Mogollon Wildway is a geologic feature forming a natural wildlife corridor. The Mogollon Rim is the southwest edge of the Colorado Plateau. Elevations drop sharply southwest of the Rim, but along the Mogollon Plateau, Lobo, Puma, Black Bear, Elk, native trout, and other wildlife find ample forest cover and cool temperatures, while the desert below bakes. Mogollon Wildway is largely public and tribal land, most of which is still at least semi-natural. It includes all or parts of several National Forests, Bureau of Land Management and state properties, and the White Mountain and San Carlos Apache tribal reservations. Part of our effort to promote and better protect Mogollon Wildway is our proposed Lobo National Scenic Trail. This will begin and end on – and connect – the Continental Divide Trail and Arizona Trail. Other key parts of successfully protecting the Mogollon wildlife corridor include tribal protection of native lands in the wildway; Wild & Scenic designations of the Gila, San Francisco, Black, and Blue Rivers; Wilderness designations of road-free parts of the National Forests in the Wildway; retirement of livestock grazing leases on BLM and state lands in the area; and expansion of designated critical habitat for Mexican Wolf (which US Fish & Wildlife Service arbitrarily bounded on the north by I-40 – far shy of Lobo’s original northern haunts).

The status of Mogollon Wildway is partly protected, largely public. Most of the lands from the Gila wildlands complex through Grand Canyon wildlands complex and encompassing the Mogollon Rim and Plateau are still relatively wild and are in public or tribal ownership. However, only small fractions of the land are strongly protected in wilderness, parks, refuges, or other strong categories (as in Status 1 & 2 protection in IUCN terms). A generous estimate might put protection of the wildlife corridor as nearly a third complete. Most public lands in Mogollon Wildway and throughout the American West, even if protected from most other exploitive uses, are subject to livestock grazing (by neighboring ranchers, who enjoy tax-payer subsidized grazing privileges).

Mogollon Wildway as a recognized wildlife corridor and a focal conservation initiative was given a big boost in 2013 when Wildlands Network, The Rewilding Institute, Wild Arizona, New Mexico Wild, and partner groups sponsored its exploration as part of a traverse of the proposed Western Wildway. “TrekWest” then became the subject of the film Born to Rewild.

Efforts to protect the Mogollon wildlife corridor involve many non-profit conservation groups – including Wild Arizona, New Mexico Wild, The Rewilding Institute, Center for Biological Diversity, Great Old Broads for Wilderness, and Wild Earth Guardians – several native tribes (who may not necessarily endorse the Wildway as a whole but control critical lands therein), and multiple land and wildlife management agencies (none of which yet formally embrace and work to protect the whole wildlife corridor).

Mogollon Wildway spans ecosystems ranging from high desert to sub-alpine forest. World Wildlife Fund in its great systematic look at Terrestrial Ecoregions of North America clearly outlines Mogollon Wildway on its main map and calls it Arizona Mountains Forests.

The wildlife corridor extends hundreds of miles from the Gila wildlands complex to Grand Canyon wildlands complex (and then continues north as the Grand Staircase wildlife connection). It stands out as a broad green (forest) swath on satellite images. If looking for it on a map, a town in the middle of it is Pinetop, Arizona, at about 34 degrees north by 110 degrees west.