Visit Wilderness

Search for a wilderness as the destination for your next outdoor adventure.

Bob Marshall Wilderness Area, Minnesota

Why Visit Wilderness?

While wilderness can be appreciated from afar—through online content, television, or books—nothing compares to experiencing it firsthand. Activities like camping, hiking, or hunting allow you to fully enjoy the recreational, ecological, spiritual, and health benefits that wilderness areas offer. These areas provide “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation,” chances to observe wildlife, moments to renew and refresh, and the physical benefits of outdoor exercise. In many wilderness areas, you can even bring your well-behaved dog.

Learn more about the diverse ways in which we benefit from wilderness and threats wilderness areas face today.

The Bering Sea Wilderness encompasses St. Matthew Island, Hall Island, and Pinnacle Island and is part of the larger Bering Sea unit of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.

One of the largest seabird concentrations in the North Pacific (3.5 million birds) can be found here in summer, dominated by auklets, common eiders, old-squaws, gulls, murres, and puffins.

Geographically, this Wilderness is the most isolated in all of America. It is a beautiful land carpeted with grasses, sedges, mosses, lichens, and heath, and formed by volcanic activity, rising more than 1,500 feet above the sea with sheer cliffs and waterfalls dropping dramatically into icy water. The annual average for visiting ships is fewer than one.

On Saint Matthew you'll find one of the few colonies of northern fulmars on Earth, and almost the entire world's population of McKay's buntings nest here. Northern sea lions and seals haul out at several places, and walruses climb ashore at one spot on Saint Matthew.

Reindeer, once introduced here, have disappeared. Arctic foxes den here, and polar bears, practically wiped out by hunting, wander over from the mainland occasionally on the winter ice pack. Gray whales are often seen offshore, and sometimes an endangered bowhead whale swims by in winter.

Summer temperatures average in the low 50s and 60s (Fahrenheit) and in the low 20s and 30s in winter.

The Bering Sea Wilderness receives 73.5 inches of precipitation, annually.

Leave No Trace

How to follow the seven standard Leave No Trace principles differs in different parts of the country (desert vs. Rocky Mountains). Click on any of the principles listed below to learn more about how they apply in the Bering Sea Wilderness.

Plan Ahead and Prepare
Travel and Camp on Durable Surfaces
Dispose of Waste Properly
Leave What You Find
Minimize Campfire Impacts
Respect Wildlife
Be Considerate of Other Visitors

For more information on Leave No Trace, Visit the Leave No Trace, Inc. website.

Location

Maps

Digital and paper maps are critical tools for wilderness visitors. Online maps can help you plan and prepare for your visit ahead of time. You can also carry digital maps with you on your GPS unit or other handheld GPS device. Having a paper map with you in the backcountry, as well as solid orienteering skills, however, ensures that you can still route-find in the event that your electronic device fails.

Online Maps

Interactive Map of the Bering Sea Wilderness
Google Earth

Alaska Wildernesses

Printed Maps

Fetching MyTopo from Database

USGS Store

Rules & Regulations

Motorized equipment and equipment used for mechanical transport is generally prohibited in all wilderness areas. This includes the use of motor vehicles, motorboats, motorized equipment, bicycles, hang gliders, wagons, carts, portage wheels, and the landing of aircraft including helicopters.

Wilderness-Specific Regulations

Learn more about why regulations may be necessary in wilderness.

Contacts

Applicable Wilderness Law(s)

Public Law 91-504

Date: October 23, 1970
Acreage: 41,113 acres

(No official title, designates Fish and Wildlife Service wildernesses) - Public Law 91-504 (10/23/1970) To designate certain lands as wilderness within National Wildlife Refuges

For more information (To download or see all affected wilderness areas) visit our law library for 91-504 or legislative history for 91-504.

Want to Volunteer for Wilderness?

People who volunteer their time to steward our wilderness areas are an essential part of wilderness management. Contact the following groups to inquire about volunteer opportunities. Groups are listed alphabetically by the state(s) in which the wilderness is located.