This was the precursor: Forty years before the Wilderness Act, 755,000 acres in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, including the Middle Fork of the Gila River, became the world’s first designated wilderness.
Gila Wilderness
This was the precursor: Forty years before the Wilderness Act, 755,000 acres in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, including the Middle Fork of the Gila River, became the world’s first designated wilderness.
50 Years of Wilderness
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act in 1964 to give future generations a “glimpse of the world as it was in the beginning.” Did it work?
This story appears in the September 2014 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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