Breathe, walk, chat, snack, and look. This recipe led us down 15 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail into Desolation Wilderness, the 96-square-mile swath of alpine beauty located near Tahoe’s South Shore. Our packs were light and the weather cool on a late August afternoon as we trudged through forests of lodgepole pine and red fir. As the sun retreated, we decided to make camp at Middle Velma Lake. Dozens of rock and pine-strewn islands radiated a soft red glow, as did the shallow lake that stretched a few hundred yards across. Even with a group of campers on the distant edge of the lake, and another duo eating dinner nearby, pristine defined the moment and it felt as if we were hundreds of miles away from any city or town.
Desolation, along with Mount Rose and Granite Chief, make up Tahoe Basin’s three wilderness areas. Hikers, backpackers, hunters, and skiers are able to enjoy these breathtaking backcountry zones thanks to Congress, which in 1964 passed the Wildnerness Act, now celebrating its 50th anniversary. The key to the wilderness experience, according to lawmakers, is that after we enjoy these natural areas responsibly, we leave them completely untouched, the original leave no trace philosophy. As defined in the language of the original Wilderness Act, “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.”
Environmental activist Howard Zahniser wrote the first draft of the Wilderness Act in 1956, and after eight years, 65 revisions, and 18 public hearings, it was passed by Congress with only one opposing vote. After the law was signed by President Lyndon Johnson, 9 million acres of land throughout the country were protected. In the last 50 years those designations have ballooned to 110 million acres, 5 percent of all the land in the country. The Basin itself contains 125,000 acres of wilderness areas, just over 1 percent of the nation’s total.
The U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Bureau of Land Management, U.S. National Park Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service manage the wilderness areas. Technicalities of the law are extensive and exceptions to the rules do exist, but the principles of the law are simple: Wilderness areas are to remain without roads, timber harvesting, cattle grazing, or motorized or mechanized vehicle use, and are intended to encourage primitive human recreation. In essence, the lands are meant to stay wild.
A Changing Mentality
Designated wilderness areas in Tahoe came during an era when “the political climate was just right for preservation,” said Don Lane, a Forest Service ranger in Tahoe for more than 40 years. He points to the changing mindset that surrounded the Basin in the roughly 100 years between the first wave of Europeans in the late 1800s and the late 1980s, when Mount Rose, the most recent Tahoe Wilderness Area, was designated.
“People didn’t have the vision to preserve wilderness in the late 1800s and the land was seen as a resource, a way to spur mankind’s progress, with manifest destiny being the main driver,” said Lane.
This era brought us the Comstock boom, when the majority of the Basin’s forests were logged for Nevada’s mining industry and the landscape was drastically altered.
Fast-forward to the 1960s when the Wilderness Act passed and Tahoe had to learn how to manage a fast-growing population with increasing interest in outdoor recreation. “It was the scarcity of land that we began to see during this time that was the trigger to preservation,” Lane said. “The land has a value all of its own, and this wasn’t seen in the days of the Comstock Lode. But this new way of thinking was the mindset behind wilderness.”
Desolation Wilderness
Desolation Wilderness, designated in 1969, was the first official wilderness area in the Basin. Encompassing more than 63,000 acres and with an average of 120,000 visitors per year, it is by far the most popular in the Basin; some even consider it per acre the most used in the entire country. Due to this high interest, all users — whether on day hikes or overnight trips — are required to carry a permit. A varying amount of permits for overnight trips are given out for the area’s 45 designated zones, with a maximum group size of 12 people.
Desolation’s massive swaths of granite, high peaks, and rugged terrain spared it from logging in the 1800s, and thus much of its original beauty was preserved, which helped prove its importance as a conservation area. The dams constructed at the turn of the century on some of the estimated 130 lakes in the area, however, could have been a deal breaker for wilderness consideration, as they go against one of the wilderness requirements. But through political maneuvering and the high value given to that area, Desolation received wilderness approval.
“One of the values of Desolation is that people in casinos in South Lake, with the cars and buildings and heavy development all around them, can gaze upon Tallac and Desolation as a contrasting bastion of the wild,” Lane said.
Granite Chief
Granite Chief, at 25,680 acres Tahoe’s smallest wilderness area, is located just east of Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows ski resorts and north of Desolation. To make the land a candidate for wilderness, parcels of land had to be purchased by the Forest Service from the Santa Fe Pacific Land Company. Designated in 1984, Granite Chief is known for its glacially carved valleys, open meadows, and lack of people.
“There is still a great opportunity for solitude in Granite Chief,” said Joe Flannery, a Tahoe National Forest lands, trails, and wilderness specialist.
Exemplifying the aggressive management that is commonplace in nationwide wilderness areas, the Bradley Hut — a backcountry ski hut built in 1957 in the Five Lakes Basin — had to be deconstructed and moved to a new area when Granite Chief was designated as wilderness to comply with the law’s ban against buildings. However, demonstrating the act’s sometimes-flexible nature, the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Race, which began in 1977 and passes through Granite Chief for about 4 miles, was grandfathered in despite the fact that competitions are outlawed in wilderness areas. To keep the race permit, organizers limit the number of entries to 369 per year, the highest number of competitors the race saw before the area was designated as wilderness in 1984.
Mount Rose Wilderness
Mount Rose Wilderness contains 31,000 acres and is “by far the most used wilderness area in Nevada due to its close proximity to Reno and Carson City,” according to wilderness.net. This area holds the 10,776-foot Mount Rose and a popular trailhead right off of Highway 431 where trekkers can begin hiking at 8,911 feet. In an example of the Wilderness Act’s complexities, a Jeep road, something usually prohibited in wilderness, splits the north and south sections of Mount Rose Wildness. Organizers and the Forest Service decided the road, which existed before the area received wilderness designation, would have to be a rare exception as the area was otherwise a great wilderness candidate.
Future Worries, Future Hope
While wilderness areas are protected, they are far from assured of remaining untrammeled forever. Human impacts from illegal campfires, human waste, trash, and a litany of other issues such as the recent arson-fueled King Fire that came close to spreading into Granite Chief, constantly threaten the areas from remaining in accordance with the1964 legislation.
Lane and Flannery point out that the wilderness label is really just the first step toward preservation.
“Just because the area is designated, you can’t stop there,” Lane said. “Then becomes the huge burden to preserve it and protect it from ourselves.”
Flannery identifies fire, invasive plants, and illegal camping as some of Granite Chief’s biggest threats.
The two also point out that the greatest of all the challenges is to educate visitors on how sensitive nature is to human impacts. The amount of ground-level regulation available to the different agencies for such huge areas is inadequate if people disregard the rules, leave trash, or carve names into trees.
But Lane believes the wilderness areas and their beauty have the power to teach responsible stewardship.
“As urbanization happens around the areas, they become islands of naturalness, and they will become a gift to future generations,” he said. “Wilderness has a tough heart of granite, but it is a world of beauty that we cannot take for granted.”
~ Have you spent time in Tahoe’s wilderness? Let us know below.
