Sipsey Wilderness at 50: Alabama’s pioneering conservation efforts

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Fifty years ago, on January 3, 1975, President Gerald Ford signed the Eastern Wilderness Act into law. 

Tucked inside the law was a newly-designated wilderness area in the Bankhead National Forest—a 12,000 acre parcel of land endowed with canyons and dozens of waterfalls called the Sipsey Wilderness.

Something you likely won’t find in history books is the story about the creation of the Sipsey Wilderness and how a five year campaign by early Alabama conservationists birthed the national Eastern Wilderness movement. 

This is the first story in a three-part series about Alabama’s Wilderness areas.

What is Wilderness?

Talk to anyone who has walked into the Sipsey Wilderness, there is one thing they notice. 

It’s quiet. 

The soundtrack? Nature.

It’s birds singing, water flowing, frogs and bugs peeping and wind blowing through the rich old growth forest.  

Missing is that constant buzz modernity brings that we don’t notice because it is so prevalent: the sound of cars, air conditioning, chainsaws, leaf blowers and rumblings on paths and roads. Go to a wilderness and the familiar noise of civilization disappears.

When Congress passed the federal Wilderness Act of 1964, they did so to set aside and  preserve wild places, provide opportunities for solitude and primitive recreation and protect cultural, ecological and historical values. 

That meant prohibiting commercial activities such as cutting trees, mining, roadbuilding and motorized vehicle and machine use (there are emergency exceptions). 

As many wilderness advocates say, they wanted to keep the land as God intended it. 

Wilderness in Alabama? Yes!

When the original Wilderness Act passed it designated over 9 million acres as wilderness— all in the Western U.S. except for two wilderness areas in North Carolina (Shining Rock Wilderness and Lindville Gorge Wilderness) and the Great Gulf Wilderness Area in New Hampshire.

Back then, that particular wilderness area was treated as an anomaly by the Forest Service and other federal agencies. The prevailing opinion was that only Western federal forests should become wilderness areas.

Conservationists in Alabama took a different approach. 

According to the book, “The Battle for Alabama’s Wilderness” written by the late John Randolph, the designated North Carolina wilderness greenlit efforts in Alabama to find a potential wilderness area.

That’s where Sipsey comes in.

Birth of the wilderness movement in Alabama 

In 1969, according to Randolph’s book, three University of Alabama professors, including Joab Thomas, who served as President of the University, got behind a proposal to the Forest Service to preserve the Sipsey Wilderness within the Bankhead Forest.

That fall, the Alabama Conservancy, a newly formed group established by members of the Birmingham Audubon Society, took on the Sipsey proposal as a project.

They were soon told by the Forest Service that the establishment of a wilderness area east of the Mississippi was impossible, because at the time they believed wilderness could only be designated in vast places like the Boundary Waters or the Bob Marshall Wilderness in the west.   

Even though the Forest Service was against the idea of the wilderness, the Conservancy was able to convince the Forest Service to issue a year-long moratorium on cutting timber and road construction in January 1970.

As a result of the moratorium, the group of wilderness advocates set out to prove the Sipsey qualified as a wilderness area.

Building public support

Beginning in early 1970, a Wilderness Feasibility Study Committee was formed and organized by Mary Burks, founder of the Alabama Conservancy. The all-volunteer group, which included some of Alabama’s finest scientists, studied and reported on every possible aspect of the proposed wilderness area and included conservationists like:

• Ornithology – Tom Imhof, author of Alabama Birds
• Herpetology – Mike Hopiak
• Ichthyology (fish) – Mike Howell from Samford and Don Dycus from the Department of Conservation 
• Botany – Louise G. “Weesie” Smith and Blanche Dean
• History – Dale Carruthers
• Game wildlife – Charles Kelly, director of Game and Fish for Department of Conservation
• Non-game wildlife – Dan Holliman, biologist from Birmingham-Southern College
• Trail and field parties – Jim and Ruth Manasco

Jim Manasco’s home was the staging ground for many of the studies. 

“We’d go to Jim’s home and he’d take us all around the forests. He knew the forest like the back of his hand. A true naturalist.” 

Mike Howell

The study not only helped secure the original Sipsey Wilderness designation in 1975, it was used to expand it in the 1980s.

In addition to the study, a film called “Alabama Adventures” was created. It was narrated by Birmingham Audubon Society’s Walter Coxe, a regular on the Country Boy Eddie Morning Show, and shot by legendary photographers Dennis Holt and Perry Covington. Elberta Reid, one of Birmingham’s most beloved conservationists, was film editor.

The film was shown throughout Alabama and the South. Below is a restored copy of the film. The audio with Coxe’s voice was unrecoverable.

Alabama leads the way

The launch of the Sipsey Wilderness Campaign coincided with the first Earth Day in 1970. Within a year, thousands of petitions were signed and the proposal was supported by Governor George Wallace and the Alabama Legislature, led by former congressman Ben Erdreich.

By April 21, 1971, Sipsey Wilderness legislation was introduced by Senator John Sparkman. It was the very first Eastern Wilderness bill ever introduced. West Virginia followed with their own bill, and thanks to the Alabama Sipsey campaign template, states introduced legislation throughout the East.  

Why it matters today – Sipsey at 50

Five decades later, why does the Sipsey Wilderness matter? Let us count the ways.

• Clean water – The Sipsey Wilderness preserves the headwaters of Alabama’s largest watershed, the Black Warrior River.
• Wild and Scenic – 61 miles of the Sipsey Fork of the Black Warrior River have this rare designation by Congress to remain free flowing. This is Alabama’s only river with a Wild and Scenic designation..
• Big Tree – The wilderness preserves one of the oldest trees in the state—The Big Tree, a Tulip Poplar, that is between 500-600 years old
• Eastern wilderness – Today, over two million acres have been designated as wilderness in the East, including the Everglades Marjory Stoneman Douglas Wilderness and Linville Gorge in North Carolina.
• Alabama’s environmental movement – The Sipsey Wilderness campaign was the Alabama environmental community’s first national victory. It would set the stage for campaigns creating the Forever Wild Program and Little River Canyon National Preserve.
• Location – The Sipsey is in northwest Alabama, part of the Bankhead National Forest in Winston and Lawrence Counties, 40-50 miles from Alabama’s two largest metro areas, Birmingham and Huntsville.

Ready to explore Sipsey? Access is free and open to the public.

Find trailheads and regulations on the U.S. Wilderness site: Sipsey Wilderness page and the National Forests in Alabama website.

Want to get involved?

Connect with Wild Alabama’s Janice Barrett by emailing her at janice@wildal.org  or visit the Wild Alabama website at wildal.org for details about local events and organized hikes.

Next up – How we expanded wilderness

After the Sipsey Wilderness became law, the following two decades Alabama nearly tripled the amount of designated wilderness in the state, including two new wilderness areas in East Alabama.

Today, we have three wilderness areas, Sipsey Wilderness (25,809 acres), Cheaha Wilderness (7,400 acres) and Dugger Mountain Wilderness (8,947) — totaling 41,156 acres

In our second installment about wilderness in Alabama, we will explore how it has evolved over the 50 years.

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