A group of young outdoor enthusiasts traveled to Washington, D.C. from across the country after winning an essay contest sponsored by Sportsmen for Responsible Energy Development, a coalition of sportsmen and conservation groups led by the National Wildlife Federation, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and Trout Unlimited. The contest’s theme was “The Importance of Public Lands to Me,” and the essays highlight the forests, mountains, sagebrush steppe and backcountry waters of our public lands.

Hailing from both the East and West, the winners are Jarred Kay, 17, Flagstaff, Ariz.; Haley Powell, 17, Rock Springs, Wyo.; Matthew Reilly, 18, Palmyra, Va.; Rebecca Brown, 17, Conrad, Mont.; and Noah Davis, 18, Greensburg, Pa.

Read the student’s essays below, and let us know what you think about their passion for public lands in the comments section:

A Day on Bell’s Gap Run in State Game Lands 158 – By Noah Davis

The trees still cling to the morning fog as I drive out of the valley into the mountains along the Allegheny Front, toward a lake of clouds nestled in the ridges. The early summer foliage acts as translucent glass, sending patterns of light down upon the hood of my truck. The pull-offs in the game lands are used mostly as snowplow turnarounds and are seldom occupied, except for the two weeks of rifle season when most Pennsylvanians head out with hopes for a deer.

I park next to a section of flowering raspberry and mind my step over the last remaining colt’s foot whose yellow blossom will turn to seed within the next couple of days. The 2wt. in my right hand was built by my barber this past winter, his name engraved above mine on the handle, a Royal Wulff imprinted above both.

My wading boots are treated more like hiking shoes that are always wet. With 23,000 acres of public land, I need to be able to move freely in order to explore this fine seam through the hollow, the miles of water that crease it. My goal today is to reach the waterfall before drifting my fly a couple of miles downstream.

The narrow gauge railroad that was used to pull timber from this far wilderness during the late 19th century can still be found in the occasional rusted rail. Two miles in, under the cover of ostrich ferns, I find a lamp knocked from an engine. On most of myjourneys here, I discover some artifact, an emblem of our past being reclaimed by the green world.

The farther I walk the older the trees become. Remnant stands of old growth hemlock shade the pools; rhododendrons as large as houses force me to crawl on all fours. Deer and porcupine scat make me wary of where I place my hand, and every grouse or woodcock that bursts into flight leaves my senses buzzing.

The sun has risen to a point in the sky that the dew on the backs of rhododendron leaves warms and begins to evaporate. At a crossing just below the first pool, I see the tracks of a fisher. Crouching behind a boulder, I string my olive line through the guides of my rod, inspect the quality of the tippet, and tie a Royal Wulff to complete the outfit.

I then stand, so my eyes can catch the light reflecting from the water, and wait for a signal near the small waterfall. It doesn’t take long this time of year. Bugs are always on the water: terrestrials all day, caddis at noon, and mayflies as I make my way down the mountain. This time it’s an ant that’s fallen in the water that causes the trout to rise at the tail of the pool. I raise my rod and flip my fly up into the current. Characteristic of brook trout, it doesn’t take long for my fly to be sipped below the foamy film.

The most beautiful aspect of small, remote, trout streams, like this one, is the variegation of colors. Every season possesses a certain brilliance. The spring with its thick-green bleeding into summer. Fall with maple-gold and oak-orange. The gray of late season, when I take to the woods a final time for deer. And the white that winter brings to the deep woods, its silence and space, a place to reconsider and think about what is still to come.

The eight inches of brook trout I hold in my left hand reflect all of these seasons and add still to their splendor. The white of winter confined to anal fins, the fires of autumn caught on the underside, and the dappled back which forces me to look up and see its mirror, light cascading through the canopy of summer in this present tense.

When the fish is again under its sunken log, I gaze up the hollow. Another piece of flat water is twenty yards up and a deep pool ten beyond that. I dip my face into the cool, and let it fall down my front as I stand.

In a world where the façade of ownership blinds and corrupts, public lands are the jewels that keep wildness a part of our lives. When people experience the natural world— where human intervention is minimal at best—there’s the chance to feel connected to something greater than ourselves. Public lands allow for the experience of hunting, fishing, hiking, berry-picking, bird-counting, and simply listening and watching.

It’s these last two acts that will save our forests and rivers: the ability to listen to and watch the earth, to join with its waters and trees and the lives that depend upon them.

