The North Country National Scenic Trail was a concept, not a reality, for half its recorded history. How it grew from one to the other is the story of
The Early History of the
North Country Trail
|
The North Country National Scenic Trail was a concept, not a reality, for half its recorded history. How it grew from one to the other is the story of |
|
|
The Early History of the |
||
by
Tom Gilbert
Midwestern Regional Trails Office
Adapted from a speech given
at the Annual Meeting of
The North Country Trail Association
Beverly, Ohio, August 23, 1997
President Johnson's "Natural Beauty Message" in 1965 first laid down the idea that we should be establishing a national system of trails that copied the Appalachian Trail in all parts of our nation. As a result of that message, the Secretary of the Interior was directed to undertake a national trails study. He assigned that to the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, the organization I started out working for back in 1972, seven years after that study.
In March of 1965 they formed a steering committee to conduct that study. The steering committee consisted of four federal agencies: the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management in the Interior Department, and the Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture. This steering committee undertook to involve all other federal land managing agencies as well as state interests, in looking at the situation regarding trails in our country, to look at what might be done to carry out the intent of what President Johnson had said in his natural beauty message. As part of that process, federal agencies were directed to study potential trail routes similar to the Appalachian Trail that could be part of this national trails system.
The report, "Forest Service Report for the Nationwide System of Trails Study", that the US Forest Service contributed to that National System of Trails study is dated September, 1965. Up until I went through some of the records, I thought that this report was the earliest publication that had a record of the concept of the North Country National Scenic Trail. It talks about "trunk trails", long-distance backbone trails. One of the trails covered in here was a proposal for what at that time was called the "Northern Country Trail," and there was a first-cut idea of what a logo might be for the trail.
This is the first idea I can find of
what a north country trail route might be. I find it fascinating. For instance, the route in Ohio goes right up
through Columbus, Ohio, rather than through the western part of the state; it had a looping system in the eastern
part of Michigan's upper peninsula, and other very interesting ideas that are a little different.
I said that I thought this was the earliest report that you could find with reference to the North Country Trail in it. In looking through the files again, I noticed that there was an earlier report. This is the report prepared by Region 9 of the US Forest Service, on the the feasibility of a "Northern Country Trunk Trail" for the steering committee of the nationwide system of trails study. This was the Milwaukee office's input on the North Country Trail to the steering committee. I thought that maybe this would tell where the idea began; what it told me is that the original idea may have been somewhere outside the Forest Service, even though the Forest Service still was the one that ran with the idea and developed it. It says on the first page of the study, "The Bureau of Outdoor Recreation was assigned to study the task of setting up a steering committee to conduct a trail study and prepare program reports. Specific assignments for the various studies were given to the agencies. The Forest Service was assigned, among others, the responsibility for the study of the Northern Country Trail as a potential trail." I deduce from this that the concept of the Northern Country Trail came from someone, and then was assigned to the Forest Service to evaluate and develop. The date on this is 1965; it doesn't tell the month but it's very obviously input and predates by several months this document.
As a result of the Forest Service's evaluation of this trail, it carried over to the final report from the interior department on the nationwide system of trails study called "Trails for America", published in 1966. This report set the stage for the legislation that occurred two years later, establishing the National Trails System.
The North Country Trail in this report is very interesting, in that it goes right across Vermont into New Hampshire. When it gets up to northern Ohio, it turns due west and follows the Michigan-Indiana state line all the way over to Lake Michigan, and then goes all the way up the Lake Michigan shoreline right from the Indiana border all the way up to the Straits of Mackinac. What I've noticed from looking at the different routes from that point on is that each generation of routes keeps retreating more and more from the shoreline of Lake Michigan, until what we came up with as a result of public involvement sessions in 1980 and 1981 in Michigan got completely away from Lake Michigan, with a side trail over to the shoreline in part of the Manistee National Forest.
One of the things that was happening at the same time was that a senator from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson, had started back in the '50s and early '60s to have a real interest in working to permanently and completely protect the Appalachian Trail, and was formulating legislation Eventually the idea came together that legislation ought to look at the idea of creating other trails, and not just protecting one. He thought these things ought to be available in other parts of the country, so eventually the work he was doing expanded into the idea of establishing an entire system of trails. This same concept came from the administration, and the President became very interested in introducing the piece of legislation proposing this national system. Senator Nelson finally stepped back and allowed the administration to put forth their bill. It was a cooperative effort in that way, and that bill was eventually introduced and eventually passed in other forms.
That legislation was passed in 1966. It talked about National Scenic Trails as being something very special, something superlative, in our country. In the work that my office carries out, that is something that goes way back to this report, and is why Bill and I remind ourselves that we're not working just to create any neighborhood trail, we're creating one of the great trails of our nation. We keep that in our minds; not the back of our minds, but in the forward part all the time when we look at what we're doing: we're creating what will come to be the longest trail in America and should become one of the great trails.
The legislation, in 1968, authorized the North Country Trail as one of fourteen routes to be studied as potential National Scenic Trails. The study for the trail got under way in 1971, with the formation of a state and federal task force designed to carry out that study. The membership consisted of representatives of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, the National Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Federal Highway Administration, and one representative of each of the eight states that the trail was envisioned to go through at that point -- the seven we have today, plus Vermont, because the concept from the outset was that it would connect with the Appalachian Trail. In addition to the federal-state task force, each state was directed to set up its own subcommittee to guide the work and do evaluations of feasable routes in the various states.
The federal-state task force organized its work across three regions of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. There were teams in our Philadelphia office and our Denver office. The work was led by people in our Ann Arbor office. Bob Martin is retired now, but he was in charge of overseeing all of the work during most of the period of the North Country Trail feasibility study. Before him there was another person by the name of David Schonck, also recently retired from our Omaha, Nebraska office of the National Park Service. He was in Ann Arbor, and in early 1973, just after the study got launched, he did a switch in positions with the corresponding person in charge of resource studies in our Washington office, Bob Martin. That put Bob in charge of carrying out the rest of the work on the North Country Trail.
I got drawn into that work in 1973, because I'd been hired in 1972 as the regional public information officer for the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation in their regional office in Ann Arbor, so that is my first appearance. One of the things they wanted to have when they got around to going out to public meetings with the first draft of what this route might be was a slide program. That's what drew me into this process.
The route that was being considered at the time we did public meetings on the draft report for the North Country Trail comes off the Appalachian Trail down in the southern part of Vermont, and doesn't follow the Long Trail at all. It goes north to Crown Point before starting to turn west, where the authorized trail does today. It follows pretty much the same route that we have until we get to Michigan, where it made a swing down the White River in the Manistee National Forest, over to the Lake Michigan shoreline, and went up the Lake Michigan shoreline north of Manistee before cutting in and connecting with the Shore-to-Shore Riding-Hiking Trail. In Wisconsin, the route swung way up the Bayfield Peninsula to the Apostle Islands before coming back down to the route we have today. In North Dakota it stayed with the Sheyenne River, where today we drop down and follow part of the Garrison Diversion Canal. It did not stop at the Missouri River, but continued way west along Lake Sakakawea before ending at Four Bears Monument. That's the route that is talked about in this slide program in 1973. That's what was put out to the public. The changes came about because of reaction and comment on that report.
One of the things I remember about this slide program is that we did a real sophisticated job of it. It was recorded in the dinette of my apartment. We didn't use any fancy recording studios; we didn't have any money. It was definitely a homemade job, and we had to record it several times, because the lady upstairs, kept slamming her door, and we'd have to back up and record it over again because we had these door slamming noises in the tape.
As a result of the public review process, there were some changes made to the route of the trail. The loop up the Bayfield Peninsula in Wisconsin dropped out. The loop in Michigan's upper peninsula, shown in a 1974 internal report, before it was shown to the public, is gone. The route into the Appalachian Trail in Vermont has changed; it no longer drops to the south along the Hudson River valley into Vermont; but goes straight across from Crown Point. It did not connect to the Long Trail at that point, because we had the concern from the Green Mountain Club that they did not want the North Country Trail to connect to the Appalachian Trail via the Long Trail. So, this route went straight across the Long Trail, only intersecting the Appalachian Trail in Vermont close to the western New Hampshire border.
