When it comes to national parks, in many ways the U.S. government has failed its citizens.  Except in Alaska, few national park backcountry areas have been designated wilderness. In my bioregion, our three great parks are Glacier, Yellowstone and Grand Teton – and there is not a single acre of designated wilderness in any of these gems. In my opinion, that’s shameful.

One reason for this is that traditionally, conservation groups have viewed the national forests and the BLM domain as more threatened than the parks, thus we see them focus only upon these areas for their wilderness designation work. They reason that unlike the forests and BLM lands, the parks are already protected from industrial extraction, so wilderness designations are less necessary. I believe that this is faulty logic, now more than ever.

Certainly, logging and mining are excluded from most units of the park system. Nonetheless, roads, parking lots, stores, power lines and gigantic gas-guzzling motor homes and their services are the obvious tip of an industrial tourism iceberg that can and will expand into the backcountry in lieu of legal wilderness designation (and in lieu of a more general commitment to real conservation). Regardless of the level of threats, though, great wildlands should be wilderness areas just because they have intrinsic value as great wildlands.

Off road vehicles plague the Canyonlands National Park backcountry. In the West Unit of Great Smokey Mountains National Park, a large area that should be forested backcountry, Cades Cove, is managed and mowed as pasture land, ostensibly to preserve a historic pioneering heritage. In Grand Teton National Park, local conservationists fight a plan for paved bicycle paths that would fragment parts of the backcountry. These are just a few examples of many threats to national park wilds. And recall that just recently, the Bush Administration proposed a system wide policy that would have de-emphasized conservation in favor of more motor-centered recreation. That would have resulted in more roads, more parking lots, more off road vehicles, more air and water pollution, less wildness.

Fortunately, public outcry squelched this cynical attempt to further industrialize/motorize our national parks. But had this policy been enacted, the horrifying scenario of new roads and all terrain vehicles slicing through your favorite park’s backcountry might have become real. Imagine ATV’s along the Great Divide in Glacier, or a new highway into the upper Yellowstone River Valley. Nuts? Sure. But such travesties were a mere step from reality when the proposed Bush policy was on the table. If national park backcountry were to be designated Wilderness, most of this potential mischief would dissolve. These world-reknowned wilds cry our for real protection as designated wilderness.

Unfortunately, while many of its recommendations for wilderness designation are sound (see below), the National Park Service’s wilderness stewardship record is notoriously weak. For example, in Olympic National Park – which provides perhaps our most glaring example of bad stewardship – the Park Service proposes to carve a pasture out of wild rainforest in order to re-create a 19^th century settler’s cabin and environs. This is within designated wilderness! Also in Olympic, some wilderness trails are absurdly over-built monuments to human engineering, mocking the idea that in wilderness, “the imprint of man’s work [is] substantially unnoticeable” (Wilderness Act, section 2-c). That rainy park has also seen a Park Service attempt to construct and place new wood camping shelters in the wilderness, though a Wilderness Watch lawsuit recently repelled that shenanigan.

When the Wilderness Act was enacted in 1964, it ordered the Park Service to study and report within ten years on the wilderness suitability of its backcountry domain. As a result, many national park backcountry areas have been recommended for wilderness designation since the early 1970’s (just a few have been designated). To its credit, many Park Service wilderness recommendations were excellent, and they still officially stand. For example, nearly all of Yellowstone and Glacier’s expansive backcountry are recommended for wilderness designation. Moreover, it is official Park Service policy to manage such areas as though they were already legal wilderness. This means that wilderness character must be preserved and degradation averted.

But as we’ve seen in Olympic and elsewhere, many park managers just don’t get it. More examples: In Yellowstone, horse packers can sometimes take up to 24 (!!) head of livestock per pack string. That’s 96 heavy hooves in a single group digging into the earth and its vegetation. That’s way too many. For comparison, my backpacking company, Big Wild Adventures, voluntarily limits its groups to 10 hikers, including guides). Also, Yellowstone trail crews routinely clear trails with chainsaws, shattering the wild sounds of silence while creating bee-line type trails that ram-rod through the topography, often with ugly cuts and fills that fill with exotic weeds, rather than gently laying the trail upon the existing contours with as little disturbance as possible.

In fairness to park administrators, at a recent meeting with the Yellowstone Superintendent and Chief Ranger, I was assured that trail crews were now being trained to use non-motorized primitive tools in the backcountry, and that chainsaw use was on the wane. Time will tell if this is indeed the case.

Still, there are many other affronts to wilderness in Yellowstone and throughout the national park system. A power line slices through proposed wilderness in northwest Yellowstone’s Gallatin Range, fragmenting habitat and opening the door to motorized maintenance. There is no plan to recognize the area’s wilderness values by moving the power corridor to the front country. Motorboats, albeit with speed and power restrictions, are still allowed on portions of the remote and beautiful South and Southeast Arms of Yellowstone Lake. And re-construction of existing park roads is creating wider rights of way than before. So vehicles move faster, thus increasing both noise pollution and road-kill of precious park wildlife. This also de-wilds adjacent proposed wilderness.

The situation in Yellowstone is neither unique nor particularly egregious; it’s simply that I’m more familiar with Yellowstone than with other national parks because I live seven miles from its northwest boundary, and because I guide so many backcountry trips in this magical wildland.

In other words, there is a national park system-wide failure to understand both the spirit and the letter of our nation’s foremost conservation law, the Wilderness Act. Throughout our national parks, wilderness character has declined and degradation has increased. Though this failure is by no means unique to the National Park Service, this agency has enjoyed relative immunity from public scrutiny, at least compared with the Forest Service and the BLM. That’s partly the result of activist conservation groups that mistakenly believe the national parks to be adequately protected.

In summary, I see two glaring needs for our national park wildlands. First is the obvious necessity to designate all available wilds within the parks as legal wilderness under the Wilderness Act of 1964, with no weakening provisions. Second, National Park Service stewardship of its wilderness and proposed wilderness lands must improve dramatically. That will take time and determination, because agency cultures are notoriously resistant to change. The Park Service needs to develop a much better understanding of the Wilderness Act and its mandates, not to mention the wilderness idea. This change won’t happen spontaneously. It will occur only when citizen conservation groups stop pretending that intense oversight should be confined only to the Forest Service and the BLM.

Howie Wolke guides backpacking trips in Yellowstone’s wild backcountry, is Wilderness Watch’s president, and the author of Wilderness On The Rocks.