Cathy Twardjck, age 13, of East Lansing, Mich... For her question:

What is a wilderness area?

A wilderness is a wild region unclaimed by human beings. It may teem with life, with plants arid animals living freely as nature made them. It may be a barren, lifeless wasteland. At one time, the central area of North America was a teeming wilderness of grassland and forest. As mankind tamed this wilderness, it becomes our fertile Great Plains.

The Antarctic is a barren wilderness too cold to support much wild life and too unfriendly to coax mankind to tame it. The unexplored tangles of tropical forests are also wildernesses. The lonely waters of the ocean also have been called wildernesses.