I know that some of the agencies have talked about scenic byways. Could those be [part of] a strategy. I know you’ve talked about tying the east entrance of Crater Lake into a sort of byway system.
There’s any number of smaller or minor strategies to increase public awareness about the issue. Our feeling has been the public doesn’t care about things they don’t know, but just because you see somebody walking down a hiking trail doesn’t save it, either. But if you don’t have somebody walking down a trail you sure won’t save it, that’s for sure. Crater Lake National Park has been of interest because you can see with aerial photographs or on the ground as to how the Forest Service clear cuts have defined the boundary around the park. One of the things we’ve toyed with is simply the suggestion that if the park [service] would look at opening the old east entrance into the park, [perhaps] that give some economic advantage to, say, Chiloquin, where people would otherwise turnoff before that exit [on highway 971 to enter the park. We wouldn’t want to send people to the east entrance at Pinnacles if the park
[service] felt there were some biological harm that would be done. If people saw the Forest Service’s clear cuts along that entrance [road], that would give them some cause [to reflect on] what is the function of the park and about the difference in management philosophies [between the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service].
I was thinking about the publicity and effort made to get public support for protecting more ancient forest. What led to the decisions concerning you being the author of the guidebook which came out in 1991, and for ONRC to publish it?
It was part of what I was describing as an educational effort to increase public awareness of those forests by telling people where they could go see it. We sought to include an example in each of the BLM districts and national forests [located] in the state. The guidebook we did [focused on] particular areas that we were trying to protect. There was a lot of editorial comment compared with most guidebooks as to what the good and the bad was. In other words, it was very hard to go through one of the premier ancient forest groves in Oregon without driving through one of the premier clear cuts. The Gold Beach Ranger District [staff] read the book and objected to it because of our editorial comments about their logging practices and decided they did not want to sell the book with their publications.
Has it [the book] been a financial success?
I think it more than paid for itself. I remember when we [ONRC] were having some tight times financially in the ’90s and our bookkeeper said we made this amount of money this month from sales of the Walkins Guide. There were a few months that it really helped our financial situation, not that it floated us, but the real purpose was [as] an educational conscious-raising [device]. We [ONRC] felt that we made enough money on the book that it was not, by any means, a financial drain. There were a few months there, when revenues [derived from it] arrived at a critical time.
