Denali National Park, 6/7/17
We procured a backcountry permit at the park office, took a shuttle bus a ways into the park, debarked and backpacked into the landscape in this photo to spend a couple of nights. The only sign of people we came across was a plastic lens cap from a camera – something accidentally lost, not littered. Caribou and Dall Sheep, Wolf prints and Wolverine tracks… A Grizzly Bear caused us to change our course… Short-eared Owls cruising low, nesting Willow Ptarmigan hens – the males waking us at first light with their call of Potato! Potato! Potato. Tree Sparrows flushing from tiny ground nests where clutches of blue-green & brown eggs were crowded together. We came across Caribou antler sheds; a moose rack attached to a skull suggested a successful hunt by wolves. In 1846, Thoreau needed only to travel from Concord, Massachusetts to Maine’s Mt. Katahdin* to immerse in the vital contact with wilderness he sought. During the 2022-2023 season, 105,000 tourists traveled to Antarctica – up from just 5,000 only a few years prior… which was up from somewhere near zero not so long before that. Even Alaska’s remote, far-north rivers are typically floated by multiple parties each year. Not long ago I came across a recent piece of video depicting an unimproved campsite I overnighted at on youthful floats down my native Clarion River. The site was seldom used in those days, nearly pristine, and you could nice-sized large trout in the pool and the riffle water that flowed by. The contemporary video showed trampled vegetation, fire pit scars, bags of trash…
There are no doubt as many definitions of wilderness as there are human expectations of what might be present or absent in such a place. The one certainty is that wilderness is becoming more difficult to find, to immerse in, to discover and explore. My recollection of reading Thoreau’s account of his attempt to ascend Katahdin is that at some point the climb (or was it the descent?) was terrifying. Perhaps therein lies a piece of what wilderness means… a place cut off from civilization, where things could go wrong, and if they do, you’re on your own. There’s something liberating in it.
CutterLight 
Yes…The essential part of wilderness is its wildness.My beloved Glacier National Park is what can only be described now as a gorgeous theme park with descending hoards of over a million visitors per year.I snuck into the park alone 30 some years ago and bypassed the Polebridge Ranger station on the far west entrance and hiked for 7 glorious days never seeing a soul but encountering moose, mountain goats and two grizzly bears, one of which was in hot pursuit of a goat no more than 50 feet from my cliff side campsight.To say I was shook would not do justice to the full body tingleing of sheer adrenaline.It is my most cherished memory.
You and I are fortunate to have gotten into some of these places prior to them becoming overrun… or in circumstances that allowed us to avoid crowds. One morning decades ago, I had a long stretch of a well known river in Yellowstone to myself. I caught quite a few trout, and two relatively large grayling – almost unheard of at the time. Similar experiences on The Outer Banks, Yosemite, other places… but such solitude has become more difficult to find, and it makes me wonder: what will happen to our remaining Wilderness when few remember what wilderness is.
I’m not being glib and I deeply mean it when I say that time erases all memory,and time even erases itself eventually into the great void.
I suspect that the saying “we are loving them to death” that has been applied to National Parks will also become increasingly true about more remote places. It would be nice if we took only memories and left only footprints, but that ideal has rarely been put into practice.
Yes, thanks. We can’t seen even to convince people to take their own bags when they go shopping… Maybe if we hired people to follow other people around with brooms and dustpans like the do at Disneyland… (I write with a wry smile).
That’s a sad statement about the state of humanity. 😦