Utah Wilderness Association archive

Salt Lake City, 1985. 65 pieces. Collections includes newsletters, mailings, flyers for fundraisers, short reports, pamphlets, and related ephemera. Nice collection from this early Utah environmentalist group that shows the first half decade of its existence. The Utah Wilderness Association was organized in 1979 as a voice for Utah's wilderness. Dick Carter, Hyrum resident and former Utah representative for the Wilderness Society, founded the Utah Wilderness Association in the midst of the Bureau of Land Management's 1980 inventory of Utah lands and the Forest Service's second RARE (Roadless Area Review Evaluation) study, both of which pushed the UWA into action to further protect Utah wilderness.

The organization grew from about a dozen members at its first meeting in May 1979 to more than one thousand committed members in the early 1990s, mostly from northern Utah. Other issues that concerned the members of the Utah Wilderness Association were grazing, timber harvesting, and especially oil drilling in Utah wildernesses. On numerous occasions, the UWA appealed drilling and oil exploration in the High Uintas.

The mission statement of the Utah Wilderness Association declares that the organization "is dedicated to the preservation of Utah's wilderness, public lands, and the flora and fauna dependent upon them." Though a greater percentage of the organization's efforts were centered on wilderness and land usage, some of the more prominent wildlife issues that UWA advocated were bans on bear baiting, as well as sandhill crane and cougar hunting.

The Utah Wilderness Association was active until 1996, when several board members left the association, including founder Dick Carter, and the organization lacked sufficient funds to continue.