Gila

Why should it be a National Park?

On June 3, 1924, the Forest Service set aside three quarters of a million acres of southwestern New Mexico as wilderness. It was the first designated wilderness area anywhere in the world, and it happened because a young forester named Aldo Leopold argued that some country should be left without roads. Forty years later the Wilderness Act made the idea national law. The place where it started is still here, still roadless, and still not a National Park.

The Gila is rough, dry, and enormous, a landscape of ponderosa mesas cut by the canyons of the Gila River and its forks. It holds the last free-flowing river in New Mexico. Mexican gray wolves were reintroduced here in 1998, the only place in the country where that experiment has been run at scale. The Gila Cliff Dwellings, built into caves above the west fork around 1280, preserve the work of the Mogollon people who lived here for a few decades and then left.

This is Apache homeland. Geronimo was born near the headwaters of the Gila. The mountains that shelter the wilderness sheltered Apache resistance for decades, and the place names throughout the forest carry that history.

No National Park has ever been proposed for the Gila in Congress. The Sierra Club has floated a six-and-a-half-million-acre park spanning Arizona and New Mexico, restoring an ecologically complete Southwest, but that is advocacy rather than legislation. The live federal effort here is a Wild and Scenic designation for the Gila's free-flowing miles, which has been introduced repeatedly and repeatedly stalled. The country's first wilderness is protected by a designation it invented, and has never been offered the one that draws visitors.

The wilderness idea started here, and it started with an argument about roads. Aldo Leopold was a young forester in the Southwest when he began pressing for country kept roadless on purpose, and the Gila in 1924 was the first place the Forest Service agreed to it, forty years before the Wilderness Act. Everything in the American wilderness system descends from that memo.

The Gila River below is the last major undammed river in New Mexico, which is not an accident but a decision made repeatedly, most recently when the state walked away from a diversion project in 2020 after decades of planning. The river's cottonwood galleries carry one of the richest bird lists in the Southwest, and the Gila trout, once nearly gone, was brought back in these headwaters.

Nothing about the Gila fails the test for a park. What stands in the way is that it is already federal, and agencies do not hand their best country to one another willingly, which is why the only sketches ever drawn here have come from outside Congress. A park would have to be written around what the Gila already carries: the wilderness at its core, the grazing agreements, the water, and the wolf recovery that has come too far to interrupt. Those are terms to negotiate, not reasons to stop.