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There are too many people coming to parks doing the wrong things. They treat the parks like popcorn playgrounds. They don't understand what the national parks mean.

National parks are cathedrals of spirituality and emotion, and unfortunately, they are being loved to death by many of the same people who enjoy them the most.

Civilization in our time is driven by materialism and troubled by pollution, over-population, corruption, and violence. National parks can hardly be uncoupled from the society around them, but that only makes it more important to protect them and keep them whole and pure.

A national park is not a playground. It's a sanctuary for nature and for humans who will accept nature on nature's own terms.

So when people go to the park this summer, they are not going to have the same quality of a visit. There is not going to be a ranger out on the trail to tell them about the important cultural and historic areas within the Olympic National Park.

What people ought to do is find out what a national park is to begin with.

In the hierarchy of public lands, national parks by law have been above the rest: America's most special places, where natural beauty and all its attendant pleasures - quiet waters, the scents of fir and balsam, the hoot of an owl, and the dark of a night sky unsullied by city lights - are sacrosanct.

Nothing can be more striking to one who is accustomed to the little inclosures called public parks in our American cities, than the spacious, open grounds of London. I doubt, in fact, whether any person fully comprehends their extent, from any of the ordinary descriptions of them, until he has seen them or tried to walk over them.

We've achieved this feeling, for instance, with the colors. The colors in the park are harmonious with each other, not like in big cities where they don't.

However one reaches the parks, the main thing is to slow down and absorb the natural wonders at leisure.