Sipsey Wilderness and the Fight That Saved It

The Sipsey Wilderness in the William B. Bankhead National Forest is one of the oldest designated wilderness areas in the eastern United States, established as part of the original Eastern Wilderness Areas Act of nineteen seventy-five. It covers roughly twenty-five thousand acres of canyon country in the southern end of the Cumberland Plateau, where the Sipsey Fork of the Black Warrior River has cut a series of steep-walled gorges into the sandstone, creating a landscape of waterfalls, overhanging bluffs, and old-growth hardwoods that has been growing undisturbed for more than a century.

The wilderness designation was not inevitable. The Bankhead National Forest had been under sustained logging pressure throughout the mid-twentieth century, and the Sipsey Fork area was targeted for clearcutting in the nineteen sixties. A coalition of Alabama conservationists, aided by the national environmental organizations that were then building political power in Washington, mounted a campaign to protect the gorge. The Eastern Wilderness Act, which passed over objections from the timber industry and from federal agencies that had argued eastern forests were too managed and degraded to qualify as wilderness, was partly a product of that campaign.

The forest takes its name from William B. Bankhead, an Alabama congressman who served as Speaker of the House from nineteen thirty-six until his death in office in nineteen forty. His daughter Tallulah Bankhead became one of the most celebrated American actresses of the mid-twentieth century, a fact locals mention with a frequency that suggests the forest's naming has always carried a certain social weight in this part of Alabama.

The Sipsey River Wilderness is also one of the primary water sources for Birmingham, Alabama, a function that gives the city a direct stake in the forest's health that no amount of timber revenue can adequately offset.