America’s Next National Parks? 
A look at four gorgeous places that are great candidates for national park status

Uncommpaghre	Big Sur	White Mtns.	Maine Woods

The heyday of national park creation is a few years behind us. In 1980, Jimmy Carter signed into existence several gigantic parks in Alaska, while Ronald Reagan later added Great Basin, Gates of the Arctic and Glacier Bay to the array.

Bill Clinton oversaw the creation of Death Valley (the largest park in the Lower 48 states), Joshua Tree, Dry Tortugas and Saguaro national parks.

Currently, there are no new proposals for national parks on the table. The reasons why vary. 

First, there’s the disgracefully low level of annual funding for already existing parks that spans several recent presidential administrations. Nobody knows how we’d pay to build infrastructure for any new parks or administer them when we can’t even properly care for the ones already here.

Another reason: Seemingly all the prime candidates for national park status have already been protected, either as parks, national monuments or wilderness areas.

Still, are there any places left in the Lower 48 states that have been “missed,” that would make splendid national parks?

We think so. In fact, there are four places we say would make wonderful new parks. They fall short of the ideal in the sense that they’re not as pristine as the great landscapes we had the foresight to protect earlier in our history.

To one degree or another, each of them has been settled in and used for commercial purposes – although not heavily enough to mar their beauty in any unalterable way.

With a diligent application of flexibility and common sense, we could add to them the elite list of protected places. It would mean grandfathering in their more benign or established human uses, but as the Europeans have learned with their national parks, there’s no need to treat the human part of an ecology as a foe. (For a discussion on two significant European national parks that incorporate and protect human ecology, see our September 2002 article on Gran Paradiso and Vanoise national parks)

The people and enterprises that would remain in place would constitute major elements of the infrastructure necessary for a fully functioning park.

These are our four nominees:

Uncompaghre National Park

San Juan Mountains, Southwestern Colorado

(See: “The Million Dollar Highway,” May 2002)

Dimensions and Size: The park and protected areas would extend from Ouray on the north and Telluride on the west, south along the Uncompaghre River, and then jump east to encompass the Weminuche Wilderness Area. About 1,000 square miles.

Highlights: Colorado’s largest wilderness area; spectacular high-mountain scenery; historic mining towns; the gorgeous canyon of the Uncompaghre River, flanked by the Million Dollar Highway, one of North America’s 10 top scenic drives.

Drawbacks: Some lingering environmental damage from mining; extensive use of high-country areas by 4-wheel drivers; large sections of private lands in the heart of the range, including the key town of Silverton. 

Mitigations: Efforts could be made to include Silverton and environs in the park or in an adjoining preserve, with tax incentives to encourage such an affiliation. Congress could create a second category of national park that recognizes certain established or prior uses and does not attempt to ban them outright.

Why Do it: These are Colorado’s biggest, steepest and most remote mountains, tucked into the state’s southwest corner, far away from major cities or easy Interstate access.

Locals often refer to the San Juans as “The Switzerland of America,” and there are places in the range where peaks rear out of the ground, sans foothills, like the precipitous peaks of the Alps.

Over the years, as mining has played out, the San Juans have become a Mecca for four-wheelers. Alpine dirt roads, some of them at elevations above 13,000 feet, lace the back country and present some of the greatest driving challenges to be found in the lower 48 states.

(To get from the beautiful old Victorian mining town of Ouray to Telluride, you can take a leisurely 62-mile drive that goes around the San Juans, skirting their base. Or you can take the 18-mile Imogene Pass road that crests 4,000 above Telluride, nestled far below in its box canyon. The view looks well beyond the town, west into Utah and the Manti-La Sal Mountains near Arches and Canyonlands national parks.)

For more conventional drivers, the scenic heart of the San Juans is the 23-mile stretch along the “Million Dollar Highway” between Silverton (9,300 feet) and Ouray (7,800 feet). The mountains are incredibly steep, and the reddish-colored canyon of Uncompaghre River is one of the great unsung defiles in North America. It is a tribute to the San Juans’ isolation that this canyon hasn’t received more attention from nature writers and photographers.

We think the more conventional uses of a national park – hiking, camping, wilderness preservation – can co-exist with four-wheel driving in our proposed park. Alaska’s combination national park/preserves serve as a helpful example here: National parks protect all wilderness aspects of an area, while contiguous preserves, which take into account prior human claims and uses, allow for some forms of economic activity even as they protect important scenic and biological elements.

