Keeping it Wild in a Crown Jewel: Wilderness Building Blocks for Glacier National Park

Douglas, Mark

This report consists of building blocks that provide the foundation for effectively integrating wilderness character in Glacier National Park. It establishes a shared understanding of what is valuable about the recommended, proposed, and potential Glacier wilderness. It articulates those important values in a wilderness character framework. Chapter 1 introduces wilderness character by defining the qualities that structure the framework and explaining its benefits. The building block approach provides maximum flexibility for staff to continue effectively and efficiently strengthening the wilderness stewardship foundation in the park. The blocks correspond to achievable and meaningful steps. One building block consists of Wilderness Basics. The material in chapter 2 was gained from taking the first Wilderness Basics step of gathering background wilderness information. The map on the inside cover and the overview in chapter 2 reflect information found in the park’s 1974 wilderness recommendation, State of the Wilderness and Backcountry reports from 1992 through 2011, the 1999 General Management Plan, and the 2004 Commercial Services Plan. The second Wilderness Basics step develops the wilderness character narrative as a qualitative description of what is unique and special about the wilderness in Glacier National Park. Later in the report, chapter 8 completes the Wilderness Basics by identifying preliminary wilderness issues to inform the scope of additional data and planning needs. It presents considerations to inform continued wilderness stewardship in Glacier National Park. Most of this report’s content is in chapters 3 through 7 in the form of descriptions of the wilderness character indicators for each quality of wilderness character and definitions of the measures associated with those indicators. There are also tables that organize the measures’ data that were gathered and input into a wilderness character database. This material resulted from taking the first two steps of a second building block: Wilderness Character Assessment. The final step for that block calls for park staff to conduct ongoing monitoring of the measures presented and others vital to wilderness stewardship. The final building block is to Integrate Wilderness Character into Management and Operations. It calls for park staff to continue taking steps to use minimum requirement analyses in decision making and to take steps to consider wilderness character in operations.