Henry David Thoreau has gotten a bad rap lately. He's been pigeon-holed as a "romantic" by resource managers who do not have a tiny fragment of his wisdom and don't know anything about him. He's been accused of hypocrisy because his cabin at Walden Pond was not, after all, very remote. His wilderness trips, in this age of fly-in mountaineering, are dismissed as pedestrian. His writing, in the Age of Attention Deficit Disorder, is increasingly not read because it takes too much work. This is unfortunate because no wilderness advocate has said anything that Thoreau didn't say first, or that does not build directly on Thoreau's work. In this article, the author talks about Thoreau's wilderness philosophy and explores why everything one needs to know about this concept could have been learned from Henry Thoreau.