Syndication News Column:
Wilderness In Our Midst

This is a view of the Gila Wilderness.
(The photograph was produced by Jessie Jobs and was provided courtesy
of the U S Fish and Wildlife Service, June 4, 2016.)

Do you ever want to get away from everything? Put aside your day-to-day life?

Consider going back to the wilderness where the noise of car engines is replaced by the sounds of birds and water flowing through rivers.

There are sections of New Mexico that have been designated as wilderness for almost 100 years. These lands have no roadways for motor vehicles and no lodging. You can travel through these areas by your own power on foot, by canoe, or on horseback.

These are the Gila Wilderness and the Aldo Leopold Wilderness.

The two wilderness areas – plus the Blue Range Wilderness in Catron County – are located within the Gila National Forest.

“The wilderness areas on the Gila comprise a vast, roadless realm astride the Black, Mogollon, Diablo, and Blue mountain ranges, varying from grassland foothills upward through juniper woodland, ponderosa pine, and then spruce-fir forests on the high peaks,” according to a statement from the Forest Service of the United States Department of Agriculture. “Mountain meadows, aspen glades, and spruce forests border on narrow, rock-walled canyons which in some places plunge to depths of more than a thousand feet.”

While there are no major operations within these wilderness areas, grazing, hunting, and fishing do occur.

The acres now in the Gila Wilderness were the first designated by the U S Forest Service as wilderness lands in June of 1924. For Native Americans and long-time residents, this action by the Federal government only confirmed what they already knew of these lands. At that time, the acreage was known as the “Gila Primitive Area.” In January of 1953, according a news article in the Tucson Daily Citizen, the Secretary of Agriculture signed an order re-naming these acres as the “Gila Wilderness.”

The ground included in what is today known as the “Aldo Leopold Wilderness” was initially part of the Gila Primitive Area. The two areas were separated after the construction of Forest Road 150 – the North Star Road – through the wilderness; the eastern portion became known as the “Black Range Primitive Area” in 1932. This area took on its current name when the United States Congress passed an act including the acreage within the National Wilderness Preservation System in 1980. Mr. Aldo Leopold, an Iowa native, had served as a leader within the U S Forest Service in New Mexico and had been a proponent of the preservation of the wilderness in the Gila National Forest.

Total acreage within each wilderness area varies. The Gila Wilderness includes 558,065 acres (almost 872 square miles), the Aldo Leopold Wilderness encompasses 202,016 acres (about 315 square miles), and the Blue Range Wilderness has 29,304 acres (almost 46 square miles) within its borders.

Taken together, the three wilderness areas account for almost one-quarter of the entire Gila National Forest.

According to the Wilderness Act passed by the U S Congress in 1964, “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

In the 1930’s, small groups of people from places far and wide came to tour the Gila Wilderness. One of those expeditions was detailed in a news article from the U S Forest Service printed on Christmas Day of 1940 in the El Paso Herald-Post. A group of 17 men and women visited the area for 13 days in July and August of 1940. The news article noted that the individuals in this and previous groups included “teachers, engineers, doctors, secretaries and well-to-do people accustomed to all the comforts of city life.”

The comments of a “schoolma’am” from New England were quoted in the news article to highlight the view of one of the visitors upon witnessing the wilderness of New Mexico: “Oh dear! They’ll never believe me back home when I try to tell them about this!”

Her words likely echo comments by others today as they visit the wilderness within the Gila National Forest.

This map, provided courtesy of the  U S Forest Service, highlights the wilderness areas (in darker green)
within the Gila National Forest (lighter green and darker green areas highlighted on the map).

© 2020 Richard McDonough