ROADLESS AREA

To Paul Brooks, the roadless area on the map is an invitation. ""Familiarity with wilderness,"" he says, ""breeds not contempt but humility."" Here described are a number of journeys to national parks and areas of varied aspects, but all offering the lover of nature reward. The author and his wife have canoed on the Border Lakes of Minnesota-Canada, and in the heart of England; they have compassed the Olympic Peninsula with its Sitka spruces, rain forest, glacier, mountain meadows and Pacific Beach; have hiked in the Great Mountains National Park, ""a living museum"" with 130 species of trees where they discovered themselves ""bewildered,"" not lost. They have visited Alaska via the Inside Passage and been introduced to Dall sheep on Mt. McKinley by the Muries; viewed the Indian ruins and fantastic rock formations of the Canyonlands of Southeastern Utah, a potential new park under congressional consideration. They have beachcombed in the Virgin Islands, trekked in East Africa. This Mr. Brooks shares with varying attempts at evocation, as well as his view of the nature of the wilderness, its value to modern man. He concludes with a brief history of man's changing relationship with (and attitude toward) the wilderness. Low-keyed but far ranging, of interest to those of similar mind if not such hardy attainments.