Director of Outdoors

A domain larger than Belgium, wilder than Abyssinia, more visited than Rome, colder than Moose Factory and hotter than Tophet, a fabulously scenic empire scattered over half a continent, quietly changed hands last week. In Washington, Secretary of the Interior Ickes announced that effective Aug. 9, Arno Berthold Cammerer would be the third director of the National Park Service. His job: to introduce the U. S. people to the grandeur of their own amazing outdoors.

The acquaintance of at least a third of the nation's citizenry with nature is largely limited to the spectacle of a strip of park lawn and a few trees which have valiantly withstood the ravages of factory smoke. City shut-ins are likely to forget that all one needs to penetrate a wilderness of 13,000 sq. mi. is a car. a fortnight and a few dollars. The National Park Service does the rest. These are popular Western spots:

Biggest, best known and second oldest national park is Yellowstone, tucked up in Wyoming's northwest corner. Last week hundreds of vacationers were pouring in through its east portal, Buffalo Bill's Cody. For about 50 mi. you follow the Shoshone ("Stinking Water"), whose warm springs never let it freeze, before you are in the park proper. You bed down that night in the Government log lodge at Yellowstone Lake, fifth highest in the world. This year the guides are taking parties of four over to Shoshone Lake for a chance at the big Mackinaw trout. Molly Island, in the southeastern arm of Yellowstone Lake, is alive with pelicans. Next day, when you look into the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, there will be ospreys which you will probably mistake for eagles. Eagles are banned from the park because they kill so much small game.

Somebody in your neighborhood at home will have told you about the park's bears. There are some 700 black and silver-tipped grizzlies this year, so you are bound to see plenty. The park service runs tourist camps, but you can safely pitch your tent anywhere. (For ferocious bears, go to Katamai National Monument, Alaska, rivaled as a game range only by Belgian Congo's gorilla preserve.) There are more bison (1,000) and elk (10,000) in the park than the mountainous area could support in the winter if hunters did not kill the elk and rangers cull out the bison. There will be Indians as well as geysers, about which government guides lecture at intervals all day long, at Old Faithful Inn. It is best not to do much public drinking in the Government hostels. The Federal preserves were bone Dry long before national Prohibition.

If you leave Yellowstone by Gardiner, Mont., a long day's drive up the Park-to-Park Highway will get you to Glacier, on the Canadian border. Glacier is the happy hunting ground for mountain climbers. (But at Mt. Rainier Park, Wash., you can climb over more ice, reach the third highest peak in the U. S.) In fact, so Alpine is Glacier's atmosphere that guest houses are called chalets. There are tepees of placid Blackfeet by mirrored lakes, lots of snow on the peaks, and the Government botanist keeps the hotels full of Indian paintbrush, tufted bear grass, harebell, Nancy-over-the-ground. He wants you to steal them. It will keep you from rooting up wildflowers in the park, which the Government assiduously cultivates. The Great Northern has a corner on Glacier rail travel just as the Northern Pacific considers Yellowstone its own.

From June 15 to September 15 this year, 50,000 people will visit Glacier, 150,000 will see Yellowstone. More than twice that many will go to the nation's most popular park, Yosemite, where Director Cammerer was due this week. Main gateway to the Yosemite is Merced, in central California. Pert, goodlooking college boys drive the buses and co-eds perform cheerfully but inexpertly as waitresses. Whopping groves of Sequoia gigantea help prepare you for the first glimpse of Yosemite Valley. Because it is more conceivable, less Dantesque than the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, it is perhaps the most solemn natural spectacle in the world. First the earth burst open, then a glacier, next an ancient lake hollowed out and smoothed over this vast and verdant chasm. From its flat, pine-needled floor, grey monoliths rise 3,000 ft. around its edges. Bridal Veil Falls trails softly to nothingness from the top of the west rim. In the middle of the valley is Yosemite, which has a comfortable hotel and one of the coldest swimming pools on earth.

Zion, in southwest Utah, is Yosemite done in oils. Its fantastic peaks and spires stand on the floor of the Virgin River Canyon in glittering pinks, whites and vermilions. The Great White Throne of Zion has a history as awesome as its name. Only two men have ever stood in the forest which caps its flat and crumbly sides. One was so unnerved by the descent that he was killed on an easier climb two days later. The other fell on the way down, survived only to become a nervous wreck.

Director. These and 18 other national parks, in addition to 40 national monuments, are the charge of Director Cammerer. During the fiscal year he will spend some $5,000,000 on them, receive from hotel concessions and entry fees some $1,000,000. His efficient and resourceful staff of 3,000 will counsel, direct and rescue from petty difficulties 1,700,000 visitors before the summer is over. All of this will be a familiar routine to Mr. Cammerer.

In 1904 he gave up his job with the Parker Fountain Pen Co. in Janesville, Wis. to go to Washington as a clerk in the Treasury Department. In his spare time he learned shorthand, Spanish, the law. In 1916 he emerged from bureaucratic anonymity as assistant secretary of the Fine Arts Commission. A year later he took on a position as first secretary of the Public Building Commission.

In 1915 the late great Stephen Tyng Mather was taken from his Chicago borax business by Secretary of the Interior Lane, who two years later made him first head of the National Park System. Director

Mather appointed Mr. Cammerer assistant director of the service in 1919. When Mr. Mather's ill health retired him in 1929, Associate Director Horace M. Albright, a Republican, succeeded him. Mr. Cammerer, a potent Democrat in Virginia, where he lives with his wife at Lyonhurst, succeeds Mr. Albright. The Mather tradition goes on. Director Cammerer, tall, browned, 49 and a good mixer, has not seen his new domain in years. While supervising east ern parks, he has puttered expertly in his two-acre Lyonhurst garden, chewing an unlit cigar. In the Eastern service he has already erected a monument to himself. It was he who handled the acquisition -- through State help, private grants, $5,000,000 from the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Foundation -- of the lands for Great Smoky Mountains Park, in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. The park, not yet formally opened, had 300,000 visitors last year. Southerners boast that its peaks are as high from base level as any in the Rockies, point out that only from an air plane has anyone seen sections of its deep wilderness. Nobody boasts that it is the land from which the Cherokee Nation was driven in 1836-39, in spite of Andrew Jackson's promises, when Georgians thought they had found gold in the deep Valley of the Noonday Sun.

*Yellowstone was established in 1872. Hot Springs, Ark. became a national preserve 30 years earlier.

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