SOMEWHERE IN THREE SISTERS WILDERNESS, Oregon — As I scribble these words in my notebook, I'm totally lost.

My two sons and I are backpacking on the Pacific Crest Trail, but the trail disappeared under three feet of snow several miles ago. So we set out cross-country, camping last night on a patch of green surrounded by snow.

At the moment it's dawn at our bivouac, right about timberline, and my sons are still sleeping, blithely confident that we'll find our way again. And, truth be told, so long as one has food, shelter and a compass, it's gloriously liberating to be lost in a snowy wilderness.

That was a couple of weeks ago, and we eventually hiked beyond the snow and stumbled across a trail again. But I strongly recommend the practice of getting lost in the wilderness, and our government should give us more opportunities to do so.

A focus of the American environmental movement has been conservation, and that's why there is such rage at the Bush administration's efforts to log, mine or drill patches of wilderness from the Arctic to Florida. President Bush has done more than any other recent president to shift our environmental balance away from conservation and toward development.

Mr. Bush's Healthy Forests initiative, in its harsh early version, allowed logging companies to pillage federal land. The latest assault is President Bush's decision to overturn the Clinton administration's "roadless rule," protecting nearly 60 million acres of national forests from road building and development.

Presidential fingerprints on a country usually fade quickly, but an exception is the decision to preserve or develop the wilderness. Teddy Roosevelt's imprint on 21st-century America is enormous because he preserved wild spaces for future generations, while Mr. Bush's 22nd-century legacy may be the permanent scarring of those same spaces.

Yet the environmental movement is wrong to emphasize preservation for the sake of the wolves and the moose alone. We should preserve wilderness for our sake - to remind us of our scale on this planet, to humble us, to soothe us. Nothing so civilizes humans as the wild.

That means that we not only have to preserve wilderness, but we also must get more people into it. It's great that we have managed to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But virtually the only visitors who get to enjoy it are superwealthy tourists who charter airplanes to fly into remote airstrips.

So how about a hiking trail from Arctic Village going north to the Brooks Range, allowing many more people to enjoy the refuge? How about polar bear ecotourism in Kaktovik? Why not democratize the chance to hear wolves howl or be menaced by grizzlies?

The greatest opportunity for a conservation legacy, just waiting for some politician to grab it, is a proposed east-west hiking trail across America. The 7,700-mile sea-to-sea route, as sketched on maps, runs from Cape Alava in Washington State to Cape Gaspé in Quebec (see www.c2c-route.org/C2C/about_C2C.htm).

The U.S. already has three great long-distance hiking trails: the Appalachian Trail in the East, the Continental Divide Trail in the Rockies and the Pacific Crest Trail on the West Coast. They are steadily getting more users, and the trend toward ultralite backpacking is making trail hiking more appealing.

At a time when America is struggling with obesity and fewer Americans have daily contact with the outdoors, we should not be sealing off the wilderness but rather increasing access to it for those on foot or horseback. Canada is building the world's longest hiking trail, a 11,000-mile path called the Trans Canada Trail, and Europe is building a dazzling collection of distance trails, including the 6,500-mile E4 European Long Distance Path, from Portugal to Cyprus. But the U.S. is dozing on the couch.

I wish that Mr. Bush's environmental policy wasn't rooted in rapine. But I also wish that the green movement fought as hard for interactions between humans and our environment as it did against blind development. If environmentalists applied a small fraction of the energy they devoted to fighting snowmobiles in Yellowstone to push for the coast-to-coast trail, we would now have one.

We should give our descendants every chance to show their children how puny we humans are in a wilderness, by taking them hiking and getting them bitten by mosquitoes, hopelessly lost and totally exhilarated.

E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com