Some 115,000 acres of wilderness will be protected in California's southern Sierras under new bipartisan legislation introduced in both the House and Senate in July. The centerpiece is a 69,500-acre wild treasure most fittingly to be named the John Krebs Wilderness, honoring the former Congressman and conservationist whose courageous leadership was crucial in winning protection for this once gravely threatened place.

Local conservationists have long sought full Wilderness Act protection for the wild portions of Mineral King, a valley set deep in the Sierras and literally surrounded, save for a narrow access road corridor, by Sequoia National Park. It offers a steep, rugged landscape ranging from low elevation blue oak woodland to montane red fir forests above 7,500 feet.

"Mineral King" may not be a name widely remembered today, but four decades ago this secluded valley was the setting for one of the defining conservation confrontations of the period that spawned the first Earth Day. When the Walt Disney Company unveiled plans to build a huge destination ski resort, with two hotels, 14 ski lifts, and an alpine village, "Save Mineral King" became a major rallying cry for the burgeoning environmental movement. The ensuing controversy reached front pages nationwide, and became the focus of a long-running lawsuit that ultimately reached the Supreme Court.

John Krebs, now 80, tangled with the issue of Mineral King first as a Fresno County planning commissioner, then a county supervisor before going on to serve four years in the House of Representatives. It was as a member of Congress that Krebs exerted extraordinary leadership, courageously championing the protection of Mineral King valley, rejecting the Disney ski development in the face of the all-too-typical and exaggerated claims of vast tourism income for the local communities. While it may have cost him his seat in Congress, Krebs, backed by a nationwide outpouring of opposition to the disney-fi-cation of the valley, was successful in getting Mineral King added to Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park in 1978.

The new legislation is championed by Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) in the Senate and the bipartisan team of local Representatives Jim Costa (D-CA) and Devin Nunes (R-CA) in the House of Representatives. It will extend the strongest possible protection to the wild portions of the Mineral King valley, as well as a 43,450-acre area in the North Fork/Redwood Canyon, and one smaller area-all of which are within the national park. As the Bee newspaper chain's Washington, D.C. reporter wrote, "because it is already park service property, the valley would not be managed much differently once designated a wilderness. But extensive negotiations have sought to protect the interests of area cabin owners, backcountry packers and power companies."

Prompt enactment of the Bower-Costa-Nunes legislation will extend an extra layer of protection, identical to that which already covers most of the undeveloped lands within Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park. As one of the architects of the historic 1964 Wilderness Act explained, wilderness areas are designated by Act of Congress within national park lands "because we in the Congress recognized the pressures that would face the national parks, and provided in the Wilderness Act the statutory basis for strengthening the protective hand of the National Park Service" [Sen. Frank Church, 1972].