In deciding what qualified as wilderness, we followed strictly the guidelines found in the Wilderness Act and also the more detailed Forest Service Handbook (FSH1909.12,7). (We made a small number of exceptions to this strict interpretation; see below.)
According to the Wilderness Act, human impacts within wilderness areas must be "substantially unnoticeable". Note that it does not say that impacts must be completely absent or not noticeable at all. Subsequent Wilderness bills passed by Congress (including Jim Hansen's 1984 Utah Forest Wilderness Bill) established there are a wide variety of minor human impacts, including primitive roads and logging impacts, which are acceptable within designated Wilderness.
The Forest Service Handbook (FSH) goes into much greater detail on allowable human impacts in wilderness.
According to the FSH, potential wilderness areas should not contain "improved roads maintained for travel by standard passenger-type vehicles". Permissible within potential wilderness are high-clearance vehicle routes (also known as primitive roads or jeep trails), as well as motorcycle and ATV trails.
The UFN actually adopted a slightly stricter standard than the one in the FSH. We often exclude jeep trails, ATV routes and mountain bike trails from our boundaries, especially those routes are popular and used frequently.
We exclude significant logging impacts, but sometimes include logging impacts which are substantially unnoticeable. In practice this means that we are willing to include areas of past logging activity so long as (a) the area is generally natural looking (to an untrained observer), (b) there are not too many stumps, and (c) there is a reasonable variety of ages and species in the forest. The above standard is consistent with Wilderness bills passed by Congress over the past three decades.
According to the FSH, other permissible impacts include: grazing infrastructure, such as fences and spring developments; evidence of historic mining activity; and small electronic installations.
In a few instances we have deviated from the above standards. We did so only when there were strong, compelling reasons to adjust the proposed wilderness boundaries. There are a small number of dirt roads suitable for standard passenger-type vehicles in our proposal (such as the Dry Mesa road in the Abajo Mountains). These roads currently serve little purpose, and we feel that the benefits of closing them (in terms of improved wildlife habitat and opportunities for primitive recreation) far outweigh the costs. A second type of exception is small but significant logging impacts deep inside an otherwise natural area. We feel that it would serve little purpose to make a large boundary adjustment, adversely impacting thousands of acres of pristine wilderness, just for the sake of excluding these isolated impacts.
The foundation of our inventory is as extensive library of over 20,000 digital photos taken by our fieldworkers. This information was supplemented by aerial photography and Forest Service GIS data. All information was reviewed by an experienced technical review committee. This committee included the principal architects of the Utah Wilderness Coalition BLM Wilderness proposal, as well as representatives from a variety of Utah forest advocacy groups.