Big Sur National Park

Central California Coast

Dimensions and Size: From Point Sur in the north south 60 miles along the coast to Salmon Creek; east to include the Ventana and Silver Peak wilderness areas, as well as adjoining parts of Los Padres National Forest; annex Hunter-Liggett Military Reservation to preserve California’s most magnificent remnant oak prairie. About 800 square miles.

Highlights: The most dramatic coastline in the lower 48 states, with steep mountains soaring above the ocean; the southernmost natural groves of the coastal redwoods; large wilderness of chaparral-type landscape; a superlative oak parkland on the east and San Antonio de Padua, the 12^th of Fr. Junipero Serra’s 21 mission churches in Alta California. Much of the area is publicly owned.

Drawbacks: Very limited accommodations and access for casual, non-hiking visitors; the adjoining oak woodland is part of an active and important U.S. Army testing ground.

Mitigations: Put no pressure on current private inholdings, such as the Esalen Institute, Tassajara Hot Springs, Nepenthe Restaurant, Ventana Resort, various Buddhist, Catholic and Anglican monasteries, etc., which provide superb low-key destinations for travelers. Build a modest 100 to 200-room lodge at Pt. Sur Lighthouse and another lodge on the east side of the park near Mission San Antonio at Hunter-Liggett. Swap federal land further south for use as an Army proving ground.

Why Do It: Though there are two federal wilderness areas and several state parks that protect elements of them, this park would elevate two of the country’s most outstanding landscapes to iconic status. They are the interior oak woodlands of California’s coastal ranges and the dramatic interface between the Santa Lucia (pronounced in the Spanish manner as “SAHN-tuh Loo-SEE-yuh”) Mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

The Santa Lucias rise sheer from the ocean, quickly gaining altitude and cresting at Junipero Serra Peak (5,862 feet – 1,787 meters), only 11 miles inland. Outside of Alaska’s coastal ranges, that’s one of the steepest and swiftest climbs in elevation of any land-sea meeting in the U.S. 

State prisoners in the 1920s built the two-lane highway that winds its way up the coast, starting in the south near William Randolph Hearst’s fabled castle at San Simeon and pushing north to Carmel by the Sea. The road, which averages 300 to 500 feet above the breakers, hugs the mountainside like a skittish 3 year old clinging to his mother’s skirts.

It was a brutally hard road to build. The mountainsides were so steep that there was no room for error – landslides, falls and roadway cave-ins were constant threats. Crews worked in the middle of a wilderness, dozens of miles from civilization. But despite the danger and isolation, prisoners often wrote home to their loved ones about the sense of serenity the landscape offered, and how the project’s hard work and struggle gave them a chance to sort out their lives

White Mountains National Park

New Hampshire

Dimensions and Size:  This new park would be formed from the White Mountains National Forest, a preserve that currently covers 770,000 acres (1,200 square miles). It would extend about 25 miles west to east and 30 miles north to south in a rough square delineated by U.S. Hwy 2 on the north, U.S. Hwy 3 on the west, State Hwy 112 (the Kancamagus  Highway) on the south and State Hwy 16 on the east. Total area: About 400,000 acres (600 square miles).

Highlights: The Northeast’s most dramatic peaks (48 of them 4,000 feet or higher) rising from the New England countryside (and hefty enough to look like transplants from the Rockies 2,000 miles to the west); remnant groves of the great virgin forest that blanketed New England before the arrival of English and French settlers. The weather station atop Mt. Washington once clocked the highest wind velocity ever recorded on earth – 231 miles per hour. Meteorologists say that Mt. Washington is so big it can affect weather in the entire New England region. The cog railway that climbs to its summit has been a tourist favorite for decades.

Drawbacks: The area is dotted with towns, ski resorts and highways. Although the national forest contains a 112,000-acre wilderness, and no more than 0.5% of the total area can be logged in any given year, much of the forest cover has been previously logged.

Mitigations: Surprisingly, New England’s extreme climate has never stood in the way of quick regeneration by forests that have been denuded by logging or farming. Late in the 19^th century, after New England agriculture moved away to more fertile and productive areas in the South and Midwest, abandoned farmland was quickly reclaimed by vibrant second-growth forests. New England today has twice as much woodland as it had in 1900, when the population of the U.S. was only one third of what it is now.

