Welcome to the Park of the Month newsletter for June 2026. This month we’re featuring the world’s first designated wilderness area.
Gila Wilderness Area
Location
New Mexico, United States
Claim to fame
Established in 1924, Gila was the first place in the world to be officially designated a wilderness area. Aldo Leopold, who was at that time a young US Forest Service employee, proposed the creation of Gila Wilderness Area after learning of plans to build a road in the heart of the pristine Gila National Forest backcountry. He designed a plan that would keep the area wild by restricting all mechanized equipment and development, a plan that would later be codified into US law under the Wilderness Act of 1964.
Today there are 806 designated wilderness areas in the US, and the concept has been exported to over 60 nations worldwide.
Reason to visit
Situated in Gila National Forest and next to Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument and Aldo Leopold Wilderness Area, Gila Wilderness Area is half a million acres of protected wilderness. Visitors today can explore it via foot or horseback, much as visitors would have over a century ago. The wilderness area protects the vertical cliffs of the Gila River corridor, where visitors can spot the remains of cliff dwellings left by the Mongollon people of the late 13th and early 14th centuries.
Wild Fact
Like many designated wilderness areas in the US, Gila is home to fragile, rare, or even threatened or endangered species of flora and fauna. Gila Wilderness Area is home to the largest population of the Mexican subspecies of spotted owl, which has been listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. These birds thrive in the wilderness area’s ponderosa pine forest, one of the healthiest and largest such forests in the world.
Want to learn more about Gila Wilderness Area? Visit the park’s website.
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