Less than five miles into the nation’s first designated wilderness area, I scan the muddy banks of New Mexico’s last free-flowing river for animal tracks, wondering who else is here.
Low sunlight casts shadows into a deer’s heart-shaped hoofprint. Scat gives away the fox and coyote. I glimpse the orange underwing of a bird—maybe a northern flicker—floating down to its perch. Then, upstream, I see the surest sign of this valley’s residents: a beaver dam.
I have hiked to the Gila River’s Middle Fork by way of Little Bear Canyon with Luke Koenig, the Gila grassroots organizer of the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, and Jay Hemphill, a photographer who spent last summer in the Gila Wilderness. We traversed a ridge, marveled at the snow-covered Mogollon Baldy, gazed through binoculars toward an Apache cave dwelling, dropped into a box canyon, wound through willow trees, and stopped at the ice-cold water, trickling as it does even without human witnesses.
Covering just these 10 miles in the 3.3-million-acre Gila National Forest leaves so many wonders unexplored. Even getting to know the 558,014-acre Gila Wilderness contained within the national forest would take a lifetime. But a sense of appreciation for its existence and wonder at nature’s perfect complexity can grow in a much shorter time.
It took conservationist Aldo Leopold only a few years in southern New Mexico to understand as
