It is a place wild enough to earn Utah's first federal designation of "wilderness" - a distinction intended by the Wilderness Act's authors to preserve the unkempt legacy of remote American lands.
This month marks the 40th anniversary of the original Wilderness Act and the 20th anniversary of the Utah Wilderness Act, a bill that marked the last time the state's environmentalists and politicians were able to hammer out a deal to protect some of the state's most beautiful places forever.
Looking back, the Utah Wilderness Act seems the more unlikely success story. While the 1964 Wilderness Act had almost unanimous support by the time it was signed by President Lyndon Johnson, the Utah bill 20 years later required plenty of wheeling and dealing between Utah's conservation community and unexpected partners such as Republican Rep. Jim Hansen.
When it was signed into law by Ronald Reagan on Sept. 28, 1984 - part of a flurry of wilderness bills protecting areas in 22 states signed that year by a president reviled by most environmentalists - it was a controversial victory.
Many of those who thought the Utah Wilderness Act did not protect enough of Utah's land continue the fight to protect Utah's wild places. No Utah group, however, has successfully had any wilderness designated since. Here's how it happened.
The pioneer: Alexis Kelner first put on a pair of skis in Berchtesgaden, Germany, a winter wonderland in the German Alps frequented by Adolf Hitler, and later the home of a United Nations-run "displaced persons camp" where Kelner's family members fled after fleeing Latvia as World War II ended.
The skis were military surplus, but they were enough to make the adolescent Kelner fall in love with hiking up majestic mountains for the sheer thrill of sliding down.
That passion remained with him when his family moved to Salt Lake City in 1950, landing on Capitol Hill, where the teenage Kelner played in the foothills near Ensign Peak. Kelner's skiing and hiking led to caving and then rock climbing. After joining the Wasatch Mountain Club, he started scaling mountains, including his first ascent of Lone Peak in 1958.
While Kelner was attending the University of Utah, Congress passed the 1964 Wilderness Act, and suddenly Kelner and his cohorts saw a way to preserve their playground.
"We got seriously started thinking about what the future of the Wasatch was" after the Wilderness Act passed, Kelner said. "We saw the urbanization happening. We saw the need to organize and lobby for wilderness because we thought Lone Peak was just a perfect gem."
Lone Peak goes wild: Kelner and his friends built a coalition of recreationalists and conservationists and set out to convince anyone who would listen that Lone Peak should be preserved. The effort lasted 14 years.
They flew Salt Lake County's commissioners around the Wasatch to show them what was at stake. They convinced then-Sen. Frank Moss to sponsor a bill preserving Lone Peak. They teamed up with Dick Carter, then the Utah regional representative of The Wilderness Society, to create ties with a national conservation group. They tried to convince one-time water commissioner and then-Mayor Jake Garn that there could be wilderness along the Wasatch without disrupting drinking water supplies.
At every turn, they hit a wall.
"I was opposed to Lone Peak being a wilderness area . . . because I had to deliver water to a few hundred thousand people every year," Garn recalled in a recent interview.
The political winds started to shift in the mid-1970s, though, starting with Garn's election to the U.S. Senate in 1974. He was replaced in the mayor's office by wilderness-friendly Ted Wilson. Around that time, a couple of non-Utahns - Idaho Sen. Frank Church and Arizona Rep. Morris Udall - introduced the Endangered American Wilderness Act, a measure to protect about a dozen areas in the West and, Kelner said, "they used the Lone Peak area as the flagship for the whole bill."
Kelner and Wilson went to work. They convinced members of the city commission - the precursor to the current city council system - that "the best way to maintain water quality was to keep development out [of the watershed]," Wilson said, "so we endorsed wilderness as a city."
More importantly, Wilson was able to convince the city's "Mr. Water," Charlie Wilson, who ran the city water department, of the same thing. Garn knew that if Charlie Wilson were on board, the water issues he was concerned with as mayor could be dealt with.
"When Jake got the green light from Charlie, that moved that bill along," Ted Wilson said.
Indeed, Garn signed on as a sponsor of Church and Udall's Endangered American Wilderness Act, and in 1978 President Carter signed it into law, designating a total of 1.3 million acres of Forest Service land in the West as wil- derness. The 30,088 acres of Lone
Peak became Utah's first wilderness area, and the spark for years of wilderness battles to come.
"As I look back, I don't remember any celebration or anything like that," Kelner said. "I guess we all felt relieved it passed."
Strange bedfellows: With Lone Peak protected, Kelner and his friends "started to look seriously at other areas that would qualify" as wilderness. When The Wilderness Society closed its regional offices, Dick Carter formed the Utah Wilderness Association in 1979 and focused on protecting the High Uintas.
