Wilderness News

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.

While I was watching the recent Ken Burns documentary series on national parks, one quote in particular struck me. Former cattle rancher, Wyoming governor, and U.S. Sen. Clifford Hansen was one of the leading voices against the expansion of Grand Teton National Park in the 1940s. Yet, in the mid-1960s, at a luncheon in New York, he said:

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.

Simply getting to West Virginia's wildest wilderness area is an adventure in itself.

No roads lead into the newly created Spice Run Wilderness, a 10-square-mile expanse of the Monongahela National Forest straddling the Greenbrier-Pocahontas county line northwest of Neola. Once you find your way to the edge of the wilderness, there are no trails to guide you into its interior.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - Tomorrow is the 15-year anniversary of the California Desert Protection Act. The legislation protects 7.7 million acres of California desert and remains the largest wilderness and national park bill in the history of the lower 48 states. When President Bill Clinton signed the act, baby desert tortoises crawled on his desk to symbolize the protection being brought to the area.

A local conservation group praised city council approval Tuesday of a resolution supporting legislative designation of the Gold Butte Complex as a National Conservation Area with wilderness as a sign of progress.

The unanimously-passed resolution also urged Congress "to enact these designations and mandate that an effective management plan be implemented that secures the interests of neighboring jurisdictions."

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.

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.

Fifteen years have passed since the historic California Desert Protection Act set aside millions of unspoiled acres as wilderness, elevated Joshua Tree and Death Valley to national park status and created the Mojave National Preserve.

The legislation was the largest land conservation bill in the continental United States, hailed for its safekeeping of a long-ignored 6.37 million acres of landscape that counts "singing" sand dunes, volcanic cinder cones and world-class climbing boulders among its attractions.

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.