Nation: Ah, Wilderness

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When the U.S. General Accounting Office dispatched its investigators onto Forest Service land, the assignment seemed typically dull: a survey of mining claims. But last week the investigators returned to Washington pop-eyed and aghast at all the things in the forest that cannot be seen for all the trees.

In Idaho national forestland they found a week-end nudist camp. In Arizona, a brothel had existed for eight years while Government lawyers struggled with a tricky point: Does a brothel satisfy federal requirements to hold a mining claim?

In California, only 30 of the 3,000 shacks, homes, cafés, rock museums, orchards and summer camps had a right to their place in the nation's woodlands. In Idaho, two squatters' towns rested near the nudist camp. In Washington, another squatters' town was defiantly if quaintly called Liberty.

The report brought embarrassment to the Forest Service, which comes under Secretary Orville Freeman's woe-weary Agricultural Department and holds about 160 million acres under its domain. Edward C. Crafts, a Forest Service spokesman, confessed that the service had not been "sufficiently aggressive'' in policing claims on its lands. But the Government did display an encouraging ability to learn by its mistakes: Crafts has been transferred. Now he works for the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation.