The year 2014 marked the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964.

It created a new American phenomenon, where nature is still legally in charge and humans are mere visitors.

The wildernesses that best exemplifies what the Wilderness Act envisioned are to be found in the Wind River Range.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

This is the Wind River Range in Wyoming, it's the state's largest mountain rage with many peaks over 13,000 feet high.

You can enter a trail at the northern or southern end and hike to the other end for 95 miles or an eastern western trail for thirty miles.

Almost all of it is wilderness.

The range is located in western Wyoming just to the southeast of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National parks.

Not a single road bisects the range.

[Music] The best way to get the big picture of the Wind River Range is from above in a small aircraft.

The range is huge, but we can get down close and see what the Stough Creek Basin looks like where I'm going to hike into with the guys and see the glaciers and see how vast this range is.

Boy, timberline is so obvious here, you have the thick forest and then it just vanishes and we know when we see that, that's 10,500 feet and above that is the Apline and oh man the rock.

It's hard to know what this would have been like before the glaciers got to it, but they tore it up, they smoothed it out, tore it up again because glaciers are huge 2-3,000 feet thick rivers of ice.

They have tremendous power and they can just tear the mountains apart, but they smooth them out and make these neat little round circular things called, believe it or not cirques.

Oh my goodness.

And the glaciers formed the lakes.

They leave their deposits of rocks along a fault or a stream bed and that makes a dam, so you go down stream lake after lake and look up there.

And the highest peak is Gannett Peak just under 14,000, the highest peak in Wyoming.

So I'm trying to envision what this would be with a 1,000 feet of ice on top of the whole range and then these valleys that would be at least 4,000 feet thick.

They are smooth on top and then as the planet warms, gradually the mountains poke up through the ice and the ice is moving, tearing things apart and it also tells me how rough the hike is going to be.

It isn't as bad as when you're on the ground as it looks in the air, but it's going to be a challenge.

I know we go over 11,000 feet.

(Music) The man who knows the Wind River Range as well as anyone is biologist John Mioncyznski.

He is waiting with my brother Dick Yetman to give a tour around the Wind River before we take off into the wilderness.

Well, we'll go up to 11,000 feet from about 7,500 feet.

Would you mind maybe giving me the big picture of Atlantic City and mines and gold?

Oh, alright.

Now this is state of the art.

Is my mother going to be pleased?

Well, it's pretty stylish for this country out here, yeah.

Tick a tick tick a tick a tick.

Tick tick.

Oh, I believe I'm ready.

There was a gold strike here in the 1840's, they found gold and it was before the 49ers, but it wasn't until they built an army for it right outside of town here that it was safe for the miners to come in from the California Gold rush.

There were coming from West to East, because gold mining was a way to populate an area and they wanted people to move out here into this desolate country.

John, how cold does it get here in the winter?

Oh, I've seen it 54 below zero.

54 below!

It commonly gets to 20-25 below.

So we just pulled out of Atlantic City.

Every way into Atlantic City is downhill and every way out of town is uphill.

By 1870 there were thousands of people living in South Past city.

Thousands, really Which is four miles from here and there were hundreds here living in Atlantic City.

This is part of Atlantic City and they were putting up new mines every year and so there were hundreds and hundreds of mines around here.

(Music) The miners left obvious signs of their work.

The people before that, the Shoshone Indians left more subtle reminders of their occupation, which has lasted a long time.

Seems like an unlikely place to find petroglyphs at least from my experience.

Yeah, well at this elevation the one rock layer that's exposed is this Ten Sleep and all of the mountain Shohone pertoglyphs tend to be on this Ten Sleep formation, which is a sandstone.

These are supposed to be some of the healing, spiritual deities of the Mountain Shoshone.

These are all pecked in, probably with Elk antler tines or in some cases they think rocks.

This form here would probably be Pa Waip, which is the water ghost woman.

Someone who lives in certain lakes that can pull you into the water if you get too close to the water.

This panel goes on and on.

