Fifty years ago on Sept. 3, Lyndon Johnson signed into a law a bill that encouraged getting lost in the wild. Not lost in the literal sense, of course, but of losing the trappings of civilization in forest and mountains where no buildings, or roads, or marks of permanent human habitation can be found. 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 its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain, reads the Wilderness Act of 1964. Oregon and its citizens have taken that idea of wilderness seriously. Only one national park, Crater Lake, can be found in the Beaver State while a whopping 47 wilderness areas populate every corner of its landscape. From the Oregon Islands on the coast, to the old-growth forests of Drift Creek in the Coast Range, to the snow-capped volcanoes of Hood, Jefferson and the Three Sisters across the Cascades, to the serpentine desert of the Kalmiopsis of the southwest to Eastern Oregons Strawberry and Wallowa mountains, the Wilderness Act has left its mark on every corner of the state.
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 07:17:07 +0000
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