Wilderness Experienced

By Cathy Brandt Due to life-long arthritis and now a bit of the “A” word (age), I can’t hike very deep into wilderness areas. However, when I do I’m looking to experience solitude—to get away from masses of people and their litter, cell phones, dogs barking, and aircraft noise. It’s very sad that some people…

By Scott Crain The Juniper Dunes Wilderness area is a 7000-acre part of the National Wilderness Preservation System, located in southeastern Washington State. It lies just a few miles north of what used to be a quiet part of the state, now exploding with population and development. The Hanford Nuclear Reservation lies a few miles…

By Kevin Proescholdt In August, my family and I enjoyed our second canoe trip of the summer in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) of northeastern Minnesota.  The 1.1 million-acre BWCAW is a lakeland wilderness with over 1,000 lakes connected by rivers, streams and portage trails. It is part of Superior National Forest and is…

By Jessica Howell-Edwards Cumberland Island Wilderness is part of the Cumberland Island National Seashore in southern Georgia, administered by the National Park Service (NPS). It was previously sanctioned as a UN Biosphere Reserve, and is located just miles from Kings Bay Naval Base and also nuclear warhead storage. I firmly believe that all Wilderness experiences…

By René Voss So now I know why people came up with the idea of aerial spraying DDT to kill pesky bugs … like the thousands of mosquitoes that attacked me over the summer solstice in the Emigrant Wilderness.  Relentless beasts! As I was walking out of the Wilderness I struck an interesting conversation with a…

By Brett Haverstick I just returned from a recent backpacking trip into one of our nation’s first Wilderness areas, the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of north central Idaho and western Montana. It was a typical June trip in the Northern Rockies with thunder, lightning, rain, hail, clouds, and sun. The forests were greening up, the rivers and…