Over 90% of the mountains in the United States are owned by the federal government, and the bulk of the rest by the various state governments. This happy circumstance means that virtaully all the mountainous terrain in the country is open to public access.
Besides owning most of the country's mountains, the United States government also owns about three-quarters of all the land west of the Great Plains. Being the prototypical bureaucracy it is, the government classifies its land and assigns various departments and bureaus to manage it. Some of the principal kinds of land found in the western third of the country are military bases, Indian reservations, wildlife refuges, land managed by the wonderfully named Bureau of Land Management, National Parks, and National Forests.
Few, if any, significant mountains are on military bases, since the largest ones are in the god-forsaken deserts of California and Nevada and hold only dry, scrubby ranges of little interest. Wildlife refuges are usually very small, and managed much like National Parks. Indian Reservations do sometimes contain important chunks of mountains, the most significant being a large chunk of the Wind River Range in Wyoming, most of the Mission Range in Montana, and Navajo and Ute Mountains in the southwest. (Please note that you should always get permission from the tribe before venturing into any reservation backcountry.) The Bureau of Land Managemant (BLM) also manages some mountainous terrain, most notably many ranges in the Great Basin of Nevada and Utah, but most BLM land is flat, dry, and used only by ranchers for grazing.
This leaves National Parks and National Forests, which together hold the bulk of the govermnment's mountains. This, plus the difficulty some people have in telling the two apart, make it worthwhile to examine these two kinds of land in depth.
The National Park Service, part of the Department of the Interior, runs the National Parks, which come in many different flavors: National Monuments, National Recreation Areas, National Historic Parks, National Historic Sites, National Seashores, plain old National Parks, and so on. (But NOT National Forests.) Most mountains are in regular National Parks, with a couple National Monuments (such as Death Valley or Mt. St. Helens) holding significant mountainous terrain.
National Parks have two principal missions. First is the preservation of outstanding natural areas, and the second is somehow allowing millions of people to visit these outstanding natural areas without destroying them. Preservation means that National Parks strives to keep as much of their land as possilbe in the state it was in when only Indians lived in America--hunting is banned, originally native animals are re-introduced, and the backcountry is left alone. In Yellowstone, for example, this policy has led to unpopular decisions such as letting naturally set forest fires to burn and re- introducing wolves into the park form Canada.
The second part of the Park Service's mission is evident in all the visitor centers, campgrounds, marinas, hot-dog stands, and parking lots that they build to handle the crush of visitors. Although a bit incongruous in places, these facilities are necessary, and usually only cover miniscule percentages of any big park's land. Large backcountry areas are available for an escape from the occasionally Disneyesque atmosphere, and the built-up areas are necessary for people who simply don't like to ever be more than fifty yards from their car. It is kind of elitist to insist that the only access to Old Faithful be by a 20-mile bushwhack, so instead the Park Service built a two-lane highway cloverleaf overpass to speed tourists to the famous geyser.
The incompatable nature of the two primary Park Service goals inevitably leads to a highly regulated environment. Mountain climbing and backpacking in almost all National Parks involves getting permits, camping in designated places, following a Ranger's instructions, and sometimes obtaining reservations beforehand. All this is needed to keep unruly hordes from destroying the backcountry, but it can still be a real drag.
National Forests are far less famous and popular than National Parks, but cover 2.5 times as much land and hold many more mountains than their cousins. They are run by the Department of Agriculture's U.S. Forest Service, and, like the National Parks, they are managed for two seemingly contradictory goals: in this case, timber production and outdoor recreation.
Since the National Forests are not parks, the Forest Service lets loggers cut trees in an regulated manner, getting fees for the wood removed and deciding where cutting is permitted. Hunting is allowed, too, and concepts like "ecosystem preservation" and "wildlife management" are largely alien. The Forest Service is not all about exploitation, though; it is simply trying to maximize productive yield from it land without destroying it entirely.
Recreation use of the National Forests is often an afterthought to the Forest Service. It does maintain campgrounds, hiking trails, visitor centers, and ranger stations, but since most truly outstanding natural areas have been turned into National Parks, the demand for these kinds of facilities is much lower. No entrance fees are ever charged for National Forests, they are usually less crowded, less developed, have less paved roads, and have fewer regulations than the National Parks.
However, with 175 million acres (275,000 square miles) of mountainous terrain in the National Forests, there are of course exceptions to this rule. Some forests are de facto National Parks, such as the White Mountain Forest, and many others see so much use that permits and regulations are needed, such as at Inyo National Forest's Mt. Whitney Trail. Since there are far fewer car tourists and Winnebago-jammed campgrounds than in the National Parks, most savvy backpackers have long realized that the National Forests are a good place to avoid this kind of distraction, and therefore the spectacular backcountry in the Forests can get pretty crowded--especially the Wilderness Areas.
Large chunks of National Forest land have been officially designated by the government as "Wilderness Areas", a status that theoretically prohibits any intrusion of civilization whatsoever. A wilderness has no roads at all, motorized vehicles of any kind are prohibited, mining and logging are definitely off-limits, and ideally there aren't even any structures or buildings of any kind, although a few cabins and lean-tos still exist in some Wildernesses. Foot trails and trail signs are the only sanctioned man-made intrusions in these areas.
In addition to the National Forest lands designated Wilderness, large sections of most National Parks are managed using the same rules, in keeping with their mission of preservation. Some BLM and Indian Reservation land is also essentially Wilderness.
Unfortunately, a Wilderness designation has become almost as much as an attraction to outdoorsmen as a National Park designation is to the casual tourist. Although often crowded with backpackers, hunters, or fisherman, Wilderness areas are still important and popular tracts of land, in many ways the very heart and soul of the publicly owned mountain lands.
In this site the word Wilderness capitalized means a federally designated Wilderness Area, while an all lower-cased wilderness means any area away from civilization.
There are only three state parks in the entire United States that cover significant amounts of mountain country: Baxter State Park in Maine, which preserves Mt. Katahdin and its surroundng area, and the enormous Adirondack and Catskill parks in New York State, both covering virtaully all of the state's two principal ranges. Baxter State Park is run much like a National Park, with entrance fees and many regulations, while New York's enormous parks are run much like National Forest Wilderness land.
There are also many small state parks scattered about, usually covering a few square miles on a mountaintop, often the state's highest (for example, in New Hampshire, Vermont, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama). Also, Custer State Park in South Dakota, a highly regulated tract covering some nice terrain in the Black Hills, should be mentioned.
The only significant mountainous areas in the entire contiguous United States not in public ownership of some kind are the Culebra Range area of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of southern Colorado, including Culebra Peak (14,047), and most mountains in Maine outside of Baxter State Park and Acadia National Park. Culebra Peak is owned by the Taylor Ranch, which allows climbers if they obtain permission first, and the privately-owned mountains in Maine belong to paper companies, which generally don't mind hikers wandering through their woods as long as they stay away from logging operations and don't start any forest fires. Recently Maine has been establishing Public Reserve lands on some of the higher mountain crests, and the Appalachian trail in the state is well-protected, so the sitiuation there is improving.
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