SHENANDOAH National Park's super intendent this week used the spot Herbert Hoover created for escaping politics to explain the dual agenda underlying a state-of-the-park press tour.

Standing near Hoover's newly renovated presidential getaway, Camp Rapidan, Doug Morris said that the park and a national parks advocacy group agree on the need to celebrate new successes at Shenandoah.

To that end, much of the tour was focused on the restoration of the recreational woodland camp Hoover built with his own bucks in the early '30s to escape the heat, the crowds and the pressure-cooker of Washington politics.

But Morris, joined by leaders of the National Parks Conservation Association, said the day's other goal was highlighting problems caused by pollution, invasive species and funding shortfalls.

Park and NPCA experts hit on specific problems: acid rain's toll on park fish and other living creatures, ozone's stressing of trees and vegetation, invasive species' decimation of resources like the towering hemlocks and lagging federal funding that last year left Shenandoah more than 80 people and $6 million short of what one independent review said was needed.

The NPCA is a private, nonprofit advocacy group established in 1919 to preserve and enhance the national parks system.

In the State of the Parks report it released with the tour, the NPCA called Shenandoah the pride of the Blue Ridge, "a remarkable slice of southern Appalachian natural history and natural beauty."

But beneath its magnificence, the report said, "Shenandoah is a park in jeopardy. Years of inadequate funding, coupled with serious threats to the park's resources, are taking a toll."

Park interpretive specialist Claire Comer, introducing the visitors to Rapidan Camp, called it the perfect spot to show visitors because the same thing attracts them to the park today that attracted Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover there to build the Camp David of that day.

Built at the headwaters of the Rapidan River, where two small mountain streams tumble gently over rock stream beds to become one, the camp surprised archaeologists who unearthed the remains of a concrete-lined pond.

Turns out it was Hoover's very own trout pond, which answered another puzzling question.