I was rushing up a trail in the Gila National Forest to see a wooden sign. Henry Provencio had to get back to his Forest Service office for a meeting, but he knew how much I wanted to see it, so we hiked along the Middle Fork of New Mexico’s Gila River, not even pausing to take off our boots at the wide, shallow river crossings. The trail we followed could take us north through the Gila Wilderness, or even all the way to Canada via the Continental Divide Trail, but our destination was only about a mile away, where it curved into the shade cast by the canyon wall. Provencio, a land-management planner for the Forest Service, pointed out the dirt piles left by javelinas digging for food, reminding me that we were only about a hundred miles north of Mexico.
Though I’d never seen this sign, one of several that marks the wilderness boundary, I recognized its not-quite-rectangular, almost Flintstones-style outline and the all-cap letters stamped into unpainted wood. I’ve seen a lot of these signs in my life, and they look the same in New Mexico as they do in California, Alaska and North Carolina. You’ve seen them, too, if you’ve ever ventured into a designated wilderness area.
The word “wilderness” might evoke certain images — remote Arctic landscapes or thick tropical rainforests — but it’s also a legal definition. In 1964, Congress passed the Wilderness Act, which required federal public land management agencies to consider large roadless areas for an extra level of protection — what some call “Big W” wilderness. There are mountainous, glacier-pocked wilderness areas, swampy wilderness areas and red-rock canyon wilderness areas; some are filled with lakes and others with saguaros. Under the law, wilderness areas are undeveloped, with no roads and minimal structures — places where “man is just a visitor who does not remain.”
The Gila Wilderness, however, was the first. In June 1924, 40 years before Congress passed the Wilderness Act, forest managers set aside this area as the nation’s first protected wilderness. That’s why I wanted to see this sign.
I’d become fascinated with these legally designated wilderness areas. I’ve backpacked in them for more than two decades; I’ve worked as a wilderness guide; I’ve carried out scientific fieldwork in them. I’m of the generation that ditched Ed Abbey’s ode to solitude in favor of William Cronon and Rebecca Solnit, writers who critique the concept of wilderness for its erasure of Indigenous histories and its implication that humans are merely visitors to nature, not part of it. But that doesn’t change how I feel when I stand on a mountain pass in the middle of a wilderness area, absorbed in the sight of peaks and valleys stretching in every direction.
Not until I became a journalist did I fully understand that the wooden signs I passed as I entered wilderness areas marked legal boundaries. That there were rules about what constitutes a wilderness, from its “naturalness” to its opportunities for “solitude.” The more time I spend in wilderness, the more I see those rules tested. More frequent, destructive fires and invasive species, both amplified by climate change, are arguably eroding its naturalness; more people, and more pinging smartphones, are making solitude harder to find. As our ideas about wilderness evolve, the landscapes designated as such are also changing in profound ways. What do these parallel developments mean for “Big W” wilderness?
I DIDN’T COME TO THE GILA just for the sign; I also wanted to see a box. A few days after our hike, I met Provencio at the Gila National Forest headquarters in Silver City. “I told you where we found this, right?” he said, hoisting a cardboard banker’s box onto the glossy wood surface of a conference room table. “Sitting on top of the icebox in our breakroom.” When Provencio discovered the box during an office cleanup, he set it aside to throw away. But one of his staffers got curious. “He started reading,” Provencio told me, “And he’s like, ‘Do you realize what this stuff is?’”
The box was full of copies of documents and letters about the establishment of the wilderness area, many dating back to the 1920s. “So, in this box, we have some of those original designations and management plans that people were considering for management of the wilderness,” Provencio said.
Though the Wilderness Act considers humans only visitors, people have lived in the Gila for millennia. Today, tourists come to see the 700-year-old Gila Cliff Dwellings and visit museums displaying the beautiful black, white and red pottery made by the Mimbres people. Ancestors of today’s Zuni, Acoma and Hopi traveled through this area. The Apache, who also call the area home, are among its most enduring residents. Every year, archaeological findings reveal new details about the land’s long human history. Trying to conceive of this place before humans is like traveling toward the horizon; the destination keeps receding.
By the mid-1800s, the area was busy with Spanish ranchers, Mexican miners, Black “buffalo soldiers” and white East Coast transplants looking to stake a claim on land or minerals. After Mexico ceded its New Mexico territory to the U.S. at the end of the Mexican-American War of 1848, the Apache fought to defend their homeland from colonizers and Army troops; despite decades of resistance, many were killed or captured.
