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Reviews
WINDSHIELD WILDERNESS: CARS, ROADS, AND NATURE IN WASHINGTON'S NATIONAL PARKS
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by David Louter
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| University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2006. Illustrations, photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 257 pages. $35.00 cloth. |
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| Recently, historians have been unkind to the National Park Service (NPS), taking the federal agency to task for its embrace of automobiles, tourism, and consumer culture at the expense of wilderness and nature. Into these waters wades David Louter, a historian employed by the NPS who examines the evolving relationship between Washington state's three national parks and the automobile. Windshield Wilderness is a nuanced treatment of the NPS's evolving understanding of the automobiles and roads that give the driving masses access to pristine nature within the parks. Perhaps the most important insight Louter provides is that wilderness and roads have not always been mutually exclusive categories, even after wilderness came to be associated with the lack of roads. |
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For those familiar with the efforts to build the Columbia River Highway during the 1910s, the discussion of Mt. Rainier National Park may seem familiar. Louter notes that park officials, such as NPS director Stephen Mather, embraced strategies of landscape architects and engineers to develop a harmonious relationship between nature and the machine. Using local materials that seemed natural, they built winding roads that emphasized the unfolding of scenery as they slowly climbed into the high country. Park Superintendent Owen A. Tomlinson believed the roads that would make Mt. Rainier "accessible to the people" would at the same time keep the park in "its natural condition as nearly as possible" (p. 45). Louter reminds readers that others saw a similar relationship; both John Muir and the Sierra Club perceived the automobile and accessibility in general as essential to efforts to protect the parks from an aggressively utilitarian Forest Service. |
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As nature preservationists increasingly defined wilderness as roadless areas, the NPS responded, in part because of direction given by President Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, who was a wilderness advocate. Planning for Olympic National Park involved confrontation with the troublesome Forest Service. But it also involved fighting off demands by local politicians, such as Congressman Henry Jackson who, in the spirit of the New Deal, sought more recreational opportunities for urbanites and pushed the NPS to establish a lodge and ski runs at the top of Hurricane Ridge. In their planning for Olympic National Park, NPS officials divested themselves of the past by rejecting the kind of roads that had been built at Mt. Rainier. Instead, they constructed one that made a relative beeline to a high-country overlook into the Olympic Range. Consistent with developing efforts to move visitors more efficiently on wider and straighter highways that sat less gracefully on the land, the Hurricane Ridge road, completed in 1958, provided the rapidly growing number of visitors a view into wilderness's scenic essence while limiting the number of tourists who could actually invade wild areas. The shortness of the drive further supported the wilderness value of the park by diminishing the demand for lodging and services within park boundaries. Though the NPS had scaled back its emphasis on the road itself, automobiles remained the key means by which visitors experienced the parks. |
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Louter then turns to North Cascades National Park, which would offer even less access to automobiles. Developed in the wake of the Wilderness Act of 1964, North Cascades was conceived as a park in which roads would remain outside, leaving the park's steep inclines and peaks out of reach of casual drivers. Yet, with some irony, wilderness advocates lobbied for the addition of adjoining recreational areas to the park, believing that this would defuse pressure on the NPS to build roads into the core of the park. They also urged that roads be built with the kind of aesthetic that had been applied to Mt. Rainier National Park at the beginning of the century. Louter points out that for wilderness advocates as well as park officials, the understanding of wilderness was integrally connected to their understanding of the automobile. Realizing that the vast majority of park visitors would remain close to the road as they experienced the park, the NPS developed films, with varying success, creating what Louter suggests was a new phenomenon — a "virtual park" — in the highway-based visitor centers (p. 136). |
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Windshield Wilderness is based on extensive archival research, but Louter also engages some of the most important recent scholarship on related subjects, carefully integrating it into the story that he tells. While the first couple of chapters regarding Mather and Mt. Rainier National Park may seem overly familiar and long, the rest of the book is a nice corrective of the literature. Readers will enjoy the ways in which various interests, as well as an NPS much more devoted to wilderness, inevitably thought about automobiles as they put forth policy objectives. Scholars will certainly benefit from the precision of Louter's discussions, and readers interested in the intersection between bureaucracy, environment, and wilderness advocacy will find this book invaluable. |
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| Lawrence M. Lipin
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| Pacific University |
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