Test of time: The Wilderness Act at 60

CABINET MOUNTAINS WILDERNESS – A little less than a half-mile up the trail to Leigh Lake, just about when the incline begins to get annoying, there’s a light blue sign screwed to a tree.

Over the years, people have scratched their initials into it. Others took the time to complete their first name. The sea of jagged letters surrounds the words that spell out this piece of wood’s primary purpose: to let hikers know when they enter the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness Area.

The wilderness area consists of a little more than 94,000 acres in this mountain range in northwest Montana, not far from the town of Libby.

On a map, it’s an oblong shape in an overlooked corner of the state. On the ground, it’s dazzling.

Leigh Lake is a perfect example. The trail climbs through dense forest until it reaches a waterfall – the lake’s outlet. Then the trail climbs some more, eventually leading hikers to the lake.

The west end of the lake is hemmed in by a steep rock face that looks impossible to navigate. For mountain goats, it’s a playground.

Spend a morning watching the white dots move against the gray rocks and it’s easy to see why a big chunk of this mountain range is celebrating an anniversary this year.

About 94,000 acres of the Cabinet Mountains makes up one of 54 areas included in the Wilderness Act, a law that was signed 60 years ago this month.

The law created the National Wilderness Preservation System and provided permanent protections for 9.1 million acres of roadless and remote forest land across the country.

Its mission was to keep these places as they were and preserve a form of quiet, primitive recreation. They were places meant to be free roads, motors, mechanized equipment, and they were to be designated only by Congress.

Since 1964, the system has grown to include 806 wilderness areas totaling nearly 112 million acres. Washington has 4.4 million acres of wilderness. Idaho has 4.7 million. Montana has 3.5 million, including this 35-mile-long stretch of the Cabinets.

Sixty years later, the pressures on wilderness have changed. Debates over when and where to use the law have grown more complicated. Some argue that exceptions to the law have weakened it.

But the law endures, and so do the protections it provides. That was one of the driving forces behind its creation – a chance to keep places wild in perpetuity.

“That was very much on the mind of the creators of the act,” said Ed Krumpe, a retired professor who taught wilderness management at the University of Idaho. “They wanted to ensure there would be permanent protection.”

Writing the act

Forty years before the act was passed, the U.S. got its first “wilderness area.”

After a Forest Service employee named Aldo Leopold fought against the expansion of a road system in the Gila National Forest, the agency set aside 755,000 acres of the forest as protected wilderness.

The classification provided a model that the Forest Service then replicated in other places, sometimes using different words such as “wild” or “primitive.”

None of those protections were permanent, however. The federal officials who ordered them could just as easily take them away.

In the late 1940s, leaders of The Wilderness Society – a group founded by Leopold and others to campaign for protecting wild spaces – began talking about drafting a law that could preserve big pieces of land permanently.

Becky Rom, who has served on The Wilderness Society’s governing council for 28 years, She said the talks came as development pressure in the aftermath of World War II led to parts of national parks and federal forest land getting shrunk or carved up.

“They were watching these areas slip away,” Rom said.

Howard Zahnhiser, the society’s executive secretary, was the law’s primary author. He produced the first draft in 1956, which wound up a failure in the halls of Congress. He continued working however, rewriting the law and trying to get it passed.

The society’s official count is 66 rewrites and 18 public hearings. But finally, in 1964, the bill ended up on the desk of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Johnson signed the bill on Sept. 3.

All the rewrites and lobbying resulted in a bill with a few compromises, Krumpe said. For one, it did not create a new agency to manage wilderness areas. For another, it included a provision that allowed mineral exploration in wilderness areas for a period of 20 years. At that point, unless a claim had proven commercially viable, the claims would expire.

The way the bill defines wilderness has drawn criticism. The law says wilderness is a place that’s “untrammeled” and where man is a “visitor who does not remain” – critics say that ignores the long history of Indigenous people who lived on, used and managed the land for centuries before the arrival of European Americans.

“That has erased some of the tribal uses of these lands that occurred historically,” said Brad Smith, conservation director for the Idaho Conservation League.

Will Rice, a wilderness researcher at the University of Montana, said there have been “millennia of human history in these places.

“There’s also really recent human history,” Rice said.

Dams, homesteads and active airstrips all exist within the boundaries of wilderness areas. Trash from cowboys and miners. Fences that had to be torn out.

