Contemplating the Meaning of "Wilderness" In Our Subaru Crosstrek Wilderness
Sometimes a quiet moment outdoors can inspire so much more.
Blackened trees fill the valley before us, stubborn Douglas fir refusing to give in to the previous summer’s wildfire. On a faraway horizon, snow still caps distant peaks. Here, though, the early summer sun shines through wispy clouds, and a cool breeze rustling the undergrowth is all I hear. Just off the path, wild raspberries sprouted next to a fallen log, a perfect place for a hungry bear or weary hiker to rest and have a snack. I close my eyes and slowly inhale the mountain air. It took some nine months and 10,000 miles, but our 2024 Subaru Crosstrek Wilderness had finally found, well, the wilderness.
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Or at least our little Subaru got a nibble of nature. In truth, we were mere footsteps past the end of a gravel road in Washington’s North Cascades National Park, spreading my grandfather’s ashes in a spot accessible to just about any vehicle with four wheels. But gazing out across the vast expanse of one of America's most remote places, even with civilization right at my back, I couldn’t help but think of exploring where there are no roads.
Road-Tripping Through Civilization
Before exploring those rare roadless areas, however, you have to get to them. This particular excursion began near MT’s SoCal headquarters and took us 1,300 miles north. It's a drive I’ve detailed before, so I won’t rehash the details again. The only meaningful difference was trading mid-winter ice and snow for early-summer heat and sunshine, but from the Subaru’s interior I didn’t notice much about either.
The Crosstrek remains an outstanding road-trip vehicle, as long as your family doesn’t require more space than most subcompact SUVs can offer. Things can get tight in a hurry here, but that’s true of any vehicle in the class. Over the course of the drive, the majority of it on I-5 through California, Oregon, and Washington, we averaged 29.9 mpg, slightly beating the 2024 Crosstrek’s 29-mpg highway rating from the EPA and 2.0 mpg better than our fuel economy on the same trip six months prior, bumping our overall average fuel economy up to 26.2 mpg (still short of the EPA’s 27-mpg combined figure but 1.1 mpg better than our prior average). We also stretched a tank of gas to 444.2 miles before filling up, just 4 miles short of the official max range.
Defining Wilderness
Exploring roadless areas is ostensibly what the Crosstrek Wilderness is all about. It’s a subcompact SUV built to fit into the daily lives and drives of common folk who dream of one day getting out into nature, even if they rarely have a chance to make those dreams reality. The Wilderness trim’s modest lift (0.6 inch, for 9.3 total inches of ground clearance) and off-road cladding aren’t meant to compete with the extreme AEV-backed off-roaders of the world. Even so, if you park one in your driveway—its Yellowstone-evoking Geyser Blue paint beckoning you to explore—you’ll probably at least think about heading to a wild, roadless area each time you leave the house, and you’ll know the Crosstrek will probably get you there.
“Wilderness,” however, isn’t just an abstract idea. It has an official, federal definition. The Wilderness Act of 1964 codified it as such: “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
That definition, which still stands in the federal books 60 years later, is worth noting because it’s what brought me and the Crosstrek Wilderness to the edge of civilization in the first place. My grandfather was a self-described “practical environmentalist” who spent much of his adult life as a midlevel bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. That view on the edge of North Cascades? We owe it to him, at least in part; he helped Senator Scoop Jackson write the legislation, signed into law in 1968, that established the national park, his first major assignment as a congressional staffer. Further, the Wilderness Act four years prior directed the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture to inventory millions of acres of federal land for possible preservation as wilderness, including “every roadless area of five thousand contiguous acres or more in the national parks.” My grandfather headed the Forest Service portion of 1978’s Roadless Area Review and Evaluation (RARE II), the federal follow-up to that initial study, and recommended more than 12.5 million acres be designated as protected wilderness. Without him and countless other anonymous federal employees over generations, America’s wilderness could look remarkably different.
A Taste of the Wild
Those numbers and that legacy rattled around in my head in silence for the 18-hour drive home—once more comfortable and uneventful, because the Crosstrek really is a wonderful little SUV that makes long drives fly by. The National Park Service oversees tens of millions of acres, and the Forest Service manages nearly 200 million more, with a not-insignificant portion of that preserved by my grandpa. Yet over the course of nine months, I hadn't taken the Crosstrek deeper into the wilderness than a mile or so past a visitor’s center parking lot. The closest I’d come to a technical trail was a mall’s parking garage. In the Crosstrek’s arrival story, I noted some long-neglected fly rods I needed to get in a river; I still hadn’t done that, either, but I did glance through an Orvis catalog.
The more I thought about the wilderness I hadn’t seen, the more shame I felt. We have this massive country, full of interesting people, beautiful places, and, crucially, beautiful places where there are no people. I have a car I genuinely enjoy that can get me to any of them. And increasingly, I’m aware that time to do so is running out. Our Crosstrek returns to Subaru this fall, but it’s not just that. Each week seems to bring forth new record temperatures and new disasters with them, threatening both access to and the existence of wilderness areas. Our stewardship of the natural world is on the ballot this November, so who knows what environmental protections will even remain? And my grandfather’s death served as an immediate reminder that none of us has as much time as we’d like.
With the clock ticking, I decided to use what time I have left to explore some wilderness while I still can. I first set my sights just north of Los Angeles, to Angeles National Forest. Turns out it was on fire. Instead, my wife and I decided to head east, to Joshua Tree National Park.
