What follows is the conclusion of Wallace Stegner's "Wilderness Letter."  If you would like to read the letter separate from the background and foreground material we provided in part's 1-3, simply click on Part 4 and read the last 3 posts. 

"Let me say something on the subject of the kinds of wilderness worth preserving.  Most of those areas contemplated are in the national forests and in high mountain country.  For all the usual recreational purposes, the alpine and the forest wildernesses are obviously the most important, both as genetic banks and as beauty spots. But for the spiritual renewal, the recognition of identity, the birth of awe, other kinds will serve every bit as well.  Perhaps, because they are less friendly to life, more abstractly nonhuman, they will serve even better.  On our Saskatchewan prairie, the nearest neighbor was four miles away, and at night we saw only two lights on all the dark rounding earth.

"The earth was full of animals - field mice, ground squirrels, weasels, ferrets, badgers, coyotes, burrowing owls, snakes.  I knew them as my little brothers, as fellow creatures, and I have never been able to look upon animals in any other way since.  The sky in that country came clear down to the ground on every side, and it was full of great weathers, and clouds, and winds, and hawks.  I hope I learned something from looking a long way, from looking up, from being much alone.

"A prairie like that, one big enough to carry the eye clear to the sinking, rounding horizon, can be as lonely and grand and simple in its forms as the sea.  It is as good a place as any for the wilderness experience to happen; the vanishing prairie is as worth preserving for the wilderness idea as the alpine forest.

"So are great reaches of our western deserts, scarred somewhat by prospectors but otherwise open, beautiful, waiting, close to whatever God you want to see in them.  Just as a sample, let me suggest the Robbers' Roost country in Wayne County, Utah, near the Capitol Reef National Monument.  In that desert climate the dozer and jeep tracks will not soon melt back into the earth, but the country has a way of making the scars insignificant.  It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.

"Save a piece of country like that intact, and it does not matter in the slightest that only a few people every year will go into it.  That is precisely its value.  Roads would be a desecration, crowds would ruin it.  But those who haven't the strength or youth to go into it and live can simply sit and look.  They can look two hundred miles, clear into Colorado: and looking down over the cliffs and canyons of the San Rafael Swell and the Robbers' Roost they can also look as deeply into themselves as anywhere I know.

"And if they can't even get to the places on the Aquarius Plateau where the present roads will carry them, they can simply contemplate the idea, take pleasure in the fact that such a timeless and uncontrolled part of earth is still there.  These are some of the things wilderness can do for us.  That is the reason we need to put into effect, for its preservation, some other principle that the principles of exploitation or "usefulness" or even recreation.  We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.  For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

Very sincerely yours,

Wallace Stegner"