It's been 50 years since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed The Wilderness Act into law in 1964, but the question remains: Why has so much land within the National Park System not been designated as wilderness?

News that the National Park Service wants to consider whether grizzly bears should be restored to the North Cascades ecosystem in Washington state is a big step towards bolstering the region's ecological integrity, but recent events surrounding the Endangered Species Act raises questions about whether the Park Service can succeed if it decides grizzly recovery is in the ecosystem's best interests.

There’s a sense of place in the West. It flows from endless stands of lodgepole pines, glades of aspen tinged gold by the season, horizons that spread the sky wider than you’ve ever noticed. Spend a little time here, and it seeps into you. It’s the distant bugle of a bull elk, a band of pronghorn darting across the open range, the chortling flock of sandhill cranes, southbound, high overhead. They all fill your senses with the West as it’s always been, as it always should be.

At Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks, the National Park Service should welcome a discussion into a form of backcountry travel that, if properly managed, need not alter the decades-long experience of visiting these two magnificent parks, but rather enhance it for a small number of wilderness travelers.