Is your dream a second home in the wilderness? Is there such a thing in the USA? Untouched? Untrammeled by man? Indeed, not only does wilderness exist, but since the Wilderness Act of 1964, it has been protected by the US Federal Government.
The first sentence of Section 2(c) of the Wilderness Act defines wilderness as follows:
"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 community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."
Certainly hiking in would make you a visitor, but what about building your second home there? That indeed is the heart of a conflict of values today between the love of wilderness and private land owners who happen to have land right in the middle of national forests.
Federal wilderness lands often surround parcels of state or privately-owned land, called inholdings. The National Wilderness Protection Service contains more than a million acres of inholdings. The presence of inholdings within wilderness in the Western US are largely a result of five legislative acts designed to encourage settling the West, including the 1872 Mining Law, the 1862 Homestead Act, the 1864 and 1870 Land Grant Acts, and the Alaska Native Claims and Settlement Act (ANCSA). Many inholdings in wilderness are quite large, from 20 acres to 640-acre parcels.
Balancing the rights of landowners with the obligation to preserve the overall wilderness character of the area is a major challenge today. As people dream of a vacation retreat in the wilderness, or have had the land in their family for years, the desire to improve the property, create roads and basically inhabit the area is strong. At the same time, inholdings present a variety of serious stewardship challenges: requests for motorized access; land speculation and threatened development of inholdings; incompatible property uses; legal ambiguities related to the extent of property rights of inholders; and multiple legal guidelines governing access through wilderness. Finally, towns that are near wilderness, such as Crested Butte, Colorado, realize that the prime resource of their area, and the one attracting the vacation home owners, might disappear if unlimited development was allowed.
Recognizing the need to create consistent protection, the US Code on Public Lands, Title 43 Section 2303 directs the Secretary of Agriculture to establish a procedure to locate inholdings where the landowner has indicated a desire to sell the land or interest to the United States; and prioritize their acquisition. However, it hasn’t always been feasible for the US Forest Service and other agencies to coordinate the efforts to acquire so many different parcels of land. For example, in 1999, the National Park Trust listed 20 "high priority" sites covering 110,000 acres and urged Congress to come up with the estimated $70 million it would take to buy them for the public good. That’s a big chunk of money.
In recent years, help has come from private citizens and non government organizations such as the Trust for Public Land, which uses fundraising and donations to procure land and keep it protected in perpetuity. An example of their efforts has been their work in Colorado. The High Elk Corridor lies in the heart of the Elk Mountains in the Colorado Rockies, between Aspen and Crested Butte, and includes approximately 6,000 acres of privately owned patented mining claims, platted home sites, and other inholdings within the White River National Forest. This sub-alpine valley system provides unparalleled opportunities for long-term biological research, recreational activities, and historic landscape preservation. The project area also includes the historic Crystal Mill, arguably one of the most photographed landmarks in the state, as well as potential habitat for the Canadian Lynx.
The Trust for Public Land was instrumental in releasing Federal funds to help with the protection of the land, and is working hard in creating a public/private partnership for land protection.
So we return to the question: What should you do if your dream is a second home in the midst of the wilderness? Perhaps the best solution is to find a home in communities such as Crested Butte and others where the commitment is to provide both exceptional places for second homes and access to wilderness that will remain wild as long as possible.
For an interesting article about the legal precedents and solutions, see the library at Wilderness Watch.
Grateful acknowledgment to the following sources for information for this article:
Wilderness Watch,
Trust for Public Land