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You are here: Home / News / Essays and Commentary / Can Wilderness Include Humans?

Can Wilderness Include Humans?

by Ben Kilbourne on August 25, 2020 Essays and Commentary, New Features

DSC01497

The Wilderness Boundary at North Pole Pass, looking west.

A Catechism

After passing Flaming Gorge Reservoir, that strange blue mirror pooling unnaturally around red hills and cliffs, and turning off the 191 onto a dirt road, we drove past the eastern terminus of the Uinta Highline Trail because there was no sign. We flipped around in the deeply rutted road and let the GPS guide us to where the trailhead was supposed to be. There were a toilet and one white sedan in an otherwise empty and very dusty parking lot. The clouds were patchy, the sky behind them rich blue, and it was hot when we stepped outside the car and pulled the COVID masks from our faces.

We packed hurriedly, and I made a last-second decision to carry a grapefruit. Then we started down the two-track past the post where the sign should be, or once had been. Walking through the forest, we noted its relative health compared to other parts of the Uintas. We started at 3:15 in the afternoon and hiked until we realized we hadn’t seen water in a long time. I checked the map and found a blue squiggle labeled Big Brush Creek, meandering through a meadow called Manilla Park. When we reached it, we ambled down the meadow until it transitioned from dry to wet, and there on the edge of the marsh, we dropped our packs and made camp.

The next day we walked on dusty logging roads and through forests consisting of equal parts stumps and new trees. We passed trucks parked on the edges of lakes, jarringly shiny in all that matte landscape. We heard heavy machinery roaring and beeping somewhere in the woods. It wasn’t until late afternoon on the third day that we actually found the Wilderness boundary at the top of North Pole Pass and looked down into the Uinta Basin. The Wilderness sign stood propped up by a pile of rocks on the subtle apex of rounded, bleak tundra. It divided the land of humans, roads, and motor sounds behind us from the land described in the Wilderness Act of 1964 as “untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

We were headed into a land that would provide us with a sort of religious experience. The Catechism of Observing Otherness. A view of the world without the humans. A world which hints at the ancient times from which we sprang. It hints at The Before.

Before there was anything at all – Before we were able to meddle. It reminds us of our source within the earth, the universe. We went there to be humbled by this vision, while on our backs, we carried everything we needed in order not to be killed by it. We had rain jackets and tents and sleeping bags and food procured from grocery stores. And we experienced that very tension, skirting the edge of death intentionally, looking off the edge into its void while remaining firmly tethered to life by our gear, skills, physical strength, willpower, and luck.

As we climbed to the top of another pass, seven elk dashed across the trail in front of us and ran down the hill to the green treeless meadow below. A mother stopped and turned and called to her babies, the last to descend. And then they all ran to where ribbons of water from the snowmelt subtly pleated the green velvet, following gravity and geology to a shallow blue lake.

Not ten seconds later, a mountain goat ascended the trail in front of us. It moved strong and fast and didn’t even look in our direction. This was the world we came to see: that place where the human is a visitor but doesn’t remain. It felt like a pristine – ahistorical – Eden, and it filled me with awe. It was the world separate from the human world, rolling on intentionless and insulated from the influence of ideas. This separate world couldn’t be infiltrated by concepts like religion or physics with all their limits. It just is what it is.

DSC01533

Oweep Basin from Porcupine Pass.

This Ground is Not Prepared For You

Wilderness didn’t always elicit such feelings of wonder and awe; it used to be viewed as the outer margins of civilization. It’s described in the Bible as a fearful place one went only against one’s will. For years, Europeans thought it was the darkness on the edge of town, which was empty, deserted, barren, savage, and ultimately useless besides the fact that it contained the raw materials of civilization. In short, it was an undesirable place.

And then its meaning started to shift. Henry David Thoreau viewed it as something simultaneously awe-inspiring and frightening. He described Mt. Katahdin in Maine as “vast, Titanic, and such as man never inhabits… She seems to say sternly, why came ye here before your time? This ground is not prepared for you.” Of course, while Thoreau was climbing Katahdin in 1846, Black people all across the country knew wilderness as the place where they might be lynched. Wilderness has, at times, meant very different things to different people.

