NATIONAL PARKS: The U.S.'s Time Dimension

The story itself was an ancient one, but in the summer of 1956 it enchanted the travelingest, doingest, seeingest people on earth. They marveled at Yellowstone's Old Faithful geyser. They gasped at the grandeur of the Grand Canyon, at the fire falls cascading down the face of Yosemite's Glacier Point, at the stalactitic vastness of New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns. They agreed that there is nothing more beautiful than the Great Smokies when the rhododendron and the laurel are in bloom. They whispered in the cathedral silence of the towering rain forests of the Northwest. And they shivered a little as they summoned up the ghostly crash of battle at Chickamauga, Fredericksburg and Antietam.

This year Americans are flocking in record numbers through the 28 major parks, the 153 national monuments, memorials, recreation areas and historic sites that make up the U.S.'s unmatched National Park system. On the Fourth of July, 34,000 rolled through the gates of Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee; 16.000 checked in at Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park; 4,000 descended into the Carlsbad Cavern of New Mexico; 8,350 arrived at Yosemite, and 20,000 at Yellowstone. By year's end, estimates the Interior Department's National Park Service, the visitor total will reach 55 million.

More for the Desert. The nation took its first step toward creation of a national park system in 1872. In that year Congress designated a vast area in what are now the states of Idaho, Montana and Wyoming as a public "pleasuring ground." Thus was created Yellowstone, still the largest (3,450 square miles), as well as the oldest of the national parks, and visited in the last 84 years by an army of 19 million. But the wonders of Yellowstone have yielded first place in popularity to Hoover Dam's Lake Mead in the desert country at the Arizona-Nevada border. Close behind Lake Mead's 2,675,000-a-year traffic come the Great Smokies, with 2,580,000 a year. The newest of the parks, Florida's swampy Everglades, 1,258,000 acres set aside by Congress in 1947, draws about 250,000 annually.

Operation of the great park domain, scattered from the West Indies to Alaska and from Maine to Hawaii, is a housekeeping chore of prodigious proportions. The understaffed, overworked Park Service must serve 50 to 60 million tourists a year with facilities set up to handle no more than half that number.

The Park Service is tackling its immense task on a current budget of $68 million, or less than $1.25 for each of its self-invited guests. Conservationists argue that the figure is ridiculously low, and some have angrily contended that if sufficient funds are not appropriated, the parks should be closed. The service itself is hopefully trying to boom its fortunes with a campaign called "Mission 66." Its objective: an "adequately developed and staffed" National Park system by 1966, golden anniversary year of the founding of the Park Service.

Yen for the Superlative. Despite the fact that visitors are counted by the millions, a national park is a peculiarly personal and individual thing for most of the millions. For some, the magnificent scenery is the attraction. For others, the biggest thrill is a look at such preserved forms of wildlife as the bison, trumpeter swan and desert bighorn. For others, the parks have satisfied the American yen for the superlative: within their boundaries are the continent's highest mountain (Mt. McKinley in Alaska, 20,270 ft.), wettest area (the west slope of Washington's Olympic Mountains, with 12 ft. of rain a year), hottest, driest, lowest spots (134DEG in the shade, less than 2 in. of rain a year, 280 ft. below sea level, all in California's Death Valley), oldest living thing (California's Big Trees, 3,500 years or older), and deepest fresh water (Crater Lake in Oregon, 1,983 ft.).

But, whether they come to scale the heights or plumb the depths, to ski, boat, snooze or send postcards, most visitors to the parks leave with a feeling for a new dimension about their country. It is the time dimension, derived from a glimpse of history in its broadest sweep. Here is the land that inspired the forty-niners and the mountain men, that intrigued the conquistadors and the Roanoke colonists, that baffled the Civil War generals. Here, indeed, are the days, thousands of centuries before the white man came, before Christ, before life itself, when the earth heaved and twisted and buckled and thrust its mountains skyward and shaped its valleys beneath them.

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