The Yaak Valley of northwest Montana comprises roughly a million acres lying along the Canadian and Idaho borders, and hosts some of the wildest, most diverse country in the West. Despite this wildness, there’s still not a single acre of designated wilderness in the Yaak — the Land the Wilderness Act Forgot. Activists have been waiting and working for wilderness in the Yaak for 45 years now.
At 30,000 acres, Roderick Mountain is not the biggest roadless area in northwest Montana, but it’s the biggest in the fragmented Yaak. In the Kootenai National Forest, which has nearly ten thousand miles of roads, it is the centerpiece of an archipelago of smaller wildlands. What Roderick might lack in size compared to other western wildernesses, it more than makes up for in diversity. Once Senator Jon Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act passes Congress and President Obama signs it into law, Roderick Mountain would become some of the lowest elevation wilderness in Montana. Few places could provide the kind of diverse lower-elevation ecosystems so needed in National Wilderness Preservation System — particularly in Montana — like the roadless lands of the Yaak.
The Yaak defines vegetative and biological diversity, and Roderick Mountain is a wonderful representative of that mix. Many forest types in the intermountain West are single-species dominant, but in the Yaak, the forests are often co-dominant or multi-species dominant. There are giant larch snags still standing from the great fire of 1910, the gray spires towering over the younger forests, and yet there are also unburned boggy groves and pockets of giant cedar and hemlock, as well as spruce, Doug fir, Ponderosa and white pine.
Lodgepole — fuel for the breath of fire that feeds and nurtures all forests in the West exists in scattered stands, but is intertwined with aspen, cottonwood, and willow, particularly around the low-elevation marshes. Almost anywhere in the Yaak can be found giant larch — the rarest form of old growth in the West, but the most common form in the Yaak. In fact, the Yaak is the epicenter of larch distribution in North America. Thirty thousand acres of roadless lands in a wet and diverse swampy landscape like the Yaak may well be the ecological equivalent of a roadless area ten times that size in a more arid or less biologically diverse landscape.
Roderick has some high peaks, too. The nearby Cabinet Mountains emerged from the last Ice Age as the majestic jagged spires we so admire in our recreational wilderness portfolio. But the Yaak — just on the other side of the Kootenai River — remained compressed beneath more than a mile of blue ice and thus shaped and sculpted into the soft humpbacked mountains still visible today. It’s rare to ever get up above the treeline in the low, rounded Yaak. There aren’t many sightlines or hikers’ vistas, but its value in providing a unique and rewarding wilderness experience is unmatched in the Rocky Mountains.
Designating Roderick as wilderness would tie together a great international trans-boundary ecosystem. The Roderick wilderness would be a raven’s short flight away from Canada’s great chain of wildness, and represent the southern terminus of the Purcell Mountains, Canada’s largest mountain range. It’s the only place where the Purcells enter the United States.
Finally, not a single species has gone extinct in the Yaak since the ice last went away, nearly 10,000 years ago. Roderick is a refuge not just for the last few grizzlies in the valley, but long toed salamanders, spotted frogs, lynx, great gray owls, west-slope cutthroat trout, and bull trout in the waters of Pipe Creek.
For 45 years, Roderick — like the other roadless lands in the Yaak — has waited for protection. Senator Tester’s Forest Jobs and Recreation Act would finally deliver the recognition and protection that the complex diversity of this beautiful and invaluable landscape has so long deserved.
This article written by Rick Bass, a prize-winning author of more than twenty books and a longtime Yaak Valley resident.
