Connie Saylor Johnson’s Story

Connie Saylor Johnson was a beloved friend, teacher, mentor, mother, and life-long educator. She was the first field staff member of the Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation in its inaugural year of 2006 and was instrumental in the creation of SBFC’s Wilderness Ranger Fellow program. In 2009, she joined the SBFC board after retiring as a wilderness ranger and remained on the board until her passing in 2018.

Connie was devoted to providing hands-on wilderness experiences for school children, college students, and adults from across the United States to help care for her beloved Selway-Bitterroot and Frank Church River of No Return wilderness areas in Montana and Idaho.

In the late 1980’s, Connie, who taught high school in Iowa, began working summers in the Clearwater National Forest and the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. In the early 1990’s, she moved to Idaho to devote herself fully to working in Wilderness, eventually becoming a wilderness ranger at Moose Creek Ranger Station. She applied her teaching skills to the work, organizing workshops and introducing teachers and students to the beauty and transformative power of wild places. She soon found a way to combine her passions for teaching and wilderness by bringing high school students from Iowa to Idaho to learn hands-on stewardship skills repairing trails and wilderness survival skills. This program, lovingly known as IDAWA, is thriving to this day. Connie also helped to establish the annual History Day at the Lochsa Historical Ranger Station, where fourth graders flock to the historical center to learn wilderness skills— from how to handle a crosscut saw, to how to pack a mule train, and even how to make meals in the wild. Connie spent over 25 years teaching and training young people and adults in the backcountry of Idaho and Montana. She believed in the power and necessity of Wilderness education. Her passion for getting people into Wilderness brought generations of students into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, including SBFC Wilderness Ranger Interns and project and cabin volunteers. Many of her former students now work in conservation, as teachers, and as wilderness defenders.

Connie died in the place that she loved. She was last heard from on October 2, 2018 at a hunting camp near Moose Creek Ranger Station in the Nez-Perce Clearwater National Forest, Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. After Connie’s disappearance, a large but unsuccessful search was conducted.

The Connie Saylor Johnson Wilderness Education Fund was established in 2019, to honor her legacy. This fund enables the Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation to provide incentive grants for educators and educational organizations to incorporate stewardship of wilderness and natural ecosystems into the curriculum and to perform on-the-ground volunteer work.

“If you can get them there, if you can get people to the Wilderness, they become advocates already,” Connie said, in a 2011 interview. “They understand, they get it.”



All donations made to the Connie Saylor Johnson Wilderness Education Fund go directly to providing incentive grants. Your contribution will help educators inspire younger generations to cherish wild places through an integrated curriculum and hands on experience in the classroom. Thank you for your generosity.

“I just love being in that place so much. It just took care of me, you know. It’s a pretty overpowering feeling to look up into those hills and especially being a flatlander like I was. I still am in awe of the power of those mountains and the power of the weather and the creeks and just the sheer hugeness of it and the fact that we’re not in control of anything.”

-Connie Saylor Johnson in an interview about the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness