In 1924, forester Aldo Leopold convinced his superiors in the regional office of the U.S. Forest Service to set aside thousands of acres in the Gila National Forest in southwest New Mexico as wilderness to remain roadless forever. That was a revolutionary idea in his time as well as ours.
Forty years later in 1964, Congress passed, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed The Wilderness Act, creating the National Wilderness Preservation System which now embraces 111 million acres. That’s 4% of the United States. Ironically, 4% is also the total number of paved streets, highways, roads, and Walmart parking lots that sprawl across our nation.
Much has happened with wilderness policies and procedures in the last century. It all began in the Gila near Silver City, New Mexico, though Leopold learned of the concept of wilderness from Coloradan Arthur Carhart and his experiences at Trappers Lake in the White River National Forest east of Meeker. As the first landscape architect for the U.S. Forest Service, Carhart had been tasked with surveying the area around Trappers Lake for summer cabins. He did so, but he also fly fished and came to believe that the lake’s shoreline should be left alone, not leased to wealthy cabin builders.
Carhart shared his thoughts with the regional forester in Denver. Another young forester sat in on that meeting. Aldo Leopold took Carhart’s idea and implemented it. Forty years later Congress would pass federal legislation to create a wilderness preservation system, but for years the law was stuck in a Congressional committee.
Congressman Wayne Aspinall from Colorado never met a dam he didn’t like. He feared that the wilderness bill would “lock up” resources so he forced 66 rewrites. Each time the wording got better and the legislation came to focus on two key points: grazing would be continued in wilderness and only Congress could legally designate wilderness areas.
Environmentalists bristle over cows in pristine areas, but they should admire Aspinall for what he did. By refusing to let federal agencies designate wilderness and demanding that only Congress had that right, Aspinall inadvertently gave birth to the modern environmental movement in which dispersed local groups rally their members to protect public lands and influence Congress. Without knowing it Aspinall deepened and broadened the environmental movement because the 1964 Wilderness Act requires citizen involvement.
Trapper’s Lake is now considered the Cradle of Wilderness. Having backpacked and climbed into the Flat Tops Wilderness above Trappers Lake, I then met Leopold on his own turf when I directed the Western New Mexico University Museum in Silver City. In cooperation with the Gila National Forest, we planned an exhibit on the meaning and value of wilderness. In the museum’s files I found an extraordinary original document, a primary source. We had a typed copy of Leopold’s memo recommending the Gila as wilderness. At only two and a half pages, the manuscript elucidated Leopold’s thoughts in his clear, precise prose. This was the Declaration of Independence for the wilderness concept and we proudly put it on display. As I came to know the Gila, I came to know myself.
One of the least visited and most pristine environments in the United States is in the mountains of southwest New Mexico. Here, where the Continental Divide stretches north from Mexico, a spectacular country of canyons, hot springs, mesas and mountaintops survives as an ecological island: the 800,000-acre Gila and Aldo Leopold wildernesses, within the 3.3 million-acre Gila National Forest. From Sonoran Desert and exotic cactus below to spruce, fir and aspen above, rising to 10,892 feet at the summit of Whitewater Baldy, the Gila River region is rich in biological and cultural diversity. The wilderness survives as a unique ecosystem, though reintroduced Mexican wolves are struggling.
Deeply appreciative of the clear vistas, sparkling days, and rich opportunities for solitude in the Gila, Leopold proposed setting aside acres of the Gila National Forest as a wilderness or primitive area. In explaining the proposal, he said the area would be “a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks’ pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man.”
Leopold understood the human need for solitude and sanctuary. In A Sand County Almanac he eloquently argued, “Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot-on the map?” In 1924 there was still no federal law protecting roadless areas nor was there a congressionally accepted philosophy on wilderness.
Although three quarters of a million acres had been set aside as a “primitive area,” white settlement had already occurred deep within it along the forks of the Gila River. Until the Great Depression of the 1930s collapsed farm prices, Anglo settlers and Hispanic farmers earned a meager living in the Gila’s isolated canyons and narrow river valleys. Gradually, settlers drifted away, as had the prehistoric Mimbres Indians who had lived in the same valleys. The U.S. Forest Service had owned the mountainsides; now, thanks to unpaid property taxes, it gradually began to own the river bottoms.
After World War II, it didn’t take long for the use of four-wheel-drive Jeeps to expose a flaw in Leopold’s plan. Hunters used Jeeps to make their own roads. No guidelines had been established for wilderness management. Though the Gila received protection in 1924, few regulations existed. Nothing restricted miners from building Jeep trails to remote mining claims.
Then in 1964, with passage of the Wilderness Act, national legislation set specific rules for wilderness use and created new challenges for the Gila’s district rangers. The 1964 Wilderness Act proclaimed “a wilderness … is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” But humans had been living in the Gila Wilderness for the last thousand years. With the act's passage, zealous Forest Service employees burned historic corrals and log cabins that should have endured as valuable cultural resources. While the Forest Service sought to return the wilderness to its natural state, angry four-wheelers sought to test the new law.
A four-wheel-drive club from El Paso, Texas arrived to drive their Jeeps through the Gila River and into the wilderness. Stalled in unexpected flood waters, the Jeeps were abandoned. Later, when club members petitioned the Forest Service to permit them to retrieve their stuck vehicles and drive them out of the wilderness, staff responded with a steadfast “No.” The Jeep owners had to pay dearly to have mules pull out their vehicles.
This year Silver City and southwest New Mexico are celebrating the wisdom of Leopold’s wilderness idea. Thoughtful commentary includes not only ecological and environmental questions, but also moral issues surrounding the forced removal of Indigenous inhabitants like the Apaches. Critics complaining that John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and others only sought a dehumanized wilderness open and available to white exploration and back country travel, must also realize that 1924 was the same year that Native Americans finally earned the legal right to vote, though many Western states denied them voting access for decades.
Leopold should not be criticized for supporting a wilderness concept “where man is a visitor who does not remain.” Most tribal wildernesses today utilize the same philosophy. Many traditional elders abhor mechanized access to sacred wilderness lands. In the publication Mission Mountains Tribal Wilderness, prepared for the Native Lands and Wilderness Council, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes explain that wilderness lands, “have become for us … sacred grounds. Grounds that should not be disturbed or marred … Lands and landmarks carved through the minds of our ancestors through Coyote stories and actual experiences … we should look up to with respect.”
Tribes agree. Some lands should be left alone. The wilderness ideal provides the rationale for doing that.
Andrew Gulliford is an award-winning author and editor and a professor of history at Fort Lewis College. He can be reached at gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.
