ABSTRACT
Expectation of a wilderness experience has been built into the public use of the National Park System right from the outset; it was not something that just happened with the passage of the Wilderness Act. With regard to legislative wilderness, we have about 40,000,000 acres in the National Park System, out of a total of about 80,000,000 acres in the National Wilderness Preservation System. All of us need to be concerned about the basic issue of reconciling value systems associated with wilderness and public use. Expectations and values brought to wilderness by visitors are of a higher standard. In terms of wilderness management, we desire management without having a major manipulative impact. When discussing the challenge of managing wilderness in national parks, we are really discussing basic protection; a concept of management based on a philosophy which has excluded providing modern, up-to-date visitor accommodation, settling instead for the primitive.
