That feeling owes much to the Wilderness Act, which became law 60 years ago, in 1964. When President Lyndon B. Johnson created a nationwide system of wild landscapes “untrammeled by man,” it gave physical expression to an unusual attitude toward land.

The attitude could be summarized as: In the wildest parts of America, humans come second. What comes first is the land, its water and its wildlife. If the grizzly that left those droppings had confronted us, and I’m glad it never did, we lacked the resources of civilization to protect us.

If I’d fallen off a cliff, there was no cell service to call 911. If a freak snowstorm made us cold, wet and miserable, all we could do was suffer. In wilderness, Mother Nature won’t kiss a boo-boo to make it better.

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.

Before the Act became law, American culture prioritized pulling all the resources we could out of the land by drilling, mining, dam building, logging, over-grazing. We barged through habitat, flattened forests and plowed prairies. We replaced old growth with board-feet of timber, canyons with cubic meters of water, and grasslands with barrels per day of oil. We’re still doing that on 95% of public land.

But the Wilderness Act acknowledged that in some places, the land should be left as unexploited as possible. It defined wilderness as being “in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape.”

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.

The Act’s primary author, Howard Zahniser loved hiking in wild places and he was determined: In eight years of lobbying the Congress for The Wilderness Society, he helped rewrite the bill 65 times. By the time the Act overwhelmingly passed—73–12 in the Senate and 374–1 in the House—Zahniser had died of heart disease at the young age of 58.

The Act is often discussed in terms of the acreage it protects, now comprising 806 wilderness areas and 112 million acres, roughly half of that in Alaska. Yet it’s really about nature being the boss.

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.

Wilderness is not the only place we embrace not getting our way, just as the U.S. Capitol building is not the only place we embrace democracy, and Civil War battlefields are not the only places we honor fallen soldiers. With wilderness as reminders, we can also consider not being the boss in a city park or backyard, while watching birds or growing native plants.

Threats to keeping wilderness wild, however, have never subsided. Sixty years have brought us innumerable technologies to help us get our way while recreating in nature. And as we’ve realized that making nature more accessible might make it more inclusive and its fans more diverse, some of us are tempted to relax recreational restrictions in wilderness.

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.”

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. Thanks to the Wilderness Act, we can celebrate that some places remain free of our habit of changing everything—just because we can.

John Clayton is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit that promotes lively dialog about the West. He lives in Montana and writes the newsletter Natural Stories.

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That’s what some rock climbers must be thinking. They want to enter designated Wilderness in order to drill permanent anchors into wilderness rock faces, turning these wild places into sport-climbing walls.

When the Wilderness Act became law in 1964, it put wildlife and wild lands first, decreeing that these special places should be left alone as much as possible. This unusual approach codified humility, arguing that some wild places, rich in wildlife and natural beauty, needed as much protection as possible.

So far, the Act protects less than 3% of what Congress called “untrammeled” public land in the Lower 48. These are unique places free of roads and vehicles and most manmade intrusions that afflict the rest of America. 

The Wilderness Act also prohibits “installations,” but to get around this, a group called the Access Fund has persuaded friends in Congress to introduce a bill that would, in effect, amend the Wilderness Act. 

Introduced by Rep. John Curtis, a Republican from the anti-environmental delegation of Utah, and co-sponsored by Democrat Joe Neguse from Colorado, the “Protect America’s Rock Climbing Act” (PARC Act) has been promoted as bi-partisan. 

Yet over 40 conservation groups, from small grassroots greens to large national organizations, have written Congress to oppose the bill. Wilderness is not about human convenience, they say, it’s about safeguarding the tiny pockets of wild landscape we’ve allowed to remain.

The PARC Act directs federal agencies to recognize the legal use of fixed anchors in Wilderness, a backdoor approach to statutory amendment that even the U.S. Forest Service and Department of Interior oppose.

In a hearing on the bill, the Forest Service stated that “creating new definitions for allowable uses in wilderness areas, as (the PARC Act) would do, has the practical effect of amending the Wilderness Act. (It) could have serious and harmful consequences for the management of wilderness areas across the nation.”

Beyond the permanent visual evidence of human development, fixed anchors would attract more climbers looking for bolted routes and concentrate use in sensitive habitats. That impact is harmful enough, but the bill also sends a loud message: Recreation interests are more important than preserving the small bit of Wilderness we have left. 

What’s coming next is clear. Some mountain bikers, led by the Sustainable Trails Coalition, have introduced legislation to exempt mountain bikes from the prohibition on mechanized travel in Wilderness. 

Then there are the trail runners who want exemptions from the ban on commercial trail racing. Drone pilots and hang-gliders also want their forms of aircraft exempted. 

What’s confounding is that climbing is already allowed in Wilderness. This bill is simply about using fixed bolts to climb as opposed to using removable protection. That’s apparently confusing to some people. 

An article in the Salt Lake Tribune went so far as to wrongly state that, “a ban on anchors would be tantamount to a ban on climbing in wilderness areas.” 

But now, even some climbers are pushing back. The Montana writer George Ochenski, known for his decades of first ascents in Wilderness, calls the Tribune’s position “Total bullsh*t.” In an e-mail, he said bolting routes “bring ‘sport climbing’ into the wilderness when it belongs in the gym or on non-wilderness rocks.” 

For decades, many climbers have advocated for a marriage of climbing and wilderness ethics. In Chouinard Equipment’s first catalog, Patagonia founder and legendary climber Yvon Chouinard called for an ethic of “clean climbing” that comes from “the exercise of moral restraint and individual responsibility.”

We don’t like to think of recreation as consumptive, but it consumes the diminishing resource of space. And protected space is in short supply as stressors on the natural world increase. With every “user group” demand, the refuge for wild animals grows smaller. Meanwhile, a startling number of our animal counterparts have faded into extinction.

As someone who loves trail running, I understand the allure of wedding a love of wild places with the love of adventure and sport. But I’ve also come to see that that the flip side of freedom is restraint, and Wilderness needs our restraint more than ever.

Dana Johnson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is a staff attorney and policy director for Wilderness Watch, a national wilderness nonprofit.

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