Meanwhile, in the race to build a nation, the U.S. was rapidly depleting its abundant natural resources. As undeveloped land became scarcer, Anglo-American settlers began to see “wilderness” not as a scary, untamable forest but as a threatened Eden. John Muir’s writing rallied public support for national parks, and Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the Forest Service, maintained that the public lands should be governed according to their “highest use.” The Gila National Forest, which was established in 1905, was intended, like other national forests, to be managed for sustained logging, mining and grazing.
In the 1920s, as cars became more affordable and reliable, travel to U.S. public lands increased. The National Park Service and Forest Service built roads and lodges, raising conservationists’ fears that car-based recreation was eroding the landscape — and transforming their experience of it.
The Gila National Forest, which was established in 1905, was intended, like other national forests, to be managed for sustained logging, mining and grazing.
One such conservationist was Aldo Leopold, a Yale-trained forester in the Southwest. Though Leopold would later become a pathbreaking wildlife ecologist, famous for his essay collection A Sand County Almanac, his concerns in the 1920s were more utilitarian: As a lifelong hunter, he worried that outdoorspeople would soon be unable to go on a two-week hunting trip without running into a road. Along with his Forest Service colleague Arthur Carhart, he came up with the idea of setting aside some roadless areas as designated wilderness. Leopold knew of a remote, rugged stretch of the Gila National Forest that he thought would be perfect. He spoke to his boss, District Forester Frank Pooler, arguing that the agency should manage for the persistence of wilderness just as it managed for logging, mining and grazing. Pooler agreed and signed off on the protection of nearly 800,000 acres.
I pulled a manila folder from the box and flipped through its contents. There it was: the 1924 Recreational Working Plan for the Gila National Forest, the official record of the first wilderness area. As word of Pooler and Leopold’s action spread, the concept of wilderness gained traction across the agency. In a 1926 letter to Pooler, Leopold wrote excitedly, “I am beginning to believe there is a real chance of public interest developing … on the idea of large wilderness areas before the opportunity for them has disappeared.” Only two years after the establishment of the Gila Wilderness, the Forest Service chief wrote to Pooler: “The wilderness idea should be given serious consideration in our plans.”
Throughout their correspondence, the foresters hashed out the details of wilderness management. “‘Can we use tractors? Can we use horses? Can we use airplanes? How do we get equipment and supplies and people into the wilderness?’” Provencio noted. They agreed that grazing should be allowed, but that roads, structures and logging should not. “We’re still nearly 40 years before the Wilderness Act,” he said, “and they’re talking about what does this thing of ‘wilderness’ mean?”
Leopold and several other conservationists founded The Wilderness Society in 1935. In the 1940s, the group hired a young man named Howard Zahniser to edit its newsletter. Zahniser soon began to advocate for a national wilderness system that would preserve wilderness areas in perpetuity.
“Here we go,” I said, finding a letter with Zahniser’s name on it. I read aloud: “Dear Mr. Schilling, I have been looking forward to our planned inspection of the Gila and Picos Division areas.” It was signed “Zahnie.” In 1949, Zahniser traveled to the Gila to learn about managing the world’s first designated wilderness. The foresters took him on a pack trip into the Gila; later, he wrote that he was surprised by the damage grazing had done to the land. By this time, Zahniser and other conservationists understood the importance of protecting land not only for its recreational opportunities but for its ecological value. He didn’t think grazing had a place in wilderness, but he would eventually concede that without it, a national wilderness system would never win the political support it needed.
“I am beginning to believe there is a real chance of public interest developing … on the idea of large wilderness areas before the opportunity for them has disappeared.”
In the 1950s, as the environmental movement gained momentum, “Zahnie” began drafting legislation for a Wilderness Act. He had no illusions that the areas he sought to protect were pristine. In fact, though the word “pristine” is often associated with the concept, it is never mentioned in the Wilderness Act. Zahniser, who was more interested in protecting land from future human impacts than in repairing past harms, preferred the term “untrammeled,” which was suggested to him by conservationist Polly Dyer. In the 1950s, during her successful campaign to stop a proposed road in Olympic National Park, Dyer wrote of the “untrammeled” nature of the forests there. To “trammel” a horse is to shackle or restrain its gait. Zahniser, a poet at heart, thought the word conveyed the conditions he hoped to see in wilderness — unrestrained by humans, and free.