Later yet, John Muir recounted a trip to the Sierra. “Perched like a fly on this Yosemite dome, I gaze and sketch and bask, oftentimes settling down into dumb admiration without definite hope of ever learning much, yet with the longing, unresting effort that lies at the door of hope, humbly prostrate before the vast display of God’s power, and eager to offer self-denial and renunciation with eternal toil to learn any lesson in the divine manuscript.”

This version of the wilderness experience seemed closest to what I was seeking when I set foot on the Uinta Highline Trail. I found myself humbly prostrate before the seven elk crossing the meadow.

This romantic sublime view of wilderness described by Muir is foundational to conservation in the United States, but was only possible in places that were untouched by humans, places that were pristine Edens, places where no one had set foot since the day God stopped creating. The only problem with this was that these Edens didn’t actually exist! People had been walking every square inch of America for at least 15,000 years before Muir. So, when forest preserves and national parks began to be created, Native people were removed from them so the parks could be advertised to the wealthy white tourists as safe, uninhabited, and most importantly, unchanged since the dawn of creation.

In the late 1800s, Americans began to lament the disappearance of the frontier. Moreover, wealthy white men wanted something empty to be able to push into, to conquer. If wild places were so important in the construction of the United States, then the future of the country must lie in their preservation.

In his famous essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” the environmental historian William Cronon says, “It is no accident that the movement to set aside national parks and wilderness areas began to gain real momentum at precisely the time that laments about the passing frontier reached their peak. To protect wilderness was in a very real sense to protect the nation’s most sacred myth of origin.”

Recreating in the wilderness became an elite activity. And ironically, the construction of national parks closely followed the final Indian Wars, and Native people were removed and placed on reservations. It’s ironic as well, that while these places had a façade of wildness, their boundaries were policed to keep violence out. Real wildness, frontier wildness, was full of conflict. The wildness we experience today, like the wildness I saw in the High Uintas, is lacking a human element that could be even wilder. As an elite, white, male, I don’t have to watch my back the way I would have in the mid-1800s. Lightning and hypothermia are separated from other real (and objectively wild) threats, such as human conflict.

The Beguiling Mask

According to Cronon, all these things describe the problem with wilderness. “Wilderness,” he says, “hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural.” This idea was appalling to me when I first came across it, and if it gets your hackles up, you’re not alone.

“But it is natural!” I’ve wanted to scream. It’s nature, isn’t it? It’s true enough that we’re going to have transcendental encounters with the more-than-human world in the wilderness, and these are real. But the islands of land in which we have these experiences are a cultural construction. The elk I watched run across the talus, tundra, and meadow, and disappear into the mysterious distance felt wild. The whole encounter was indelibly wild. It caused in me a feeling of awe, joy, melancholy, elation, and wonder. These were feelings I couldn’t articulate or define, but the combination of which continues to drive me to walk through these wild places.

So, there I was, following in the footsteps of Muir except in the High Uintas instead of the Sierra, in search of the romantic sublime, something at once frightening and beautiful, a religious experience impossible to have in my suburban neighborhood. And I pushed into this imagined frontier, almost squinting to blur it into something it isn’t, to see myself as the first to descend a rocky pass and rest against a glacial boulder placed there on the day of creation and which no one has seen since. To be the first to fill a bottle from clear snowmelt running through squat willows and Indian paintbrush.

The problem with this experience, according to Cronon, is that it dishonestly leaves humans out of the equation. Even worse, it creates an intractable nature/human. So, in the context of “The Trouble with Wilderness,” the big question becomes: What would it mean to backpack (or engage in other forms of recreation) while being fully aware of historical contexts? What would it mean to consider humans as part of nature instead of separate from it? Am I willing to temper my desire for the pristine with an awareness that the pristine is a cultural construct? Can I try and reinstate the past in my imagination?

