DOMINGUEZ CANYON: We need wilderness. Wallace Stegner wrote, “We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”

Stegner called wilderness “the geography of hope,” and thanks to U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar and 3rd District Rep. John Salazar, a major wilderness and conservation bill is now before Congress to help protect part of Colorado’s Western Slope in the canyons between Delta and Grand Junction.

Unlike high-elevation rock and ice wildernesses in Colorado, the proposed 210,677 acre Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area and wilderness can be accessed on foot or by canoe or raft down the lower Gunnison River.

One of my favorite memories is canoeing into this BLM wilderness study area when my boys were young. They delighted in the many pools and pouroffs along Dominguez Creek. Our Colorado Historical Society expedition found historic cowboy corrals, rock shelters made by sheepherders, prehistoric Fremont and historic Ute Indian rock art, and a magnificent, wild canyon system perfect for exploring.

That visit was 10 years ago. Last month I went back on a BLM reconnaissance trip, and I appreciated how little had changed and how serious the BLM had become about protecting the area. A new steel bridge at Bridgeport, south of Whitewater, allows day hikers to park near the Union Pacific railroad tracks, walk a mile, cross the bridge and then enter the 66,255 acre Dominguez Canyon Wilderness Area that is to be included in the NCA.

As Congressman Salazar explains, “Colorado’s Western Slope is home to some of the most beautiful land in the entire nation and this bill will help ensure it stays that way.”

County commissioners from Mesa, Delta, and Montrose counties have approved resolutions supporting the bill.

The NCA will include designated campgrounds and mechanized recreation on old four-wheel drive roads in more accessible areas. The wilderness area is in two big forks of Dominguez Canyon. Each fork ascends for miles westward into U.S. Forest Service land on the Uncompahgre Plateau.

Mapmaker F.V. Hayden named the canyons for the Spanish friars Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante, who explored Colorado in 1776 but never actually made it into these canyons. But homesteaders and ranchers did, and part of the joy of exploring the landscape is seeing remnants of homesteader occupation and cowboy culture from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Muriel Marshall wrote about the area in “Red Hole in Time,” the best account of the ranchers who eked out a living among the cacti, Sego lilies, and deadly larkspur growing along the canyon walls.

Former Outward Bound instructor Tony Prendergast, from Crawford, explains that the wilderness designation is “a great idea and a long time coming. The canyons are perfect in the winter time and shoulder months. As Grand Junction has grown, the area has gotten a higher degree of attention and it needs more management.”

Most visitors will stay close to the Gunnison River riparian corridor and the red rocks but, for Prendergast, the best wilderness values can be found higher up in remote sections of the canyons, above the river and below the forest.

If a wilderness is a wild place with opportunities for silence, solitude and darkness, can you improve upon it? Yes! Recently, volunteers from the San Juan Mountains Association canoed into the area. They camped along the mouth of Dominguez Creek. With a crew from Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado, and logistics and cuisine provided by Centennial Canoes, they spent a long, hot day removing invasive tamarisks and making the area more accessible for watercraft. Along the river, crews used chainsaws to remove tamarisks at two campsites, but handsaws within the wilderness study area.

Volunteer Dianne Donovan saw “a remarkable change in just two days.” In addition to removing the invasive, water-sucking tamarisks, the next day volunteers planted cottonwood trees along the river, which will eventually provide shade for future generations of wilderness visitors.

We need wilderness. We need wilderness as a genetic bank for plants and animals, but also because wilderness and access to wildlands helped shape our unique American character. Who we are as a nation, and who we became as a people, is a direct result of our intimate contact with wild landscapes. Hiking and camping on wildlands, “where man is a visitor who does not remain,” to quote from the 1964 Wilderness Act, is one of America’s most enduring traditions.

But if wilderness visits are about solitude, they are also about building community and sharing the outdoors, which is exactly what the volunteers enjoyed on their successful canoe trip.

Thank you, Ken and John Salazar, for introducing this important piece of federal legislation.

Andrew Gulliford is a professor of Southwest Studies and history at Fort Lewis College. He can be reached at gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.