Wilderness Commentary

The Hidden Gems Wilderness proposal is not about bikers. It's not about hikers, motorized users or horseback riders either. It's about the land. It's about the creatures that inhabit the land, their only option. Many of the Hidden Gems are excellent wildlife habitat. Let's give the wildlife some space of its own.

I attended the open house on Hidden Gems Wednesday evening, and found the behavior of most wilderness opponents extremely appalling. I hope the county commissioners realize that while the opponents in the room are certainly loud, they are not the majority. These people were saying that there's "already enough wilderness." They're clearly speaking only for themselves. We are all lucky to have such great "backyards" with easy access to beautiful public land, but it doesn't exist just for us.

A decade ago, no one would have predicted that a taxidermist, a rancher, a small-town attorney, a farmer, a teacher, an outfitter and many others would be working together to protect the Rocky Mountain Front.

It has been a lot of work but we've managed to put together a wholly made-in-Montana solution - a vision that looks after one of the most premier landscapes and the people that work and play here. After three years we've built a proposal that we believe Montanans can support.

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-great-grandkids in a 100 years.

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

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.