Wild Arizona
Grants Awarded
The project will enhance access to key trails in the Gila National Forest, creating opportunities for two exceptional day hikes and connecting to over 100 miles of the Gila Centennial Trail. By restoring trails impacted by fire, flood, and erosion, the initiative supports the Gila Wilderness Centennial Celebration and promotes a sustainable local economy while fostering outdoor access and stewardship through collaboration with Latino Outdoors.
Wild Arizona’s mission is to protect, unite, and restore wild lands and waters across Arizona and beyond, for the enrichment and health of all generations, and to ensure native plants and animals a lasting home in wild nature. We organize and amplify multi-community voices of support for legislation and special designations; advocate for conservation science-based environmental policy and planning; and cultivate stewardship, and well-being through outdoor volunteerism, science, and education. Wild Arizona is the merger of Arizona Wilderness Coalition with the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council. In 2015, we blended two long-standing conservation organizations with strong roots in Arizona’s rich conservation history, the wilderness movement, field-based ecological research, hands-on habitat restoration, and working for and with Indigenous partners. We believe that you need to know—to experience, to make memories and learn about—something in order to love it. And that when a person loves something, they will take action to protect it. Therefore, we recognize how vital it is to connect people with wild places and one another. We do this through fostering meaningful relationships with partners and constituents, grassroots organizing, educational outreach, engaging in mentorship opportunities, and leading place-based excursions. Since 2020, we have maintained an in-house “Wild Stew Field Crew” staffed by full-time employees in crews of six that work on conservation projects. This program, in concert with our volunteer and community outreach programs, focuses on connecting people with nature and public lands through on-the-ground projects designed to maintain and restore wild places, riparian areas, and trails. We now collaborate with all six national forests in Arizona and the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. We have an excellent track record of completing multiple stewardship projects annually. Agencies seek our services, as we have demonstrated reliability and a high level of skill in our professional crew, as well as in using volunteers to accomplish important monitoring, restoration, and maintenance work in remote backcountry settings. We have a long and established history of coordinating and implementing trail maintenance projects, ranging from simple corridor brushing, to large-scale, week-long, crosscut logouts that involve clearing hundreds of deadfall trees off trails, to total restorations with tread reconstruction and technical rockwork. We have several long standing projects to restore networks of trails across the Mogollon Rim, in Arizona and New Mexico.