Solitude and Stewardship

Recently I had the pleasure to help the WWA team wrap up some solitude monitoring sites in the Gros Ventre Wilderness on the Bridger-Teton National Forest. It was an absolute joy of an excuse to step away from the computer and into the wilderness for work. Thanks to the low snowpack, I was able to make it into both of the BT’s monitoring sites for Turquoise Lake and Blue Miner Lake. Spoiler alert: I encountered zero parties in either monitoring area. 

Every time I enter a wilderness area in Wyoming I think of the people before me that kept this place wild.  Occasionally I catch myself thinking how lucky I am, and then I remember it wasn’t really luck. It was people that had foresight and fortitude that fought for me to enjoy the same opportunities that they did. This is especially true on the 60th anniversary of the Wilderness Act and the 40th anniversary of the Wyoming Wilderness Act.

And, it’s especially true for a place like the Gros Ventre wilderness! The Gros Ventres are notably a lower elevation, wildlife-rich landscape that’s unique to our mostly rock-and-ice Wilderness system. The wilderness boundary abuts the town of Jackson, a fun-loving and conservation-minded community that is grappling with how increasing and diversifying recreation is impacting the wildlife and public lands surrounding it. Forty years later, it’s miraculous to me that this landscape made it into the Wyoming Wilderness Act. And it’s all too easy for me to imagine what the area would look like if it hadn’t. 

To be fair - I very much wished I had a bicycle on some of the single track gradually ascending to one of my destination lakes. I could get in and out in a day! But alas, I was forced to plod along with all my things, at three miles an hour; tracking moose, spotting cutthroat, IDing new plants, and welcoming back our tiniest songbirds. And in the end, I was rewarded with solitude, a camp to myself. I couldn’t help but wonder how many more people I would encounter if we had the mechanical advantage to go faster and further through this wild place. 

And just as I’m grateful for those who fought to protect these places as Wilderness, I’m grateful for the agencies that manage these Wilderness areas today. One of the neat things about our solitude monitoring program is the opportunity to give back and support our land managers. Volunteers for the solitude monitoring program greatly reduce the FS staff required to meet their own Wilderness Stewardship Performance requirements, a practical necessity with the ongoing budget cuts. And it’s a pretty easy way to give back to the wild places we value, which kind of feels like the least I can do. 

Volunteers for the solitude monitoring program greatly reduce the FS staff required to meet their own Wilderness Stewardship Performance requirements.

To learn more about becoming a solitude monitor, check out our solitude monitoring page here. There are 33 more sites that need to be monitored this year, and you might already be traveling to one!

To support our work to keep Wyoming wild for the next generation, become a member here.