WSP07790

• File Number: 7630.285
• Description: Wild and Scenic - General
• State: CO
• Basin: Statewide
• Date: 6/3/1974
• Author: Unknown
• Title: Press Kit - Wilderness and Wild Areas 50 th Anniversary - USFS
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: News Article/Press Release

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Sherman accorded the applicant a warm reception, but having no specific openings to
offer, suggested that Carhart correspond directly with the various District Offices of the
Forest Service to determine their possible need for a landscape architect. Following a series
of letters and examinations, the Forester approved the plan of securing a recreational
engineer for the Denver office at the beginning salary of eighteen hundred dollars per
annum. From his home in Mapleton, Carhart accepted the appointment, agreeing to report
to Denver at his own expense on March 1, 1919, to take up his duties as the first
Recreational Engineer to be employed by the Forest Service on a full-time, permanent
basis.2 I

By May, 1919, news of the work that Recreation Engineer Carhart had undertaken
began to circulate throughout the Rocky Mountain Region of what was then District 2 (now
Region 21 of the Forest Service, an area embracing some twenty-three million acres.22 In
what was probably his first article boosting recreation in the National Forests, Carhart wrote
in May, 1919:

Recreation plans for the Forests of the District are getting a real start toward a comprehensive
development plan. Not a surprising lot will be accomplished this season perhaps but the important
thing, the beginning of 8 full utilization of Forest Recreation, commenced.23

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The "beauty engineer," as Carhart was quickly dubbed,24 meanwhile continued to
maintain contact with his friend Sherman in Washington. In reply to a letter from Carhart,
Sherman wrote that he was very glad indeed to hear that conditions appeared favorable to
the development of recreation in the National Forests in both Colorado and Wyoming,
adding:

I was particularly interested in your scheme for developing a system of camps for the city of
Pueblo. The idea seems to me to be an excellent one and will no doubt meet with the approval of all
persons who are able to visit the camps by automobile whether they be residents of Pueblo or of the
plains country to the eastward. . . .25

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I n the meantime, Carhart was working out "the system of camps" and was in the
process of writing a sixty.four page report which. he called "General Working Plan,
Recreational Development of the San Isabel National Forest, Colorado," complete with
attached maps of the locality.26 Beginning in 1919 with this and other reports, articles, and
letters, Carhart's writings seemed to pyramid. In drafting the San Isabel plan Carhart stated
that it was "the first great regional plan that has been undertaken anywhere in the National
Forests and it is bound to be a model for other like plans that will inevitably follow. . . ."27

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In that year also, when he became a truly itinerant Recreation Engineer, Carhart made a
survey of the Superior National Forest in Minnesota, He traveled through the country now
the Boundary Waters Canoe Area by canoe, as did the early French voyageurs and coureurs
de bois.2a On this trip he made observations and took photographs and extensive notes for
the Forest Service. He embodied his findings in a preliminary report of 117 pages, with 85
pages of lively text and 32 magnificent photographs, carefully identified.29

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