After my trip to the Gila, I spoke with Michelle Reilly of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a liaison for the agency at the Arthur Carhart National Wilderness Training Center. Reilly has studied the many drafts of the Wilderness Act. While other members of The Wilderness Society wanted Zahniser to use “undisturbed” instead of “untrammeled,” he resisted. “With ‘untrammeled,’ he was recognizing that there were areas that would have been disturbed,” Reilly said. “It’s a word that is more action-oriented and more outcome-oriented … it’s a bit forward-thinking. (Wilderness) can be an area that’s disturbed, but we’re not trying to control it.”
In one of the law’s early drafts, Zahniser also described wilderness as a place where “man himself is a member of the natural community.” Today, the concept of wilderness is criticized for reinforcing a false separation between humans and nature. How might we see wilderness areas differently if that single phrase had survived?
AFTER 66 DRAFTS AND ENTHUSIASTIC House and Senate approval, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law in September 1964, almost exactly two months after the much harder-fought Civil Rights Act. Thanks to Zahniser’s wordsmithing, the Wilderness Act is often called one of the most poetic pieces of U.S. legislation. At its core is the single long paragraph devoted to a working definition of wilderness:
A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.
Land managers have since distilled this definition into five more easily measurable qualities of “wilderness character”: natural; untrammeled; undeveloped; having opportunities for solitude and “primitive and unconfined” recreation; and having other features of value. Land managers conduct surveys to determine whether visitors are finding enough solitude. They deliberate whether actions like using chemicals to kill invasive fish in backcountry lakes result in an unnecessary amount of “trammeling” to the land. Wilderness managers talk a lot about exercising restraint; human interventions — ecological restoration work, hiking permit systems and even signage — are seen as a last resort, undertaken only after careful consideration.
But the Wilderness Act remains open to interpretation. I find myself squinting as I read its ornate language again and again, searching for answers in some of its vaguer language — like the line about wilderness as an area that “generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable.” How generally? How substantially? Is an unnoticeable imprint the same thing as no imprint?
THROUGHOUT THE WEST, social and physical changes are testing the idea of “wilderness character.”I’ve tagged along with rangers checking hiking permits in Colorado’s stunning Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, where the increasingly popular trails make “solitude” harder to find. I’ve bushwhacked off-trail through poison oak to see a grove of ancient sequoias, killed by a fire that burned extraordinarily hot due to climate change and a century of fire suppression. Park managers are now replanting there, risking a bit of “trammeling” in a bid to restore “natural” conditions.
In the Gila, the nation’s first wilderness, fires haven’t been as firmly suppressed as elsewhere in the West. But it is still experiencing more severe burns: Over the last two decades, endangered Gila trout have been repeatedly evacuated by helicopter to keep them from dying in ash-choked rivers.
“Zahnie” probably never pictured an airlift of endangered fish when he wrote the Wilderness Act, but it’s becoming harder and harder to preserve “natural” conditions without a little trammeling. As an ecologist planting seedlings in Sequoia told me, “Inaction is an action at this point.”
In the face of climate change and biodiversity loss, is the Wilderness Act even the right tool for the kind of conservation we need? The Mexican wolves recently reintroduced in the Gila don’t know about the wilderness boundaries; they keep wandering north, where they’re not legally protected. Science shows that large roadless areas are important for biodiversity, but that they can’t thrive in isolation. We need safe passages connecting them — coordinated, landscape-level conservation efforts.
That’s what Leia Barnett, the Greater Gila New Mexico Advocate with the group WildEarth Guardians, would like to see. Her organization envisions a regional conservation network of public lands that includes the Gila but stretches across the border from New Mexico into Arizona and south into Mexico. While wilderness remains important, Barnett said, much larger areas are needed to buffer ecosystems from the pressures of climate breakdown and biodiversity collapse. So how can lands managed for multiple use — from solar energy farms to mountain biking — also be managed for biodiversity protection? That, said Barnett, will take some radical new thinking.
“If we’re thinking back 100 years, Aldo Leopold did something to revolutionize land management culture, which was introducing this idea of wilderness,” Barnett said. “A hundred years later, what if we did something similar that is at a larger scale, but in a way that is relevant to the threats that we face in the 21st century?”
