Wilderness Expectation WLC-04

Is it fair to exclude motorized vehicles from remote areas because you can hear them over a broad area?

If a family on ATV’s pass you on the trail, is that much different from walking around a group of thirty hikers camped near a foot path a day’s hike in from the trailhead?  

 Aren’t both a violation of your wilderness expectation?

 If you are free climbing a rock face and a hang glider soars overhead, which of you violated the others wilderness expectation?

 Recent studies on the “Measuring Quality of Wilderness Experience” by Borrie and Birzell (USFS 2001) found that “a linear and direct relationship between use density conditions and experiential quality should not be assumed.” 

So more people do not necessarily degrade the wilderness experience, but managers of wilderness are faced with two choices: to either emphasize wildness of conditions or to emphasize naturalness, and the choice between mass experience and solitude.

 Land managers are debating restricting the number of visitors to the wilderness, to provide fewer visitors with more solitude.