"There is no way to express the luck that I had," Carter said. "Alexis and I, we came in and we worked on wilderness bills at a time when it was ripe to happen."
To make more wilderness a reality in Utah, though, they would have to work with a congressional delegation not necessarily predisposed to tying up Utah lands with federal regulations, particularly newly elected Rep. Hansen.
The High Uintas, though, were common ground for Carter and Hansen.
"I'll go to my grave saying that if there's any place in Utah that serves the spirit of the '64 [Wilderness] Act, that's it," Hansen said in an interview at his Farmington office.
Hansen says he read the entire 1964 law when he first took office in 1982, and he saw wilderness as an issue he could make a mark with as a member of the House Public Lands and National Parks Subcommittee.
"In Congress, you have to have a mother hen, someone with a real fire in the belly to get things done," Hansen added. "Myself and Jake [Garn] really had a desire to get something done."
Carter knew protecting all the areas that he and other conservationists wanted would be impossible, but he also believed that getting 460,000 acres of the High Uintas protected was better than getting nothing at all.
"Your ideals, visions and dreams are tiny players once there's a bill in Congress," Carter recently told a Forest Service-sponsored gathering on the history of the Utah Wilderness Act. "Once you're on a political path, you'll be pilloried and lauded by both sides."
And that's exactly what happened as Hansen and Garn navigated the Utah Wilderness Act to passage, designating as wilderness 744,804 acres of Forest Service-managed land in areas like the High Uintas, Mount Olympus, Mount Timpanogos and Mount Nebo.
The backlash: "The reason that [the Utah Wilderness Act] was achievable was Dick Carter," said Howard Rigtrup, a longtime cohort of and staffer for Hansen, recalling the negotiations. "We were basically dealing with Utahns. They were environmentalists, extremists, and we hardly agreed on anything. But they were willing to come to the table."
Ted Wilson recalled that Carter "became very controversial among the more energetic wilderness types."
"They kind of thought he gave away the store," Wilson said. "I never felt that way. . .Some people were a little angry with him, though. SUWA [the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, where Wilson is a board member] was kind of born as a result of that."
Jim Catlin, who now works with the Wild Utah Project, was a Sierra Club volunteer at the time Carter's Utah Wilderness Association was negotiating with Utah's congressional delegation.
In his view, the bill did not go nearly far enough, but he acknowledges that watching the deal go down helped Utah's conservation community in later pursuits.
"The problem, of course, is that at the time it was a very small wilderness proposal, and some of the very best areas were left out," said Catlin, noting that the Sierra Club had its own, larger proposal for 3.2 million acres of wilderness.
"So we were trying to get enough of a public outrage to add those areas in. We didn't have the political base to do it. We didn't have the counterproposal well-developed. . .We couldn't really say, 'We have a better way.' ''
Recently, standing on an overlook to the High Uintas Wilderness, Carter admitted that he would have liked to see another 350,000 acres protected as wilderness, but he is satisfied his group made the right decision 20 years ago.
"If we hadn't designated 460,000 acres here 20 years ago, they would be under the gun of ATVs [all-terrain vehicles] right now," Carter said.
"That's one thing we can say with all of the areas [from the 1984 bill]. We would be talking right now about protecting them if we hadn't done it then."
Where from here: Wilderness remains a hot-button issue in Utah and elsewhere, especially on Bureau of Land Management lands. The Utah Wilderness Coalition, which includes 226 member organizations such as SUWA, the Wild Utah Project and the Wasatch Mountain Club, has proposed the Redrock Wilderness Act to designate more than 9 million acres of Utah land as wilderness, but it hasn't convinced a Utah politician to sponsor the act since the late Democratic Rep. Wayne Owens left office.
Wilson notes that "back in those days, wilderness was almost a hate word in Utah. It was anathema." Now, though, there are polls showing the majority of people want more wilderness.
Garn remains pleased with the results of the Utah Wilderness Act and the compromises that occurred, "and I have been very, very disappointed that 20 years later we have not added any wilderness to it."
Hansen believes the wilderness debate has become a cottage industry for groups like SUWA, used more to raise money than to actually get wilderness designated. He is skeptical the conservationists will ever be satisfied.
Catlin said his group and others in the Utah Wilderness Coalition learned from the early '80s battles that they need to work together, "and we're more effective now." Still, given the current political climate, he does not expect any large wilderness bills in the near future.
And Carter, arguably the driving force of the Utah Wilderness Act, believes that future wilderness designations in Utah will come in small pieces, if at all.
"Wilderness has become a poison pill, and a lot of it is because misinformation has become the norm, or because conservationists haven't come up with any solutions, or because the opponents have no interest in solutions," Carter said.
"To get wilderness, you have to engage in a political discussion. No one right now wants to have that political discussion."
nailen@sltrib.com
