New Mexico Wild has launched an online Hiking Guide featuring descriptions of more than 100 trails, at least one in each Wilderness area in the state.

The New Mexico Wild Hiking Guide is the first known online resource dedicated exclusively to hiking trails in New Mexico’s Wilderness areas.

The New Mexico Wild Hiking Guide provides a detailed description of each hiking trail, including driving instructions, the types of ecosystems present and an overview of the Wilderness area containing the trail.

Users may narrow searches to find trails that fit their interests using seven different filters: distance, route type, difficulty, water, natural features, activities and solitude. Users may also create a profile to share trail conditions and upload photos of their hikes to improve the accuracy of descriptions. Each trail features a downloadable PDF trail map.

Please heed the advice of Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and public health officials when planning your next hiking trip. These guidelines include limiting long distance travel and practicing physical distancing when on a hiking trail until the state’s stay-at-home order has been fully lifted.

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The Senate today passed the most sweeping conservation legislation in a decade, protecting millions of acres of land and hundreds of miles of wild rivers across the country and establishing four new national monuments honoring heroes from Civil War soldiers to a civil rights icon.

The 662-page measure, which passed 92 to 8, represented an old-fashioned approach to deal-making that has largely disappeared on Capitol Hill. Senators from across the ideological spectrum celebrated home-state gains and congratulated each other for bridging the partisan divide.

The measure protects 1.3 million acres as wilderness, the nation’s most stringent protection that prohibits even roads and motorized vehicles. It permanently withdraws more than 370,000 acres of land from mining around two national parks, including Yellowstone, and permanently authorizes a program to spend offshore drilling revenue on conservation efforts.

Perhaps the most significant change the legislation would make is permanently authorizing a federal program that funnels offshore drilling revenue to conserve everything from major national parks and wildlife preserves to local baseball diamonds and basketball courts. Authorization for the popular program, the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), lapsed months ago due to the partial government shutdown and other disputes. Liberals like the fact that the money allows agencies to set aside land for wildlife habitat. Conservatives like the fact that taxpayers don’t have to foot the bill for it.

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The hiker trudged up a logging road and into a valley, tracing a route that seemed unremarkable. There were no sweeping views of the mountains that towered nearby. There was no summit to scale. Yet he stopped suddenly, jubilant, after about four miles of walking. He had found exactly what he was searching for: quiet.

In these loud times — with political foes yelling on television, trucks rumbling through streets, and smartphones chirping all around — who doesn’t want a little peace and quiet? But some wilderness lovers have taken their aversion to the cacophony of the modern world a step further, traveling to some of the country’s most remote areas in a quest for utter silence.

Connoisseurs of quiet say it is increasingly difficult, even in the wilderness, to escape the sounds of vehicles, industries, voices. A study published last year in the academic journal Science found that noise pollution was doubling sound levels in much of the nation’s conserved land, like national parks and areas preserved by the federal Bureau of Land Management.

The National Park Service has a policy requiring park managers to measure “baseline acoustic conditions” and determine which noises have an adverse effect. There is even a branch of the Park Service known as the Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division that is dedicated in part to preserving the untrammeled soundscape.

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  A couple from Florida got sick of trekking into the backcountry only to contend with hordes of other people. So they embarked on a search for the most remote spots in every state.

“I was walking down a very crowded Florida beach on a training hike,” Ryan says, “and I was in my late thirties. Something was welling up inside me. I knew I wanted to do something grandiose that’d never been done, and then I thought, ‘How can I get as far away from this circus as possible? Remote.’ And the word kept reverberating in my head over and over.” He and Rebecca, as wildlife scientists and serial backpackers, decided they would stand at the most remote point in every state and document the wildest parts of our national wildernesses.

“You cannot get more than five miles from a road within the vast majority of America’s wilderness,” says Ryan, an ecologist with the Tallahassee, Florida–based nonprofit Coastal Plains Institute. Less if you count trails and cabins. He and Rebecca, a wildlife biologist also with the institute, are the only people to have stood at the remotest coordinates in almost all of America’s backcountry.

Rebecca, a pro with the graphical information system (GIS) satellite cartography tool, calculated the coordinates in each state farthest from roads and settlements. The Means began hiking to them and recording data, like whether the spot had cell service and visible human impacts. “We’ve been in lightning storms, snowstorms, hailstorms,” Rebecca says. “Extreme cold, extreme heat. We haven’t had a real vacation since 2009.”

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When John Muir helped establish the National Park Service, he argued that such parks were vital to help people unplug from the world. “Break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods,” Muir was quoted as saying in 1915.

But these days at Yosemite National Park, hikers to Half Dome are likely to encounter people talking on cell phones as they climb to the top. Similar scenes are playing out at other national parks as the call of the outdoors increasingly comes with crisp 4G service. Not everyone is wild about that.

In Yosemite, Yellowstone, Mount Rainier and other iconic parks, environmentalists are pressing the National Park Service to slow or halt construction of new cellular towers within park boundaries. They say the NPS is quietly facilitating a digital transformation with little public input or regard to its mission statement — to preserve “unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System.”

Yet advocates for increased cell service, including many NPS officials, say the parks can’t cling to an earlier era. Expanded cellular and broadband coverage, they argue, helps rescue teams respond to emergencies and are necessary to draw a new generation to the parks.

Under National Park Service guidelines, such “special uses” are encouraged if they enhance park resources or improve public safety. But such uses should be rejected, the NPS says, if they “unreasonably disrupt the atmosphere of peace and tranquility of wilderness.”