As I walked huffing and puffing over Porcupine Pass, I tried to see Paleo-humans with tools chipped from quartz-sandstone following big game to the edges of the glaciers. The glaciers disappear and I see horse herds in Oweep Basin. We pass their bones, whiter than snow with lupine and columbine protruding from hip-sockets and eye-sockets. Wall tents are staked to glacial moraines, and smoke pours from them as the sound of clanking pots and pans comes from within, and distant voices echo through the healthy lodgepole forests. The sounds mingle with the hermit thrush’s pentatonic call that still echoes through dying forests today. I hear rocks crashing together as CCC crews construct a dam along the outlet of a lake.

We stopped for lunch where Oweep Creek left the long meadow to enter pines, spruce, and fir. I pulled out my map and noticed a clumsy line running along the entire spine of the Uintas labeled “Old Indian Treaty Boundary.” When Utes were rounded up out of the Wasatch Front and other areas, and then dumped in the Uinta Basin, their promised territory extended all the way up past the very place where I sat. The Uintah Valley Reservation was designated in 1861, the Ouray in 1882, and in 1886 they were combined to encompass 4 million acres of land. But as was always the case, Native territory got whittled down to nothing like a boy scout trying to make a spoon out of soft aspen wood. Pretty soon there’s nothing left.

While this was obviously Native land before the treaty, I found it all the more upsetting that it was also promised to remain so under a treaty that was no longer being honored. Indeed, if you type “Uintah Ouray Reservation” into Google Maps, the original swath of 4 million acres is still shown, including the entire southern slope of the Uintas, the whole Uinta Basin, much of Desolation Canyon, and a gigantic portion of the Tavaputs Plateau.

Today, tribal land includes only 1.2 million acres of this original area, patchy and disjointed. Presidential proclamations created townsites within it. On July 15, 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt absorbed almost all of the southern slope of the Uintas, the Native land, into the Uinta Forest Reserve. Three years later, by executive order, he renamed this area Ashley National Forest, the very forest where I was sitting looking at my map. Soon thereafter, dam construction began, an effort to standardize water availability for a growing population of white settlers within the reservation boundaries at the base of the mountains.

The original Uintah and Ouray Reservation includes about half of the Uinta Mountains and most of the Highline Trail (Screenshot of Google Maps search result).

Does this remembrance diminish the sublime experience? If it does, I don’t care.

Not only does it improve my overall backpacking experience, but it’s also an absolute necessity to know a place’s history. I prefer to backpack while aware of my own privilege, aware of the human histories embedded in a place that is only pristine if you actively ignore its history. Cronon reminds us that “Wilderness always displays an escape from history, an erasure, running from something to a past that never actually existed.” I don’t want to experience wilderness in this way; I want to be fully aware that my 104-mile Highline trip took place in what is supposed to be native land.

But let me acknowledge the merits of Wilderness, National Parks, and other protected areas. While there is nothing natural about the idea of wilderness, it doesn’t mean there isn’t any value in it. We’ve ended up with islands of relatively intact ecosystems, and this is a good thing! We protected them often for the wrong reasons (beauty, the feeling of the sublime associated with such grandeur, etc.), but we protected them nonetheless, and it feels  important to remember both of these things at once. National Parks and Wilderness areas are better off this way than they would be if we left them open to exploitation.

That said, I may have to rethink the way backpacking, my preferred method of recreation, influences which landscapes I choose to care about, and which I choose to ignore. This could mean paying more attention to pastoral or suburban areas between core protected areas.

Considering conservation in these places could start to undo that human/nature division that is so seductive, which props up the concept of wilderness. It would suggest that we have to consider ourselves as a part of nature, part of everything. It would start to break down the fantasy Cronon laments.

This fantasy is what worries Cronon the most. He’s concerned that wilderness causes us to dismiss the nature all around us, and forget that conservation should happen in the places we are, not just the places we visit. He doesn’t want us to forget about that liminal space that people have inhabited for all of human history: working with nature, using it, making a living. Cronon’s final plea is for us “to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word “home.” So how do we do this?