Noah Davis, 18, of Tipton, Pa., is a first-year student at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pa., where he studies English and plays for the basketball team. He enjoys hunting and fishing, especially fly fishing for native brook trout on small streams. His own writing has been influenced by some of his favorite authors, including Rick Bass, David James Duncan and Aldo Leopold. 

A group of young outdoor enthusiasts traveled to Washington, D.C. from across the country after winning an essay contest sponsored by Sportsmen for Responsible Energy Development, a coalition of sportsmen and conservation groups led by the National Wildlife Federation, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and Trout Unlimited. The contest’s theme was “The Importance of Public Lands to Me,” and the essays highlight the forests, mountains, sagebrush steppe and backcountry waters of our public lands.

Hailing from both the East and West, the winners are Jarred Kay, 17, Flagstaff, Ariz.; Haley Powell, 17, Rock Springs, Wyo.; Matthew Reilly, 18, Palmyra, Va.; Rebecca Brown, 17, Conrad, Mont.; and Noah Davis, 18, Greensburg, Pa.

Read the student’s essays below, and let us know what you think about their passion for public lands in the comments section:

A Spiritual Tradition: The Importance of Public Lands to Me – By Matthew Reilly

Modern society has convinced the outdoorsman in me that I was born too late. The rivers that I frequent are suppressed in spirit, their wonder restrained to their actual dimensions by urban sprawl, highways, and water treatment plants. When I take to the field, I thirst for the refreshing experience of new waters; but I lust for those places tucked away, out of sight, lost in nature—where their essence extends for miles through some black hole of the mind, never threatened by development or the idea that they might, in some dimension, end.

Development. My parents know what it means. Their age is told in their memories. There was a time when Charlottesville, Virginia, was not a city, but a town. Before Walmart and Sam’s Club took their anarchical perch above Route 29, farmer Matheny tended to his cows on the grassy pasture behind a blackboard fence and an illusion that things might never change. The Rivanna River, in the gulley behind Walton’s culturally obese babies, coursed higher and stronger through the rolling hills of the Piedmont, its lifeblood not yet stolen by the host of housing developments to come, its finned inhabitants still unrestrained by dams.

I hear these memories as a young child. Fear briefly enters and exits my mind. What will the world look like when I am grown? But at 8 years old, as far as I know, things don’t change.

I eventually learned my lesson.

The woodlot that was destined to be subdivided behind our newly furnished house was just large enough to be reminiscent of Maine’s “Big Woods” that I had learned of in Field & Stream. If I walked along the length of the creek bottom, in the shadows of towering ridges, I could escape with the perception of total isolation.

One spring, I happened upon a stream of moderate girth. I returned countless times in following seasons, slinging spinners and flies to feisty panfish and pickerel.

One day I was startled by the sight of two houses. Both were under construction; and their backyards had torn into the woodland veil protecting my secret gem, revealing it for all to see, eroding the banks, and slowing the current.

Sour and cynical over the soiling of my stream, I retreated into my mind to a place where rivers run free and woods seem endless, where constant human activity does not hamper the wildlife activity, and the flora is ornamental by God’s design, rather than that of a landscaper. It was from this experience that I began to crave wild lands removed from human occupation.By the time I earned my driver’s license I was a passionate fly fisherman, completely lost in the sport; and my search for new water took me to where my childhood fantasies existed in actuality—the Shenandoah National Park, where my dad had taken me to grouse hunt and trout fish at a very young age. Now, with the means to transport myself, I set off into the Blue Ridge when I yearn for the tug of a sprightly brook trout.

I drive west; and as the roads turn from pavement to gravel to dirt to nothing, and the hardwoods close in above my head as I’m intertwined into the deep, meandering hollows where the freestones run, the shackles of society and modern, complicated life disintegrate into the air.

I can fish my way through the gorge that the Rapidan River flows through in consensual ignorance. In my mind, the park does not end, but extends forever in every direction, as does the river; and the fish in its watery depths are virgin natives—refugees, like me.

When a brook trout comes to hand, my suspicion is upheld. The fiery brilliance that adorns its belly and pectorals, the olive river rock along its back, accented by strong blue and red bull’s eyes make me believe that they are a purity in nature, a stronghold of all that has been lost in the world, safeguarded, hidden in the bottom of a mountain stream.

But alas, I know this illusion is false. The trout in my hand is a species endangered by a host of manmade threats; and its range retreats into the mountaintops yearly. However, unlike the Piedmont stream of my childhood, this one is protected, forever sealed from peripheral development by 197,000 acres of federally protected land. To the brook trout, and to me, that thought is full of hope, as it is a symbol of like-minded individuals concerned with the state of the environment doing their best to secure recreational areas and wildlife havens for future generations, to preserve our spiritual haunts. In a word, it is a promise: For as long as I, and my children, live, places like Shenandoah will be protected and cherished by sportsmen.

