I should note that in the late ’60s and ’70s, “they” almost always referred to hippies. At one point, just below Sawtooth Lake, I was almost run over by a man coming down the trail, out of breath and outraged.

“Arrest them,” he said when he saw my Forest Service badge.

“Who?” I asked.

“They’re having sex right by Sawtooth Lake,” he said.

“Who?” I asked again.

“Hippies,” he said. “Lots of them. They waved at me.”

Apparently it was the waves that had set him off.

I was at that point in the tourist season that I had seen too many people pounding Sawtooth trails to dust, and I might have been willing to ticket those hippies if they were increasing the population. But it was a delicate matter to check to see if they were using birth control, and anyway, when I got to Sawtooth Lake, all I found was a group of fully-clothed young people hanging out on the lakeshore, smoking dope, an activity that by that August I saw as less criminal than making babies.

Perhaps because wilderness is supposed to be a place of pristine purity, it brings out the true believer in us, as well as the urge to contact the authorities and make Those People—whatever group we’re currently scapegoating—damned well behave. The urge to make others behave is not an attractive human quality, but it’s one we all recognize, and it leads to people making lists of rules, some of which are tricky to follow.

When I mention that wilderness, as defined under the 1964 Wilderness Act, is among the most-highly regulated real estate in the country, most people are surprised. The window-box lake whose waters reflect a distant peak is the usual image people have of wilderness, and the mention of extreme regulation and police presence always is a shock. But wilderness is a creature of law. If wilderness were a chunk of granite, it would be a chunk of granite engraved with the Ten Commandments.

There is little doubt that the wilderness system in this country has allowed a great many of our wild lands to remain wild. But it’s also hard to get to most wildernesses, and that factor has been far more important than most people realize. Ever since the Reagan presidency, Forest Service budgets have been minimal, and the reaction of the Forest Service has been to preserve its permanent office positions at the expense of its seasonal field workers. For the Boulders and the White Clouds in Idaho, it has made for a kind of benign neglect: Roads have been closed because they couldn’t be maintained, trails have been allowed to become filled with deadfall, and people-mitigation measures—including police presence—have been restricted to areas close to motorized access.

These facts should not be construed as support for a “Lock It Up” wilderness policy. People need to be in wild areas, and if I may give a nod to Barry Commoner, wild areas need people, if for no other reason that being in the wild raises the consciousness of the people who go there, and a higher consciousness is the only thing that will allow humans to survive the century. Without that consciousness, the discussion about wild lands in the American West has the quality of arguing over sleeping arrangements on the Titanic.