Visit Wilderness

Search for a wilderness as the destination for your next outdoor adventure.

Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, Minnesota

Why Visit Wilderness?

While wilderness can be appreciated from afar—through online content, television, or books—nothing compares to experiencing it firsthand. Activities like camping, hiking, or hunting allow you to fully enjoy the recreational, ecological, spiritual, and health benefits that wilderness areas offer. These areas provide “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation,” chances to observe wildlife, moments to renew and refresh, and the physical benefits of outdoor exercise. In many wilderness areas, you can even bring your well-behaved dog.

Learn more about the diverse ways in which we benefit from wilderness and threats wilderness areas face today.

Imagine waking to a mist enshrouded wetland, echoing with the calls of herons and ibis. Your camping site is a wooden platform surrounded by miles and miles of wet-prairie or moss-covered cypress. The only sounds you hear are the calls of native wildlife and those you make upon taking in such beauty. This is what it is like to experience a night in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) Wilderness Area! The Okefenokee NWR encompasses the Okefenokee Swamp, one of the oldest and best-preserved freshwater areas in the country. This vast bog, lies inside a huge depression that was once on the ocean floor. The refuge extends just over the state line into Florida. The interior wetlands of the Okefenokee Swamp within Georgia have been designated the state's largest wilderness area. Native Americans called the swamp the "land of trembling earth" because the unstable peat deposits that cover much of the swamp floor tremble when stepped on. "Okefenokee" is a European interpretation of their words. The last Native Americans to seek sanctuary here, the Seminole, were driven out of the swamp and into Florida in 1850, and lived on to become the only Native Americans to refuse to sign a treaty with the U.S. government.

The Okefenokee Swamp forms the headwaters for two very distinct rivers. The historic Suwannee River originates in the heart of the swamp and flows southwest. The second is the St. Marys River, which originates in the southeastern portion of the swamp, and flows to the Atlantic Ocean, forming part of the boundary between Georgia and Florida. The swamp provides a rich diversity of habitat types that support numerous species of wildlife and plants - islands, lakes, cypress forests, scrub-shrub areas, and open wet "prairies". Fire and water define the swamp's habitats. Lakes and prairies are created after long droughts when fire burns off layers of vegetation and peat. Rain water replenishes the swamp, filling in the open spaces created by fire. Later, cycles of drought lower water levels, causing vegetation and displaced peat blow-ups to cover the area again. Fire sweeps through the area once more and the entire process continues again.

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Leave No Trace

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Applicable Wilderness Law(s)

Public Law 93-429

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