Profile of Sigurd Olson

So here it is: the long awaited profile I wrote of Sigurd Olson. Mind you, it is not the most riveting piece of writing, although I did enjoy writing it. I stand by my recommendation last time of encouraging anyone to read some of his work if they haven’t. If you’ve never had the opportunity to experience the North woods, after reading an essay or two of Olson’s, I can almost guarantee you’ll want to! Enjoy!

Of Time and Place: A Profile of Sigurd F. Olson (1899-1982)

Sigurd Olson

“Simplicity in all things is the secret of the wilderness and one of its most valuable lessons.”—Sigurd Olson

               Simple joys. A way of life. A corridor into the past. A hope for the future. This is what Sigurd Olson sees as he sits on an outcrop of Pre-Cambrian greenstone jutting out from Listening Point, overlooking the south end of Burntside Lake at the border of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. He peers thoughtfully at the glassy surface of the water with one knee pulled up and an arm resting on it, a pipe casually held in his hand. 

               Olson spent the better part of sixty years conveying the importance of wilderness preservation. Nature and the wilderness were never far from his mind or his reach. Hunting, fishing and trapping were regular activities of his childhood in northern Wisconsin and later, teaching, guiding, reflecting and writing at the edge of what became the Boundary Waters Canoe Area became the norm. It was through his quiet wisdom and intimate relationship with the natural world that Olson arguably became one of the most influential and active conservationists and nature writers of the twentieth century.

               The middle of three sons, Sigurd Ferdinand Olson was born in Chicago, Illinois in April of 1899 to Lawrence J. Olson, a Swedish Baptist minister, and Ida May Cederholm. When Sigurd was seven years old, the family moved to Sister Bay on the Door County peninsula where his father’s job was to modernize the practice of the Baptist faith by introducing English language services to the congregation. From there, the Olson family moved to the small logging village of Prentice, Wisconsin before finally settling in Ashland on the shores of Chequamegon Bay. 

Sigurd’s passion and attachment for nature and outdoor recreation began at early age. With the exception of his grandmother, Olson later recalled for the Minneapolis Star that “nobody understood why on earth I had to be running off in the woods all the time.”  His father and mother held little interest in the outdoors, except to fish or picnic occasionally. And unlike his brothers, Olson’s childhood days were passionately filled with fishing, hunting, exploring, and running trap lines, a phase he termed his “Daniel Boone Days.” 

In the summer after he completed his degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Sigurd began to reacquaint himself with the north woods after spending the previous summers working on the farm of his future father-in-law. He was offered a job teaching animal husbandry, agricultural botany, and geology at two neighboring high schools in northern Minnesota. As soon as classes let out for the weekend he packed his camping gear and took off into the woods. 

The next summer in June 1921, Sigurd embarked on his first canoe trip into the Quetico-Superior wilderness. This trip left a profound effect on Sigurd and he documented it fairly extensively.  In one entry, the draw of the land on him is immeasurable: “This is beautiful. Everything is as God made it, untouched by man. My dreams have come true. I’ve seen wild country and have not been disappointed.” This first canoe country trip seemed to lay the foundation for a new phase in his love affair with the wilderness as well as sow the seed he felt for writing. Shortly after this trip, he published his first feature article for the Milwaukee Journal with the help of his brother describing his trip. 

After his marriage to Elizabeth Uhrenholdt in August 1921, Sigurd resumed teaching, although his thoughts rested mostly on spending more time outdoors and more time writing. To assuage his need to be outdoors, Sigurd decided that returning to Madison to become a field geologist might be the right decision. Even though his instructors left a lasting impression on him, Sigurd dropped out after one semester, likely after discovering his impending fatherhood.

Sigurd returned to teaching once more in February 1923, not because he enjoyed it, but most likely because it was a stable source of income. He and Elizabeth moved to the edge of the wilderness in Ely, Minnesota where Sigurd began teaching at the high school. It was in his outdoor classroom where Sigurd was in his element; where he could convey the sense of wonder he felt in experiencing nature first hand. 

To compensate in the summer months, Sigurd took a job as a wilderness guide, becoming intimately acquainted with all the major canoe routes, the best camp sites, the best places to fish, and the whole of the Quetico-Superior. He often turned the trips he led into more than just fishing expeditions. To him, they were opportunities to teach about the lay of the land, its geology, the flora and fauna, and its cultural history. Despite hectic summers spent as a guide, Sigurd began to find a new meaningful purpose and a sense of peace and contentment through his trips into the wilderness. To him, “wilderness is a spiritual necessity, an antidote to the high pressure of modern life, a means of regaining serenity and equilibrium.” Time spent in the outdoors became an elixir to maintain simplicity and balance in his life.

The year of 1925 marked Sigurd’s entry into the realm of conservation activism, which continued until his death in 1982. The U.S. Forest Service proposed bisecting the canoe country with roads to ease the movement of people and equipment in the event of forest fires and local business owners wanted to boost the tourism sector. Though there were areas of the region designated as wilderness areas, roads were subsequently built, opening the door for more development, considerably shrinking the American side of the Quetico-Superior Wilderness. 

In 1947, after resigning as the dean of Ely Junior College, Sigurd decided to pursue writing full-time and become a professional conservationist. In the years leading up to this decision, Sigurd had written numerous essays and articles reflecting on his life in the wilderness, the nostalgia of a bygone era, plant and animal life, and most importantly to Sigurd, the need to preserve the wilderness. In the years following 1947, Sigurd rose prominently as a writer and as a conservationist leader. The skills he had  gained as a wilderness guide and an educator also proved to be advantageous in his years as a leader of the wilderness perseveration movement, especially in defusing tension between strong-willed Congress members and environmentalists. He served as vice president and president of both the National Parks Association and the Wilderness Society and was instrumental in drafting the Wilderness Act which set the stage for the Wilderness Preservation system in the U.S. In 1978, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area was granted full wilderness status, fifty years after Sigurd’s first efforts to protect it. Throughout these years, he continued to publish many articles and essays in addition to nine books outlining the wonder and awe of nature and the wilderness. 

In the few years leading up to his death, Sigurd had been in poorer health, having undergone treatment for colon cancer in 1979 and never fully regaining his strength. At the time of his death in 1982, though, Sigurd felt well enough and decided to go for a hike on snowshoe. It was during this hike that he suffered a fatal heart attack. He had just completed his ninth and last book, Of Time and Place, published after his death. 

Sigurd Olson spent the better part of sixty years expressing the importance of wilderness preservation and simple beauty of nature itself. Through his quiet wisdom and intimate relationship with the natural world, Sigurd became one of the most influential and active conservationists and nature writers of the twentieth century. His last typed words embody the very pioneer spirit he advocated and the sense of wonder he felt at the turning point of his life. Before he left his cabin, he wrote that, “a new adventure is coming up and I know it’s going to be a good one” and that “as long as there are young men with the light of adventure in their eyes or a touch of wildness in their souls, rapids will be run.”

Quotes, timeline of events, and vision of Sigurd Olson referenced from:

Backes, David. Wilderness Within: the Life of Sigurd Olson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Print.

Backes, David and Sigurd Olson. The Meaning of Wilderness: Essential Articles and Speeches. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Print. 

The Wilderness World of Sigurd Olson. Video