For me, it’s two-fold.

1. Fully acknowledge the histories of places where we backpack.

2. Acknowledge wilderness not associated with backpacking at all: in the city, in our own neighborhoods.

Remembering that the High Uintas Wilderness has been occupied, used for subsistence, altered, stolen, and renamed should begin to illuminate a kinship between it and the sycamores that line the street in front of my house, and the squirrel that runs across the powerline between them. All of these things are the more-than-human world affected in some way by humans. We should endeavor to care for all these things as much as we can, regardless of their connection to backpacking or other forms of recreation.

DSC01520

My hiking partner Jacob basking like Muir.

Further Reading:

  • William Cronon’s “The Trouble with Wilderness”
  • Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation by Carl Jacoby
  • The Wilderness Act of 1964
  • The Writings of Henry David Thoreau
  • John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra

Related Content

More thoughtful trip reports from our Backpacking Light authors

  • Benjamin Kilbourne – Backpackers Should Be Amateur Naturalists
  • Daniel Sizer – Getting Lost in an Urban Wilderness
  • Andrew Marshall  – Walking in Circles: A Tahoe Rim Trail Thru-Hike
  • Ryan Jordan – Wind River Backpacking: Sawmills, Tenkara, and Trout in the Popo Agie Wilderness

DISCLOSURE (Updated November 7, 2019)

  • Some (but not all) of the links on this page may be “affiliate” links. If you click on one of these links and visit one of our affiliate partners (usually a retailer site), and subsequently place an order with that retailer, we receive a small commission. These commissions help us provide authors with honoraria, fund our editorial projects, podcasts, instructional webinars, and more, and we appreciate it a lot! Thank you for supporting Backpacking Light!

Backpacking, conservation, essay, muir, thoreau, Unita, Utah, wilderness

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  • Aug 25, 2020 at 4:13 pm #3672989
    Backpacking Light
    Admin

    @backpackinglight

    Locale: Rocky Mountains

    Am I willing to temper my desire for the pristine with an awareness that the pristine is a cultural construct?

    • Can Wilderness Include Humans?
    Aug 26, 2020 at 7:01 am #3673080
    Kurt Odendahl
    BPL Member

    @judykurt-2

    Locale: Tallgrass prairie

    Ben, thanks for another great thought-provoking article. BackpackingLight, more like this.

    Aug 26, 2020 at 8:52 am #3673097
    Paul Wagner
    BPL Member

    @balzaccom

    Locale: Wine Country

    Skirting the edge of death? Is that really how you see wilderness?

    It’s an escape from the city/suburbs, much like a very large city park. Only larger, and farther from the city. I would suggest it is more like traveling back in time–away from machines, rather than escaping any trace of humankind. After all, the vast majority of trips to the wilderness involve following man-made trails…

    And while there are certainly many wilderness areas that were heavily used/lived in/and affected by Native Americans, many of the areas above 9,000 feet were not so affected–mainly because there is little in the way of food sources so high. The only reason to go is for recreation.

    Now I’ll go get a container of popcorn…

    Aug 26, 2020 at 8:59 am #3673100
    rubmybelly!
    BPL Member

    @sleeping

    Locale: The Cascades

    “The only reason to go is for recreation.”

    I don’t have much of an issue with most of your post, but can’t agree with this. Some folks do find a spirituality in the wilderness and I won’t discount that. There are other reasons people seek solitude in the less-travelled places, the wilder places, beyond recreation, and I don’t discount any of that as well.

    I never thought popcorn went that well with wine… :-)

    Aug 26, 2020 at 10:11 am #3673128
    Karen
    BPL Member

    @granolagirlak

    I appreciate this essay’s thoughtful approach to the concept of wilderness. Up here in Alaska the word wilderness isn’t one that most Alaska Natives use because it refers to their home, and implies they shouldn’t be there. They still live there, and take food from the land. They weren’t removed to reservations, so although there has been a history of attack on their culture and traditions (as well as the removal of children to institutions), they’ve always been connected with their ancestral lands. They know the reality; that some white folks would still like them to go away, so the land can be taken over and used for …. whatever. It’s not an idle threat.

