The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [224]
Snyder had a scholarly bent and an intense interest in Native American history, and he managed to win a scholarship to prestigious Reed College in Portland. Earning A’s in English literature, an all-around excellent student, he spent his free time at the nonprofit Mazamas clubhouse on the top floor of Portland’s Power and Light Building. The Mazamas sponsored alpine hikes and climbs all over the Pacific Northwest from Mount Baker in Washington to Mount Shasta in California. Snyder, using the club’s library, studied the history of mountaineers in the Cascades, learning useful information from their firsthand accounts.3 Since 1894 the club had been a leader in conservation in the Pacific Northwest, fighting to save Crater Lake and the North Cascades from over-timbering. Snyder also joined the satirical Regressive Party (whose slogan was “Back to the Neolithic”).4 The only real politics that Snyder and his friends engaged in was trying to get William O. Douglas to run for president in the Democratic primary in Oregon.5 “Marshall, Yard, Douglas, and those guys were my animating force,” Snyder recalled. “I joined The Wilderness Society at seventeen. And I received The Living Wilderness, which automatically came with membership. I was already mountain climbing with the Mazamas Club of Portland. Bob Marshall was a socialist, with very liberal ideas, and everything he had written about roadless areas made absolute sense to me. It still does.”6
What Snyder admired about The Wilderness Society was that it worked closely with Native Alaskans and other allies to ensure that local voices were heard in the public debate over public lands. Snyder, even in his teens, wanted to prevent “big timber” from taking over the entire Alaskan territory and Pacific Northwest. Reading about the early explorations of the Rocky Mountains during the 1850s, Snyder came to admire rough-hewn mountain men such as Jim Bridger; they were intrepid, and they knew how to “read” nature as the Cayuse or Paiute did. But Snyder saw the “second wave”—the stockmen, timbermen, mine operators, and sheep ranchers—as pillagers and despoilers. They bought and sold nature’s wonderful patrimony.
While Snyder was growing up, between 1947 and 1951, The Wilderness Society and the Mazamas Club were leading a campaign to designate the Cascade Mountains (from Mount Saint Helens in southern Oregon to the Skagit Mountains in north Washington and up to British Columbia) as Ice Peaks National Park. But many Washingtonians saw Ice Peaks as a land grab by Harold Ickes. Bob Marshall, along with Ferdinand Silcox, director of the U.S. Forest Service, insisted that this park would protect the Cascades from desecration. Marshall, working for the U.S. Forest Service, was able to save parts of the northern Cascades in the early 1930s: Glacier Peak Recreation Area (230,000 acres) and North Cascades Primitive Area (800,000 acres). But politicians in Oregon and Washington couldn’t or wouldn’t take on the lumber giant Weyerhaeuser. By the time Snyder climbed Mount Saint Helens and Mount Hood—which can be described as sentinel towers of the Pacific Northwest—a postwar housing boom was under way, timber was in high demand on the market, and the concept of Ice Peaks National Park was shelved.7
In 1951 Snyder earned his BA in literature and anthropology from Reed College; he then continued drifting around the Pacific Northwest in blue jeans and a zip-up rain jacket, working as a camp counselor, carpenter, and logger. Sometimes he would look for red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus) and owls