The East Branch Pemigewasset River flows beneath ice. (Compass Points Media / flickr) http://www.flickr.com/photos/compasspointsmedia/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
Let’s start a conversation here at Compass Points. Let’s explore whether the term “wilderness” refers to a place here in the United States or is it a frame of mind, a subjective term defined by the user.
We have celebrated national parks with iconic natural features – El Capitan, the Grand Canyon, Acadia tidal pools, orchids in the Everglades – but can a place maintain its wilderness when millions visit? The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, one of the largest parks at half a million square acres, is swarmed by 9.2 million annual visitors and at its highest point – like many parks and state high points – there’s a parking lot and observation deck.
Standing at the top of Algonquin looking out at the Adirondacks High Peaks, N.Y. (Compass Points Media / flickr) http://www.flickr.com/photos/compasspointsmedia/ / CC BY-ND 2.0
In the Adirondacks Forest Preserve, along with the Catskills the only place constitutionally protected to be “forever wild,” summit stewards stand on Algonquin’s peak to educate the thousands who hike there about the fragile alpine zones. The bears in the ‘Daks are so used to humans, hikers are mandated to carry burdensome bear canisters to keep the bruins from accessing our food. How can a place be wild when the bears are so used to a human presence?
And yet despite obvious human footprints on our wild areas, I cannot deny feeling isolated on some of my backpacks. Two years ago, I slipped solo into Saguaro National Park, Ariz., and despite having the ability to see all of Tucson and its 540,000 people spread out like an urban checkerboard below the Rincon Mountains, I have never felt more alone. I felt fear. I couldn’t hear Tucson; just my own heartbeat and overactive mind. I was in the wilderness, at least in my opinion.
Mark Jenkins, a well-recognized adventure writer, penned a story in Backpacker‘s December 2008 about how the most isolated campsite in the lower 48 was located in Yellowstone:
The romance and risk of remoteness implies, nay, insists upon having to take care of yourself. Remote means roadless. Which is problematic for today’s hiker. Roadless regions have all but vanished from 21st-century America. According to Harvard Professor of Landscape Richard Forman, who wrote Road Ecology: Science and Solutions, about the environmental impact of roads, there are almost 4 million miles of public roads in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands of miles of private roads. Roads are the first thing we build, before houses, warehouses, and water slides. “Americans in the 1990s converted open space to developed land at a rate of 2.2 million acres a year, or 252 acres per hour,” writes Forman.
Once upon a time, wide-open spaces–not asphalt and concrete–defined our landscape. They’re gone now. In less than 250 years, the U.S. went from a country of Indian footpaths and horse trails, wagon tracks, and game paths to a domesticated nation of streets, strip malls, parking lots, and superhighways. West of the Mississippi, the mythological hinterland of rolling plains and high peaks, the countryside has been drawn and quartered by bulldozers. Paved county roads checkerboard farmland from Iowa to Idaho; gravel roads stitch together the ranches, ranchettes, and resorts. Even our once immense forests have been carved up. In the last century, logging roads, truck routes for oil, gas, and mining, and ATV tracks have crept into the most distant regions of our mountains, forests, and deserts. Officially, there are more than 430,000 miles of roads in our national forests–unofficially, it could be twice that.
As a result, east of the Mississippi every camping spot is about only 10 miles from a road. To the west, the most remote camping spot (which Jenkins would not reveal) is about 20 miles from a road.
Let’s chat about this. What’s your perspective about American wilderness? Is it a place or a state of mind? We’ll continue on this topic for a while, so let’s talk. And if we don’t have wilderness and it’s just a state of mind, or if we truly do have wilderness in the United States, what do we as a country do about it?
Leave your thoughts in the comments section or at the Compass Points Facebook and Twitter pages. This is a consequential topic for all of us – hikers, climbers, kayakers and so on.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Genuine wilderness survives, perhaps, in Alaska, but not here in the lower 48, particularly not in the East. So we say, “wilderness is a state of mind.” I suppose I agree, but it feels like a compromise that is forced upon us. We can no longer experience genuine wilderness as our forebears of past centuries did, so we “pretend.”
I believe it’s a compromise, but it is a necessary one. What other choice do we have?
As I recommend on my Web site, if you are hiking in a popular place, go as early in the morning as you can. I frequently set out on the Arethusa Falls Trail before the sun rises. I sit on top of the cliff for an hour or so in “wilderness.” Then the first ice climbers or day hikers arrive, and “wilderness” departs.
Funny, there are two places (that I can think of off the top of my head) in my neck of the woods that have “wilderness” in their names, the Pemigewasset Wilderness and the Dry River Wilderness. Whenever I see them on the map, I can not help but think that if it has a name, it’s not a wilderness.
