing you know, the Park Service will be telling Congress the public doesn't want the Queets River rain forest. How can the public want what it cannot see? Then out the trees will come."
The road to Sol Duc Hot Springs offered further proof. "Every park needs good roads," Carsten agreed. "It just does not need that they be fast. The whole point of preservation is to allow the resource to dictate where the roads should go." Instead, a Park Service realignment proposed in 1985 would have cost the park 3,800 trees. "Imagine it," he said, repeating the thesis of Olympic Battleground. "At the Queets trailhead there is no footbridge, but yes, here they believed they had the money to widen 12 miles of road." Had environmental groups not stopped the project, he added for emphasis, those trees would have gone straight to the mill.
The Test
At the Visitor Center in Port Angeles, I decided to put Olympic Battleground to the test. "I don't see a copy on the shelf," I said to the ranger behind the desk. "Do you sell it here?"
"Oh, no, not that book," she replied. "'It's much too controversial! You will have to try somewhere else."
"I told you so," Carsten said, chuckling off to the side. I still detected his resignation. After all, this was the audience he wanted most. "How can the National Park Service expect to be taken seriously if the only history it wants is a whitewash?" he asked.
"It's how you wrote the book," I replied. "You exhausted the files. You left them no wiggle room. You caught them dead to rights."
For the moment we left it there, only to test the Park Service on subsequent visits to Port Angeles, if always with the same result.
We soon developed a fondness for Kalaloch Lodge, in part because Carsten, having been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, could still enjoy long walks on its glorious beach. Fortunately, he continued responding well to drugs and therapy. Still, from year to year we could see him slowing down, until finally, in 2010, we sensed that our last trip might be at hand.
Vindication
"I would like to see the Hoh River Rain Forest again." Carsten said. It remained one of his favorite spots in the park. That day, Cristi and Christine had wanted to hike Kalaloch Beach. "I'll take you, Carsten," I said. "We'll give the wives a break. I would like to see the forest, too."
At Dodwell-Rixon Pass, Olympic National Park, 1974. By the time this photo was taken, Carsten had climbed extensively throughout the Pacific Northwest, including several ascents of Mount Rainier/Harry Parsons photo. Used with permission.
After the two-hour drive, we arrived at the visitor center parking lot. I found a handicap space and removed Carsten's walker from the trunk. It now took considerable effort for him to get out of a car, let alone walk a hundred feet. He still eagerly went inside.
At the desk, I opened with my routine while Carsten perused the books. "Do you carry Olympic Battleground?" I asked the attending ranger. Even as I said it I felt guilty for imposing my schtick on someone so obviously of college age. "No, we don't," she replied pleasantly. "However, we have it here behind the desk for visitors to examine. Would you like to see it?"
Well, that was different, I thought. I noticed that Carsten had looked up, too. "Actually," I said, recovering my tongue from my throat, "I wondered if you would like to meet the author. He is standing right over there."
"Carsten Lien? You mean THE Carsten Lien?" she asked. Again, her depth of knowledge and enthusiasm had taken me completely by surprise.
"Yes," I replied. "That's him, the author of Olympic Battleground. We came over from Kalaloch for the afternoon."
She had already turned to alert her colleagues. "Hey, everybody! Carsten Lien is here! You know, the author of Olympic Battleground!"
As the back room emptied, Carsten found himself surrounded, led by the supervising ranger, Jon Preston. "We absolutely love your book," he began. "Thank you so much for reminding the public that the reason for this park is the trees. I assign your book to everyone on the seasonal staff and recommend it constantly to park visitors. You are our hero."
Someone then pressed the desk copy into Carsten's hands. "Will you sign this for us?" Another ranger mentioned his personal copy and sped off to retrieve it.
I could see the desk copy was ready to fall apart. Every page had been soaked with highlight, the sentences now colored in various hues. The marginal notations were impossible to count. "It does get used," Jon said, mentioning the obvious.
"Tell you what, Carsten," I said, not wanting to steal his moment. "The Hall of Mosses Trail is probably spectacular today. I'll be back within an hour."
I returned to find him sitting in the sunlight, his walker beside the bench. The rangers had taken full advantage of his impromptu seminar, then had helped him back outside to wait for me.
"I guess some people in the Park Service have read my book," Carsten said. I detected the quiver in his voice. Actually, both of us had been deeply touched. "Read it?" I replied. "You are a rock star to those rangers, as Jon Preston said, their hero. Through them your writing has changed the National Park Service for the better, even if management will never admit it."
We happened to get in one more trip, that late the following spring. It had been widely announced in conservation circles and the press that the Elwha River dams were finally coming down. Carsten wanted a look for himself. After all, their removal was momentous, and now even to his mind, proof that Olympic Battleground was being read and heeded.
