Visit Wilderness
Search for a wilderness as the destination for your next outdoor adventure.
Why Visit Wilderness?
Learn more about the diverse ways in which we benefit from wilderness and threats wilderness areas face today.
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Search for a wilderness as the destination for your next outdoor adventure.
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.
The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) is a natural area located in the northern third of the Superior National Forest in northeastern Minnesota. It extends nearly 199 miles along the international boundary. The BWCAW's northern border is contiguous with Canada's Quetico Provincial Park, also managed as a wilderness area, and together they form a core wilderness area of approximately two million acres.
Great glaciers carved the physical features of what is today known as the BWCAW by scraping and gouging rock. The glaciers left behind lakes and streams interspersed with islands and surrounded by rugged cliffs and crags, gentle hills, canyon walls, rocky shores, and sandy beaches. Approximately 1175 lakes varying in size from 10 acres to 10,000 acres and several hundred miles of streams comprise about 190,000 acres (20%) of the BWCAW surface area and provide for the opportunity for long-distance travel by watercraft. This type of experience is rare within the continental United States and the BWCAW is the only large lake land wilderness in the National Wilderness Preservation System The BWCAW allows visitors to canoe, portage, and camp in the spirit of the French Voyageurs of 200 years ago. The BWCAW has approximately 80 entry points with access to 1200 miles of canoe routes, 18 hiking trails, and nearly 2,200 campsites (designated by a latrine and steel fire grate). It offers freedom to those who wish to pursue an experience of expansive solitude, challenge, and personal integration with nature. In the winter months, visitors to the BWCAW enjoy opportunities for skiing, dogsledding, camping, and ice fishing.
The BWCAW has a rich human history beginning with sites from the Paleo-Indian culture from 10,000-12000 years ago. There are numerous cultural resource sites in the BWCAW resulting from the Woodland period (500 BC - 1650 AD) and historic Native American settlements and activities. These include camping sites, villages, wild ricing sites, cemetery areas, pictographs, and sites of spiritual and traditional importance. The BWCAW also contains evidence of historic European and early American activities ranging from the fur trade up to and including early logging and settlement of the area. The BWCAW provides important habitat to many wildlife species at all levels of the food chain including a large, stable gray wolf population, red fox, lynx, fisher, pine martin, mink, otter, weasel, black bear, moose, beaver, red-backed salamander, southern bog lemming, northern leopard frogs, bats, white-tailed deer, black bear, beaver, porcupine, snowshoe hare, red squirrel, and chipmunk. Fish population includes lake trout, walleye, northern pike, smallmouth bass, largemouth bass, perch, crappie, whitefish, sucker, sturgeon, burbot, and many species of minnows. As any summer visitor will tell you the BWCAW is also home to a wide array of abundant insect life.
Remember that the BWCAW is heavily used, so consider traveling in smaller groups sizes, keeping your noise level to a minimum as sound travels well over water, preventing campsites from growing larger by using fewer and smaller tents, protecting green trees from vandalism and looking for your dead and down firewood well away from your campsite, practicing portage etiquette, do not burn any trash to prevent air and water pollution, and planning ahead to prevent emergency rescues. Wilderness travel can be a challenge and a risk, so take responsibility for yourself, your group, and the health of the environment.
For more information to plan a trip, visit https://usfs-public.app.box.com/v/BWCAW-TripPlanner.
How to follow the seven standard Leave No Trace principles differs in different parts of the country (desert vs. Rocky Mountains). Click on any of the principles listed below to learn more about how they apply in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
For more information on Leave No Trace, Visit the Leave No Trace, Inc. website.
Digital and paper maps are critical tools for wilderness visitors. Online maps can help you plan and prepare for your visit ahead of time. You can also carry digital maps with you on your GPS unit or other handheld GPS device. Having a paper map with you in the backcountry, as well as solid orienteering skills, however, ensures that you can still route-find in the event that your electronic device fails.
Motorized equipment and equipment used for mechanical transport is generally prohibited in all wilderness areas. This includes the use of motor vehicles, motorboats, motorized equipment, bicycles, hang gliders, wagons, carts, portage wheels, and the landing of aircraft including helicopters.
Date: September 3, 1964
Acreage: 886,673 acres
The Wilderness Act - Public law 88-577 (9/3/1964) To establish a National Wilderness Preservation System for the permanent good of the whole people, and for other purposes
For more information (To download or see all affected Wilderness areas) visit our law library for 88-577 or special provisions for 88-577 or legislative history for 88-577 for this law.
Date: October 21, 1978
Acreage: 1,075,500 acres
Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act - Public law 95-495 (10/21/1978) To designate the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, to establish the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Mining Protection Act, and for other purposes
For more information (To download or see all affected Wilderness areas) visit our law library for 95-495 or special provisions for 95-495 or legislative history for 95-495 for this law.
People who volunteer their time to steward our wilderness areas are an essential part of wilderness management. Contact the following groups to inquire about volunteer opportunities. Groups are listed alphabetically by the state(s) in which the wilderness is located.