​One of the singular joys of trekking the back roads in a Jeep is the treasures one finds; some are small, others larger, and sometimes one encounters an entire township of them. Such it was this past summer when my wife and I were visiting relatives in New Mexico. Hwy 159 just north of Glennwood, NM leads to the old ghost town of Mogollon. 
 
The journey is half the adventure, as Mogollon lies a half-dozen vertical miles off of Hwy 180 and it’s a narrow windy bit that can give those of delicate constitutions the vapors, but once there the town itself is a quaint village nestled in a deep valley that reminded me of Bisbee, AZ – another late 19th century mining town.
 
Founded in 1889, Mogollon enjoyed the typical boom of a mining town, followed by the bust that folllows; in the early 20th century the mines were producing wealth for all, but by WW1 they had virtually all been shut down.  The mines reopened during WW2 for a time, and even the Little Fanny Mine hung on the longest, producing until the early 1950s when it too shut down forever.
 
Now a berg of scarcely over 25 souls, Mogollon seems to hang on out of sheer will and memory of its former glory. There is a museum, a few private homes, the Purple Onion Cafe, and not much more.
 
But its remains honor the history of the boomtown mining camps of a hundred plus years ago, and there are historic structures and a cemetery at the top of the canyon that bears witness to the struggles of our forebears.  There are no t-shirts, really, or trinkets to buy, only the experience of visiting, which in a town like Mogollon, is more than enough.

​A few weeks ago I took a short trip up to the Mogollon Rim, and found myself hiking around the West Clear Creek area.  I encountered a line of barbed wire fencing which bore this sign:

​Quite frankly, I think the point of this post is that I’m not sure how I feel about this sign – or rather, the idea behind this sign, what this sign represents.  On the one hand, I am gladdened to know that the state has set aside tracts of land for wilderness, land that will presumably remain relatively pristine and untouched by logging, logging roads, and the ubiquitous Winnebago RV.
 
Still, I wonder what it means that to be behind this sign, behind this permeable boundary represented by barbed wire (barbed wire, of course, is the quintessential symbol of civilization for every westerner).  What does it mean to the tree in front of this sign versus one of the pines behind it?  Do foraging elk care what this barbed wire represents?  Do the bear?
 
“Wilderness” is defined by an online dictionary as “a wild and uncultivated region, as of forest or desert, uninhabited or inhabited only by wild animals; a tract of wasteland” (dictionary.com).  According the Wilderness Act of 1964, “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
 
Such definitions fit the legal designation, the denotative meaning of the sign, but there is another meaning of wilderness, a more connotative definition that hinges on the root word “wild.” That which is wild is natural and unrestrained, and how can a state restrain through barbed wire borders that which is properly, by definition, unrestrained?  Doug Peacock, author of Grizzly Years, used a different definition, saying “it ain’t wilderness unless there’s a critter out there that can kill you and eat you.”   I love this definition.
 
This is not to suggest that there is something morally superior about being mauled by a bear, but that there may be something morally superior in choosing to tread where one is not guaranteed of being the apex predator.  Here is the psychological value of wilderness for mankind, especially in the highly complex, technologically driven cultures of first-world nations.
 
It’s good for the state to designate land as “wilderness” in order to protect it from the ravages of civilization, both the rapacious industries of logging and mining as well as the well-intentioned consumption of RV campers.  But don’t be fooled; it’s not really wilderness until you feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.