But six years later, after wolves were largely exterminated, in order to allow hunter access to the burgeoning deer herds, the Forest Service bladed a four-wheel-drive road through the wilderness, thus dividing it into the Gila and Aldo Leopold wilderness areas. The region includes the world’s first wilderness area, which in 1924 was protected from motorized access at the urging of pioneering ecologist Aldo Leopold. The prey base for the Mexican wolf includes elk, mule and white-tailed deer, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, javelina and beaver. The recovery area is home to an array of rare and imperiled animals found in few other places-including Gila hotsprings snails, Chiricahua leopard frogs, Mexican spotted owls and even, if recurring reports turn out to be true, jaguars. Over twenty species of deciduous trees-more than anywhere else in the West-grow here. At the bottoms of those canyons, in the places where cattle are fenced out, streams and rivers flow-nurturing tangles of water-loving willows, cottonwoods, box elders, alders, walnuts and sycamores, trees whose leaves turn yellow in the fall before dropping off and regrow bright green again in the spring. In between are rolling grasslands speckled with junipers, stately ponderosa pine forests and thousand-plus-foot canyons. Habitats range from low-elevation Chihuahuan Desert to evergreen forests and mountains above 10,000 feet. The current Recovery Area spans 98.5 million acres, that includes 20.5 million acres of habitat. The Blue Range Wolf Recovery Area, which has since been expanded, was originally the Gila National Forest in New Mexico and the Apache National Forest in Arizona and part of New Mexico-comprising 4.4 million acres (twice the size of Yellowstone National Park), which support an extraordinary array of wildlife and vegetation types.
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