Wildlands of the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests. Kylie Wilson map prepared for Friends of the Clearwater, 2024.

"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own 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."
 
- Howard Zahniser

The above quote comes from the Wilderness Act of 1964, which created the National Wilderness Preservation System, created a legal framework for wilderness protection, and set an ethical vision of wilderness management that has inspired conservation movements for 60 years.

Wilderness can be difficult to define: it is a philosophical concept as well as a land management directive. At the core of wilderness is the idea of self-willed land. Federally-protected wildernesses are free to develop as they have in perpetuity, free from mechanized and motorized technology and industrial development.

Consider the word "untrammeled" from Zahniser's quote. Often mistaken for "trampled", a trammel is a device to limit the motion of horses legs, a way to force them to walk the way their trainer sees fit.

Untrammeled, then, isn't the absence of human impacts - that kind of wilderness likely hasn't existed nearly anywhere on Earth for at least 15,000 years - it is the presence of unmanaged natural processes.

A female mountain bluebird at a snag in the Meadow Creek Roadless Area. Burned trees are prime real estate for birds. Marquart photo.

In the protected wildernesses of Idaho, many natural processes continue much as they have for millions of years, like: