1. The bill establishing the Land and Water Conservation Fund—that has enabled public acquisition of many key lands important to protecting wilderness, watersheds, and wildlife.
2. Senator Hubert Humphrey, D-MN, in 1956.
3. The El Toro Wilderness in El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico.
4. California – with 13 areas.
5. California—which now has 149 areas.
6. Arizona—with 90 areas.
7. Alaska—by far.
8. Forty-four.
9. Rhode Island, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Iowa, and Kansas.
10. Four agencies—Forest Service, National Park Service, Fish & Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management.
11. Pennsylvania. (Not till 1984).
12. Ohio, Massachusetts, and New York each have only one wilderness area -- which is an island—in Ohio’s case, a small island in Lake Erie. For New York, it’s a barrier island off the Long Island coast; for Massachusetts it’s a barrier island just off Cape Cod—in the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge. Indiana also has one wilderness area only, the Charles C. Deam, south of Indianapolis.
13. The Wrangell-Saint Elias Wilderness in Alaska has a total of 9,078,675 acres.
14. Pelican Island Wilderness in Florida has a total of 5.5 acres.
15. There are 12 state wildernesses in California: Anza Borrego Desert, Boney Mountain, Bull Creek, Cuyamaca Mountain, Henry W. Coe (Orestimba), Limekiln, Mount San Jacinto, Murrelet, Redwood Heritage, Santa Rosa Mountains, Sinkyone, West Waddell Creek.
16. Seven counties plus seven cities: Counties: Lake, Sonoma, Kern, San Luis Obispo, San Diego, Humboldt, Napa. Cities: Bakersfield, Vallejo, Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Davis. (But, San Francisco is a city and county all in one—that complicates the tally.)
17. Nevada, in 2013—as their state legislature meets only every other year. Their proclamation interestingly combined honor to the Wilderness Act with honor to the Civil Rights Act.
18. Howard Zahniser, longtime Executive Secretary of The Wilderness Society. (who dedicated his life to this project but unfortunately died several months before the Act was signed.)
19. Untrammeled. It conveys the essence of wilderness character—self-willed, uncontrolled land. Many people think the word means untrampled, untrodden. It does not. It means uncontrolled or unmanipulated, unrestrained, from the original definition of a trammel, as a kind of hobble for a horse or a net to confine fish.
20. Ronald Reagan: 1984 saw a large number of statewide wilderness bills.
21. Eighteen federal (Cache Creek, Cedar Roughs, Chanchelulla, Elkhorn Ridge, King Range, Marble Mountain, Mount Lassic, North Fork, Red Buttes, Rocks and Islands, Russian, Sanhedrin, Siskiyou, Snow Mountain, South Fork Eel River, Trinity Alps, Yolla Bolly-Middle Eel, Yuki) and three state (Murrelet, Redwood Heritage, Sinkyone).
22. Trinity Alps (525,636 acres) and Rocks and Islands (6 acres).