Jun. 2—SILVER CITY — While hiking a ridgeline trail, one’s vision of the Gila Wilderness can be funneled like the wind between towering green hills and craggy mesas.
It’s a phenomenon that offers a telescopic glimpse of the grandeur ahead.
Then you round a bend and suddenly encounter a sweeping view of peaks, forested hills, canyons and hump-backed ridges melding into a mosaic in vivid relief across the horizon.
You can understand why Aldo Leopold described feeling like a speck in an immensity.
And while he wasn’t specifically referring to the Gila, Leopold no doubt felt a similar sense of wonder about the pristine Southern New Mexico wilderness he wanted to remain unspoiled — in an era when the predominant ethos was to tame every mile of land.
Leopold was an author and an early conservationist who also worked as a U.S. Forest Service operations manager, putting him in a position to lobby the agency to keep this vast, multi-faceted expanse wild, arguing the “highest use” for the Gila was to leave it be.
He succeeded.
In 1924, the agency’s Southwest regional director in Albuquerque agreed to set aside and protect 755,000 acres, creating the nation’s first designated wilderness area. Monday marks the centennial of this landmark policy action, which predated the Wilderness Act by 40 years.
“This was a different way of thinking of an alternative to intensive development,” said Curt Meine, senior fellow at the Aldo Leopold Foundation and author of what many consider the premiere Leopold biography.
A centennial celebration was held Saturday at Silver City’s Gough Park. U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, Rep. Gabe Vasquez and tribal leaders spoke at the event, paying tribute to New Mexico having the country’s first designated wilderness, which laid the groundwork for future ones.
Last week, a local speaker series was held in the run-up to the festival. Conservationists, historians, public land experts and Indigenous advocates discussed why wilderness areas are so vital for a society increasingly divorced from the natural world, how it works as an ecological tool, and the inequities of who benefits and who’s left out.
The centennial fest drew a mix of local residents, people from around New Mexico and out-of-state visitors. Among them were Fort Sill Apache Tribe members, who came from around the country to honor the Gila Wilderness enduring for a century.
John Treat, 26, who hails from San Antonio, Texas, said while hiking a section of the wilderness, he felt deep emotions knowing he was on land that is unchanged since his Native ancestors traversed it.
“When I looked out 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 effort to preserve the Gila. Federal leaders had formed national parks and monuments, dating to the founding of Yellowstone in 1872.
But creating a roadless wilderness that was off-limits to motorized intrusion took protections much further. Parks were intended to accommodate tourists, so they required roads, lookouts, campsites and other amenities for recreationists, nature lovers and, in the early decades, curiosity seekers.
National forests were even more open to being degraded, with the federal government establishing them partly as natural resource hubs to serve commercial interests, whether it was logging, mining, livestock grazing or oil drilling.
Such activities demanded a network of roads slice through the forests.
Leopold was painfully aware the Gila, which had been a national forest since 1905, was vulnerable, especially as automobile became household items, stoking the “good roads movement.”
The movement had pushed for byways that could connect urban and rural areas so cars could travel the countryside more easily. By World War I, advocates sought to pave anywhere motorists might possibly want to drive, including through the wilderness, Meine said.
A proposal to build a ranching road in the Gila forest became the catalyst for Leopold, who feared it was the first tendril that could burgeon into a full-blown network in the name of progress.
“He said, ‘I’m not anti-road. I’m just saying we don’t need roads everywhere,’ ” Meine said.
Leopold wasn’t the first to think of setting aside a wilderness area, but he was the first to effectively press the government to actually do it, 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 Gifford Pinchot, the famed American forester and politician and former head of the U.S. Forest Service, opposed “bottling up” huge wilderness tracts but believed the forests could be managed so they are productive without being devastated. Pinchot suggested some extraction was necessary for the forests to have their highest use.
Leopold argued development in the forests was going too far, and that some wilderness should be left intact to be enjoyed as a recreational area by those entering on foot or horseback. In these instances, recreation is the highest use, he said.
