Honoring wilderness ideals is especially important today because it represents the same lesson that we should be learning from climate change: People can’t control nature.
Lower Blue Lake, visible from the trail leading to the other namesake Blue Lakes. Blue Lakes Trail is the most popular hike within the Mount Sneffels Wilderness. When my friends and I encountered the fresh grizzly bear scat, we were deep in Wyoming’s Teton Wilderness, 20 miles from a trailhead. I’d seen grizzlies before — from the car. But this experience was on a whole other level. I felt vulnerable, nervous. I also felt fully alive., which became law 60 years ago, in 1964.
There’s something elemental about being on your own, exposed. You’ve made a choice based on your values about the outdoors. As a result, you feel the power of larger forces — and sometimes, if you’re lucky, even the power of yourself. Preserving wildness calls for restraint. It calls for motorized users, e-bikers, mountain bikers, pilots, snowmobilers, technical climbers with hardware and drone flyers to recreate somewhere else. Yet hiking, hunting, boating, fishing and horseback riding are all allowed in wilderness, as well as grazing if grandfathered in.
In wilderness, we recognize that always getting our way can devalue ecosystems. It can harm wildlife, clean water, fresh air and other widely shared resources. It can cause us to scorn Indigenous people’s connections to the land when we should be honoring them. That would miss the point. “We must remember always that the essential quality of the wilderness is its ‘wildness,’” Zahniser said. “We must not only protect the wilderness from commercial exploitation. We must also see that we don’t ourselves destroy its wilderness character in our own management programs.”
A LoDo restaurant closes and its owner takes to Yelp: "Cry me a river about your dinner reservations"Denver budget cuts due to migrant crisis face more scrutiny as recreation centers reduce hoursWill Russell Wilson, Justin Fields or Kirk Cousins play with the Broncos in 2024? Here’s what one sportsbook says.
United Kingdom Latest News, United Kingdom Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
How Good Is Biden’s Memory? Special Counsel Report Renews SpeculationSee multiple perspectives from National Review (Opinion), Slate, and New York Times (Opinion) at AllSides.com.
Read more »
In this one-house town, Alaska’s wilderness is at your fingertipsYou might not think Whittier—a town with fewer than 300 residents—would be the gateway to multiple cruise ship docks, a major railhead, dozens of glaciers, and a temperate rainforest. You’d be wrong.
Read more »
Curry's late 3-pointer sends Warriors past SunsStephen Curry made a 3-pointer with 0.7 seconds left and the Warriors beat the Suns 113-112 on Saturday night.
Read more »
MINING.COMNo 1 source of global mining news and opinion
Read more »
MINING.COMNo 1 source of global mining news and opinion
Read more »
MINING.COMNo 1 source of global mining news and opinion
Read more »