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Check Out the Top 15 “Wild Facts” about BLM Wilderness and Wilderness Study Areas on This Month’s #conservationlands15 Social Media Takeover.
1. BLM’s nearly 8.8 million acres of federally designated wilderness account for about 3.5 percent of the Bureau’s total acreage in the United States.
2. BLM’s newest wilderness is the Jim McClure-Jerry Peak Wilderness in Idaho, designated on August 7, 2015. BLM’s oldest wilderness areas are the 1,807-acre Santa Lucia Wilderness in California and Oregon’s 8,604-acre Wild Rogue Wilderness, designated in 1978.
3. The BLM’s largest wilderness is the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. At nearly 315,000 acres, the wilderness is about half the size of Rhode Island.
4. Just five acres, the Rocks and Islands Wilderness off the coast of California is BLM’s smallest.
5. At 260,000 acres, Alaska’s Central Arctic Management Area is BLM’s largest wilderness study area.
6. The smallest wilderness study area is 10-acre Hack Lake WSA in Colorado.
7. BLM manages nearly two-thirds of the 5.5 million acres Congress has designated as wilderness in the past 15 years.
8. Alaska’s Central Arctic Management Area Wilderness Study Area contains the first well-documented Paleo-Indian site discovered in the North American Arctic. Excavations there have revealed stone tools and hearths dating to 7,700 – 9,700 BC.
9. The Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness in New Mexico preserves a record of biotic change that occurred across the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event of 66 million years ago, including the best record of mammalian succession and post-extinction re-diversification.
10. BLM manages more desert wilderness units than any of the wilderness-managing agencies (National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and U.S. Forest Service). Most of BLM’s wilderness areas are located in the Southwest; 80 percent are in Arizona, California, and Nevada.
11. Archaeological sites in New Mexico’s Peña Blanca Wilderness Study Area contain remains of the oldest cultivated corn in the U.S.
12. The highest BLM-managed land is 14,048-foot Handies Peak in the Handies Peak Wilderness Study Area in Colorado.
13. Jaguars, a species rarely seen in the U.S., have occasionally been seen in Guadalupe Canyon Wilderness Study Area in New Mexico. Located on the U.S.-Mexico border, the unit is the farthest south of the BLM’s 517 WSAs.
14. The King Range Wilderness includes approximately 25 miles of Pacific coastline—part of California’s “Lost Coast”—one of the few oceanfront wilderness areas in the Lower 48.
15. The BLM manages five wilderness study areas in Utah’s Henry Mountains, a place so remote it was the last mountain range in the Lower 48 to be mapped and named (Mt. Hillers, Little Rockies, Mt. Pennell, Bull Mountain, and Mt. Ellen-Blue Hills WSAs).
Note: The #conservationlands15 Social Media Takeover is a 2015 monthly celebration of the 15th anniversary of the BLM’s National Conservation Lands.
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