Some of the wildest places in the American West don’t have a wilderness sign.
They aren’t national parks.
They aren’t designated wilderness.
And they don’t always have a famous trail leading into them.
Instead, they are Wilderness Study Areas—public lands that the Bureau of Land Management has identified as having wilderness characteristics and that are being managed to preserve those characteristics while their ultimate fate is determined.
Across the West, these landscapes include desert canyons, mountain ranges, badlands, grasslands, forests, rivers, and enormous stretches of country where roads and development remain limited.
They are some of the places where you can still look across a landscape and see very little evidence of modern infrastructure.
That matters.
In June 2026, the Bureau of Land Management announced a nationwide review of its policy for managing Wilderness Study Areas.
The agency is considering whether to update, clarify, or revise BLM Manual 6330, the policy that establishes how WSAs are managed while they remain under study for potential wilderness designation.
The review does not itself eliminate Wilderness Study Areas.
It does, however, raise a much larger question:
How should we manage the places that may become tomorrow’s wilderness?
Explore the Wilderness Study Area Map
The map below shows the distribution of BLM Wilderness Study Areas across the West.
These landscapes are remarkably diverse.
Some are enormous desert basins.
Some are mountain ranges.
Some contain spectacular canyons.
Others are quiet stretches of sagebrush, grassland, or forest that may never become famous—but still provide habitat, solitude, clean water, and opportunities for recreation.
The map makes one thing clear:
Wilderness Study Areas are not one type of landscape.
They are a network of places spread across an enormous portion of the American West.
```What Is a Wilderness Study Area?
The name can be confusing.
A Wilderness Study Area is not the same thing as designated wilderness.
Congress creates designated wilderness under the Wilderness Act.
Wilderness Study Areas are different.
They are lands that have been identified through federal wilderness reviews or other authorized processes as having wilderness characteristics and that are managed to preserve their suitability for potential wilderness designation while their status remains unresolved.
Under BLM policy, those characteristics generally include:
- Naturalness
- Opportunities for solitude
- Opportunities for primitive and unconfined recreation
- Supplemental values such as ecological, geological, historical, or cultural features
BLM Manual 6330 establishes a non-impairment standard intended to maintain those characteristics while a WSA remains under study.
In other words, the idea is relatively simple:
Don’t make a decision today that permanently destroys the wilderness characteristics that Congress may want to consider tomorrow.
Why Do These Areas Exist?
The Wilderness Act was signed into law in 1964.
It created a national system for protecting some of America’s remaining wild lands from roads, development, and other forms of permanent alteration.
But identifying potential wilderness is not as simple as drawing a line on a map.
The federal government has spent decades inventorying public lands, evaluating their characteristics, studying their uses, and considering whether particular areas might be appropriate for wilderness designation.
Wilderness Study Areas are part of that long process.
Some have been studied for decades.
Some have been recommended for wilderness.
Some have been released from study.
Some have eventually been designated by Congress.
And some remain in a kind of limbo—managed to preserve their wilderness characteristics while waiting for a final decision.
That uncertainty is part of what makes their management so important.
What Does the Current Policy Do?
BLM Manual 6330 provides guidance for managing WSAs so they remain suitable for potential wilderness designation.
The core concept is the non-impairment standard.
Activities generally cannot be allowed to permanently impair the wilderness characteristics for which an area is being studied, subject to specific exceptions and existing rights.
That doesn’t mean nothing can happen inside a WSA.
People can still visit.
People can hike.
People can hunt.
People can fish.
People can ride horses.
Existing uses may continue.
Certain activities can be authorized.
Emergency actions can occur.
And valid existing rights can still matter.
The difference is that managers have to consider whether proposed activities would impair the area’s wilderness characteristics.
That extra layer of consideration is the point.
What Is BLM Considering Changing?
The 2026 policy review is not a proposed redesignation of every WSA.
Instead, BLM is reviewing the policy itself.
The Federal Register notice asks for information and recommendations about whether the existing Manual 6330 should be updated, clarified, or revised.
That might sound technical.
It is.
But policy manuals can have enormous consequences on the ground.
They determine how managers interpret rules.
They establish standards.
They influence how proposed projects are evaluated.
And they shape what kinds of activities can occur in places that are supposed to retain wilderness characteristics.
A change in policy can therefore change how a landscape is managed without changing a single boundary on a map.
Wilderness Study Areas Are Not Locked Away
This is an important part of the conversation.
WSAs are not closed museums.
They are public lands.
People use them.
People recreate in them.
Ranchers may have valid existing rights.
Local communities may depend on access through or around them.
Federal agencies may need to manage wildfire, invasive species, wildlife, water, and other resources.
The goal of WSA management isn’t to eliminate human interaction with these landscapes.
It is to prevent activities from permanently changing the characteristics that make the areas worthy of wilderness consideration.
