National Parks

A state legislator from the west side thinks the National Park Service has neglected Oregon in a manner that is distressing both for its duration and its consistency.

His name is Fred Girod, he's a Republican representative from Stayton, and he might be onto something.

Oregon has, after all, only one national park: Crater Lake, a place of such sublime beauty that not even a narcoleptic federal bureaucracy could ignore its blatant qualifications for national park status.

Yet Crater Lake earned its national recognition in 1902, which is, to put the matter in perspective, quite some time before reality TV debuted. Or any TV.

Anyway, it seems to me that 106 years is time enough for even the government to convene a committee and draft a report or an analysis or a white paper or something. I mean consider that the feds, since they signed the paperwork on the Crater Lake deal, have managed to build the interstate freeway system and split the atom. They also have plenty of paper.

(I don't mean, by repeatedly referring to Crater Lake, to demean the Lewis & Clark National Historical Park near Astoria. I am confining my comments to standard, non-historical national parks, although to be chronologically accurate Crater Lake is considerably older than either Lewis or Clark.)

I could more easily forgive the Park Service's disdain for our state if the agency hadn't lavished so much attention (and tax dollars) on two of our neighbors.

California has eight national parks, which I suppose is a fair tally since California has more of many things than other states, including people and Mercedes-Benzes. Why shouldn't California also have an abundance of little shops in which you can buy a shot glass with a redwood painted on it?

But Washington boasts three national parks, and I refuse to accept that Washington, by any measure, is three times better than Oregon.

I have visited two of Washington's parks — Mount Rainier and Olympic — but at both places the clouds were so dense during my tour that mostly what I saw were Douglas-fir, hemlock and cedar trees, and none of them seemed in any way outstanding. Although they did smell nice.

I have seen a fair number of cloud-free photographs of both parks, though, and also of North Cascades, the third member of Washington's trio. I concede that each of the three parks possesses the sort of grandiosity that the park-going public demands.

But so do a lot of places in Oregon.

I suspect Girod and I agree on this point. I doubt, though, that our concurrence has anything to do with our both being from Stayton (although we are) or with my having worked one spring stocking shelves and bagging groceries in his family's supermarket (although I did). I never crushed anyone's eggs or smushed their bread, either, but probably that's beside the point unless you've ever tried to make a sandwich out of bread slices compressed to the size of Triscuits.

Where Girod and I part ways (not that he realizes we've been traveling together over these long and winding paragraphs) is on the issue of making reparations for the Park Service's errors.

I don't think we ought to.

I've sampled nine national parks during the past year and a half and I've concluded that Oregon, though undoubtedly deserving, doesn't need any more parks and would in fact be better off if it doesn't get any.

We don't need mile-long parades of cars packed with kids and dogs waiting for their turn to pose for pictures against a backdrop of the Three Sisters or the Wallowas.

We don't need T-shirts that depict a howling wolf next to the words "Steens Mountain." We don't need Mount Hood shot glasses.

Girod, though, insists that Oregon should have another national park, and that it should be Silver Falls.

That is Oregon's largest state park, at almost 9,000 acres, and one of its more popular, luring about a million visitors each year — twice as many as Crater Lake attracts.

Silver Falls is just 20 miles or so from Stayton and so I've been there dozens of times. I have hiked all its trails and have had my hair tousled by the damp wind that forever blows at the base of each of the falls, of which there are about a dozen main ones.

It's a pretty place, to be sure, and perhaps the most idyllic outdoor refuge in which to while away a torrid summer afternoon. But Silver Falls just doesn't feel to me like a national park.

None of the falls is particularly spectacular, and the tallest of the bunch, with a drop of 178 feet, barely ranks among the five highest in Oregon. And that one, called Double Falls, is hardly a trickle compared with, say, Yosemite.

Girod points out that the National Park Service pondered adding Silver Falls to the national park roster in 1926 and again in 1935.

Yet both times the park failed to impress the judges.

This is no insult. It matters not a whit to me whether the sign at the park's entrance includes the word "state" or "national." The spray from the plummeting water caresses the cheek just as refreshingly on an August afternoon whether the people who run the park have offices in Salem or in Washington, D.C.

I can't see how Silver Falls would be a better place, or a prettier one, if two million people came to see the water plunge every year instead of half that number.

I'm fairly certain the Grand Canyon isn't more spectacular now than it was a couple centuries ago. But it's a lot easier now to get kicked by a mule there, or by a six-year-old from Cleveland who throws a tantrum because his parents won't buy him a second ice cream.

I don't expect that Girod's national park proposal will gain much traction. But he has drummed up a fair amount of publicity, so perhaps Oregonians who haven't seen Silver Falls will add the park to their vacation itinerary.

This is a good thing.

If you go, don't skip the little gift shop in the lodge. They had a nice selection of T-shirts the last time I was in there. I don't remember seeing any shot glasses.

But that doesn't mean they aren't there.

Jayson Jacoby is the editor of the Baker City Herald.