I’ll go with “state of mind.” To avoid a jaded perspective, think about this question from the perspective of a child. For me personally, the acre or two of forest in my backyard growing up was “wilderness” – it just happened that my “wilderness” also had easy access to hot chocolate.
I spend a lot of time in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I grew up there and I am still there very very often year round.
The absolute worst hike in New Hampshire is Mount Washington in the summer (highest peak in New England). Not only do you have to deal with large groups racing up in sneakers and tshirts, but by the time you reach the glorious summit you step off the trail and onto the blacktop of a parking lot, then on to the observation deck with armies of people, all the various buildings, and into the cafeteria, where you can watch the Cog Railway chug up the other side of the mountain spewing black smoke. Needless to say I quickly make for the next trailhead and continue wherever I’m going. Something about the “tallest” mountain in any given area attracts people unworthy of their ascent (i.e., Everest).
Having said that last summer I hit one of my favorite peaks: Mt. Carrigain. From the summit — the highest peak in that part of the forest (4700′) — my fellow hikers and I searched across the clear unobstructed horizon for as many signs of humanity that we could. We found four: the ski trails at Attitash and Waterville Valley, the distant small town of Bartlett, NH, and of course, the summit of Mt. Washington.
The Pemigewasset Wilderness is huge and expansive and beautiful from that spot. Much of the forest in the Pemi is only about 100 years old … old growth was decimated by big logging companies in the 19th and early 20th century. They clearcut much of that forest and used big old trains on erector-set rail lines that often derailed and started forest fires. Thankfully the land was protected and the wilderness has returned.
The 100 mile wilderness in Maine represents either the start or the finish of the AT, and anyone who’s done 10 days without crossing much humanity can attest to the existence of wilderness there.
And most importantly is the Boreal Forest of Canada. A little bit of it exists on the high peaks of the Whites. This forest is VITAL to the carbon sequestration on the entire planet and is the subject of an increasing amount of attention in that regard. It plays a similar — and even more important role — to the rainforests in South America. Canada’s government will be far more inclined to conservation than those governments, thankfully. But the Boreal is about as wild as it gets in N. America.
Is what we have pure wilderness, as in no signs of human existence? No. But I would not say that should be what we want. In my opinion as a lifelong outdoorsman and naturalist, no wilderness “state of mind” can exist without the existence of actual physical wilderness. If there were no human knowledge of true wilderness, then how would we appreciate it, treasure it, experience it, or protect it? We need people who know and appreciate wilderness in all its forms to fight for their continued existence and rightful place in human experience. Our dual roles as both its greatest protector and its greatest threat are a challenge indeed.
For me, the word wilderness is synonymous with frontier. I would have to agree that the traditional American wilderness is a thing of the past. Change your definition of what wilderness is, and new worlds present themselves. It’s all a matter of perspective.
For me, “wilderness” really is a state of mind, because unfortunately – as has been pointed out numerous times – true wild areas hardly exist in the U.S. anymore. Have we gone overboard with building roads, malls, buildings, cell towers, and other man made facilities? Yes, of course. But as humans in 2010, we’ve come to depend on most of them, and would find it difficult to go without. Wilderness is something we have come to live without.
I can find as much solace and peace by doing a little extra homework and working a bit harder to find areas that don’t pass through so many paved areas, where hordes of people are less likely to frequent, where I can find the illusion of “wilderness,” because honestly, that’s all we really have left. Illusion.
From the perspective of a hiker from the UK, the scale of the landscape in the USA makes me think that there must still be tracts of wilderness over there? How big does a stretch of ‘wild’ land have to be before it can be called wilderness? I think that people’s expectations of scale are important to this discussion. And as suggested by some of your previous commentators, it does depend on what you choose to define as wilderness. Like Ian from Trail Voice, when I was growing up, any bit of forest, bog or moor that I could get to on foot, that wasn’t farmed, and where I was out of sight of any house or road, constituted wilderness as far as I was concerned. As I got older, I was able to hike much further away from the end of the road or track, but one mile into the moors or 15 miles, it still ‘feels’ pretty wild once you’re out there on your own. The UK is a very small and crowded little island, but the Scottish Highlands still, I believe, have wonderful stretches of wilderness. There’s a book called The Wild Places, by Robert MacFarlane, where the author goes in search of wilderness across the UK – and he does find some, albeit just small pockets. If part of ‘wilderness’ is confronting how small we are, and having to be self-sufficient for our survival in a landscape that utterly doesn’t care, I’ve had that same feeling in both Scottish mountains and on the edge of the Australian outback. I think wilderness is both a place and a state of mind.