“Even when I can't get to the backcountry, the thought of the colored deserts of southern Utah…where the little but intensely important human being is exposed to the five directions of the thirty-six winds, is a positive consolation.”
Wallace Stegner wrote those words in his Wilderness Letter to the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission in 1960. The ORRRC, established by Congress in 1958, was tasked with reviewing outdoor recreation opportunities available to the American people, determining what support was needed to improve these recreation areas, and to provide policy recommendations to implement this support. Stegner, who understood the unique qualities of the American west and its red rock wilderness better than most, wrote his letter in support of the then current needs of federal wild places, but it has since become a standard bearing document supporting continued protection of the wild that remains.
Below is a portion of Stegner’s Wilderness Letter…
“It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs. Save a piece of country like that intact, and it does not matter in the slightest that only a few people every year will go into it. That is precisely its value. Roads would be a desecration, crowds would ruin it. But those who haven't the strength or youth to go into it and live can simply sit and look. They can look two hundred miles, clear into Colorado: and looking down over the cliffs and canyons of the San Rafael Swell and the Robbers' Roost they can also look as deeply into themselves as anywhere I know. And if they can't even get to the places on the Aquarius Plateau where the present roads will carry them, they can simply contemplate the idea, take pleasure in the fact that such a timeless and uncontrolled part of earth is still there.
These are some of the things wilderness can do for us. That is the reason we need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles of exploitation or "usefulness" or even recreation. We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”