About 140 miles from our home, Joshua Tree stretches across nearly 800,000 acres, 595,000 of them designated wilderness. You can’t actually drive through designated wilderness—remember, “untrammeled by man”—but Joshua Tree does have several backcountry roads snaking through areas close enough to at least see it.
We began our day exploring Queen Valley, which offers a few easy unpaved routes. The National Park Service deems these roads “suitable for most two-wheel-drive vehicles,” and that’s an understatement. Unsurprisingly, the Crosstrek Wilderness had no problem traversing flat dirt roads. A ’98 Corolla rolling on a donut probably could’ve made it through, too. That said, we did encounter some pretty notable washboard sections where driving faster than 5 mph produced a deafening roar. My wife, no stranger to off-roading (she’s spent most summers of her life jeeping through the San Juans in southwest Colorado), thought something must be wrong, but the problem was just insufficient sound-deadening to handle this particular racket. A problem Subaru must address? Not really. Most people won’t drive on this exact road or even roads like it, and if they do, they can address the issue themselves by slowing down.
Next up: Geology Tour Road, a sandy, bumpy 17-mile route through Pleasant Valley with several miles of gentle climbs and descents. Here, the National Park Service does require high ground clearance and four-wheel drive. (There is a difference between all-wheel and four-wheel drive. We assumed the NPS did not make the technical distinction but have since learned that assumption was incorrect. Regardless of what you think you or your vehicle can handle, make sure you're in compliance with posted regulations so you avoid getting in over your head or getting fined.) However, this section wasn’t particularly challenging, either. A careful driver could probably manage it in just about any vehicle with four real tires if they had to. Although it clearly wasn’t necessary, I decided to activate the Crosstrek’s snow/dirt setting in X-Mode. This adjusts throttle mapping, keeps the CVT in “lower gears,” and alters the reaction time of the limited-slip diff to enhance traction in low-grip, low-speed environments. It also activates hill descent control.
The result was ... interesting. Even though the terrain definitely didn’t require an off-road mode, snow/dirt mode nonetheless gave an immediate sense of sure-footedness. Every move felt somehow a little more purposeful. A little more confident. The kind of subtle security a child might feel being carried in his or her dad’s arms instead of pushed in a stroller.
Rocky Roads Ahead
For most of our drive through the desert, the temperature hovered right around 100 degrees, hot enough that we didn’t get out and explore the actual wilderness on foot. That’s not atypical weather for the California desert at this time of year, but it was a constant reminder the world is getting hotter (we made this trip one day after a new global temperature high was reached in July), and with the heat comes ecological upheaval. Although Joshua trees thrive in their native Southwest deserts, they’re not immune to environmental pressures. According to the National Park Service, under some emissions estimates, nearly all suitable habitat for the trees in their namesake park could be eliminated within the next 75 years.
But a changing climate isn’t the only potential threat. Project 2025—surely you’ve heard of that by now—includes many policy goals, for the management of federal lands and much, much more. Among its aims is the “repeal of the Antiquities Act of 1906.” In case you’re not up to speed on your Teddy Roosevelt–era legislation, the Antiquities Act gave the president authority to establish national monuments on federal land. Franklin D. Roosevelt used that act in 1936 to provide federal protection for Joshua Tree, bringing to a halt much of the mining that had taken place there over the previous 80 years. (It became a National Park in 1994.) Without that act and the protections it affords, Joshua Tree would be quite a bit less wild today. And if you’re the type of person who digs the idea of a Crosstrek Wilderness, odds are good you’d like to ensure we preserve some actual wilderness worth exploring.
As I think about all these stressors—on me, on all of us, on the world itself—I'm thankful that at least our Subaru hasn’t given us anything extra to worry about. It’s a serene little thing that encourages long, thoughtful drives, your mind drifting back generations. Leisurely trips through an untrammeled world. Meditations behind the wheel, reflections on what has been, and dreams of what could be with what little time we have left.
For More on Our Long-Term 2024 Subaru Crosstrek Wilderness:
- Ready for Adventure?
- An Unplanned Road Trip and Surprise Snow Present Learning Opportunities
- On-Road Compromises?
- Interior Pros and Cons
- Over-the-Air Updates Add a Feature We Won’t Use
Most of us at MotorTrend grew up loving cars. I grew up just loving good stories. Whether those stories were about a boy and his dog, shape-shifting aliens, or Spanish bullfighters didn’t really matter. At the heart of all good stories, though, is something that connects us all. And that’s what cars do.
I’m blessed to get to wake up every day, go to work, and help tell the story of America through our love of the automobile. I was born and raised in Missouri, not vehicle-averse but not exactly an automotive enthusiast, either. When I was little, my dad had a ’79 Fiat 124 Spider, and top-down summer drives were always a treat, but he sold it long before passion set in, and from that point forward, cars were mere tools in our household. I spent my early adulthood teaching high school English, a default option for someone who loved good stories and wanted to inspire similar feelings in others.
When I decided I wanted to tell stories myself instead of teaching them, I enrolled in the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where I quickly fell in love with working behind the scenes. It wasn’t until after I started as a copy editor at MotorTrend, though, that cars and I finally clicked. I still occasionally write, but these days I mostly find myself thriving in the background, helping the rest of our staff refine their words to give our readers all the entertaining and informative stories they want and need about the motoring world.Read More
