Wilderness crossroad

Idaho Conservation League re-ignites efforts to designate a Boulder-White Cloud wilderness area

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By GREG STAHL
Express Staff Writer

It’s the largest potential wilderness area left in the lower 48 United States, and wilderness designation efforts will soon be rekindled with the Idaho Conservation League (ICL) igniting designation efforts into a full-blown blaze.

The Boulder and White Cloud mountain ranges and surrounding lands—parts of the Challis and Sawtooth National Forests and some Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land—are still largely bereft of roads and mining and timber harvesting scars.

The area the ICL proposes as wilderness includes over 500,000 acres of both the Boulder and White Cloud mountain ranges, stretching roughly from state Highway 75 on the north and west borders to Highway 93 on the east and Trail Creek Road on the south. Trail Creek Road is an extension of Sun Valley Road.

The area is over twice the size of the 217,000-acre Sawtooth Wilderness Area and one quarter the size of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area, the country’s largest. In it are jagged alpine peaks, sharply tumbling mountain streams, one of the southernmost populations of mountain goats in the world and several biologically diverse eco-zones.

"There are some places that [the ICL] just doesn’t think can wait any longer," ICL central Idaho director Linn Kincannon said.

As part of a study completed in 1987, the area was selected by Sawtooth National Forest officials as potential wilderness. Shortly thereafter, Challis National Forest and BLM officials followed suit. The area targeted by public land managers is slightly smaller that that sighted by the ICL.

Forest officials sight just over 400,000 acres, excluding two northern sections—selected by the ICL—that would be cut off from the majority of the wilderness by existing roads.

For the past three years, legislation has been introduced in Congress that would designate all Northwestern National Forest areas without roads, which are larger than 5,000 acres, as wilderness. The bill, called the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, has been introduced in the 104th, 105th and 106th congressional sessions, but has never been considered by the full House of Representatives.

The bill might eventually be passed, Kincannon said, but the ICL has decided that it can’t wait any longer. The time to act is now—or in the very near future, she said.

Though she wouldn’t reveal the ICL’s plans or timeline for introducing a bill in Congress that would specifically designate the Boulder-White Clouds as wilderness, she did say the next few years will probably be crucial.

Idaho U.S. Sen. Mike Simpson has expressed interest in introducing Boulder-White Clouds wilderness designation legislation. During a speech he gave at ICL’s Wild Idaho! conference at Redfish Lake in May he also said the time has come. The ICL is hopeful that Simpson will help to get the ball rolling in the near future.

There are currently 104 million acres of federally designated wilderness land in the United States, and many more areas, including the Boulder-White Clouds, the Owyhee canyons in Southwestern Idaho and expanded areas to the Sawtooth Wilderness, are eyed as potential wilderness.

Wilderness areas are the most limited to human entrance of all public lands. Motorized and mechanized transportation of any kind are not allowed. Travel is limited to horses, mules and hiking.

Because of the difficulty of entering these wild places and a strict set of guidelines precluding development, wilderness areas are generally the most pristine of all public lands.

At a time when some place a higher value on profit than on the sanctity and solitude of a remote, fresh-air morning spent on a feral land, wilderness management and designation are becoming increasingly more important, Idaho regional director of the Wilderness Society, Craig Gehrke, said in an interview.

According to Gehrke, wild areas are becoming more valuable because they’re offering increased populations the freedom to enjoy the outdoors. They’ll be increasingly treasured for their ability to provide escape for people, he added.

Wilderness areas are managed with one major premise: keeping land open and useable by people while still protecting wild characteristics, Gehrke said.

According to The Wilderness Society’s 1997 annual report, "Idaho is ground zero in (the) fight to save roadless forest lands."

The Idaho Conservation League’s Kincannon said the state currently has between 10 and 11-million acres of roadless land that isn’t protected, land that could potentially be lost to timber or mining interests, she said.

In Idaho, the Wilderness Society’s report states, forest roads, primarily built by and for loggers, were being constructed at alarming rates prior to a recent road-building moratorium enacted by the Forest Service.

"Idaho now has approximately one million fewer acres of its most pristine land than it did a decade ago," the report states. "With more unprotected wild forest land than any other state but Alaska, Idaho has much at stake."