    Rural lifestyles up here have changed, but not all that much; mostly it’s the tools that have changed. When us city backpacker types use the word wilderness, it implies we don’t want anyone else out there, ruining our fantasy. We’re offended when we see signs of other humans living out there and want them to adopt our motto of LNT. But Alaska Native peoples are more than a trace! Since it’s their home first, and my recreation only a remote second, I try not to use that word, and instead describe the specific land I’m thinking about – Minto flats, ANWR or whatever. I pick up trash but can’t criticize what’s left behind by people who were here first. (happy to criticize rafters though, who leave most of the trash!)

    Wilderness can be a spiritual refuge and a recreation place, but it also includes people, always.

    Aug 26, 2020 at 10:18 am #3673129
    matt B
    BPL Member

    @tothetracks

    Well written. This focal point has been something I’ve turned over again and again for year. When I was a spry 24, I took a course at UCSC centered on the philosophy of the wilderness. The course was taught outside, rain or shine. Many of these points were raised. I specifically enjoy the human context and your reexamination of our history and all it touches by those of who are privileged. Thank you for dedicating the time to craft this and for sharing it.

    Aug 26, 2020 at 10:30 am #3673133
    Paul Wagner
    BPL Member

    @balzaccom

    Locale: Wine Country

    I am not sure I disassociate recreation from spirituality. At least to me, they both have the goal of refreshing or renewing one’s spirit…and we all choose to worship in our own way.

    Bubbly with truffle oil popcorn. Heaven.

    Aug 26, 2020 at 1:20 pm #3673163
    Tjaard Breeuwer
    BPL Member

    @tjaard

    Locale: Minnesota, USA

    Well written. Unlike so many quick hits we see, this article acknowledges that there is more than one side, that there are no absolutes.

    Aug 26, 2020 at 4:35 pm #3673207
    jscott
    BPL Member

    @book

    Locale: Northern California

    surprised the author didn’t mention portable electronics…

    Strictly speaking, I suppose there is no pristine wilderness anywhere. See those planes overhead?

    I’m bothered much less than many the presence of other backpackers on my trips. Of course, there are limits–the JMT is more crowded than I like. But I usually hike solo, so I have hours on end to hike in quiet and near solitude. I don’t think other people having viewed the mountains and rivers I’m strolling through detracts from them one bit. And I’m not devastated by the sight of another tent or two near me. I think it’s all a matter of degree. In any case, I’ve learned where and how to avoid crowds and often see very few others on trips in the Sierra.

    I’m more likely to see wildlife in less traveled areas–except maybe fewer bears, since they like more hikers! And then there are remote areas–really remote, which effectively are wilderness, I think, despite their history. Many value remoteness above all, or nearly. I understand.

    Aug 30, 2020 at 7:00 pm #3673971
    J David Sullivan
    BPL Member

    @sipseyfreak

    Locale: Deep South

    Interesting considerations, Ben. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

    Aug 31, 2020 at 8:37 am #3674014
    Anne Flueckiger
    BPL Member

    @annefluke

    Locale: Northern Minnesota

    The first time I read not-so-nice quotes from John Muir (re: removing “savage Indians” from Yosemite Valley so it would be “pristine” for tourists) was in this book:

    Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks

    To create Shenandoah National Park, small communities of “mountain folk” were forcibly removed. The park now includes this part of its history in its interpretive materials.

    The relationship of long-time inhabitants/indigenous people to protected areas and conservation is a global issue:

    https://uapress.arizona.edu/book/indigenous-peoples-national-parks-and-protected-areas

    https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/violence-against-chepang-peoples-nepal-sparks-outrage-national-park-authorities-and

    https://www.iisd.org/articles/indigenous-protected-areas-way-meet-human-and-environmental-challenges

     

     

    Sep 13, 2020 at 10:11 pm #3675998
    DirtNap
    BPL Member

    @dirtnap

    Locale: SLC

    I really like this article. It clearly states the obvious conflicts that shape our modern definition of wilderness. Wilderness is all impacted in one way or another by our actions. The idea of untrammeled wilderness is mostly a fantasy any more. It’s also one that I am guilty of entertaining.

