Years ago, Ralph Swain came across a makeshift sign in a remote part of Alaska near Denali National Park. Its message summarized his idea of wilderness management. In hand-written letters, the sign proclaimed: “Wilderness: we do not guarantee your enjoyment; we do not guarantee your return.”

Swain’s wilderness philosophy helps him to guide the management of 4.3 million acres of designated wilderness in Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and South Dakota as the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Region wilderness program manager. Swain developed his love for wilderness at the beginning of his twenty-seven-year agency career. As a seasonal wilderness ranger he hiked the backcountry ten days on, four days off. Carrying a shovel and Pulaski, with a crosscut saw bowed over the top of a full backpack, Swain broke up fire rings, cleared downed trees from trails, cleaned water bars and picked up litter. Along the way, he tried to instill a love of wilderness in the people he met on the trail.

Today, he’s traded his backpack and hiking boots for a suit jacket and a laptop, and he spends more time at a desk than in the backcountry. But his enthusiasm for wilderness has not diminished, making him a rare find in the upper levels of public lands management. Armed with an undergraduate degree in marketing and a graduate degree in natural resource management, he is a dedicated defender of wilderness in an agency often more focused on other values.

“Some people in the agency just can’t handle his passion, but I think it’s great,” says Nancy Berry, a wilderness coordinator for the San Juan National Forest. “When Ralph sets his mind on something, you don’t want to stand in his way.”

This year, Swain has been busy helping the agency celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Wilderness Act, which established the National Wilderness Preservation System. Nationwide, 106 million acres of wilderness acreage are currently managed by the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Park Service.

Swain is fond of reciting passages from the Wilderness Act with Shakespearean resolve. “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby 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,” he quotes from memory, but then quickly interprets into plain language.

“Wilderness is a place where the imprint of humans should be hard to see,” Swain says. “It is where natural processes are the primary influences—a place without roads, motorized vehicles, motorboats, mechanical devices or buildings—where we can experience wild places, find quiet and feel free.”

One of his responsibilities is to keep tabs on efforts to add wilderness acreage to the Forest Service lands in the Rocky Mountain Region.

“Every state in Region 2, except Kansas, currently has bills proposing the addition of public lands into the wilderness system,” Swain says. “Some are proposed through forest planning revisions; others originate from grassroots efforts, conservation groups or Congressional delegates.”

Swain often commiserates over wilderness issues with Ed Zahniser, son of the late Howard Zahniser, executive director of the Wilderness Society, who fought two decades of wilderness battles to help secure passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964.

“Sometimes I have to pinch myself after getting off the phone with Ed,” Swain says. “That I can actually discuss my problems with the son of the man who was the principal author of the Wilderness Act is so incredible.”

Perhaps one of Swain’s toughest jobs is to make sure the agency itself lives up to the intent of the Wilderness Act.

“I get about ten requests a year from ranger districts and national forests for motorized use in wilderness,” Swain says. “A little more than half of those requests are denied. I don’t make a lot of friends with these decisions.”

In 2002, after the Missionary Ridge Fire burned 70,000 acres of the San Juan National Forest in Southwestern Colorado, Swain stepped in to support local wilderness staffers. They were concerned about motorized rehabilitation methods planned for a burned portion of the Weminuche Wilderness. One project, aimed at deterring erosion on charred slopes, called for dropping hay bales by helicopter into wilderness. Swain countered with an idea to use sand bags filled with dirt on-site and downed trees. He came up with an even more creative option for another project, which called for removing standing dead trees along trails by chainsaw.

“The sawyers didn’t feel comfortable using a crosscut saw, because the trees were very unstable, and said they would only do it with a chainsaw,” Berry says. “Ralph came up with the option of blasting the trees down instead. The results look natural, like the trees fell over from the wind, instead of being cut down.”

Swain empathizes with crews on the ground, who are trying to get each job done quickly and efficiently, but for him, the question is often one of precedent.

“Everything we do in wilderness should be arduous; that’s what makes it wilderness,” he says. “It should be just as tough for the agency to work there as it is for visitors to get around. When we say yes to motorized equipment, we run the risk of what I call management creep; we creep further and further away from the intent of the law. And when we use modern advantages, we run the risk of overdoing things.”

Swain helped create the Wilderness Ranger Academy to pass on primitive skills born on the frontier when wilderness was a way of life. Now held annually in Aspen, Colorado, the week-long event attracts rangers working for all agencies. They learn traditional ranger stuff—crosscut sawing, orienteering, backcountry cooking, basic first aid and search-and-rescue techniques—but they also learn modern skills, like global positioning satellite telemetry.

“We teach them how to conduct themselves professionally and safely in rough, unpredictable situations,” Swain says. “Public contact is perhaps their most important function, so we educate them on how to pass on ‘Leave No Trace’ ethics and backcountry safety to visitors.” Swain also oversees several other regional and national training events for wilderness staffers annually. His efforts cover project planning, volunteer workshops and database training on programs that track trail use and camping impacts.

While much of Swain’s time is spent working with rangers, he also has bigger-picture issues on his mind. Just this summer, Chief Dale Bosworth created the agency’s first stand-alone director for wilderness and wild and scenic rivers. The new position was assigned to Mary Wagner, from the Dixie National Forest in Utah, who cut her teeth in Washington working on the new national off-highway-vehicle policy. Until Wagner’s appointment, wilderness management had been under the umbrella of recreation. Swain sees this new arrangement as a huge step forward in the evolution of wilderness management for the agency.

“There’s no doubt that having wilderness under recreation has given the perception that the highest and paramount value of wilderness is recreation, and that’s not true,” Swain says. “When the American people are asked what they value most about wilderness, clean air and water are at the top of the list.”

As unmodified and pristine landscapes, wilderness areas provide natural filtering and cleansing systems. Wilderness waters supply many municipal water systems in the West, and federal laws protect wilderness airsheds to the highest standards in the nation.

“Congress mandates that we protect the wild character of wilderness,” Swain says. “Well, I say, if you can’t see the mountains, you have destroyed the wilderness character.”

Swain considers recreation a consumptive use of public lands, one that needs to be carefully managed, similar to the extraction of natural resources through logging, mining or grazing. And he sees the modern-day mindsets of many backcountry enthusiasts as a direct threat to wilderness.

“We’re so selfishly consumed by what we can get from wilderness, we haven’t matured to see that its greatest value is its wild character,” Swain says. “Especially for the extreme-sports crowd, it’s about how many miles you can run, how many peaks you can bag, how crazy you can be—and still live through it.”

His remedies for the problems are self-reliance and self-restraint, on both the individual and societal level. He hopes for a time when horseback riders voluntarily avoid using muddy trails during wet periods, and hikers leash their dogs or leave them at home during sensitive wildlife seasons.

“I’ve come to believe the future of wilderness will depend on our embracing the value of what I call the three R’s: renewal—what connecting to wildness can do for your heart and soul; respect—how humbling it is to realize your insignificance in the big picture of wildness; and restraint—how we must restrain our greed so that not every square inch of this earth is developed.”