That is a much narrower idea.
And it is one worth understanding before debating whether the policy should change.
Why Wilderness Characteristics Matter
Wilderness is about more than scenery.
A landscape can be valuable because it is difficult to access.
Because it is quiet.
Because it has few roads.
Because wildlife can move through it.
Because natural processes still dominate.
Because people can experience a place without seeing signs of development everywhere they look.
Those characteristics are increasingly rare.
Across much of the West, roads, energy development, recreation infrastructure, transmission lines, mining, agriculture, and expanding communities have divided formerly continuous landscapes into smaller pieces.
A Wilderness Study Area can provide one of those remaining pieces of relatively intact country.
It doesn’t have to be a famous landscape to matter.
Wildlife Doesn’t Need a Wilderness Designation
Wildlife doesn’t know whether Congress has designated a place as wilderness.
A mule deer doesn’t recognize a WSA boundary.
A desert bighorn doesn’t care whether a canyon has a formal designation.
A golden eagle doesn’t distinguish between BLM land and a national park.
What matters is habitat.
Connectivity.
Water.
Food.
Cover.
Migration routes.
And the absence—or presence—of disturbance.
That is one reason large blocks of undeveloped BLM land can be important even when they aren’t formally designated wilderness.
They can provide room for wildlife to move.
They can connect larger ecosystems.
And they can provide places where natural processes continue with relatively little interference.
Roads Change Landscapes
As with the Roadless Rule, roads are one of the clearest examples of why wilderness characteristics matter.
A road does more than provide transportation.
It creates access.
It fragments habitat.
It changes drainage.
It can introduce invasive species.
It can increase human activity.
It can make previously remote areas easier to develop.
And once a road is established, it can become the foundation for additional infrastructure.
In a Wilderness Study Area, that matters because the absence of roads is part of what makes the landscape eligible for wilderness consideration in the first place.
A road through a WSA may not destroy the entire area.
But it can permanently change a piece of it.
And fragmentation can matter just as much as total acreage.
The Desert Is Not Empty
Many Wilderness Study Areas are found in landscapes that people casually describe as empty.
The Great Basin.
The Mojave.
The Sonoran Desert.
The Colorado Plateau.
The Owyhee Canyonlands.
The high desert of New Mexico.
The sagebrush country of Nevada and Idaho.
But empty is the wrong word.
These landscapes support plants and animals adapted to some of the harshest conditions in North America.
They contain springs and ephemeral streams.
They provide migration routes.
They contain archaeological sites and cultural resources.
And they can support some of the last remaining large, relatively intact ecosystems in the West.
The fact that a landscape doesn’t have many people living in it is often precisely what makes it valuable.
A Landscape-Level Question
This is where Wilderness Study Areas fit into a larger conversation about public lands.
We often manage public lands according to individual parcels.
A grazing allotment.
A mining claim.
A trail.
A road.
A recreation area.
A wildlife habitat project.
Each decision can seem relatively small.
But landscapes don’t experience those decisions one at a time.
They experience them together.
A new road connects to an existing road.
A transmission line crosses a previously undeveloped valley.
A mine adds another piece of infrastructure.
A recreation area grows.
Over time, a landscape that once felt remote can become increasingly fragmented.
The purpose of WSA management is, in part, to prevent those incremental decisions from eliminating the very characteristics that Congress may eventually be asked to consider protecting permanently.
Wilderness Is a Long-Term Decision
There is an important asymmetry in decisions about wild public lands.
Protecting a landscape today does not necessarily mean it can never be developed.
But developing it today can make future protection impossible.
That is the logic behind studying and preserving wilderness characteristics.
If Congress eventually decides that an area should become wilderness, the characteristics need to still exist.
If those characteristics have already been lost, designation becomes much harder.
A road can be removed.
A structure can sometimes be demolished.
A disturbed area can sometimes be restored.
But ecological and cultural restoration can take decades or centuries.
And some changes cannot truly be reversed.
What Happens When Policy Changes?
This is why the current BLM review deserves attention.
The agency isn’t simply asking whether a particular road should be built.
It is asking whether the policy used to manage thousands of acres of potential wilderness remains appropriate.
The answer could affect how future activities are evaluated.
It could influence how managers interpret the non-impairment standard.
It could affect the balance between wilderness characteristics and other multiple-use objectives.
And it could influence the future of individual areas through subsequent planning decisions.
The details matter.
A small change in wording can have a surprisingly large effect when applied across millions of acres.
Wilderness and Multiple Use
The Bureau of Land Management manages its lands under a multiple-use framework.
That means public lands can support many different uses.
Grazing.
Recreation.
Energy development.
Mining.
Wildlife.
Timber in some areas.
Conservation.
And more.
Those uses don’t always fit neatly together.
A landscape that is excellent habitat for wildlife might also contain valuable minerals.
