ITEMS OF INTEREST January 13, 1912 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

"We have twenty Switzerlands in the United States, yet last year Switzerland took between one hundred and fifty and two hundred millions of dollars from tourists, while the United States is actually losing money by not developing its national parks. Last year three hundred and fifty million dollars was spent by Americans abroad. The great resource of a national park is its scenery. The point I want to make is that scenery will pay better than any other asset the parks have. the statesman who remarked that 'the United States is not buying scenery' may have been a mighty good politician, but he was a poor economist. I want the country to understand that one of the best business investments it can make is in national parks," said Enos A. Mills of Estes Park, Col., a lifelong pupil and associate of John Muir, whose special mission in washington was to ask the government to make a national park of Estes park, a tract of about twenty-five miles in northern Colorado, containing some of the most rugged scenery of the continental divide. Estes park is a government tract situated within a forest reserve and includes about twenty mountain peaks, averaging thirteen thousand feet in height, with great canons between and pine-clad slopes.

Efforts by the forest service to prevent speculation in government timber and to protect the public against monopoly prices are shown in a new plan which has been adopted for making timber sales in national forests. This plan provides for periodic revision of stumpage prices. In view of the general upward tendency of stumpage prices, forestry officials say that long-continued contracts based on present prices would be a strong incentive to speculation. The first bid advertised under the new plan is for seventy-three million board feet in the Tahoe national forest. California, with a ten-year period in which it all must be cut. This deal will involve the construction of twenty miles of railway. In the last fiscal year more than eight hundred and thirty million board feet of national forest timber were sold, and this year, it is estimated, will show a considerably higher total.

United effort will be made during this session of Congress by the war and navy departments to secure some effective legislation for the regulation of wireless telegraphy. The navy especially has been hindered in the development of a wireless system by commercial shore stations. Amateurs are sometimes troublesome when near a naval station, but few of them send with much power. They would be welcome to intercept all the messages they could, but when they invest in one and two kilowatt sending sets they are a nuisance and need regulating as much as commercial concerns.

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