Primitive areas bore a striking similarity to the national parks and monuments because the Forest Service (at least in theory) banned most commodity uses. One big difference was that the NPS emphasized development of roads and visitor facilities in harmony with the park setting, in contrast to the primitive areas which were to remain roadless and undeveloped. .This “parallel park system was often complemented by adjacent resort facilities located on leased national forest land where roads provided access to a lake or river (4). In this way, the Forest Service could court a wide constituency of recreational users but still make wilderness available to a relatively small number of devotees.
The first test of whether this wilderness “system” could withstand outside threats came in Oregon, in the form of a developer’s proposal to build a tramway on Mount Hood. This scheme, which was hotly debated from 1929 to 1931, was opposed by most of the Mazamas (who represented the only organized citizen voice for conservation in Oregon before World War II) and the Chief of the Forest Service. The Secretary of Agriculture, however, sided with the developer and approved the project (5). Economic conditions brought by the Depression ensured that the tramway died a quiet death, but the episode underlined the fact that the Mazamas and other local groups favoring wilderness during this period had little recourse in overturning administrative decision making other than generating negative publicity (6).
This situation began to change after World War 11, when the formerly custodial management of the national forests had given way to an increased logging of government timber because privately-held supplies had been largely exhausted. By the mid 1950s, an increasingly heated debate arose over the number and size of areas on the national forests which would remain untouched from the cutting (7). The most controversial reduction of a primitive area took place in Oregon, where 53,000 acres of the Three Sisters Primitive Area were reclassified as commercial forest land in 1954 (8). In response, a Eugene-based group called the Friends of the Three Sisters became the first organization in Oregon to form specifically for the purpose of defending wilderness from the agency managing it. They and other conservation groups made the Three Sisters reduction a focal point over the next decade in the drive to secure legislation that would give wilderness areas the same legal basis as Crater Lake, the only national park in Oregon (9).
When passage of the Wilderness Act finally came in 1964, the battles over which roadless areas were to become legally protected wilderness had only begun. Efforts by the Forest Service to inventory and recommend areas in the national forests for wilderness designation were greeted with hostility by conservation groups in Oregon and other states. They accused the agency of being more concerned with timber production than non-commodity uses of roadless areas, and increasingly resorted to litigation and civil disobedience in their attempts to stop incursions on potential wilderness. Formation of the Oregon Wilderness Coalition in 1972 provided a way for local groups to become part of a statewide organization devoted to the issue. Saving large trees (species such as Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, and ponderosa pine were termed “old growth and later, “ancient forest) soon became its main focus in the wilderness battle, rather than settling for protection of high peaks and associated subalpine (noncommercial) forests.
