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Wilderness Profile


Just three miles off of Interstate 80, Castle Peak Potential Wilderness is among the most scenic areas in the Tahoe National Forest. Home to extraordinary old-growth red fir forests and the little Truckee River, Castle Peak provides clean drinking water to residents of Nevada County.

 

 


Permanently Protecting Our Wilderness

Since 1976, CWC has been working to ensure ecologically sound management of California's public lands and potential wilderness. Recent campaigns include opposing the weakening of the Sierra Nevada Framework. We are also addressing the Bush Administration's ban on more wilderness as well as the controversial RS 2477, with which county governments and others are claiming thousands of spurious "rights-of-way" to build roads across our national parks, forests, wilderness, and other public lands.


Protecting California's Deserts

CWC works for the protection of fragile wildlands in California's Mojave, Colorado (Sonoran), and Great Basin deserts.


State Wilderness Campaign

CWC has launched this campaign to designate and protect wilderness on lands owned by the state of California. We have created maps of potential state wilderness and are now in the process of sending staff and volunteers to field-check areas eligible for wilderness protection.


California's Last Wild Places

The California Wilderness Coalition's Citizen Wilderness Inventory identified millions of acres of wild lands that still qualify for wilderness designation in California.

From 1997 to 2001, CWC staff and volunteers,along with our partner organizations, spent thousands of hours traveling California's federally owned public lands to determine the true extent of the state's remaining unprotected wilderness. In each National Forest and Bureau of Land Management area, we found new wild areas never identified before, as well as substantial additions to known wild areas. Many of these areas were overlooked in official government surveys and still lack protection of any kind. more...

 

 

En Español

 
  • WHAT'S NEW
  • Bighorn Sheep Lawsuit Over
    Habitat Protection Filed

     

    Lauren McSherry, The Sun
    December 18, 2008

    Three environmental groups filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Bureau of Land Management for a small change to a desert conservation plan that they claim will have a big impact on the bighorn sheep living south of San Gorgonio pass.

    The Sierra Club, California Wilderness Coalition and Center for Biological Diversity are suing the BLM to keep the agency from opening a mountain road that bisects the area where the sheep bear and nurse their young.

    "Dunn Road crosses important high mountain habitat for the bighorn sheep and a lambing area," Ziegler said. "The road was illegally constructed, and it trespassed over BLM land in the Santa Rosa Mountains."

    Read more...

     

     

  • Sign our Petition to Protect Wilderness
  • Before Congress is a historic, bi-partisan, public lands bill that would permanently protect more California wilderness than any bill passed in the last 15 years. While few bills have moved through the current Congress, this bill was the exception, but at the 11 th hour has been stalled by anti-wilderness opponents like Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma whose threatened filibuster stopped the bill cold this week.

    We have one last chance. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has vowed to reintroduce the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act in January. We must ensure Senator Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi do everything possible to pass this legislation after the first of the year.

    Sign the Petition

     

  • Watch CWC's Video
  • With the generous support of the folks at ChannelG, CWC produced an informational video this year. To watch the video and find out more about the great work we're doing throughout the state, click here.