He Kept Them From Moving Mountains : Park Service Pioneer Honored

A North Hollywood man who helped create the National Park Service 70 years ago was given the Sierra Club’s highest award Wednesday.

Horace M. Albright, 96, received the John Muir Award for his role in organizing the agency and establishing such national parks as Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce Canyon and the Great Smoky Mountains.

“His footprints are on the United States and the world, because all other national park systems are modeled on the one that he built,” said Elden Hughes, head of the Sierra Club’s Angeles chapter.

Douglas P. Wheeler, executive director of the San Francisco-based Sierra Club, presented the award at the Studio City home of Albright’s daughter, Marian Schenck.

“Horace Albright has been the conscience of the nation with respect to establishing and protecting our national parks,” Wheeler said.

A 1915 Suggestion

Albright was working as a Department of Interior legal adviser in 1915 when he teamed up with wealthy mountaineering enthusiast Stephen Mather to press for a federal bureau to administer the government’s loose collection of national parklands.

The Park Service was formed in 1916; Mather and Albright were appointed director and assistant director. But, in less than a year, Albright was running the fledgling agency because Mather suffered a nervous breakdown that sidelined him for two years.

When Mather finally stepped down from the agency in 1929, Albright became the Park Service’s second director, serving until he retired to go into private industry in 1933. But Albright remained active in conservation, Wheeler said. He said Albright’s achievements span a half century--ranging from his preserving 1.9 million acres of Alaskan wilderness around Mt. McKinley in 1917, when Albright was running the National Park Service, to his leading a successful fight to protect the Grand Canyon from being flooded by a dam project in 1968, long after he had retired.

“In your own way, you’re as important to the conservation movement as John Muir was to the establishment of the Sierra Club and protection of Yosemite,” Wheeler told Albright.

‘You’re Saying Something’

“You’re saying something now,” Albright responded. “This is one of the greatest things that ever happened to me.”

Previous winners of the annual conservationist award include Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, oceanographer Jacques Cousteau and nature photographer Ansel Adams.

Albright, who has retained a sharp memory for dates and places, said he once met Muir, the legendary naturalist who is credited with preserving Yosemite as a national park in 1890.

“It was in 1913, and I was a graduate law student at the University of California at Berkeley,” he said. “The professor of mining and water law was the secretary of the Sierra Club, and one day he asked me if I’d like to go over to San Francisco to a club committee meeting.

“John Muir was there. I shook hands with him. He was friendly, a nice old fellow. He died the next year.”

Teen-Age Hiker

Albright was born in 1890 in the Sierra foothills town of Bishop and spent summers as a teen-ager on back-country pack trips with Yosemite forest rangers.

As head of the Park Service, Albright hurriedly worked to stake claims on wilderness areas facing private development. Then he hurried to open them to the public.

“In our day, we had to have people in the parks, because that was the way the Congress judged the parks, on how many people used them,” he said.

Nevertheless, at the time of his retirement in 1933, Albright set a tone for park policies that is still in effect.

In a letter to Park Service rangers, he said: “Park usefulness and popularity should not be measured in terms of mere numbers of visitors.

“Some precious park areas can easily be destroyed by the concentration of too many visitors. We should be interested in the quality of park patronage, not by the quantity.”