Echoes of the Wild: Recreation, Fire, and the Future of Wilderness

Editor’s Note: This blog was authored by Lilia Page. Lilia joins ICL for the summer of 2025 to help with the administration of the ICL Wilderness Stewards Program and will be contributing a series of blogs reflecting on the program, on Wilderness, and central Idaho’s amazing public lands.

As summer draws to a close, I’ve been reflecting on my trail adventures and those of fellow wilderness stewards. We covered a lot of ground and encountered many people. My hikes involved varied interactions with wild places; there was something distinct about venturing into the Frank Church Wilderness and not seeing a soul for miles, compared to passing upwards of 65 people on the trail at Alice Lake. Both experiences count as valid wilderness experiences. Some stewards set out specifically seeking solitude while others focused on counting trail users or collecting trash. Late in the summer, I had a chance to reflect on some of these issues during a conversation with Craig Gehrke, former Regional Director of the Wilderness Society. He began with his personal connection to the wilderness, “I had always, even as a young person growing up in rural Idaho, been quite enamored with the idea of a wilderness area and a place where you learn from nature; you don't go in and try to modify it to fit a certain commodity use.” Every time we venture into the wilderness, we learn something. Whether we realize it or not, every conversation, every note about a downed tree, reveals the larger challenges in managing and shaping policy for these areas. Two issues stood out most clearly to me: recreation pressure, and the effects of wildfire driven by a changing climate.Every hike I undertook this summer reflected both the aspirations and the challenges embodied in the Wilderness Act. For example, on my hike to Herd Peak in the Jerry Peak Jim McClure Wilderness, I saw horseshoe tracks climbing most of the trail. Then I looked up and was startled by a moose about 20 yards from me and my dad. After safely avoiding the moose, we came across remnants of trash from hunting season. This made me think about the many different types of recreation within wilderness, such as bikers, hikers, backpackers, and horseback riders; recreation comes in different fashions.During our conversation, Gehrke recounted many of the challenges he faced during his tenure — from negotiating compromises over private inholdings, mining, grazing, and airstrips — so that all of us can enjoy trails without being constantly aware of these conflicts. Gehrke warns of the gray areas surrounding recreation: the Wilderness Act’s ambiguities give land managers flexibility, but also present challenges, because it offers little guidance for dealing with modern issues. Gehrke commented, “The thing about wilderness, in my experience, is that you're left on your own. And, there's good points and bad points about that. The good points are enough, you accumulate wisdom through trial and error, which is a good thing. The bad thing is people go in not realizing that they don’t properly dispose of their waste. This creates a problem.” Especially with the amount of people that are drawn to wilderness areas, this waste and other problems can accumulate quickly. Aside from the prohibition on mechanized vehicles, many things we confront today — mountain biking, heavily trafficked fire rings, or the extreme impacts of dry seasons — were not envisioned back in 1964, and weren’t anticipated in the original Wilderness Act. Gehrke shed light on the massive influx of tourists to wilderness areas in the recent decades,“I think [wilderness areas] get too much recreation. People just look at it as a recreation resource and less as a place to learn from. Certainly recreation is important, but often the opponents of wilderness dismiss it as just a playground for rich people.”It was nearly impossible this summer to hike in a wilderness area without encountering downed trees from wildfires or visible fire scars. Other wilderness stewards reported the same. Many Forest Service plans are outdated and do not address how to respond proactively to extreme dry seasons, though recent efforts have begun to announce fire restrictions. An added complication is that once issues, like degraded forest health or fire risk, are identified, there often isn’t adequate funding to address them. This is another gray area: many government services lack policies that account for the intensified wildfire risk driven by climate change.My question is how can we manage wilderness in the future when the Wilderness Act was written in the 1960s, and many Forest Service (and other agency) management plans are similarly outdated? Many guiding documents struggle to keep pace with fast-moving changes over the past fifteen years due to climate change, extreme weather, shifting recreation patterns. Policy compromises around passage or implementation are further complicated by things many people still underestimate: climate change, recreation use, invasive species, fire regimes, and more. Gehrke summarized our conversation and said, “I've always thought that the wilderness designation as one of the most far-sighted and one of the most solid land management classifications that Americans have ever come up with. It’s a decision that there are some places that we need to leave alone, learn from, and enjoy just as they are. There is this hubris that we can somehow improve them, and that doesn't apply to wilderness areas. But that doesn't mean we shouldn’t manage them in a certain way.”Wilderness brings people together, affects wildlife and the land—it carries its own challenges, and much of the discussion ends up being about recreation, but the stakes are broader than that alone, it is complex and needs protection from multiple angles.