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.
