Although most of Glacier National Park is managed as "wilderness," not one acre officially carries that designation/NPS

Will the National Park Service soon be pushing for more wilderness designations? That's difficult to say, in large part because only Congress can designate wilderness. Still, there's an effort under way by the Park Service to take a look at wilderness possibilities across the park system.

Six Park Service staff have been selected to work with staff from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management, and U.S. Forest Service to develop an implementation framework for the interagency wilderness 2020 Vision.

The Vision is a five-year strategy identifying priority areas to be addressed throughout the National Wilderness Preservation System. Signed by the agency leads for all four wilderness management agencies and the U.S. Geological Survey during the 2014 National Wilderness Conference, the Vision seeks to sustain momentum and interagency cohesion established during the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act and build on it for the next five years.



Three implementation teams will address the key themes from the Vision: Protect, Connect, and Lead. Each team will develop a framework to best implement the goals associated with a theme and make them applicable to wilderness units throughout the country.

Since 1974, U.S. presidents have asked Congress to designate at least 5.7 million acres within the National Park System as official wilderness. The last such designation came in 2014, when Congress designated more than 32,500 acres in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in Michigan as wilderness.

Still, millions more acres in such notable parks as Yellowstone, Glacier, Grand Teton, Big Bend, Great Smoky Mountains, and Cape Hatteras National Seashore have not received this designation, even though the National Park Service has deemed the acres worthy.