Environment: New Danger in the Wilderness

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Robbers, armed groups and pot growers menace park lands

Thousands of nerve-shaken, overcivilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.

When the great naturalist John Muir wrote those idealistic lines in 1898, the nation's parks and forests were peaceful retreats where a visitor from the city might not encounter anything more ominous than the mournful moans of a lovesick moose. No more. Today Muir's pristine wilderness is becoming increasingly dangerous. Not because of any natural menace, but because of human malevolence. In almost all national parks and forests, crime is rising sharply, especially the violent kind.

On a recent weekend in Oregon's Dunes National Recreation Area, carousing, boozing, drug-using dune-buggy jockeys brawled so fiercely that officials had to set up a field hospital to treat the casualties. In Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a ranger was assaulted one night when he inspected a parked car and chanced on a kidnaper and his victim. Everglades National Park in Florida has become a major thoroughfare for illegal drugs from Colombia and elsewhere. Arizona has robberies, assaults, rapes and sex parties in its Salt River area, and the Wasatch Front in Utah is the scene of drug feuds, arson and marauding motorcycle gangs. On a single summer day in Yellowstone National Park, when as many as 30,000 people visit natural wonders like Old Faithful, Park Service officers must stay on the alert for violations that range from speeding to burglarizing parked campers. Says Chief Ranger Thomas Hobbs "You learn that not only nice guys travel"

Since 1969, reports the General Accounting Office (GAO) in Washington, violations of federal law in U.S. parks and forests have tripled, exceeding the increase in the number of visitors (101 % for parks 45% for forests; during the same period. The biggest jump has been in assaults, up 400%. Vandalism is up 220%. In the past decade, timber thefts have soared by 700%. The GAO, as financial overseer of federal properties, warns that the rising crime rate may be undermining the very usefulness of many wilderness areas as retreats for recreation.

No part of the federally owned parkland has been hit harder than California's Angeles National Forest, 693,000 acres of rugged, thickly wooded wilderness in the San Gabriel Mountains, northeast of Los Angeles. The forest has long been a catch basin for urban crime. Says Administrative Officer Roger Fischer of the U.S. Forest Service: "It's the biggest dumping ground for dead bodies and stolen vehicles I've ever seen." During the first five months of the year, authorities reported eleven rapes, 27 aggravated assaults, 66 burglaries and 139 thefts and robberies, including 14 stolen cars.