The Vermont situation was a touchy one because of the concern of use levels on the Long Trail. That concern became so great that after the interagency review that included the state participation in the state-federal task force, in the final report, we find that Vermont is no longer part of the final proposal. There was a letter from the governor of Vermont, to the Secretary of the Interior, saying, "We don't want the trail in Vermont." We then deleted that from the proposal, and it became a seven-state proposal.
One of the things that did remain in the feasbility study that was published in 1971, was that the trail, in North Dakota did extend beyond Garrison Dam over to the western end of Lake Sakakawea. After we went for the authorization of the trail, the North Dakota interests through the public involvement there recommended that we just stop once we reached the Missouri River. Part of the reason is the same reason that the Bayfield Peninsula dropped out during the final preparation of the feasability study. On the Bayfield Peninsula we were running through Indian reservations, and there was a lot of opposition. The feeling was that we should just drop that part out. The same was true through all the Indian reservations along the south shore of Lake Sakakawea. There was opposition from the tribal governments, and so we dropped that when we did the Comprehensive Plan. I'm not trying to make a particular point, in saying that that is an issue that we will be dealing with as we look at the rerouting of the North Country Trail into the Arrowhead region of Minnesota, because up at the Grand Portage area we're again dealing with an Indian reservation situation. The Superior Hiking Club have skirted that area because of that same issue. It doesn't mean that it will always be that way. To get through some of those types of places we have to find a way in which all the partners and stakeholders feel comfortable. Sometimes that's more challenging than in other areas.
The road to authorization had a lot of hurdles. Our cartographer in the Ann Arbor office of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation drew up a cartoon, because at the time we were going forward with the feasability study we were running into a lot of difficulty, and we were wondering if this thing was acutally going to come out with a positive recommendation. What was represented at the eastern end is a big sign that says "Detour", and it's straddling the New York - Vermont state line, because it just wasn't going to go on across. Once you get on the trail, here's a guy sitting with a pelican on his shoulder and a leash with an alligator, sitting at Crown Point. This was Nathanial Green, the Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks. He was from Florida, and he was sitting there pondering over this thing, because there were a lot of mixed feelings at the top, and it had the hurdle of getting by him before it could go forward.
Then, every proposal had to go to the Office of Management and Budget, which is only concerned with cutting costs, so there were scissors there, ready to snip the trail off, cut it. But then, if it cleared OMB, it went to the Congress and the President, so the trail passed through the US Capitol, and if it got past that point, it went on to working together with federal, state and local and private, and off into the sunset of the Lewis and Clark Trail at the western end. There was a long, long trail awaiting, and it's still out there in front of us isn't it?
We got through some of the hurdles, but there are other ones that came after the enactment by Congress. Some of them were internal in the National Park Service, when we didn't have a budget for the trail. At one point in 1983, they nearly eliminated all staff for the national trails operation in Omaha. We had a cutback, and all the people who were occupying unfunded positions were going to be sent to fill vacant park ranger jobs out in National Park areas. Bob Martin, my supervisor, was sent to Cuyahoga Valley, as Assistant Superintendent; my co-worker, Bob Faron, was sent to Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore; another co-worker in the division, Bob Green, was sent to Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore; and I was slotted to either go to the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway or the Apostle Islands to be a park interpreter. At the last minute, they decided they were starting to get more mail about these trails, not only the North Country, but the Ice Age and the Lewis and Clark Trails, too. People were calling and asking what they could do, they wanted information, so it was decided that they'd better keep one person out of that division to answer the mail coming in the door. So, they kept me, for better or for worse.
The final study report recommended that Congress authorize a "North Country Trail". Period. Not National Scenic Trail; just North Country Trail. There was the perception that because this trail went through a snowbelt area that there was a large enough outcry from snowmobilers wanting to have access to this that we were going to have to provide for that, and if we tried to push it through without their support, then it might be defeated in Congress. So, from on high in Washington, the Lake Central office in Ann Arbor was ordered to change the recommendation from a National Scenic Trail to a concept that would have Congress authorize the North Country Trail, but that it would have both National Scenic Trail and National Recreation Trail segments, the difference being that National Recreation Trails, by definition, could be open to motorized use to accomodate the snowmobiles. The one who I believe was imposing that was Steven Underhill, the Assistant Director. He was not in love with the concept of the North Country Trail that came out of the study process.