A spectacular recreation area might also provide important grazing access.
A remote canyon might contain archaeological resources as well as a proposed road corridor.
The challenge isn’t pretending those conflicts don’t exist.
It’s deciding which places are appropriate for which uses.
And sometimes the most appropriate use for a particular landscape is to leave its wild characteristics intact.
Why We Built This Map
We created the Public Land Threats Map because public land issues are often difficult to understand from a policy document alone.
“BLM Manual 6330” doesn’t sound particularly exciting.
But put Wilderness Study Areas on a map and the issue becomes much easier to understand.
You can see the deserts.
The mountains.
The canyons.
The sagebrush.
The wildlife corridors.
The watersheds.
The places where WSAs connect with designated wilderness and other protected lands.
And you can see how widely distributed these landscapes are across the West.
We’re not trying to say that every Wilderness Study Area should automatically become wilderness.
We’re not trying to say that public lands should never be managed or used.
We’re trying to make the landscape visible.
Because understanding where these places are—and what surrounds them—is an important part of understanding what is at stake.
Location matters.
What Happens Next?
BLM announced its review of Manual 6330 in June 2026 and requested public input on potential updates, clarifications, or revisions to the agency’s Wilderness Study Area management policy. The comment period closed August 14, 2026.
The review itself does not eliminate Wilderness Study Areas.
It does not automatically open them to roads, mining, energy development, or other incompatible uses.
And it does not designate them as wilderness.
What it does is begin a review of the framework BLM uses to manage these lands.
The next steps will be important because policy changes can eventually influence individual land-use planning decisions and project-level management.
For people who care about these places, that means paying attention to the policy itself—and to what happens in individual field offices and land-use plans.
There are also simple ways to stay engaged:
- Follow updates from the Bureau of Land Management.
- Learn about Wilderness Study Areas in your region.
- Read the underlying land-management plans and wilderness inventories.
- Learn about the wildlife, cultural resources, and recreation opportunities within these landscapes.
- Pay attention to future planning processes and opportunities for public participation.
- Visit these places and experience what makes them worth protecting.
Sometimes the best argument for keeping a place wild is simply knowing what it feels like to be there.
The Bigger Question
The debate over Wilderness Study Areas is often framed as a question of whether land should be developed or protected.
We think the real question is a little different.
What do we want these landscapes to look like decades from now?
BLM manages hundreds of millions of acres.
Some of those lands are appropriate for energy development.
Some are important grazing landscapes.
Some are recreation destinations.
Some contain valuable minerals.
And some are valuable precisely because they remain wild.
Wilderness Study Areas give us an opportunity to keep that last possibility alive while those decisions are being made.
That doesn’t mean every WSA should become wilderness.
It means we should be careful about permanently eliminating the option.
Because once a road cuts through a canyon, once a landscape is fragmented, or once development transforms a remote valley, we may not get another chance to make the same decision.
The West still has places where the landscape is bigger than the infrastructure.
Places where the loudest sound is the wind.
Places where you can walk all day without crossing a road.
Places that still feel wild.
**Maybe those places don’t need another use.
Maybe their value is that they remain wild while we decide.**
Sources & Further Reading
The Public Land Threats Map is an independent project built from publicly available government documents, agency data, scientific research, planning documents, and other sources.
Because the BLM Wilderness Study Area policy review is an active federal policy process, we recommend consulting the original BLM and Federal Register documents for the most current information.
Federal Agencies
- Bureau of Land Management — Manual 6330: Management of BLM Wilderness Study Areas
- Bureau of Land Management — Manuals and Handbooks
- Bureau of Land Management — National Conservation Lands
- National Wilderness Preservation System
2026 Wilderness Study Area Policy Review
In June 2026, the Bureau of Land Management announced a review of Manual 6330, the agency’s policy for managing Wilderness Study Areas. BLM requested public input on whether the existing policy should be updated, clarified, or revised.
The Federal Register notice explains that Manual 6330 provides guidance for maintaining the suitability of Wilderness Study Areas for potential congressional designation as wilderness and establishes the non-impairment standard used in managing those lands.
The 2026 review is separate from the designation of formal wilderness by Congress. A Wilderness Study Area is not itself designated wilderness, although it is managed to preserve its suitability for potential wilderness designation.
Wilderness Study Areas and Wilderness Characteristics
BLM’s wilderness policy distinguishes Wilderness Study Areas from other lands that may possess wilderness characteristics. BLM also has separate guidance for considering lands with wilderness characteristics through the land-use planning process.
About This Project
The Public Land Threats Map is an independent project created by Public Land Lovers.
We are travelers, scientists, geographers, and public land enthusiasts who believe that understanding a landscape is one of the best ways to appreciate it.
We built this map to make complicated public land issues easier to see, explore, and understand.
If you find an important source, project, or piece of information that we missed, we’d love to hear from you.