Wilderness Watch is opposing a major motorized invasion the National Park Service (NPS) is proposing for the John Krebs Wilderness in California. This nearly 40,000-acre Wilderness is a diverse landscape of giant Sequoia trees, rivers and lakes, meadows, mountains, and canyons. The Park Service’s Environmental Assessment (EA) for the Restoration of Cahoon Meadow in Sequoia National Park calls for up to 50 helicopter flights and 30 days of bulldozer and motorized equipment use in just one year of its 10-year project. We appreciate the Park Service’s concern for restoring wet meadows in the Park, but the Wilderness Act prohibits the use of heavy equipment, helicopters, and other motorized equipment in order to protect an area’s wilderness character. We question the need to trammel this Wilderness, but we provided the NPS with examples of similar-scale projects completed using traditional skills. We urged the agency to consider traditional skills if the project is deemed necessary to protect the Wilderness, and to draft a Wilderness-compatible alternative since the EA fails to do so.

Photo: Kevin Hendricks (courtesy of Flickr)