The Welcome Creek Wilderness
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- National Forests, Wilderness Areas, Bird and Wildlife Viewing
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- General info
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Rock Creek, one of the nation’s most celebrated blue-ribbon trout streams, is bordered on the west, just a few miles southwest of here, by the Welcome Creek Wilderness Area, established in 1977. Not a typical wilderness area, Welcome Creek is a small enclave of undisturbed forest designated to protect an important watershed and contains no grand-scale scenic wonders. But to one retired forest ranger it is “a major island in an ocean of roads and logged areas.” Welcome Creek is pro- viding a unique opportunity to study long-term changes that logging and management produce on tree growth, soil fertility, wildlife diversity, and watershed protection. It is also a favorite summer home and migration route for about 300 elk that winter in the state’s Threemile Game Range in the western foothills of the Sapphire Mountains.
The Welcome Creek Wilderness