June 2 – SILVER CITY – As you hike a mountain camp trail, your vision of the Gila Wilderness can be funneled like the wind between towering green hills and steep plateaus.
It is a phenomenon that offers a telescopic glimpse of the greatness that lies ahead.
Then you round a bend and suddenly encounter a sweeping vista of mountain peaks, forested hills, canyons and humpback whales blending into a mosaic in vivid relief on the horizon.
You can understand why Aldo Leopold described the feeling as a speck in an immensity.
And while he wasn’t talking specifically about the Gila, Leopold undoubtedly felt a similar sense of wonder about the pristine wilderness of southern New Mexico that he wanted to remain unspoiled—in an era when the prevailing ethos was to tame every mile of land .
Leopold was an author and early conservationist who also worked as an operations manager for the US Forest Service, which put him in a position to lobby the agency to keep this vast, multifaceted expanse wild, arguing that its “highest use ‘ for the Gila was to leave it alone.
He succeeded.
In 1924, the agency’s Southwest regional director in Albuquerque agreed to reserve and protect 755,000 acres, creating the nation’s first designated wilderness area. Monday marks the 100th anniversary of this historic policy action, which predates the Wilderness Act by 40 years.
“This was a different way of thinking about an alternative to intensive development,” says Curt Meine, senior fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation and author of what many consider the premiere Leopold biography.
A centenary celebration was held Saturday at Gough Park in Silver City. U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich, Representative Gabe Vasquez and tribal leaders spoke at the event, paying tribute to New Mexico’s first designated wilderness, which laid the foundation for future ones.
Last week, a local speaker series took place in the run-up to the festival. Conservationists, historians, public lands experts, and indigenous advocates discussed why wilderness areas are so important to a society increasingly separated from the natural world, how it works as an ecological tool, and the inequality of who benefits has and who is left out.
The centenary celebration attracted a mix of local residents, people from all over New Mexico and visitors from out of state. Among them were members of the Fort Sill Apache tribe, who came from across the country to celebrate the Gila Wilderness for a century.
John Treat, 26, originally from San Antonio, Texas, said he felt deep emotions while walking through a section of wilderness, knowing he was on land that has remained unchanged since his native ancestors crossed it.
“When I looked at the mountains, I felt an indescribable connection,” Treat said.
A check and balance against ‘progress’
The federal government protecting land was nothing new when Leopold launched his efforts to preserve the Gila. Federal leaders had established national parks and monuments, dating back to Yellowstone’s founding in 1872.
But the creation of a roadless wilderness, off-limits to motorized invaders, went much further. Parks were intended to accommodate tourists, so they needed roads, lookouts, campsites, and other amenities for recreationists, nature lovers, and, in the early decades, curiosity seekers.
National forests were even more open to degradation, with the federal government turning them into natural resource hubs in part to serve commercial interests, whether logging, mining, ranching, or oil drilling.
Such activities required a network of roads running through the forests.
Leopold was painfully aware that the Gila, which had been a national forest since 1905, was vulnerable, especially as cars became household items, fueling the “good road movement.”
The movement had pushed for side roads that could connect urban and rural areas so that cars could travel more easily through the countryside. By World War I, proponents sought to pave everywhere motorists might want to drive, including through wilderness, Meine said.
A proposal to build a farm road in the Gila Forest became the catalyst for Leopold, who feared that this was the first tendril that could grow into a full-fledged network in the name of progress.
“He said, ‘I’m not against the road. I’m just saying we don’t need roads everywhere,'” Meine said.
Leopold wasn’t the first to think about setting aside a nature reserve, but he was the first to effectively insist that the government actually do so, Meine said.
Leopold had written about the idea, including in a 1921 Journal of Forestry essay “The Wilderness and Its Place in Forest Recreation Policy.”
In the essay, Leopold notes that Gifford Pinchot was against “bottling up” vast wilderness areas, but believed that the forests could be managed so that they were productive without being destroyed. Pinchot suggested that some extraction was necessary to make optimal use of the forests.
Leopold argued that the development of the forests went too far and that some of the wilderness should be left intact for those who entered on foot or horseback to enjoy as a recreational area. In these cases, recreation is the highest use, he said.
“By ‘wilderness’ I mean a contiguous tract of land preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, large enough to absorb a two-week package tour, and devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages or other works of man,” he wrote.
