“The cure for ‘too much roof’ is the great outdoors, and if we are going to affect the cure, we must intelligently plan and direct it.” —Arthur Carhart

An early casualty in the U.S. Forest Service’s struggle between recreation and commodities was its first landscape architect, Arthur Carhart. Carhart was a visionary and a dreamer who tried to convince his superiors that federal management of many western forests should nurture local economies based on recreation and aesthetics rather than on grazing and timber production. His ideas stirred some initial interest in far-sighted foresters who saw the genius behind Carhart’s comprehensive, community-based recreation proposals for national forests in Colorado and Minnesota. He scored early on-the-ground success by convincing his superiors of the value of wilderness at Trappers Lake on the White River National Forest in Colorado, and he collaborated with Aldo Leopold to develop the idea of wilderness.

But three years after enlisting, Carhart quit the Forest Service. He ran into the reality that public land is really political land, and he realized that recreation could not compete with timber and grazing interests. Oddly, the agency that so frustrated him is now proud to claim him as a visionary. The website for the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center, established by the Forest Service in collaboration with three other public agencies, stresses ideas such as interagency cooperation, support for wilderness management and support for aesthetics, ideas that contradict Carhart’s experience as a Forest Service employee.

Born in Mapleton, Iowa, in 1892, Carhart was the first graduate in landscape architecture from Iowa State University in 1916. After two years of service as a sanitation engineer in the U.S. Army, he accepted a job as the first junior recreation engineer with the Forest Service’s District 2 in 1919. His annual salary was $1,800.

Carhart felt that the Forest Service should cooperate with municipalities to manage forested watersheds for the public good rather than for special interests such as grazing and timber. Carhart’s first boss dispatched him to the dry and relatively unroaded San Isabel National Forest in southern Colorado. Instead of treating this young firebrand as the staff officer from hell, Forest Supervisor Al Hamel saw an alternative future in Carhart’s ideas about auto-based recreation that limited the “tin cans” to carefully designed backcountry access points. Hamel knew that earlier watershed restoration plans for the battered San Isabel had suffered setbacks due to war hysteria over shortages of wool and beef—with a resulting acceleration in wolf eradication efforts that was wildly out of proportion to the actual stock losses involved.

In Carhart, Hamel found someone who understood the relationships between watersheds, wolves, downstream urbanization and the role of the automobile in postwar prosperity. Hamel and Carhart toured the forest by auto, positioning Carhart to write the first comprehensive recreation plan for any national forest.

They drove down the Arkansas River to the booming steel town of Pueblo, Colorado. In 1919, Pueblo was arguably more important than Denver, both industrially and as a tourist gateway to the Rocky Mountains. Knowing that they had to find a counterweight to timber and grazing, Carhart and Hamel bet they could squeeze more money for recreation from Congress if they showed local support that was financial as well as political. They pioneered an early form of community-based conservation: the San Isabel Public Recreation Association.

With help from Carhart and Hamel, the association filed its nonprofit papers. “Its objects and purposes being to develop the recreation possibilities in and adjacent to the San Isabel National Forest in the State of Colorado; to own, hold and sell real estate; and to own, operate or lease hotels, stores, camp colonies, places of entertainment, stage lines, roads, trails; and to engage in all kinds of publicity and similar activities.” The capital stock was $100,000 divided into $5 shares. The cooperative agreement with the Forest Service made sure their funds remained their funds. They undertook all kinds of forestry work, with the supervisor’s approval, for beautifying the San Isabel. The association helped establish the first developed campground in the national forest system at Squirrel Creek.

A December 1920 memo written by Carhart calls the San Isabel “a good pilot project” for his assignment of “making a master recreation plan” for the forests in District 2. That would include Minnesota’s Superior National Forest, where a battle was brewing between recreation and timber interests. (Hamel later transferred to the Superior.)

Meanwhile, Carhart kept communication lines open with Washington. The assistant chief wrote to him on his first anniversary with the Forest Service, “You have every reason to feel jubilant over what you have accomplished in launching the recreation association of the San Isabel. To say that I am more than delighted is putting it mildly.” He then urged Carhart to do the same on the Superior with a group of local businesses.

Requests poured in for Carhart’s help. Community leaders saw right away that Carhart’s ideas would protect municipal watersheds while promoting the postwar auto-based recreation industry. The lifting of wartime gas rationing and travel restrictions resulted in an explosion of demand for cars and the desire to travel by car. It was up to Carhart and his allies to make sense of the demands of auto-based tourists.

Recreationists were overwhelming the forests, degrading and polluting as they went. Carhart’s training in sanitation engineering and landscape architecture uniquely suited him for such challenges. He started thinking about how to move people through a landscape once they could be induced to park their cars. The 1920 memo continues, “The need is for short foot-trails and lines of hiking traffic to take the people out of the congested area in the floor of the canyon.”

Carhart’s 1920 budget requests fell on deaf congressional ears. This was partly due to the National Park Service, which recognized the charismatic Carhart as a threat to its goal of assuming management of recreation on public land.

