Clear Springs Wilderness

Clear Springs Wilderness is a 4,730-acre roadless tract of steep, forested hills and limestone springs in southern Illinois’s Shawnee National Forest, near Wolf Lake and beside the ecologically important LaRue-Pine Hills area. Its bluffs overlook the Big Muddy River, and Clear Springs drains through Hutchins Creek to Clear Creek. Though protected as wilderness today, the area is largely second-growth forest because earlier farming, firewood cutting, grazing, and erosion reshaped the land before federal purchases in the 1930s. After Shawnee National Forest was established in 1939, Clear Springs became one of seven Illinois wilderness parcels designated under the Illinois Wilderness Act of 1990.

Alto Pass, Illinois · United States