    I spend a lot of time on reservations. In fact I consider many of the western reservations to be some of the continents wildest jewels. Spend enough time on the Navajo or Shoshone/Arapaho in the Winds and I find the relationship even more rich. Want to learn some wild stuff? Read about the NPS treatment of the Havasupai and Hualapai in one of humanity’s most cherished “preserves” the Grand Canyon. Hell, ask the Hopi old timers the stories of the Navajo invaders from the north that have been handed down through the generations.

    Alas, our history is as complex as the landscape. We use it as an “escape” but is it really an escape when what we are as a society is not the normal state of things? Is the wilderness the “anomoly” or is this alien disaster we live in day to day the anomoly?

    I personally don’t feel at home until I am in the wilds, whatever definition you choose. Is that me being naive or is that really human nature? The industrial revolution was 150 years ago. The computer revolution really started cooking about 25 years ago. Our bodies, our society, our patterns are hundreds of thousands, millions of years old. We live in the anomoly now. That makes the wilderness the last refuge of what we really are.

     

    Oct 29, 2020 at 9:53 am #3681517
    Eli Simmer
    BPL Member

    @patchessobo

    Locale: Minnesota

    Very happy to see this perspective articulated on BPL – in addition to positive replies. Honestly, I feared accusations of the author trying to ‘cancel the wilderness’ or something…

    I spend plenty of time in federally designated wilderness areas myself and, along with the author, see how learning the histories of others (and frankly an honest history of white settlers too) can enrich the experience.

    If you pursue this line of investigation further, you’ll find talk of genocide, cultural erasure, land theft, and ecological destruction. These things aren’t flattering to this country nor to the ancestors of most it’s inhabitants, to say the very least, but it’s worth absorbing. Personally I believe some form of decolonization (a complicated and politically loaded term) is absolutely necessary in order to honor the first peoples of this land, to stave of ecological collapse, and to save the souls of the settler population given the horrors we’ve committed in building this country.

    I’ve never understood the knee-jerk defensiveness of most people when the settler-colonial nature of this country is pointed out. The insistence that atrocities were necessary, the denial of any personal implication, on and on…  Most decolonization talk is about human dignity and respect, not taking anything away from anyone apart from the myth of euro-settler supremacy.

    Oct 29, 2020 at 1:40 pm #3681556
    HkNewman
    BPL Member

    @hknewman

    Locale: Western US

    Humans are part of the biosphere, but some of their activities are questionable.  My friend’s late father was part of the generation that fought in WW2 as young men; his words when I told him I’d started backpacking in the mountains were “.. did you lose something up there?”.

    Think we forget for many civilizations until recently, the “wilds” were where people went to snag natural resources before returning home (or hut, native tent, etc..).   In southwestern areas, a hiker can still find electrical parts that were used to light up old mines before they went bust by the late 1890s/early 1900s.  Mogollon NM on the Gilas western entrance used to be a bustling municipality until economics closed the mine and thousands abandoned their homes.  The forest has pretty much taken over except for the cemetery which requires real 4WD to get to.

    Think if backpackers and other temporary visitors use LNT and follow other regulations (like endangered species closures), the good outweighs whatever harm.

    Also there’s a concept of wilderness services, such as many western water supplies come in via wilderness areas.    In light of importing exotic species, think we need to actually increase most wild areas to increase natural biodiversity (though I think some places are “done – put a fork in ‘em”, maybe concentrate development in there?   Take southern Florida with its Burmese Python problem, and the “brain surgeons” who keep releasing African vipers around Houston.)

     

    Add that many of our public lands are “multiuse” for economic activities.

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