Do we love wilderness too much?

Is there are true wilderness left in the world? Are we loving our wilderness out of existence?

8000 people per year walk Tasmania's iconic Overland Track with a maximum of 60 walkers departing on any one day.

10000 people per year are expected to walk Tasmania's new Three Capes Track on the Tasman Peninsula when it is completed late this year.

This Cape Raoul. The other capes are Cape Hauy and Cape Pillar.

 
These numbers are tiny compared to visitor numbers elsewhere.
 
In 2013 I went to the world's oldest national park at Yellowstone. Not sure how many hotel rooms there are within the park, but there are 2160 campsites. There were probably over 6000 people staying overnight within the park on the night we parked our hired motorhome side by side with other motorhomes. And there are around 300km of sealed roads for visitors to tour around within Yellowstone.

In July this year, I will visit Yosemite National Park. My Yellowstone experience and my research into Yosemite has pre-warned me to be ready to encounter many humans in this 'wilderness' too. Around 4 million people visit Yosemite each year!
 
That is a hell of a lot of people in what are promoted as wilderness areas.

My Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary defines wilderness as:

"An uncultivated and still wild region of forest, scrub, bush, desert, etc; a wilderness area…wilderness area a tract of land that is largely undisturbed by humans and where indigenous plants and animals flourish in their natural environment."

But are there any places left undisturbed by humans? What is a wilderness experience? How will our wilderness areas cope with our love of wilderness and our increasing wilderness tourism?

Over Easter I walked one of the existing tracks which will be redeveloped and upgraded to become part of the Three Capes Track. There were at least 40 other walkers on the 7 km track on that day. It is an 'out and back' walk, so you walk 14 km in total. I am sure the new track will be more constructed and less natural to make it  more sustainable to cope with the larger numbers of walkers expected, and also the cliff top lookouts will be fenced off to make it 'safer'. I am glad to have done the Cape Raoul walk now before the redevelopment while it is more natural. It is a beautiful walk through a variety of vegetation types from rainforest to coastal scrub, and the cliff top walks and views that are dramatic and stunning but I suspect it will not feel as wild in the future. I doubt they will let you do this:

 

 

 

Look closely at these two photos. Can you see the people sitting on top of the cliffs? (the smaller pics are cropped from the larger photos and enlarged)