The sheep eaters were Indians that were revered by all the other tribes as the great healers, the people who were in contact with the spirits more and of course in a lot of the old Indian traditions, the spiritual healing was a lot more important than the physical healing.

The sheep eaters of course only lived in the mountains and they would come to the mountains because the mountains were high up in the sky and that's were they spirits reside.

And the birds, the flying creatures were the ones that could fly up to where the spirits were.

So they were the messengers of the healing spirits.

Pretty new for me to see petroglyphs in the Wind Rivers.

This is just a small sampling of this area, right here for petroglyphs.

Some of the estimates for the mountain Shoshone being here goes back to 10,000 years ago when they left the Southwest.

The Wind River is a major tributary of the Yellowstone River, which is a major tributary of the Missouri river, which is a major tributary of the Mississippi River.

To appreciate the Wind Rivers, you have to enter the wilderness and you can only do that on foot or on a mount.

We have to take everything with us that we'll need.

Everything we use inside the wilderness must be packed in.

Everything.

It's going to be a twenty mile hike over three days and our trial will take us well over 11,000 feet.

Since it is summer time we will not be able to avoid mosquitoes and nats and we have to be prepared for a thunderstorm or two.

This is the wildest wilderness in the lower 48 states.

Mules are ornery, but they're very strong.

Mules can carry 200 lbs and you have to pack them with precision.

The weight has to be equal for each side or it will really throw the mule off.

We just about got the mules loaded.

We'll head down to the trailhead and we need to find where the trail starts, it's around here somewhere and then we'll see how steeply it goes up.

It's really nice to have the mules.

I started in the Wind River Range back in the 60's as a prospector of all things.

I thought there was gold up here and there was.

Around 1971, the forest service was considering the wilderness act here.

It had been a primitive area prior to that, so my job was to watch hikers and horse packers and see what the impacts were from this new interest that people had not just mountain climbing, but fishing and hunting in the back country.

The United States has a concept of land use unlike anywhere else in the world.

Under the wilderness act of 1964, everything inside the wilderness is protected.

There is no permitted human residence on a permanent basis, no mechanized travels allowed.

Only the United States has that concept.

Only the United States has that concept.

No other country in the world.

Where I travel in Latin America, I find that in the Spanish language there is no word, no term that can be translated as wilderness.

Wilderness as designated by the wilderness act of 1964 is a distinctively American concept.

People don't often realize how diverse the Wind River Range is.

It's got around a thousand lakes in it and for a mountain range that's only 90 miles from one end to the other, maybe 25-35 miles wide, that's a lot of lakes.

Most of them have fish.

There's a lot of snow fields, a lot of glaciers, so recreationally there's fishing, there's glacier hiking, there's mountain climbing, there's ice climbing.

It's pretty chilly.

I'd say that the water temperature is about 47 degrees.

There's a diversity of animal life that you don't find in most mountain ranges.

You got big horned sheep in large numbers.

The largest big horned sheep herd in the world is here.

We have a large number of elk that summer here and winter in the foothills.

We have prong horned antelopes in the foothills to 8,000 to 8,500 feet.

You know Yetman, I never thought we'd make it to the pass here, the forest service people say it's 11,000 feet.

It feels like 18,000.

So how high do you figure that peak is?

Well, it's over 13,000, one of several and we're in the southern part of this range.

This is just a tip.

Most of the glaciers are coming off to the north, to northeast and there's over 30 active glaciers in the Wind River Range.

So the southern exposure gets more direct sun and it melts, but they're protected.

From the highest pass, well above timberline.

We can see the lakes way below us, where we are going to camp.

Before we descend John has some things to demonstrate about life in the Alpine region.

John, you brought me to this fantastic little Alpline garden here at 11,000 feet.

What have we got here, there's all kinds of stuff?

Oh, almost everything we're looking at it is either edible or medicinal right here.

It's very young before these flowers emerge.

You can eat these leaves raw, just like that.

As the flowers get older, they get bitter.

So you need to boil them up and that's what we call a potherb.

There's yarrow.

