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Great Sand Dunes, Colorado, 1997

"On September 3, 1964, after eight years of deliberation and 66 drafts, an act creating the National Wilderness Preservation System passed under the pen of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The measure established 54 wilderness areas in national forests in 13 states and decreed that the 9.1 million acres within them were to be protected in their natural condition. Wilderness, the act declared, was to be recognized 'as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.'''

—From "Wilderness: America's Land Apart," November 1998, National Geographic magazine

Photograph by Peter Essick