OPINION: Exploring the Great Burn
Nearly every weekend of this summer, I have ventured up into the heart of the Great Burn. Heart Lake. Dalton Lake. Cache Creek. Goose Lake. North Fork Fish Creek. West Fork Fish Creek. This area is no Glacier National Park; you may see five cars at the trailhead, not 300. But the Great Burn offers more than just solitude. The other weekend I descended off the Stateline Trail with a group of volunteers for the Great Burn Study Group — a group that had championed stewardship projects in this wild area for more than 40 years — only to find a moose bathing in a lake. This is not uncommon. The Great Burn provides exceptional habitat: few roads, few people, exposed alpine meadows, ancient cedar forests — it’s the last unprotected link in a chain of wilderness areas and national parks from Banff to the Frank Church in central Idaho. But there is no guarantee that the Great Burn will stay the way it is.
It has been 106 years since the 3 million-acre fire burned across Idaho and western Montana on a weekend in 1910. Entire towns burned to the ground, and relics of this historic, catastrophic fire remain. Lewis and Clark traversed the ridge tops on the southern edge of the Great Burn; Native Americans used this land for hunting and foraging for 10,000 years without the sound of motorized power. Located 25 miles west of Missoula as the crow flies, this 252,000-acre proposed wilderness is a gem in the northern Bitterroot. You can’t see it from I-90, nor from anywhere in the Missoula Valley. It’s looming, straddling the Montana-Idaho border south of Lookout Pass and north of Highway 12. The proposed wilderness is in administrative limbo, managed to be designated in the future as capital “W” wilderness by Congress, but it doesn’t have any form of permanent protection — at least not yet. We need to protect this unique landscape so future generations of Montanans can witness the subtle beauty, solitude and outstanding wildlife habitat of the Great Burn.
The upcoming Nez Perce-Clearwater and Lolo National Forest Plan revision will revisit their formal Wilderness recommendations for this area, leaving an uncertain future for the Great Burn. Threats to the wild character of the area come from all sides: pressure on the Lolo to cut more wood to feed mills, motorized vehicles venturing further into the backcountry, and the uncertainty of managing our public lands in the face of climate change. A recent Record of Decision released by the Nez Perce-Clearwater for their Travel Management Plan upholds the wilderness character of Recommended Wilderness areas on their forest — a win for the Burn, and for the local communities. According to Headwaters Economics, Wilderness nets communities in the vicinity of $400 per year higher income than areas without. While Wilderness is not a silver bullet, it can contribute to a more diverse economic base in rural areas.
On one of my adventures several weeks ago, I awoke on the shores of Dalton Lake. Through my tent I heard a cobbling of hooves on rock. Mountain goats scaled the rocky crags, white specks in a stunning alpine landscape. The huckleberry bushes were tacked with white fuzz, goat hair snagged in the brush. On this outing in the Great Burn I saw more goats than humans — as we move forward into the 21st century, I would like to see places like the Great Burn protected so my children can experience what a truly wild place feels like.
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Oliver Wood is a graduate student at the University of Montana in environmental studies and law. He spent the summer in the Great Burn, a proposed wilderness area on the Idaho-Montana border.