Exceptional Mountains: A Cultural History Of The Pacific Northwest Volcanoes

One reviewer described this book, as, “…why and how we have sanctified these high-altitude mountains.” However O. Alan Weltzien’s fine effort also casts some wonderful light on aspects of the national parks and National Park Service that are very pertinent to this, the Park Service’s centennial year.

While President Obama has used his authority under the Antiquities Act to designate national monuments that resonate with specific groups of Americans, some sites might fit better under a “National History Department” rather than an agency launched to protect and preserve natural wonders.

A century ago the founders of the National Park Service were perhaps more discerning. There was a clamor to add more of the Northwest’s volcanic peaks to the National Park System after Mount Rainier, Lassen Volcanic, and Crater Lake parks were created. But Stephen Mather and Horace Albright, the director of the Park Service and his deputy, were not easily swayed, notes Mr. Weltzien.

“Many people from Seattle to Portland were urging us to make national parks out of every volcanic mountain from Mount Baker to the California border. Mather and I agreed we couldn’t make every peak a park and didn’t have time to inspect them all,” Albright recalled later in life.

He also noted that, “We declined to consider… Mount Hood, Mount Baker, Mount Shasta…and many other beautiful areas because they did not measure up to what we regarded as national park standards or had too much commercial development or too many inholdings, or because the cost was prohibitive considering what Congress would give us.”

Mr. Weltzien also raises an important issue, one specific to the volcanic peaks but which we also shouldn’t overlook this year in light of record park visitation and how the National Park Service is trying to cope with it.

“In the Twentieth Century’s second half people come to the volcanoes in far greater numbers, engaging in more diverse activities than ever before, and at some sites our love affair with them creates practical, visible problems” he writes. “That love affair sometimes obscures, to our peril, the fundamental differences between these Arctic lands, as they’ve often been described, and the primary topographies of our lives. We must see beyond them as inevitably distorting mirrors even as we figuratively hold them in our embrace. To read the volcanoes is to read ourselves, and we need a fresh look.”

Running a bit over 200 pages, and amply footnoted, Exceptional Mountains touches on many of the issues in the Northwest that also are confronting our national parks: recreation demands, wilderness issues, commercialism, political meddling, and even backcountry travelers who, revering technology above personal skills, soon find themselves beyond their abilities and in need of a rescue.

Though Mr. Weltzien’s focus is the high volcanic peaks of the Northwest, many of his findings and impressions can relate to the entire National Park System.