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In contrast to many advanced countries, the United States has a vast and spectacular publicly owned wilderness, mostly free and available to all. In an age of inequality, the affluent have gated neighborhoods, private schools, backup generators and greater influence on elected officials. But our most awe-inspiring wild places have remained largely a public good to be shared by all, a bastion of equality.

This is a magnificent splendor that no billionaire is allowed to fence off. We all have equal access, at no charge: If you can hold your own against mosquitoes and bears, the spot is yours for the night. Yet these public lands are at risk today.

The march of civilization has been about distancing ourselves from the raw power of nature. At home, we move the thermostat up or down by a degree, and we absorb the idea that we are lords of the universe. On the trail, we are either sweating or freezing, and it always feels as if the path is mainly uphill. Nature mocks us, usefully reminding us who’s boss.

If your kids are suffering from what the writer Richard Louv calls nature-deficit disorder, run away from home together. Flee to the mountains. It’s heaven with blisters.

This is our collective patrimony, a tribute to the wisdom of Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot and other visionaries who preserved our wild places for the future. Thank God for them. Otherwise, these lands might have been carved up and sold off as ranches for the rich.

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In wintertime, the sounds of nature are so subtle they’re almost imperceptible: The whistling of the wind though craggy mountaintops, the whispering branches of the trees; the soft, delicate patter of an unseen animal’s paws across snowy ground.

“It’s a really quiet experience,” said Rachel Buxton, recalling a recent winter hike in southwest Colorado’s La Garita Wilderness. “You’re almost hearing your own heartbeat.”

But every 30 minutes, a jet flew overhead, shattering the fragile calm. “It’s shocking, right?” she said. “You’re in the middle of nowhere, yet you still can’t escape the sounds of humans.”

That’s the trouble with noise pollution, continued Buxton, an acoustic ecologist at Colorado State University: “It really doesn’t have any boundaries. There’s no way of holding it in.”

This problem pervades wilderness areas across the United States. Using a model based on sound measurements taken by the National Park Service, they found that human noises at least double the background sound levels at the majority of protected areas in the country. This noise pollution doesn’t just disrupt hikers; it can also frighten, distract or harm animals that inhabit the wilderness, setting off changes that cascade through the entire ecosystem.

“When we think about wilderness, we think about dark skies, going to see outstanding scenery,” said Megan McKenna, a scientist with the National Park Service’s Natural Sounds and Night Skies division and a co-author on the report. “We really should think about soundscapes, too.”

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Women around the world have always played a significant role in environmental conservation. There have been so many throughout time that some of them tend to slip through the cracks of history and mainstream media. On this International Women’s Day, let’s push some of those names into the spotlight.

These are just a few of the thousands of women who have and are making big strides in environmental science, indigenous peoples’ rights, conservation of our planet’s natural resources, preservation of biodiversity and so much more. Let’s take a moment to celebrate women who have dedicated their lives to both Earth and humanity, who have crafted and continue to craft how we use and care for this planet.

Often working in the shadows, female conservation leaders helped drive the 20th century conservation movement. In celebration of Women’s History Month, let’s honor 11 of those women who have made a difference to America’s wild lands.

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While the ecological and aesthetic value of these lands is apparent, their economic value is less intuitive. In a review article published in the Journal of Forestry, U.S. Forest Service scientist Thomas Holmes and his colleagues describe the concepts and tools used to analyze the economic value of wilderness. The scientists considered historical studies to identify trends in the use and economic value of wilderness areas as well as the economic impacts that wilderness areas have on gateway communities.

“Once resources are extracted from a wilderness area, wilderness character is irreversibly changed and can never be reproduced,” says Holmes. “This is why it is important to consider the trade-offs inherent in developing wild areas. People are often surprised to learn that the economic value of protecting wilderness areas can exceed the economic value of developing those areas.”

Economists have proposed that people generally become willing to pay more for wilderness protection and use as their income and education increases. Combined with the increasing scarcity of wild lands relative to other land uses, economists have argued that wilderness values will trend upwards as economies develop. Holmes and his colleagues reviewed the economic literature to discern trends in the economic value of wilderness. “Our review suggests that wilderness areas are becoming increasingly valuable to society over time,” says Holmes.

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Wilderness areas are the nation’s highest form of land protection, designed to protect unspoiled areas for future generations. In wilderness areas, roads, vehicles and permanent structures are prohibited, as well as activities such as logging and mining.

Currently, there are six wilderness areas in the two national forests, including Linville Gorge, Shining Rock and Middle Prong in the Pisgah National Forest and Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock, Southern Nantahala and Ellicott Rock in the Nantahala National Forest.

In 2014, the USFS invited the public to provide input on the areas to be included in an inventory to be further evaluated as potential wilderness area additions. After a broadening of the criteria for which areas could be added for wilderness consideration, 362,411 acres were included in the inventory for lands that may be suitable for wilderness, including 88,692 acres in the Grandfather Ranger District of the Pisgah National Forest.

The next step is to evaluate each area on the inventory map for wilderness characteristics, including the degree to which the area generally appears to be affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprints of man’s work substantially unnoticeable; the degree to which the area has outstanding opportunities for solitude or for a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; the degree to which an area may contain ecological, geological or other features of scientific, educational, scenic or historical value; and the degree to which the area may be managed to preserve its wilderness characteristics.

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