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Show 490. At stake was the difference between the public's learning to follow Nature's ways in the Parks, and a federal agency deciding that it should provide "a rather wide range of outdoor recreation experiences graduated to the range of demands it perceives in its clientele." In Mountains Without Handrails, Joseph Sax considers the necessities for choosing public policies, based on a hierarchy of public needs. In his most concrete example, he enumerates the kinds of camping facilities the United States Forest Service provides. Sax thinks that "people want illusions that provide the comfort of familiar services while suggesting self-reliant adventure, and that the Forest Service is calculatingly giving them exactly that." We have slid into this view of the responsibility of government agencies which administer Parks and Forests. It is not, I think, what Muir hoped for, or what Sax desires. It is, however, the current situation. But by 1908 Muir and Colby - sometimes it is hard to separate their views during this period - were advocating considerable development of trails and roads in Yosemite and elsewhere. Sometimes these were not just minor improvements, and the hierarchy of their suggestions, printed in the Sierra Club Bulletin as a letter to the Secretary of the Interior, called for improved permanent roads in Yosemite Valley, a new road to Hetch Hetchy, the purchase and repair of the Tioga Road, as well as trails up Merced Canyon and down the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne. But the last suggestion on their |