In the months following we enjoyed reminiscing, now in Carsten's lovely senior apartment in downtown Seattle. Occasionally we were joined by friends or family, but just as often met alone. In either case, the coffee was free and plentiful.
"Carsten, remember the day I told you I had not been to the park?"
"Remember it, Al? How could I forget? I was shocked. But now I know you love it, too."
"Yes, but think about it. I have never been to the park without you. You should be as proud of that record as your book."
On Saturday morning, April 7, 2012, the phone rang. It was Cristi calling to tell me that Carsten had died in his sleep. I struggled to find the proper words, both for her and for me. How does anyone say good-bye to such a generous and inspiring friend?
Just then the sun broke through the clouds, and indeed, would shine brilliantly the rest of the day.
I definitely could not remember any day like it so early in the spring. East to the Cascades and west to the Olympics, the peaks seemed close enough to touch. As for Mount Rainier, I would have thought Carsten's personal epitaph, 'I have lived the perfect Northwest life,' as perfectly legible in the snow.
Then I understood. But of course, the universe knew how to say good-bye, and now had remade the day for him. He was not to leave before his beloved Northwest had sounded its finest trumpets. As evening descended, a brilliant sunset silhouetting the Olympic Mountains offered a final, uplifting solo. Surely, as the peaks faded to black, we all knew Carsten was home.
Comments
Many thanks, Dr. Runte, for one of the finest articles I've read in NPT!
I was touched by your 'rock star' story from the Hoh. May it please you to know, just a few years after his book came out, Carsten was already on his way to celebrity and a hero to many of us working at Olympic then. Dog-earred copies of 'Battleground' circulated off-duty in all the Divisions among seasonals and rank-and-file permanents alike. It didn’t seem wise to leave the book where managers might see it, though. I even bought my own, but it grew legs.
Perhaps worse than the stumps must have been the incalculable damage to the riparian zone and spawning beds of anandromous fish by machinery 'salvaging' drift logs and tearing apart log jams.
I’m also a strong supporter of public access to the park’s outstanding “samples” of the wild, but on a minor point, I must disagree. I don't think a trail bridge at the end of the Queets Road would be affordable (pun intended), let alone sustainable, given the low gravel banks and wide, meandering, flood-prone river. The park not so long ago spent $1.5 million for an unnecessary bridge (in Wilderness, no less) at Staircase, despite already having literally miles of trail bridges it can't really maintain properly. A Queets bridge would probably cost the top-heavy NPS several times that amount. If easier and increased visitation there was truly desirable, it would be far cheaper to improve and patrol the local folk’s rough one-mile horse short-cut from a DNR logging road across the river, which avoids the gripping initial ford entirely.
Agreed, tahoma. Really great piece. The Quinault rainforest might be my favorite forest in the world.
I really appreciate guys like this. We can allow the trolls on this site to hammer their own narritive (and we know who they are), but guys like this is what makes the world (and especially North America) a better place.
Thank you Dr. Runte for writing this most wonderful tribute to your friend, and former Olympic National Park seasonal ranger, Carsten Lien. I hope this article may result in Lien's book, Olympic Battleground, being offered for sale in park bookstores.
The Olympic Battleground Story brings to light a serious threat to natural resource values rarely discussed by advocates for the national parks. That is, serious
m13cli--You should know that most superintendents do not come from the ranks of protection or law enforcement rangers. While that may have been true several decades ago, the granting of enhanced retirement benefits some years ago to those who remain in law enforcement for the vast majority of their careers has made them unable to compete after they complete their required twenty years in a law enforcement position with others for superintendent jobs who have a broader range of experience. Whatever else you believe about superintendents is open to question, but their law enforcement bias is not.
Rick
Thanks, Al, for your exquisite appreciation of Carsten.
I had the pleasure of serving with Carsten on the Olympic Park Associates board for a couple of decades or so. We worked on a number of issues and campaigns together, and my respect for his thoroughness, drive, and passion as a conservationist is immense. He was a shining example of "speaking truth to power," and his scrupulous attention research continues to guide me as a writer.
As a "local" on the Olympic Peninsula, I'm in full agreement with Tahoma; Carsten's book was immensely influential with park service staff at Olympic and with many in the local community. When he came to Port Angeles to read from the second edition in 2000, the bookstore was packed with an appreciative audience. I remember his surprise as we entered the store. His "hero status" was indeed secure.
Carsten often reminded me that Olympic was the most controversial national park in the system, and will remain so due to the incalculable economic value of its forests. Kudos to Mountaineers Books for reissuing this important history -- and to you Al, for a fine tribute to Carsten's memory.
Thank you, Dr. Runte and NPT, for bringing us this inspiring story.