“By ‘wilderness’ I mean a continuous stretch of country preserved in its natural state, open to lawful hunting and fishing, big enough to absorb a two weeks’ pack trip, and kept devoid of roads, artificial trails, cottages, or other works of man,” he wrote.
As a regional manager, Leopold carried a lot of weight. He 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 entreaties, Meine said.
“He ginned up the conversation,” Meine said.
Creating the protected wilderness was a regional decision that did not require the approval of agency chief William Greeley, a staunch proponent of the Pinchot doctrine that called for sustainable production rather than locking up large forests. Greeley would later become head of a national timber industry group.
Leopold at first sought the Gila Wilderness for recreation to ensure there would be someplace left of the backcountry he’d ridden on horseback and hunted.
His vision would evolve, and he would later extoll the value of wilderness for wildlife, cultural connections, spirituality and scientific research, Meine said.
Wilderness brings together people
In 1980, Congress split off 202,000 acres from the original expanse and created the Aldo Leopold Wilderness.
A rough, skinny dirt road bifurcates the two wilderness areas, Forest Service spokeswoman Maribeth Pecotte said at a tent the agency had set up at the festival.
Having these beautiful wilderness areas wholly protected is important because of the nearby mining district of Mogollon, Pecotte said. A large mining company is looking to expand its operations in the neighboring national forest, a reminder of what could happen to wilderness lands if they weren’t safeguarded, she said.
“Wilderness is at the core of the identity of … the communities that surround 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 much she didn’t know about the Gila — including that it was the country’s first official wilderness area — though she grew up with it virtually in her backyard.
She suspects many people who live in Silver City, like her, learned much about the nearby wilderness during the centennial events.
Delatorre said she has taken her children to the wilderness and national forest.
“My kids, they love the forest,” she said. “They go fishing; they go tubing on the river. They go hiking up the mountains.”
“I like just doing things out there,” her daughter Aliyana, 11, said.
Delatorre said her husband, who’s a Forest Service firefighter, has taught the kids to never litter, and they have taken those lessons to heart, getting irate if they encounter trash someone has left behind.
“They’ve learned quite a bit, like how to take care of the forest,” she said. “That makes me happy as a mom.”
Being stewards of the land is a principle Indigenous people have carried out for centuries and has only been adopted in recent decades by white society, with such actions as protecting wilderness areas, a couple Fort Sill Apache members noted.
“These mountains, this land — all of it is sacred,” said Emery Emiliana, 49, who came from San Diego. “That’s what speaks to me, coming back to these lands and enjoying my people. And that’s how important Native people see the land.”
Tevelee Gudino, 55, of Chicago, who’s also with the tribe, said the unspoiled wilderness resonates so deeply with them because the animals and plants have been protected, unlike so many places the country.
She told of when her son was 3 years old and walking with her outdoors, he plucked 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 he already understood the reciprocal relationship with the Earth. It’s the reverse of those who destroy trees and vegetation or exploit them for commercial purposes, she added.
“We have a responsibility to tend the land,” she said.
Leopold has been criticized for not considering Indigenous people’s generational knowledge of caring for the land, insights that might have aided his quest to cultivate the conservation ethic he saw lacking in America.
Some even say he had a cold disregard for Indigenous people, adding a troublesome 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 bemoans how men exterminate plants and trees they have no use for, or slaughter wolves, bears and other predators that kill the occasional cow without considering how they all have their place in nature.
He talks of an eternal, all-seeing mountain that could impart great wisdom, particularly about the wolf, a creature his contemporaries failed to comprehend. This revelation comes after he shot and killed a female wolf, orphaning her cubs.
Leopold deeply regretted the act as he watched “a fierce, green fire dying in her eyes.”
“There was something new to me in those eyes, something known only to her and to the mountain,” he wrote.
Whatever his flaws, Leopold became driven to create a place where nature could operate undisturbed, a wilderness that would bring together whites, Indigenous people and other ethnicities behind a common goal of preserving something good, Meine said.
“Leopold didn’t provide us all the answers or even all the right directions to go forward, but he and his generation at least … provided a landscape of opportunity for conversation about this,” Meine said.
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