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Show Except for small areas in North Carolina and New Hampshire and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota, all National Forest wilderness areas are located in the mountainous areas of the western United States. As of May 1970,56 areas were designated as wilderness areas under the provisions of the Wilderness Act of September 3, 196* 1 ( Public Law 88- 577), with a total area of slightly more than 9.9 million acres. Other areas are being proposed for wilderness status. One such area along the Wasatch Front is the Lone Peak Wilderness Area located along the Utah and Salt Lake County line between American Fork and Little Cottonwood Canyons. These wilderness areas are generally located in the higher, more remote mountainous areas which are natural snow- accumulation zones. The western states depend heavily on the melting of snow for their water supplies. Winter cloud- seeding experiments have been conducted over wilderness areas partly because these areas often provide major orographic barriers to airmasses and partly because seeding over such areas results in minimal effect on human activity. Whether cloud seeding, which induces additional precipitation over a wilderness area, constitutes a violation of the Wilderness Act of 1964 ( Public Law 88- 577), is a question which has been raised in connection with several Project Skywater field programs. Although there is little data to support any firm conclusions, it is believed that the increment of additional precipitation resulting from cloud seeding would be unnoticeable in its effect on the state of a wilderness area. In the March 1972 hearings before the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee concerning several bills to establish additional wilderness areas, the Forest Service representative testified that the Forest Service had not attempted to exercise jurisdiction over weather • modification over wilderness areas, and did not envision that it would do so in the future. Further testimony indicated that the Forest Service believed that short- term projects would probably have no effect on wilderness areas, but if cloud seeding were continued over a long period of time the vegetation patterns would change somewhat, and this would be of some concern. 508 |