As regional manager, Leopold had great influence, knew other high-ranking people in what was still a young and relatively small agency, and was eloquent and persuasive both verbally and in his written pleas, Meine said.
“He got the conversation started,” Meine said.
Creating the protected wilderness was a regional decision that did not require the approval of the agency’s head, William Greeley, a staunch supporter of the Pinchot Doctrine that called for sustainable production rather than fencing up large forests. Greeley would later become head of a national timber industry group.
Leopold first sought out the Gila Wilderness for recreation to make sure there was something left of the backcountry he had ridden and hunted.
His vision would evolve and he would later extol the value of wilderness for wildlife, cultural connections, spirituality and scientific research, Meine said.
Wilderness brings people together
In 1980, Congress split off 202,000 acres from the original expanse and created the Aldo Leopold Wilderness.
A rough, skinny dirt road separates the two wilderness areas, Forest Service spokeswoman Maribeth Pecotte said outside a tent the agency set up at the festival.
It’s important that these beautiful wilderness areas are fully protected because of the nearby Mogollon mining district, Pecotte said. A major mining company wants to expand operations in the adjacent national forest, a reminder of what could happen to wilderness areas if they are not protected, she said.
“Wilderness is at the core of the identity of… the communities surrounding the Gila National Forest,” Pecotte said. “It’s a precious resource, and we all recognize how valuable it is, and how rare it is.”
Cassi Delatorre, 30, who attended the festival with her five children, said there was a lot she didn’t know about the Gila — including that it was the country’s first official wilderness area — even though she grew up with it virtually in her backyard.
She suspects that many people like her who live in Silver City learned a lot about the nearby wilderness during the centennial events.
Delatorre said she has taken her children to the wilderness and national forest.
“My kids love the woods,” she said. “They go fishing, they go tubing on the river. They go hiking in the mountains.’
“I like to just do things outside,” says her daughter Aliyana (11).
Delatorre said her husband, who is a firefighter for the Forest Service, has taught the children never to litter, and they have taken those lessons to heart and become enraged when they encounter trash someone has left behind.
“They learned quite a bit, like how to take care of the forest,” she said. “That makes me happy as a mother.”
Being stewards of the land is a principle that indigenous people have practiced for centuries and has only been adopted by white society in recent decades, with actions such as protecting natural areas, some Fort Sill Apache members noted.
“These mountains, this land – it’s all sacred,” said Emery Emiliana, 49, a native of San Diego. “That’s what appeals to me, coming back to these lands and enjoying my people. And so important is how important the indigenous people see the land.”
Tevelee Gudino, 55, of Chicago, who is also part of the tribe, said the pristine wilderness resonates so deeply with them because the animals and plants are protected, unlike so many places in the country.
She said that when her son was three years old and was walking outside with her, he picked a medicinal plant to rub on his scraped arm.
He first asked permission to pick it, took only what he needed and thanked it, she said, showing that he already understood the reciprocal relationship with the earth. It is the opposite of those who destroy or exploit trees and vegetation for commercial purposes, she added.
“We have a responsibility to maintain the land,” she said.
Leopold has been criticized for failing to take into account indigenous people’s knowledge of caring for the land, insights that may have contributed to his quest to cultivate the conservation ethic he lacked in America.
Some even say he had a cold contempt for indigenous people, adding an awkward layer to his legacy, Meine said.
Yet the irony is that some of his reflections in A Sand County Almanac sound indigenous—as when he complains about the way people wipe out plants and trees that have no use for them, or slaughter wolves, bears, and other predators that occasionally cow killing, without thinking about how they all have their place in nature.
He speaks of an eternal, all-seeing mountain that could convey great wisdom, especially about the wolf, a creature his contemporaries could not understand. This revelation comes after he shoots and kills a female wolf, leaving her cubs orphaned.
Leopold deeply regretted the act as he watched “a bright green fire go out in her eyes.”
“There was something new to me in those eyes, something only she and the mountain knew,” he wrote.
Whatever his shortcomings, Leopold was driven to create a place where nature could function undisturbed, a wilderness that would bring whites, indigenous peoples and other ethnicities together behind a common goal of preserving something good, Meine said.
“Leopold didn’t give us all the answers or even the right directions to move forward, but he and his generation have at least given us a landscape of possibilities to talk about this,” Meine said.
