In this 2013 photo, a couple of backpackers stop to take in the view on their way to Alpine Lake in Redfish Lake Canyon in the Sawtooth National Forest. (Nate Lowe/U.S. Forest Service)
This column first appeared on Rocky Barker’s Northwest Experience blog on Sept. 5, 2024.
This month, 60 years ago, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, designating parts of federal land as places to be left undeveloped, where nature was left to its own devices and, as the act said, where the land was “untrammeled by man.”
In 1964, 54 wilderness areas across 13 states were included . Today, the Wilderness system has expanded to 806 areas in 44 states and Puerto Rico.
Idaho’s Sen. Frank Church was the floor sponsor. Former Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus helped President Jimmy Carter add 57 million acres as a part of the 104 million-acre Alaska Lands Act in 1980.
Here we have the Selway Bitterroot, the Sawtooths, the Owyhee Canyonlands , the Hells Canyon, the Gospel Hump and the Craters of the Moon. We also have the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness , the Cecil Andrus Wilderness in the White Clouds, the Ernest Hemingway Wilderness in the Boulders and the James McClure/ Jerry Peak Wilderness.
Craters of the Moon is among most unique land in National Wilderness Preservation System
Wilderness today I think holds much the same appeal to a lot of people that it did 60 years ago. The difference is that we know so many more things than we knew then, there are so many more things in our life – gadgets. We have thought about big “W” wilderness more and the difference with wildness. Historian Bill Cronon taught us that wilderness itself is really a human construct. Our protection grows out of our yearnings for wild places, for solace, for solitude.
What has changed is that we now have put a federal designated guideline on what wilderness is. We’ve put boundaries on wilderness. We manage wilderness. The whole idea of managing wilderness in and of itself is an oxymoron to many people. We don’t realize that wilderness is a state of mind as much as it is the places that we love and cherish. And as our world keeps getting larger, it is going to become infinitely more valuable.
Wildness was a significant part of my youth. I grew up on a farm, but my parents in the summer basically let me run like a wolf, and I had to check in for lunch, my mom called with a bugle and I came from the little creek that I fished. I learned. I went to camp in the Colorado Rockies and the Michigan backcountry . I canoed into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota and Ontario. My wilderness values came from my grandparents, my parents and my own sense of exploration.
I think it is very important that we pass that on to another generation . We can’t sit passively and allow them to miss the wild side of the world. Those are values that kids must get themselves. We can steer them, we can show them, but that is something you get yourself. I’m more concerned with people, with kids who just don’t get a chance to get outside at all in life. I’m a big believer that parents have been scared into not allowing their children to explore nature on their own.
I don’t think you can get it from a joystick, and I don’t think you can see it on a screen. I think you have to get out in the dirt, so to speak. And my kids, I raised them that way and they still all love the outdoors.
It is hard for us in Idaho to understand the problem of disappearing wilderness because we have so much – not just big ‘W’ wilderness but we’ve got 9 million acres of roadless federal forest. We’ve got pretty close to that of wild places in the desert range lands. A lot of our state lands have wild areas on it, if you don’t think about legal designations. I’m not saying those legal designations aren’t important. They are, but it is that concept, that connection with nature that is unfettered by our human development that is the most powerful in this whole thing. No one said it better than Sigurd Olson, the Minnesota naturalist who led the fight for the Boundary Waters and I was lucky enough to know.
He wrote:
“Wilderness to the people of America is a spiritual necessity, an antidote to the pressure of modern life, a means of regaining serenity and equilibrium.”
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