Wilderness Commentary

With a fanciful name like "Devil's Staircase," it's hard to imagine that Congress wouldn't want to protect this amazing, almost mystical waterfall and surrounding forest in Oregon's rugged Coast Range. 

Indeed, odds for protecting it improved last week when a bill to create the 29,600-acre Devil's Staircase Wilderness made it to the House floor. The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Peter DeFazio,  D-Ore., and a companion bill sponsored by Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., granting wild and scenic designation to the Molalla River, now await votes by the full House.

Montana has waited for nearly 30 years for new wilderness with nothing yet to show for it. When the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act passed in March, not a single acre of the 2 million acres newly designated as wilderness was located in Montana.

Meanwhile, Montanans have watched as our timber industry has dwindled to a bare skeleton of what it used to be, and in recent years, the nationwide decline in housing construction that hastened the shuttering of several western Montana mills.

During the late 1800s my ancestors arrived in Warren County from Sweden and like other immigrants here they were industrious people. My great great grandfather John Hofstedt made his living as a tannery laborer in Stoneham, as did his son and my great uncle Peter Hofstedt. By 1900 great great grandfather Hofstedt owned outright his own home in Stoneham (a house that still stands today along Route 6). My great grandfather Frederick Johnson also settled in Stoneham after arriving in America, and worked for the railroad.

When I was 16 years old, I joined the Bridger-Teton National Forest wilderness trail crew, working in the Wind River and Wyoming Ranges. For several summer seasons I returned to the Winds, back bent under high mountain sun, sweat marking my green F.S. uniform, to have the chance to awaken with the cold of 11,000-foot mountain mornings and to run a smooth crosscut blade through a few more downed limber pine.

Welcome to the White River National Forest. To paraphrase the U.S. Forest Service motto, "land of many uses," our forest is also the "land of many conflicts."

One of those conflicts is the current Hidden Gems campaign. I am saddened that it has become such a controversy.

October 31 may be a day of fun and dress up, but for conservationists and rangers at the Mojave National Preserve, Halloween is the anniversary of a day that changed the California desert forever.

For me, the decision to support the Hidden Gems Wilderness proposal comes down to a simple equation. Given the explosion of mountain populations, our love of the high country and how quickly we've filled the valleys and ridges with our homes and roads, add how urgent the needs of gas, oil and mining interests become, then how much of our original ecosystem do we want to have left for our great grandkids in 100 years.

After all that's why we moved here. Wild Beauty is what we base our economy on.

U.S. REP. John Salazar is to be credited for introducing legislation last week to protect about 60,000 acres as wilderness in western Colorado.

The 3rd District Democrat's San Juan Mountains Wilderness Bill would cover stretches of U.S. Forest and Bureau of Land Management land in San Miguel, Ouray and San Juan counties at the request of those local governments. Among the lands are Mount Sneffels and WilsonPeak, two of Colorado's "fourteeners" - mountains at least 14,000 feet high.

The modest wilderness bill introduced by 3rd District Congressman John Salazar has several things in its favor.

First, it applies to areas in Salazar's own congressional district. Unlike the over-reaching wilderness bill introduced by Denver Congresswoman Diana DeGette earlier this year, Salazar didn't attempt to reach into other congressional districts to designate wilderness areas in them. Nor did he include highly controversial areas with few acres of real wilderness - such as the Roan Plateau - in his bill.

I have noted with interest the letters to the editor and the debate surrounding the Hidden Gems Wilderness proposal.

I would like to add a unique perspective to the discussion. I have been flying over the West for more than 20 years doing aerial conservation work and watching the profound changes on our landscape, including the dulling of Utah's azure blue skies by power plants' emissions; the industrialization of landscapes by oil and gas drilling; the clear-cutting of our forests; and ORV (off road vehicle) tracks in the middle of fragile deserts and mountain wild lands.