Matthew Reilly, 18, Palmyra, Va. He is a senior at Fluvanna County High School. His father introduced him early to outdoors activities, which he says “shaped my character and ambitions.” Fly fishing is one of his passions. Matthew is an outdoor writer and photographer who produces a weekly column, http://adventuresafield.blogspot.com. 

A group of young outdoor enthusiasts traveled to Washington, D.C. from across the country after winning an essay contest sponsored by Sportsmen for Responsible Energy Development, a coalition of sportsmen and conservation groups led by the National Wildlife Federation, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and Trout Unlimited. The contest’s theme was “The Importance of Public Lands to Me,” and the essays highlight the forests, mountains, sagebrush steppe and backcountry waters of our public lands.

Hailing from both the East and West, the winners are Jarred Kay, 17, Flagstaff, Ariz.; Haley Powell, 17, Rock Springs, Wyo.; Matthew Reilly, 18, Palmyra, Va.; Rebecca Brown, 17, Conrad, Mont.; and Noah Davis, 18, Greensburg, Pa.

Read the student’s essays below, and let us know what you think about their passion for public lands in the comments section:

Public Lands and Me – By Haley Powell

Public lands are an opportunity, an opportunity to experience nature in a singular and transcendental way. Aristotle put it best when he said, “In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.” These lands, and access to them, allow people to experience the awe of witnessing and interacting with something truly marvelous and inescapably beautiful and to truly connect with the natural world. It is because our public lands hold this opportunity for not only me, but for everyone, that they retain a special place in my heart.

Whether you believe in a God or not in your everyday dealings, it is hard to deny that some sort of higher power was involved in creating the beautiful landscapes found throughout our country. The most beautiful places in my opinion, however, are the rivers and streams. Imagine yourself thigh-deep in a river. The rolling sound of the river, resembling boulders crashing together and rolling down a mountainside, is the only sound pervading your ears. The feeling of the water pushing against your legs is as constant as its cool temperature, but both of these fall back to the recesses of your consciousness as you take in the multitude of verdant skyscrapers arising from both sides of the bank, seemingly stretching endlessly into a cerulean sky. Your right hand comes back, gripping your fly rod tight, your left hand poised, waiting to release your extra, clutched fly line. The customary seconds of pause drift by as you take a deep breath in of cool, clean air, before that right hand comes forward with the grace of a conductor’s and the line flies through the eyes of your rod. It lands lightly on the surface of the water with the finesse of a dancer. You wait, poised. Your heartbeat quickens as you see that trout breach the surface and swallow your fly in one gulp. From then, it’s on. The tip of your rod raises as you set the hook, fighting against this wild creature, testing your strength against its as you painstakingly bring it closer. It’s within your grasp. You remove the hook and hold this gorgeous wild creature in your hands. Then, you guide it back under the surface, keeping your hands close to it as it regains its strength, like a parent teaching their child to ride a bike, before the trout swims away down the river. While this opportunity to connect one-on-one with nature exists on private lands, it is open for all to enjoy on public lands. This is why they are so special.

Being a part of nature is extremely important to me. I live in the great state of Wyoming, which contains the country’s first (and one of the most beautiful) national parks. This state has a reputation for having some of the most beautiful, sought-after natural areas and the wonderful luxury of a majority of them being public. Growing up in Rock Springs, Wyoming, I’m blessed that public lands are a part of everyday life, and as I’ve travelled to other states and talked to other people I have realized that not everyone is as fortunate as me. I can’t imagine waking up every day and not being able to go somewhere where there aren’t buildings or paved roads or lights. I can’t fathom not being able to experience my state’s native wildlife in their element. While these experiences are closer to me in Wyoming, these same lands and experiences belong to everyone and are available to everyone who makes this trip. Public lands are important to me because they’ve made my life a significantly better experience, and I can’t imagine what my life would be like without them. Public lands have given me something I can’t live without. I’m inspired every day. The beauty of the landscape that surrounds me not only influences my artistic exploits, but my academic ones as well. I love learning how to conserve my environment and its creatures. Next year I will be attending the University of Wyoming and utilizing the skills that I have gained through participating in my school’s debate program to study environmental conservation and law. It is because of my opportunity to utilize my public lands and gain a love for them that I have found my calling in life.

