For 20 years The Wilderness Land Trust has been working throughout the West to fulfill the promise to future generations that America’s wilderness areas will remain forever wild.
Designating a wilderness area does not necessarily make it a whole wilderness. More than 400,000 acres of privately owned properties remain within federal wilderness boundaries. Were these inholdings to be developed, it would essentially tear a hole in the fabric of the surrounding wilderness. The Wilderness Land Trust is the only national organization dedicated solely to buying these lands and adding them to the National Wilderness Preservation System.
.jpg)
Paul F Torrence, Board member of The Wilderness Land Trust, describes the history and work of The Trust and their fight against the menace that can almost instantly undermine the ecological fabric of a wilderness - inholdings.
Sentinel Peak at the head of North Fork Imnaha River, Wallowa National Forest - 1915.
(National Archives)
Now within the Eagle Cap Wilderness, Oregon
The Sentinel Fund
Sentinel Peak is in Arizona, and
…California
…Colorado
…Idaho
…New Mexico
…Nevada
…Oregon
…Washington
Sentinel Mountain is on station in Maine,
…and New Hampshire
“The Wilderness Land Trust is on station, every day, to protect our National Wilderness Preservation System. We don’t need to be big to do this. We do not want to be grand. But we have to be there. Available - when private property, owned within lands where “man is just a visitor and shall not remain” go up for sale so that these holes in the fabric of our wilderness can be acquired and woven into it, not sold to yet another private landowner who will spend another generation developing private dreams within what we’ve spent more than two generations weaving into a public vision of wilderness. “
– Reid Haughey, President
These peaks keep watch over our wilderness. So do we. Help us continue to be the sentinel of our wilderness, Keeping Wilderness Wild - $200,000 a year, for two years. That’s our goal. A generous supporter has already gotten us half way to our goal. Every dollar you give will be matched, dollar for dollar, up to a total of $200,000! Over our twenty years, for every dollar of support we receive, we estimate we’ve have acquired $4 dollars of land. Every acre we acquire, when woven into the fabric of the wilderness, has preserved 12 million acres of irreplaceable wilderness that surrounds it.
Please Invest in Keeping Wilderness Wild. Keep us on station, protecting the fabric of wilderness we have all worked so hard to create. Become a member today.
“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.” ― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water
