“Wilderness Experienced” is our shared stories and musings about recent experiences in our nation’s Wildernesses. Stories can focus on the virtues of Wilderness, including the opportunity for solitude, discovery, spiritual renewal, physical challenge, wildlife viewing, and more, or things you found troubling, that just didn’t seem right in Wilderness and represent the challenges facing the National Wilderness Preservation System.
We suggest a length up to 750 words. Include one or two images from your trip, as well as an author photo. Wilderness Watch will review all submissions and reserves the right to decide which submissions get posted. Please send your story to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Please do not submit travelogues or writing aimed at directing people to specific places in Wildernesses or trailheads.
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I hope the following paints a sunnier portrait of the desert.
The Oregon Badlands Wilderness is a 29,000-acre protected area in the high desert administered by the Bureau of Land Management. The desert’s hardy flora roots itself into the land’s shield volcano, which came into being 80,000 years ago when a lava tube running underneath the ground sprung a leak. Lava oozing north, south, east, and west created the badlands.
The sandy, light colored soil that the raccoon prints are imbedded in comes from thousands of years of eroded lava. At various locations in the badlands, there are elevated volcanic rock formations—ships in the sagebrush sea—that allow for unobstructed views of the Cascade volcanoes to the west and the vast desert to the east.
By Jim Peek
I’ve seen quite a few cougars over the years, but the biggest one was in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in Idaho.
My way to cool off from the spring semester at the University of Idaho was to borrow Maurice Hornocker’s two pack mules, saddle my horse, and have the agriculture school’s stock truckers take me to Selway Falls and drop me off. I would then ride the 50 or so miles to White Cap Creek. It was May, when the shrubs were in bloom and nobody else was in there.
I usually checked with the Forest Service about whether the trail was avalanched shut or if it was open. When they invariably told me it was impassible, I always went regardless and never dropped a pack.
By Kevin Proescholdt
This fall, my wife Jean and I visited Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota. Though we had driven through the area on I-94 in the past, we had never explored the park, nor visited its designated Wildernesses. We had a wonderful time visiting and hiking in the park, and exploring the Theodore Roosevelt Wilderness.
We found that the National Park Service (NPS) itself does very little to highlight the Theodore Roosevelt Wilderness within the National Park, and it was very difficult to find information about the Wilderness from the NPS. That needs to change, but that situation also unfortunately reflects the NPS’s generally lackadaisical and cavalier attitude toward Wilderness across the nation.
By Shane Vlcek
I spent most of my adulthood in the western states of Idaho, Montana, and Oregon. Experiencing the backcountry was always something I looked forward to. But finding the opportunity and time to explore those sacred Wilderness places where true freedom is no longer in front of the next step or beyond the next ridgeline had always been a chance experience rather than a lifestyle.
by Harriet Greene
After a seven-mile climb into the steep New Fork Canyon and two tricky river crossings, we ascended to a meadow, exhausted and desperate for a site. Fording the river again to a heavily-used area with a lot of horse manure, probably the spot the wrangler had mentioned, we moved far enough away, pitched our tent and cooked dinner just as it started to drizzle.
By Brett Haverstick
I was off work and at the trailhead by 6:00 p.m. I estimated that I had about three-and-a-half hours of daylight to hike the eight miles to Bass Lake on the Montana side of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. I wasn’t in the best backpacking shape, but I figured I could still knock out the miles and the 3,500 ft. elevation gain before it was completely dark. I hadn’t backpacked into the Selway—Bitterroot, my favorite Wilderness, since last autumn.
By Phil Knight
What good is designated wilderness? Are the Lee Metcalf or the Absaroka Beartooth “wasted lands” because people can’t just go do whatever they want there?
I am currently (temporarily) disabled from a fall and cannot walk unassisted. There will be no wilderness trips for me this summer.
By Michael Lipsky
For many years I had wanted to return to the Elysian Fields, an off-trail backcountry area of trackless meadows in the Mount Rainier Wilderness within Mount Rainier National Park. The opportunity arose when I joined my son, Josh, and three of his friends on a backpacking trip a few years after they graduated from college.
By Frank Keim
We’re camped on the Hulahula River,
and after dinner
on a balmy night
five of us marched like caribou
single file
upriver
along a narrow animal trail
to a tall pingo
sculpted long ago from ancient ice melt,
By Brett Haverstick
Marty met us at the Bear Creek Trailhead at 9 a.m. We left my car in the lot, and she shuttled us over to Blodgett. Tim and I unloaded our packs, and went over our itinerary one last time. We expected to be back at Bear Creek in 5-6 days and then drive my car home.