That makes a great tea and I use it for altitude adjustment.

I need a lot of that right now.

I'm feeling a little altitude.

We are pretty high.

We've got a little cup like yellow flower here.. You have to boil it, but the flowers are kind of sweet and it's also got a fungicide in it called carbomeal so you could use it to treat fungus infections.

This is an anti-inflammatory and emollient, so you can use it salves to treat dry cracked skin.

Probably the advantage of eating things like this is there are many, many tiny insects and they are pollinated and you get that benefit of chewing on them too.

Protein.

Also, these are very high in vitamin c. They are pretty tasty stuff.

That's good work, John.

Both the Navajo and the Shoshone had the same name for this plant called blue falling.

I really like that name, but the leaves taste like green beans.

I'll be dipped in roll, you're right, they do.

They actually do!

And the big ones are really good for wrapping up little fish parts and rice and making sushi.

So the point is that here we are in this wild supposedly desolate place and there's all kinds of useful plants.

Limitless.

Everything you're looking at is useful.

Pretty much for something.

While I'm focusing on plants.

My brother Dick whose a geologist and has scrambled all over these mountains is always looking at the big picture.

We're at a 11,000 feet above Stough Creek basin, what do you think it would've looked like 15,000 years ago?

This would've been a white out.

We'd be standing up on a crest of white, an invariable sea of glacial ice.

I'd bet there was a glacier here over 5,000 years ago.

I'll bet there was a glacier here 2,000 years ago.

It's a tough bushwhack to the bottom.

It's a long an ancient Indian trial.

Once we are down in the basin, we have streams to ford and lakes to get around and then we have to find where the muleteer left our camping gear, if we're lucky.

Alright, fanfare guys, just to announce we're here.

(Music) (Music) Oh heaven.

It's a long walk.

We're close to seven miles here with probably elevation gain close to 2,000 feet and we dropped down tired.

Fortunately, for us we had mules to bring in the heavy camping stuff and the food.

All we had to do was bring in our base stuff.

This is a base camp type water filter, gets rid of all the cryptosridium all the other amoebas in the water.

This is a world war two brass alcohol stove.

It works just fine.

Put a little alcohol in the middle of it and it has holes all around it and it takes in just the right amount of oxygen and the flame comes up the middle and I built these tin can chimneys for it that blocks the wind and also focuses the head up high We will make this our base camp for the next few nights and we're going to seal this tonight and it becomes bear proof.

This looks like a pretty logical place to stay.

Alright we have the fly, keeps the condensation from entering in and if you really want to go all out you can put stakes down, but unless you have wind you don't really need the stakes and then the inner door which has great netting you can open and there you have your inside and I will close it to keep the mosquitoes out.

Just as I finish setting up my tent.

The muleteer showed up with our food and the rest of our gear.

God bless him.

Now how come I have a head net up and you don't?

They don't like me.

Those mosquitoes don't fly that high when you're up on this horse they don't even bother you.

Is that right?

I've seen kids come up here and this altitude they'd have to go back.

It affects people in different ways.

It's the best job that I can find where they pay you to go up places like this.

The first activity in the morning is a nature walk around camp.

I want to make sure John really did live off the land for a summer as he has told us.

Hey John, just at the edge of timberline here you get some really strange growth form, sort of out of middle earth.

Yeah, they are strange looking alright.

It's a combination of snow, heavy snow on top of trees that have been windblown.

Because we're at such a high elevation the trees are short.

The wind blows right through and tends to blow the trees in a downwind direction Most of trees lean that way and then you get heavy snows in the winter here maybe 8-10 feet of snow and it compresses them down to the ground, so you have trunks that lay horizontally for a while and then they grow up again.

They grow up when they can.

When they can.

This is Englmann spruce, which is the only spruce that we have in these mountains, but like all spruces they are very high in antioxidants.

The Indians they made a medicine out of the tips of this spruce for just about every kind of wintertime sickness like what we would call the common cold and they just used these in a tea.

You can see where the edge of the timberline is a very definite margin and then after that no trees, just Alpline tunder.