Overall, public lands have significantly influenced my life, making them near and dear to my heart. I literally can’t imagine what my life would be like, much less where I would be now had I never been able to utilize and experience them. I hope that our public lands stay public, so that everyone can enjoy them as much as I have.

Haley Powell, 17, lives in Rock Springs, Wyo. Her interests include photography, reading, animals, camping, hiking, fishing and “basically anything outdoors.” She competes in speech and debate at her high school and competed in a national tournament last year. Haley plans to study zoology at the University of Wyoming. 

A group of young outdoor enthusiasts traveled to Washington, D.C. from across the country after winning an essay contest sponsored by Sportsmen for Responsible Energy Development, a coalition of sportsmen and conservation groups led by the National Wildlife Federation, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and Trout Unlimited. The contest’s theme was “The Importance of Public Lands to Me,” and the essays highlight the forests, mountains, sagebrush steppe and backcountry waters of our public lands.

Hailing from both the East and West, the winners are Jarred Kay, 17, Flagstaff, Ariz.; Haley Powell, 17, Rock Springs, Wyo.; Matthew Reilly, 18, Palmyra, Va.; Rebecca Brown, 17, Conrad, Mont.; and Noah Davis, 18, Greensburg, Pa.

Read the student’s essays below, and let us know what you think about their passion for public lands in the comments section:

A Life Changing Connection – By Jarred Kay

Many of my life’s biggest revelations have occurred outside while on public land: hunting in national forests, rafting through national parks, fishing on national lakes, and even understanding my history through national monuments. Throughout the time I have spent on our public land, I have gained understandings which I would have otherwise never acquired. Not only have I taken lessons away from these lands, but I have also taken away genuine joy. My access to public lands, especially for hunting, fishing, camping and hiking, has led me to a greater appreciation for my world and consequently, an aspiration to protect it.

I have hunted and fished throughout my life. Without access to public lands such as the national forests, I would not be able to do so. To some, this may seem unimportant, but to me, hunting and fishing have taught me skills and ideas which nothing else ever could. I have directly learned how everyone survives: people used to hunt and fish in order to provide food for themselves and their families. However, in the past hundred years, many people have forgotten this important connection. As people have grown accustomed to grocery stores and “ready-to- eat” food, they have buried the origins of the very food which allows them to survive. I have consulted many people who oppose the killing of animals but still eat meat. Why do they contradict their own beliefs? These people have denied that their food was once part of a living animal; all they seem to know is that their meat is located in the grocery store next to the dairy and across the aisle holding the chips and soda. This unfortunate ignorance creates a dichotomy separating people from their surrounding world. As I have hunted and fished with my family, I have found a phenomenal connection to the world around me and consequently, my role in the world, not just my society.

Having access to public lands has given me opportunities which have allowed me to experience a joy unlike any other. One time, for instance, I was scouting with my uncle Barry. We were in the desert, close to the Navajo reservation. We decided to walk up on a ridge and glass over the lower land. After crawling under a barbed wire fence and reaching the top, I glanced down at my feet and noticed some unusual rocks. After a couple seconds, I realized that these were not rocks, but were shards of pottery and arrowheads. These were old Native American ruins. As we looked around us, we saw where buildings used to exist and partial walls only remained. There was no sign posted. It was no national monument or tourist stop, but this place was just as impressive and was located in the middle of the Coconino National Forest. When I found these remnants, I felt a sense of discovery and energy. I felt a connection with the land and even with the people who lived there before me: a connection and understanding which I have felt when I have been hunting, hiking, and even rafting. This is truly a unique and special feeling that can only be felt outside. My access to the national forest and other public lands allowed me to experience this feeling, and without it, I would not be the person I am today.

The experiences I have had in the national parks, another form of public land, have also molded me into the person I am today. Because they have been protected, I have become in awe of beauties which would have otherwise long ago become inaccessible. I have gone river rafting down the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River: an experience which has changed my life. The beauty I found here is unparalleled. I was so astounded by this elegance that it gave me a desire to continue to maintain the world by serving it in a way where other people can experience that beauty like I do.

I enjoy, more than anything else in the world, spending time outside. The most amazing memories in my life have come from being outside. Public lands, especially national forests, have given me feelings of being connected which I would have never felt before. When I stumbled upon those Native American ruins with shards of pottery and arrowheads, I felt like an explorer. Many people have probably come upon those ruins before but that feeling of discovery will always remain. None of these magnificent memories and encounters would exist without public land. From the lessons I have learned to the experiences I have had, access to public land has changed me, and I strive to promote that access so others can be changed by it like I have.