By Brett Haverstick
I arrived at the Corn Creek trailhead about 4 p.m. in the afternoon. The sun was still hot, and the river canyon felt like an oven, particularly for May. After a few hours of hiking along the trail, I reached Horse Creek, a small tributary of the Salmon River. The creek was loud and brimming bank-to-bank with spring runoff. I decided to cross the creek using the foot-bridge—it was the wrong time of the year to wade into the water and attempt a stream crossing!
by Harriet Greene
by Suez Jacobson
A long wait – almost 50 years – to learn
How deeply and completely
The wild magic of the Boundary Waters
Could burrow.
A self-identified mountain girl
Lost to still, flat black water
Contained by granite outcroppings
Layered in midnight green pines
Topped with iridescent spring birches.
by Howie Wolke
In late October, Marilyn and I headed south for a 226 mile 21-day float trip down the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. There were four of us, in two rafts. For most of the 20,000 or so folks who annually float the Colorado, the scenery and numerous challenging rapids are big attractions. But for Marilyn and me, the big draw was the vast desert wilderness that the river punctuates. Although I hadn’t rowed challenging whitewater in nearly two decades, we all made it through the rapids upright, though I had a few close calls.
Wilderness. The Big Outside (Foreman and Wolke, Revised Edition 1992) inventoried the Grand Canyon wildland complex at 2,700,000 acres of roadless country in one unbroken block, the fourth largest such area in the lower 48 states. The 2.7 million acre wildland includes over a million roadless acres within Grand Canyon National Park, but also a number of contiguous national forest and BLM roadless areas and designated wildernesses.
By Paul Willis
There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. —René Daumal, Mount Analogue
Sitting here, high on the shoulder of a peak in the Ansel Adams Wilderness, I am looking down at a grassy swale where I startled a herd of eleven mule deer. From this height they are now too small to be seen, but they kept their ground as I detoured around them on scree and talus, not wanting to disturb their pasture. And looking down in the other direction, a blood-red canyon drops away to the round expanse of an alkali lake, from this vantage point its two or three islands an obvious continuation of a series of craters to the south. And, looking up, the summit of the mountain I'm on rises gently, inviting me to visit before thunderheads build and explode, just as they did yesterday on my way down another summit. Such a relief to be lost in sky, no other purpose beyond placing the next boot, the next hoof.
By Ned Vasquez
For many years, dating back even to my childhood, I have dreamed of spending time in the Alaskan wilderness. In August, 2019 this dream became a reality when my middle daughter and I spent 9 days rafting the Kongakut River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Our trip was organized through a guiding company based in Fairbanks. Our group consisted of 6 clients and 2 guides and we were fortunate to have a highly compatible group. The guiding company did an excellent job of orienting us to the nature of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and ensured that we were as minimally impactful as possible.
By Frank Keim
Old days drift slowly into new days
and the white eye of the Arctic sun rolls
bright across the night,
as we trek
south
up the Hulahula River,
named more than a century ago
by Hawaiian whalers stranded
on an ocean cold and frozen
before its time.
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 have never been away from these distractions and never know what they're missing.
We all deserve wild solitude and I feel human beings actually need it. In the wild all of our senses experience fresh cues, and our lungs take in more clean air and oxygen. For some of us, it can also be a very emotional experience. A few tears may be shed at the sight of a wondrous peak, or a gurgling moss-lined creek. Wild places are my church, and many would agree with me on that!
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 to the southwest, one of the most polluted nuclear waste sites in the country. Just outside the barbed wire fence that surrounds Juniper Dunes lies an off-road vehicle area promoted by the Bureau of Land Management for ORVs and other motorized activities.
I was born and raised a few miles south in Pasco. When I was a kid, the Dunes, as we called them, were a place to go target shooting, driving four wheelers, and doing all sorts of other things that our parents didn't want to know about. I've moved on, but those activities continue unabated right up to the wilderness boundary.
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 one of the most visited (if not the most visited) Wilderness in the National Wilderness Preservation System.
We enjoyed five days of paddling, portaging, camping, swimming, fishing, and laughing. But we did have to contend with strong winds almost the entire trip, including becoming windbound overnight at a point of land where the strong west winds howled unimpeded along many miles of open lake.
Wilderness Watch
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Missoula, MT 59807
P: 406-542-2048
E: wild@wildernesswatch.org
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Minneapolis, MN 55406
P: 612-201-9266
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P.O. Box 9765
Moscow, ID 83843