The legislation that was forwarded to the Congress along with this report was a bill that authorized the North Country Trail with Scenic and Recreational components. It recommended that the Secretary of the Interior establish a National North Country Trail Council to guide and foster the development and management of the trail, and that coordination would not be carried out by a federal agency, as it has turned out to be the case. There were also state-level North Country Trail Councils established; Congress was also to fund and provide staffing for the national North Country Trail Council, and the trail would initially only consist of segments that lay within federal lands. Non-federal segments would be designated by the Secretary of the Interior by application. Essentially, that process was retained.
The Ann Arbor office tried to protest this direction from the Washington office to change it from a scenic trail to a scenic and recreational trail. A briefing paper was prepared to request reconsideration of the proposal, and the points that were made were that the Secretary of Agriculture did not concur with the concept of designating segments of the North Country Trail as National Recreation Trails, and did not anticipate designating any of it on his lands as a National Recreation Trail. There was considerable opposition from ski touring organizations and citizens about permitting snowmobiles on the North Country Trail; other federal agencies and states also registered opposition or concern. The Federal Highway Administration, which was on the steering committee task force, objected to the combination trail because it was never discussed by the federal-state task force nor put out to the public for review; it was put out at the end of the process by people in the Washington office. We recommended that we return to the concept of the North Country National Scenic Trail as determined by the task force and presented to the public.
We were overruled and told to make those changes, and that's the way that set of recommendations came out. In August and September of the same year, there was an attempt to correct this. The Ann Arbor office wrote a new piece of legislation that proposed the "North Country National Bicentennial Trail". Where were we? The year before the Bicentennial. Then, in March, 1976, the Secretary of the Interior transmitted another bill to the president, which he sent on to Congress, which simply authorized a "North Country National Trail". No scenic, no bicentennial, no recreation, no nothing, just North Country National Trail.
The following year, we had a new administration, the Carter administration, and Bob Herbst, who was the head of the DNR in Minnesota, became the assistant secretary of the interior in the Carter Administration. Herbst was a big fan of the Appalachian Trail, and helped get authorized the big funding package that we're just getting around to finishing up, a hundred million dollars acquiring lands for the Appalachian National Scenic Trail. In 1977, he sent forward to the Congress a pure North Country National Scenic Trail authorization bill. Nothing happened. On March 6, 1978, Senator Abourzack of South Dakota introduced a bill which was essentially the one that Bob Herbst had sent forward the year before, Senate Bill 2661. Nothing happened in that congress; in the next congress, on January 29, 1979, Rep. Whitehurst, from Virginia, another non-trail state, introduced the legislation, as house bill 1307, and the companion bill, in the senate, was introduced March 15, 1979 SB 683, by Senator Cullinan of Maine -- another non-trail state. At any rate, those bills finally got passed; on March 5, 1980.
The Bureau of Outdoor Recreation, which did the study, was never intended to be a resource management agency. So, one of the questions that had to be answered whenever a trail was authorized or would be authorized was which secretary, Agriculture or Interior, would be assigned responsibility for overall administration of the trail, and would have the ultimate auhtority for insuring that the trail be established and maintained and protected. Since the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation was not a land manageing agency, those trails that ended up being assigned to the Secretary of the Interior for overall administration had to go to one of its land managing bureaus. That came down to two that were essentially in the land managing business; that would be the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management. The Fish and Wildlife Service, which while being a land manager, has a much narrower scope and mission that really wouldn't allow being named to carry out the administrative process. So, the ultimate end of authorizing any of these trails was to end up giving it, at least within Interior, to the National Park Service.
There are a lot of people who have contributed to this whole effort; many people in the organizations, and there's a lot of history. We really ought to try to put it together, and do a little bit more digging, and expand on what's in out archives. Who first dreamed up the idea of the North Country Trail may be one of those things that's lost to history, and that's sad to me, because on most trails, you have somebody, the Benton Mackayes, the Wallace Woods, that originally had the vision, and we don't know who that is. I almost wouldn't know where to start to even begin to inquire far enough back to find out where the North Country Trail idea that was assigned to the Forest Service came into being. Some of the people that do come to mind to start with aren't around any more. Somebody ought to get this all recorded before it's totally lost. Somebody out to jot down some notes. Someday, a history needs to be put together.
-or-