Hooray for Wilderness!

"We need the tonic of wildness -- to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and 
 meadow hen lurk.... We can never have enough of nature." -- Henry David Thoreau --

Aldo Leopold, founder of the The Wilderness Society said, "I am glad I shall never be young without wild places to be young in. Of what avail are 40 freedoms without a blank spot on the map?" This quotation was emblazoned on an attractive poster I had on the wall of my English classroom. For a dozen or more years, I had stared at that quotation without understanding what a "blank spot on the map" referred to. How could a map be blank?

Then in 1987, while on a fifteen mile day hike on the Continental Divide Trail in the Mt. Zirkel Wilderness while vacationing in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, a light bulb finally illuminated within my head and I comprehended what "blank spot on the map" referred to: a roadless area, unmarred by human conveyances and civilization. 

That experience changed the way I spent my long summers off while I was still a teacher (there are three main reasons for being a teacher, you know: June, July, and August!) and I became an avid, addicted backpacker. On that fortuitous Colorado day hike, I spotted campsites situated on the shores of pristine mountain lakes, meadows ablaze with wildflowers like I had never seen before (what with growing up in Chicago, Illinois,) and vistas which went on forever. A peace and longing settled within me which still exist today. It was obvious that to reach these campsites, one had to walk in with everything one needed to survive, and somehow that appealed to me, so I began researching this thing called backpacking.

I had done some in the Boy Scouts, of course, using Dad's old army duffel bag and a sleeping bag made of wool army blankets sewn together by Mom. In the intervening years, equipment had improved greatly, but there were many necessities to purchase and much knowledge to acquire.

I spent that fall, winter, and spring reading and watching for sales, and although outfitting a family of four proved costly, the benefits have proven priceless. To those yet uncomprehending of the meaning of that phrase "blank spot on the map," look at a map of southwestern Colorado, at the area between the towns of Durango, north to Montrose, east to Gunnison, south to South Fork, and back to Durango. You found an immense "blank spot" which encompasses the Weminuche and Big Blue/Uncompahgre Wilderness areas. This roadless playground is accessible only by foot or horseback.

Over 100,000,000 such acres are now set aside as designated wilderness area in our country. We all owe a debt of gratitude and unending thanks to the foresight of the many people who over the course of more than a century have fought to set aside land in the form of national parks, national forests, wildlife refuges, state and county forest preserves, etc. But these wilderness holdings are now under attack. There are those today who wish to reclaim these precious, pristine wilderness acres for development -- to bulldoze for roads, to clear-cut for timber, to mine for minerals or oil, or to build expensive, expansive resorts or subdivisions. They do not care about the degradation of the land, the destruction of the flora, or the homelessness forced upon the fauna.  Nor do they care about the farther-reaching damage wreaked upon the contiguous eco-systems dependent upon these wilderness areas.

Greed, or power, or lack of vision, or whatever compelling reasons are at the root of these selfish, short-sighted actions, the result is the same -- Land is forever lost. And as my Dad always said, "There ain't nobody printing any more of it." We must save all the pristine land we possibly can now -- or our children's children, and their children, will "never be young with wild places to be young in." We cannot -- we must not -- allow that to occur. We desperately need "blank spots on the map." The complete text of the 1964 Wilderness Act is available here.

 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 

 "We abuse the land because we regard it as a community belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." --Aldo Leopold --

 "Man did not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." -- Chief Seattle --

 "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." -- Henry David Thoreau --