Bob Sihler wrote:For me, it's territory that's so remote or so rugged or so alien that it deters most people from entering. Sometimes it is steps from the car. Other times it is miles away from the parking lot.
Is that "physical challenge"?
Bob Sihler wrote: The stream you bushwhack along until you reach the obscure waterfall is in the wilderness. The mountain lake 15 miles in that the masses use as a base camp to climb the trophy peak-- not really.
Is that "solitude"?
Bob Sihler wrote:There's the legal definition, but there's also an emotional one. I've been in many a "wilderness area" that didn't have the wilderness feel, and I've been in non-designated areas that feel as wild as anything I've ever experienced.
Agreed. Yellowstone has no designated wilderness.
This one is a designated wilderness but it's, uh, pathetic.
Bob Sihler wrote:The Everglades, what's left of it, is wilderness. The Okefenokee Swamp is. The rhododendron forests of the North Carolina ridges and hollows are. The West, of course, is teeming with wilderness both mountain and desert.
How about (a)
beaches? (b)
caves? (c)
prairies? or (d) marine wildernesses?
Are some terrain types just more wild? Why?
Bob Sihler wrote:There's also a purity factor. You know, Arthur, many of my thoughts on "pure" mountain wilderness and why I think Greater Yellowstone, the Bitterroots-Frank Church country, Bob Marshall country, and Glacier are the best places for it in the Lower 48. I need the howl of the wolf and the track of the grizzly, even if I don't hear the former or see the latter.
I know what you mean, but I wonder how that translates elsewhere: if you're in the Amazon, Kalahari, Sinai, Himalaya or Borneo you won't have wolves or grizzlies. Do you need something that can eat you?
The legal definition includes intact ecosystems, which is true of those great places you list. But it's also true of an Olympic tidal pool. Nothing there will eat you.
I hope.