The National Wilderness Preservation System was created on September 3, 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed The Wilderness Act. The National Wilderness Preservation System, created at the signing of the Wilderness Act, was to contain those lands, already owned by the American people, that were "untrammeled by man." They were to be managed "for the use and enjoyment of the American people in such manner as will leave them unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness..." No roads or structures were to be built. Vehicles and other mechanical equipment were not to be used. The minimum size was set at 5,000 acres, with certain exceptions. The Wilderness Act also put 9.1 million acres of national forest land into the new system. A process was created for congressional designation of future acreage in the national forests, parks, and wildlife refuges. In 1976, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act set forth a process for adding Bureau of Land Management (BLM) areas to the National Wilderness Preservation System. These four sets of public lands total 623 million acres, about 26 percent of our country.
This feature class was derived from the cartographic feature files (CFF's) for the Primary Base Series 7.5 minute quadrangles provided by the USDA Forest Service Geospatial Service and Technology Center (GSTC). The CFFs may have been augmented with data from a variety of sources (GPS, DOQQs, hardcopy maps) per direction from Forest specialists.