The Apline flowers are completely different.

They are very different.

There are some sub Apline overlap here, but most of them are very different from what we find below the tree line.

It's just like a string of pearls of lakes and between them are these streams, where the stream comes into the lake is where most of the big fish are and you can fish up here.

I suppose if you catch a 10-11 incher that's a big fish in these lakes.

Hey, Yetman, you got any 15-inch rainbows yet today?

No, 15 inch rainbows, actually no 15-inch anything.

What should be in here?

The fish that I've seen come out are like six inches.

Well that's basically because they are book trout and brook trout tend to overpopulate the lake pretty quickly.

It's been discovered that fish populations do very well in almost all the lakes in the Wind River range and that's why you can go from one lake and have a population of let's say golden trout and go to another lake and there's... Cut-throat Cut throat or if there's nothing else there's brook trout.

When you get bored there's brook trout.

There are over 2,000 lakes in this range, not all of them have fish, but I would say the majority of them do.

The other nice thing about being in this range is whole new set of lakes and then you've got a whole another possibility of fish population.

There are plenty of fish but as John warns us all is not well in the Wind River Range.

We've been working up here in the Alpine for about 14 years on some wildlife studies, all of the field crews have noticed decline in the small animal population as well as leghorn sheep, which is the one animal that is iconically associated with the Alpine and we suspect there are changes going on.

The food hasn't declined at all.

It's still there in abundance.

In fact, it's getting more abundant because there are less animals eating it.

The decline seem to be associated with other factors, we can't pin it on what's been termed global warming.

We can say that the water is getting more scarce in the higher alpine slopes.

Some of the peat bogs that were notoriously spongy and full of water are dry now, but we're finding mineral deficiencies in the plants in the alpine condition.

The most susceptible ecological region to this kind of dumping of pollutants within in ecosystem is the alpine.

We get so much more snow, so much more above 10,500 feet which is tree line here so we may be getting 15 times the amount of pollution up here than we're getting down at the lower elevations.

This isn't glacial because it's all going to melt by the first of September.

Yeah, this is just a snowfield that, there are some permanent snow fields that are up here that are not glaciers up in the head of this canyon over here.

This permanent snowfield.

And that's un-ending water from below as long as it's there Over thousands of years after the glaciation, the glaciers washed away as they moved down these little moraines here that are still hanging on the sides, boulder fields in a straight line and these gouges in granite itself.

If must've been an amazing amount of force that scraped the sides of these walls with boulders.

So if you've got a couple of thousand feet of ice intermeshed with boulders the size of city blocks, you can do a lot of carving.

You can do a lot of carving.

The Wind River Range is notorious for its wind.

There are refugees from the wind if you know where to find them.

This is what is known as crumholding and it's made of several species of spruces and white bark pine.

But they are growing horizontally.

They grow horizontally.

This is all one tree we're looking at here and it just spreads out along the ground and blows with the wind and you can crawl under these things and get completely out of the wind.

It's such dense foliage.

Like this you mean?

Yeah You're right, there's no wind in here.

None at all.

(Music) The glaciers, the snowfields, the lakes, the wild rivers, the flowers, the forests, are all protected because of the wilderness act of 1964.

Thanks to the foresight of those individuals who put together that act, this area will be here as it is now as long as people are around.

Join us next time In the Americas with me David Yetman.

When outsiders think of Brazil they usually think of the Amazon rainforest or Rio de Janeiro.

There's another Brazil, where we find cactus, cowboys, fishermen, and soccer.

It's Brazil's northeast, especially the state of Ceara.

This is moose habitat.

Yes, it is.

I don't see any.

Wah.

Wah.

Okay, no moose.

These streams would've been full of gold panels.

You can come in and buy up the rights to entire streams.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

Copies of this and other episodes of In the Americas with David Yetman are available from the Southwest Center.

To order call 1-800-937-8632.

Please mention the episode number and program title.

Please be sure to visit us at Inthemericas.com or intheamericas.org