Factor it all together, Rice said, and the idea of wilderness becomes more complex.

“Wilderness is a place of nuance,” Rice said.

Where and when

Alongside the Cabinet Mountains in that first batch of wilderness were spectacular places in 13 states. A couple mountain ranges away in Montana, there was the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, a collection of more than 1 million acres that was named for one of the founders of The Wilderness Society.

Rom, the longtime member of the society’s governing council, lives in Minnesota, not far from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area – also protected by the act.

“We have been the most visited wilderness area every year since 1964,” Rom said.

In eastern Oregon, there was the Eagle Cap Wilderness, in the Wallowa Mountains. In Washington, three chunks of the Cascades were immediately protected: the Glacier Peak, Goat Rocks and Mount Adams wilderness areas.

Every president since Johnson has signed laws designating new wilderness areas. The largest addition to the system came in 1984, when 175 new areas were designated, including more than 1 million acres in Washington through the Washington Wilderness Act.

The nonprofit Washington Wild was founded to campaign for that bill, albeit under a different name – the Washington Wilderness Coalition. These days, the group is still campaigning for wilderness protections, though its executive director, Tom Uniack, said some things have changed.

“The 1964 Wilderness Act was really a carefully thought out, balanced proposal and has stood the test of time,” Uniack said. “I think what has changed is how and where and when it’s applied.”

Early on, the land protected under the act was often at high elevations, places full of rocks and ice and not full of people.

Now, at least in the past couple of decades in Washington, Uniack said the conversation has shifted toward protecting places under 3,000 feet of elevation. That might mean areas with spawning salmon and old growth forests, but it also might mean places that already have logging, motorized vehicles and popular mountain bike trails – none of which would be allowed in a wilderness area.

That makes trying to draw a border for a new wilderness area challenging, Uniack said. It means wilderness supporters have to be careful what they put within the boundaries of a proposal.

It also often means that groups like Washington Wild try to work out any disputes with a potential wilderness proposal long before they start trying to bring anything to Congress. Collaborative groups have been formed to bring together hikers and mountain bikers, conservationists and loggers to draft land management proposals that all can live with.

Even then, though, there’s no guarantee the proposal will succeed in Congress. Uniack’s group has been pushing for the Wild Olympics proposal, a package of land management classifications for the Olympic National Forest that has support from a dizzying number of nonprofits, businesses and politicians. A bill was first put forward in 2012, and they’re still waiting for action.

Still, proposals like that one – which includes a 126,000-acre wilderness area drawn to exclude popular mountain biking trails and sites booked for logging – show the ways many conservationists’ thinking about the Wilderness Act has changed. People like Uniack see a place for less restrictive forms of administrative protection.

“It’s not wilderness or nothing,” Uniack said.

Others reject the notion of collaborating with loggers or mountain bikers on land management proposals. They see such efforts as horsetrading exercises that only serve to shrink any potential addition to the wilderness system.

And, while they surely wouldn’t dislike having more acreage protected under the act, there are wilderness advocates who are more concerned with the threats facing the country’s existing wilderness areas.

“I think the conservation community has to be just as concerned about the wilderness system that’s been designated as it is about getting a new wilderness,” said Gary MacFarlane, who led the nonprofit Friends of the Clearwater for more than two decades. “Generally, that hasn’t been the case.”

One of the threats MacFarlane sees is exceptions to the law that have accompanied new wilderness designations – provisions that allow otherwise prohibited activities, like landing aircraft or using machines for trail maintenance. Usually the exceptions are meant to help federal agencies manage the areas, but MacFarlane sees them as something that weakens the Wilderness Act.

A number of organizations do challenge decisions like that, such as Wilderness Watch, where MacFarlane used to be a board member. Occasionally, the group sues over decisions it believes are illegal, and it keeps a close eye on bills in Congress that could impact the Wilderness Act – such as the ones floating around this year that would allow bicycles and permanent rock climbing hardware in wilderness areas.

MacFarlane doesn’t see a need for either bicycles or permanent climbing anchors in wilderness areas. Instead, he thinks the lack of those tools, which ostensibly make it easier to access parts of those wild spaces, is exactly the point.

“I still support the idea of wilderness even if I can’t go there,” MacFarlane said. “I think it provides a lot of benefits for us as people, but also it is this sense of humility that I think we need as a species.”