During that winter, after his preliminary budget requests had been denied, Carhart changed tactics. He was learning that he could write passionately and persuasively. He was asked to write a report on the district’s recreation needs that would go to the chief.

Part of his strategy was to appeal to an outside group, the American Society of Landscape Architects, to shame the agencies into acting more professionally.

“The Forest Service is endeavoring to cooperate to the fullest extent with the Park Service. Here is surely a meeting ground where a third group of people, with only the interests of the public and art at heart, may be able to help each Service in getting closer cooperation and correlation with the other. Furthermore, this group will be trained to look at the problems of recreation in the National play areas from the standpoint of trained men, familiar with the study and development of land surfaces to human use.”

Then Carhart reviewed the history of recreation management in the United States, summing up, “Ten years ago, recreation in the Forests was no more than a recognized minor use incidental to other uses. Today it stands as the most direct and personal use made by people who utilize the Forests. This increase has been so rapid that the Forest Service in this District has been confronted by a large, insistent demand for development and policies governing recreation in the Forests to meet the recreation needs, almost before it was realized this need was present in any large degree.”

Carhart lists many causes, chief among them the war, which had “introduced a large number of the male population of the country to outdoor life and physical exercise in the open,” leaving them with a yearning for a few days each year in camp. The war had also made European travel difficult, forcing vacationers to become acquainted with recreation resources in the United States. Carhart also cited the disappearance of local camping areas, the increase of disposable income, the increase of automobiles and the corollary, the increase of well-maintained and easily navigable roads.

Inevitably, perhaps, Carhart’s report mobilized the National Park Service, as well as his enemies in the Forest Service, especially in the grazing industry. It also alarmed the chief and scared Carhart’s allies. By June 1921, reduced to surveying summer home sites in Wyoming, Carhart wrote to a landscape architect friend, “The recreation situation in the National Forests is rapidly nearing a showdown. I have felt it since last fall more acutely than ever. When I came out here, I thought that there was a magnificent opportunity to do a work that would be of national importance and of magnificent scope. The opportunity still exists but until there is a very definite change in conditions the opportunity might as well be buried at the bottom of the sea.”

Speaking of his work in recreation, he continued, “They consider it a very minor value in the forest and everything of economic importance must be considered before the recreation work is taken up. I have talked with a number of foresters in the district in the last few weeks and they have in nearly every case taken a very antagonistic attitude on one ground or another against recreation in our forests … They all admit that recreation comes when there is green timber produced but they almost all say that it is not a thing that a forester should bother his head about … they simply will not countenance the intrusion of the aesthetic use of forests until the foresters’ ideas of what a forest should be is met. This means, if followed to ultimate conclusions, that recreation will never be adequately handled by the Forest Service … Alone against such a sentiment, founded in fundamental training, I will be helplessly buried.”

Speaking of his peers, Carhart says, “They will Ôstand hitched.’ Other districts, I am told, consider this one Ôhog wild’ on recreation. And all we are trying to do is to get a regional plan started.”

Carhart warns, “We are going to lose natural beauty through inadvised planning which in the aggregate will far surpass in total quality and quantity what we have now in the national parks. Would not the landscape men and nature lovers in general get right into their fighting clothes with blood in their eye if the entire National Park system were to be abolished? The situation in the National Forests with regard to natural beauty and human usability is just as serious and ultimately as far reaching as that would be. But there is no organized sentiment to force the protection of our forest treasures of scenic worth.

“So I am quitting the work at Jan. 1 next, a fact that I am not generally broadcasting. I honestly feel that this matter will all come to a showdown within not less than a year. Either there must be the organized support on the part of the men of the profession and that in a militant form backed by an aroused public sentiment, or recreation is going to be in the hands of the foresters to make it wholly subservient to producing wood.”

Just before he left the Forest Service, Carhart wrote, “I am not done with recreation in National Forests when I leave. I will not be muzzled by censorship that exists in the department, and while I am not going to do any Ômuckraking,’ I will be free to tell my ideas and views without restriction.”

Out of the Forest Service, Carhart had a chance to reflect and to develop his writing skills. On February 22, 1926, he wrote to Paul Riis about the Superior National Forest Recreation Association: “As much as I think of the F.S. as an institution, I must confess I see some faults—or rather some tricky bits of unofficial policy which I do not like.”

Over the next fifty years—he died in 1978—Carhart established himself as one of the country’s most important and widely read popular conservation writers. His works also include major books on water and timber resources and forest planning. Meanwhile, he carefully cultivated old and new friends in the Forest Service. He never ceased his efforts at reform, chiefly by imagining a better agency.

In Pueblo, Colorado, almost sixty years after Carhart left the Forest Service, the steel mills are silent. The San Isabel National Forest has long since shut down its timber program and closed most of its grazing allotments.

On a sunny fall day in 2003, Forest Service officials helped dedicate a museum expansion with partners from local businesses and from the nonprofit Frontier Pathways Scenic Byway. In addition to an elaborate Carhart display, it also has a plaza designed just the way the old master would have done it himself: as a cure for too much roof.