Congress just passed the largest piece of environmental legislation in decades, voting to protect forever 26 million acres of the country's most scenic and historically significant sites. Odds are you've never heard of them. Jim Robbins reports on some of our last and least-known wild places—and the rewards of seeing them now

To describe lonesome Virgelle, Montana, as being in the middle of nowhere is charitable. Antelope gallop across the far-flung ranches and treeless prairie, and mule and white-tail deer wander the ravines. It looks like an American Serengeti. This tiny outpost on a dirt road was founded by Virgil and Ella Blankenbaker, a couple who came west in 1912 to ranch and trade with homesteaders flocking to the state. They built a sturdy redbrick bank, post office, and mercantile, and expected the little burg to flourish. Instead, a withering drought struck, and by 1930 most of the homesteads had blown away like the wind-whipped sagebrush that was rolling down the dirt road when I visited.

When everyone is home, the population is two. Don Sorensen, a retired pharmacist, rescued Virgelle when he bought it in 1975 and turned the mercantile into a bed-and-breakfast and antiques store. He lives in the back of the Virgelle State Bank, where he also trades antiques next to the teller's cages. Jimmy Griffin operates the single-car ferry that shuttles vehicles across the Missouri. He lives across the street from the bank, near the grain elevator.

The engine that drives Virgelle's economy is the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, an isolated, coffee-colored stretch of river and surreal badlands that mesmerized explorer Meriwether Lewis when he floated the Upper Missouri at the beginning of the nineteenth century. "It seemed as if those scenes of visionary enchantment would never have an end," he wrote of the place.

Sorensen and Griffin make their living on this enchantment, guiding visitors on canoe trips and renting out rooms in the mercantile. "The monument sustains us," says Sorensen over coffee in the kitchen in the back of the merc.

The Missouri Breaks, as it's known, is one of 850 federally protected areas in the 26-million-acre National Landscape Conservation System (NLCS), which was established a decade ago but not written into law until this past March, when President Obama signed the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act. The landmark legislation, which includes more than 160 conservation bills, gave federal protection to the first major system of American public land in generations. "In these moments when our national character is most tested, we rightly seek to protect that which fuels our spirit," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said at the signing. "For America's national character—our optimism, our dreams, our shared stories—is rooted in our landscapes."

The lands of the NLCS, largely unknown to most Americans, range from the Carrizo Plain National Monument, the largest remaining grassland in California, to the rock cliffs of Arizona's Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, to the Snake River Birds of Prey National Conservation Area in southern Idaho, which has North America's densest population of raptors. Colorado's Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, a carefully preserved rock-walled dwelling of the prehistoric Pueblo Indians, and Nevada's Black Rock Desert, a lake bed as flat as a billiard table where the Burning Man Festival is held each year, are also part of the system.