The region is a popular ski destination and the local economy depends heavily on tourism. Rather than take a heavy-handed, all-or-nothing approach that would ban current economic uses in the name of restoring the park’s landscape to an imagined pristine state, the government could take a gradual approach that gives people a generation or two to change their current economy from extraction and exploitation of natural resources to tourism and services.

Current townships would remain as tax-sheltered private inholdings but would be expected to adhere to federal guidelines for pollution control and waste disposal. Aesthetic matters, such as signage and building design, would be handled by the free market: National park status would draw visitors from the four corners of the earth – savvy businesses and municipalities would realize the need to present attractive faces to the world.

Why Do it: Over the years various conservation groups have suggested that these mountains belong at the core of one of two New England parks that would preserve some of the most spectacular scenery east of the Mississippi.

The Presidential Range boasts 12 peaks that exceed 5,000 feet, topped out by Mt. Washington at 6,288 feet. It would be an imposing ensemble of mountains anywhere in the country. Unlike other eastern peaks, New Hampshire’s mountains soar past timberline and present the kinds of bare, wind-riven faces more common to high mountains in the Far West. As such, they’re surefire attractions for hikers and climbers looking for uncanopied, open-skied encounters with nature.

At present, New England’s grand landscape is represented solely by Acadia in the U.S. national park system. Establishment of this new national park would correct an historical error by adding a significant and beautiful piece of regional geography to the collection. By setting up a European-style park that finds ways to compassionately co-exist with human uses, the park system could pioneer an approach to preserving worthy landscapes that might otherwise be frittered away because they’re not “pure” enough to rate Yosemite-like veneration and protection.

Maine Woods National Park

Maine

Dimensions and Size: Current proposals call for up to 3.2 million acres (5,000 square miles), an area equal to Yellowstone and Glacier national parks combined. This area would take in the northern counties of Maine and include the current Baxter State Park, Allagash Wilderness Waterway and northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail.

Highlights: Great deciduous and conifer woodlands in a rolling, often mountainous, landscape; abundant lakes; already existing wild rivers and other waterways that could be restored to wildness. The northernmost spur of the Appalachian Mountains climaxes at Mt. Katahdin, Maine’s highest peak (5,267 feet), protectively surrounded by Baxter State Park (320 square miles).

Drawbacks: Extensive tracts of forest here have been logged off several times over the past 200 years. The northern part of Maine has long been run as a quasi-independent fiefdom by various logging companies that have restricted access and discouraged large-scale settlement.

Yet the size and remoteness of the region has left many pockets of virgin forest and unsullied waterways. Though these pristine elements are a patchwork, the exploited areas that connect them, if left to regenerate, could be restored to wilderness condition within a few generations.

This is an intensely controversial proposal, one that has drawn heated opposition from loggers, hunters, trappers and other citizens who fear that a national park could destroy traditional livelihoods and restrict access to all but the affluent and effete.

Also, the cost of acquisition would not be cheap. Despite intense competition from Canadian and Southern U.S. pulp suppliers, the north Maine woods are still valuable properties. The National Park Service, chronically underfunded, would need help from private citizens to pay for this new park. (Land acquisition costs would be around $1 billion at current prices.)

Mitigations: As with a potential White Mountain National Park, the forests here regenerate quickly. Besides lumbering, no heavy industries have taken root in northern Maine, so the region lacks the extensive pollution that can come with mining and manufacturing.

Also, the area’s population is small. The staffing and infrastructure requirements for what could become a very popular national park (given its size and proximity to huge U.S. and Canadian populations) would afford most locals a chance to participate in an expanded economy.

Concerns about hunting and trapping could be addressed by splitting the protected area between park and preserve status. Within park boundaries, all exploitive and extractive activities, including taking animals for food or sport, would be prohibited. However, within preserve areas, which would protect less scenically significant landscapes while providing a continuum of protection, limited hunting could be allowed.

Why Do It: The northern part of Maine, despite its relative geographical closeness to the gigantic conurbation that stretches from Boston to Washington, DC, is a surprisingly wild and untrammeled place. Even generations of logging have not unalterably changed it – it remains an untamed and far-flung territory. In the heavily settled East, the existence of so large a sparsely settled landscape invites greater protection.

Maine is also the furthest reach of the Appalachian Mountains, a range that, despite its immense popularity, historic importance, heavy recreational use and 2,000-mile length, has only been fitfully protected and preserved. Here, at the Appalachians’ end, in a part of the country starved for wilderness, would be a magnificent place to set the largest national park south of Alaska.

– Patrick Totty