by Marcus Wohlsen

In the nature writing business, we throw around the term “wilderness” a lot. To describe a swath of forest, a high country meadow, or a remote river as a “pristine wilderness” is the oldest cliché there is-and the sign of a lazy writer. (It takes one to know one.)

Here’s the problem. “Pristine” doesn’t give a reader any real information about a place. What does “pristine” look like? What does it sound like?

Okay, maybe you’d expect a “pristine” place to have no trash on the ground and no highways running through it. And it’s probably quiet. But beyond that, “pristine” doesn’t have a color. It doesn’t have a shape. You can’t hear the searing cry of a peregrine falcon echoing off the granite crags of Devil’s Courthouse in a vague, bland adjective like “pristine.”

And what’s a “wilderness,” anyway? You might assume it has trees. Or mountains. But what if you’re talking about the desert? Or a coral reef?

Federal law defines a wilderness largely in terms of prohibitions. Federally designated wildernesses-places like Shining Rock or the Cohutta Wilderness in north Georgia-do not permit any form of mechanized travel. Blazed and signed trails are forbidden in these areas, and you can’t build permanent structures like trail shelters.

Though they can sometimes seem like a more elaborate version of “Keep off the grass,” we should be grateful for these rules. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, passed by Congress in 1964 and signed into law by LBJ, which established the principles that govern the management and use of federal wilderness areas.

According to the 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.”

With these words, America-the land of Manifefst Destiny-officially recognized for the first time the fundamental value of leaving some land alone.

Imagine if a politician tried to introduce a bill with that kind of language in it today. Under the Bush administration, national parks remain woefully underfunded. Timber industry lobbyists determine national forest policy. And backroom deals made by the Department of the Interior under Secretary Gale Norton have opened the door to drilling, mining, and road building on millions of acres formerly under consideration for official wilderness designation. Were it introduced today, administration officials would line up to denounce the Wilderness Act as the utopian pipe dream of a few eco-radicals out of touch with “mainstream America.”

Fortunately mainstream America doesn’t just vote at the ballot box. It votes with its feet. Wilderness areas like Linville Gorge and Shining Rock suffer from too many visitors, not too few. Clearly wilderness areas as the law defines them satisfy deep needs felt by many people-the need for beauty, for solitude, for a sense of place in nature’s grander scheme.

That still doesn’t answer the question of what a wilderness is. But with so many pristine wilderness areas across the Blue Ridge, you don’t need a lazy writer like me to tell you. You can go out there and find out for yourself.

Marcus Wohlsen is senior editor of Blue Ridge Outdoors. He can be reached at marcus@blueridgeoutdoors.com.