It might start with remembering that phrase from an early draft of the Wilderness Act, about humans being a “member of the natural community,” and formally recognizing that this has always been the case. While Zahniser knew that the areas he was working to protect weren’t pristine, the law he wrote doesn’t acknowledge their long history of Indigenous management.
“What if we did something similar that is at a larger scale, but in a way that is relevant to the threats that we face in the 21st century?”
“Everything we’re setting aside and saying is amazing — the reason why they’re amazing is because Indigenous people actually managed them for thousands of years,” said Rosalyn LaPier, aprofessor of environmental history at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and a member of the Blackfeet Nation and Métis. LaPier has argued that the word “wilderness” needs to be retired because it suggests a place that is unmanaged: “The places that we set aside are not these sort of untouched places, but they’re actually the exact opposite. They are places that Indigenous people have utilized, changed, altered.” Land was commonly set aside for different uses. “Setting aside land because it’s sacred, setting aside land because you want a particular animal species to live there, setting aside land because you want a particular plant species to flourish” — these, she said, are all examples of landscape-management practices.
Leopold sold wilderness to his superiors as a kind of management — as one type of use among many uses, a place where the government doesn’t build roads or permit motorized equipment. In this sense, the Wilderness Act is the country’s strictest environmental zoning law. But it’s weighed down by a concept that fails to recognize Indigenous history.
“Not all concepts have laws,” LaPier said. “This one does. So the issue is not the concept. The issue is the law. The fact that we even created a law based on a lie is crazy, and it’s something that we should fix.”
The U.S. could amend the Wilderness Act to correct this error of omission, and perhaps a new generation of leaders will; LaPier said that her students are much more aware of the nation’s history of colonization than their predecessors. The U.S. could also return wilderness to tribes, and in fact, it already has: in 1996, Congress restored 764 acres of New Mexico’s Wheeler Peak Wilderness to the Taos Pueblo.
Meanwhile, nothing in the current law prevents land managers from acknowledging that these areas were once managed by tribes, or from finding ways to share decision-making authority with them. In 2021, at Point Reyes National Seashore north of San Francisco, the National Park Service signed a co-stewardship agreement with the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, the tribal government of the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok. Nearly 40% of the park is designated wilderness with a long history of fire suppression and active ranching. Tribal Chairman Greg Sarris told me that his tribe looks forward to working with the Park Service to restore the health of the environment. “It’s just not putting land aside and letting it be wilderness, but letting it be a managed landscape, managed Indigenously.”
Sarris sees no conflict between this and Wilderness Act regulations, but said that those regulations reflect the viewpoint of a non-Native person looking at wilderness. “When you have Indigenous people, we’re looking at it very differently. Subsequently, we’re going to approach the restoration and maintenance and stewardship of the land somewhat differently.” He did use a word familiar to wilderness land managers: restraint. His tribe, he said, has rules about respecting certain places. Managing different parts of a national park, including a wilderness area, and balancing the tribe’s needs with visitors, requires a similar approach. “The best place to learn respect and restraint is in nature,” he said.
“The fact that we even created a law based on a lie is crazy, and it’s something that we should fix.”
While the agreement between the Graton Rancheria tribe and the Park Service is new, it’s an exciting example of new ways to interpret the Wilderness Act — interpretations that Zahniser may not have foreseen, but which are revealed by a close look at the law and its history.
Of the thousands of Chiricahua-Warm Springs Apache who called the Gila Wilderness home, only a few hundred survived after the U.S. Army imprisoned them for defending their land. They were eventually sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, more than 500 miles from the Gila Wilderness. Tribal historian Michael Darrow said the Forest Service is doing a better job of consulting with the tribe on management issues, but the Fort Sill Apache are still under-resourced, not to mention headquartered in another state. In recent decades, the tribe was able to acquire about two thousand acres of land in New Mexico. “It’d be nice if people knew that this was our tribe’s home,” Darrow said.
The nation’s first wilderness is turning 100, which is either very old — if you consider how much has changed since then — or very young, if you consider the long history of human management here. But a century is a very long time for a wooden sign, and the sign I rushed to visit isn’t the original boundary marker. Previous signs might have weathered in the intense New Mexico summer or been swept away by a flash flood. Each sign has marked a different place, altered by time or human impacts, and suggested different things to those who pass it. Future signs might look the same but inspire new interpretations — or look entirely different, with new words and new meanings.
This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation.
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This article appeared in the June 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Untrammeled.”
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