Lessons Learned

Emma Froelich – Wilderness Ranger Intern

University of Wisconsin – Madison

June 11 – 18

Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest

As we emerged from the Wilderness, I imagined this is how Robin Williams’ character in Jumanji must have felt when his jungle-adapted self re-entered society, water from a tap? What a concept! As we drove back to civilization, my hair a greasy mess and my clothes sweaty and dirt stained, I mulled over the lessons I had learned. Hitch one was nothing short of a learning curve. Learning that oatmeal for breakfast gets old after day two. Learning that your toes will go numb and there’s nothing you can do about it. Learning that if you fall face forward with a full pack into a trenched trail you will get stuck and you will get laughed at. Wilderness seems to be one of the best teachers, very much like Robin Williams’ character in Dead Poet’s Society. Its unorthodox methods hold a different lesson for each student and, as cliché as it is, teaches one to seize the day. One week in the Selway-Bitterroot taught me that any body of water counts as a shower as long as you scrub the dirt off and that hiking up to a saddle through snow isn’t easy, but the views are definitely worth every step. It’s easy to get frustrated out there and there were times I found myself wishing for things to be easier. “If only Robin Williams’ character in Aladdin were here right now, I could wish all these trees off the trail,” I’d think to myself. But I think the most special thing about Wilderness is it’s not easy, if it were it’d be a National Park. Wilderness is a challenge not meant for everyone, but the lessons it holds are far more valuable than anything I could learn in a classroom. I know I’ve got a lot of lessons left to learn, but I’m excited to have Wilderness as my teacher.

Connor Adams, Emma Froelich, Henry Vaughn, Lauren Simms, Kristopher Mueller

Round Trip Ticket to "The Big Empty"

Sam Freestone - Moose Creek Trail Crew Member

Former SBFC IDAWA Student and SBFC Wilderness Ranger Intern

I thought about writing this blog post in a journal format. Something similar to the work of people like Pete Fromm or Richard (Dick) Proenneke who detailed the adventure (or lack thereof) of each day with a date and sometimes weather and temperature. However, as a Trail Crew Member on the trail to complete lofty goals on even loftier mountains, I’m finding nearly impossible to keep the finer details of my day in order long enough to share with you before falling asleep pen in hand. That really isn’t my style anyway. I like to get to know people by sitting down with them over a drink or two and sharing the tales which brought us to where we are now. I know this medium doesn’t exactly allow for anything quite like that, so how about I have a drink and write to you from the concrete porch of the bunkhouse I call home at Powell Ranger Station; then when you get a chance to read this you can go ahead and have your beverage of choice and do your best to imagine we're just sitting next each other.

For longtime readers of these blog posts, you may remember me from two years ago when I served as an intern, but for those that don’t here is a bit of my story. I was born and raised in a little town called Adel, Iowa where through my county conservation department I began as a parking lot wienie and slowly became acquainted with the concepts of the natural world and wildness. This was large because of a man by the name of Chris Adkins and through time I became aware of trips Chris led, taking high schoolers from my neck of the woods to the great capital “W” Wilderness of Idaho. To me the chosen few who went on that trip were elite and when I came of age I toiled for hours and hours trying to form the right words to use on my application so there would be no chance of me being passed over in favor of another. My work and worry paid off and I found myself with a round trip ticket to the big empty. The rugged country where I could curse and holler into the wind without worry of repercussion. I and ten others would go on a great adventure together as strangers and come back rugged people of the outdoors. We would all grow full beards in a week and walk with the calm saunter of a man who has spent too much time on a horse. To ease the process of our acquaintance with each other we all filled out and exchanged social elixir forms so that when our time came, we slide into that 15-passenger van without friction. During our two-day drive to across the plains, we received yet another social elixir form. This one was filled out by Connie Saylor Johnson. Her cursive accent was thick and to my teenage self who hadn’t interacted with cursive since the 3rd grade, it took time to decode. But with each sentence decrypted she became nothing less than a mystic walking the wildest part of this earth. We arrived at Lolo pass and took our touristy photo of our group at the Idaho border sign before storming the visitors center and discovering the hot chocolate which I now describe as the nectar of the gods. After piling back into the van for the last 12 miles of our journey to Powell Chris spoke of a song which he believed to be about Connie. The song, 'Yukon Sally' by Peter Mayer began to play and chatter in the van dropped to nothing as we all seemed to sense the importance of the music from Chris’ description. Still now that song gets to me. Arriving at Powell we spread our sleeping bags out on the floor of the cookhouse as Connie pulled into the compound…

Fast forward to now almost 6 years later and the part of myself that I left in the Selway is stronger than ever and continues to pull me back to place where it all started. Once this Wilderness became a part of my life there was little to no choice for me to do anything else but to try and give back to the land that held a heavy hand in my development as a person. Powell is about as close as you can live to the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness and that suits with me just fine. Anyways I’ve been rambling for a while so maybe I should go back to whittling quietly. Now that I’ve shared a bit of my Motley Crew’s long and winding road, I think it’s your turn to tell me what connects you to that big patch of dark green on the map and we can get to know each other one letter or comment at a time. Don’t be shy I look forward to hearing from you, good reading material can be scarce to come by here.

Kind Regards,

Sam

HOMECOMING

Henry Vaughan – Wilderness Ranger Intern

 The College of Idaho

 Orientation/Training

 May 13 – May 27

 Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest

Our first two weeks as Wilderness Ranger Interns has had us housed and training at Powell Ranger Station in the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest. Each day, we dip our toes, feet, ankles, knees, bit by bit into wilderness until we are totally submerged: acclimated as much as possible for our fast approaching hitches. We went from staying in beds and bunkhouses during the first week—where we could avoid the worst weather at night by turning up the heaters in our rooms and closing the blinds—to sleeping in our own tents and bags during the second. Before long, we’ll be spending our nights in the wilderness with the only comforts available to us being those which we can carry in on our backs.

 We’re developing important skills for working in the wilderness this summer: becoming familiar with our primitive tools, testing out our gear, learning how to navigate in a land without Google Maps; but I’m also recognizing an important new way to perceive nature. Around Powell (particularly outside of the bunkhouses), nature gets up in our face. Deer wander daily between the buildings. One intern encountered a wolf on an early morning trail run. Oyster and morel mushrooms regularly provide a free dinner to those with watchful eyes. These natural displays: such abundances of vitality, fecundity, and productivity from the trees to the insects to the uninhibited Lochsa River flowing right by our tents show a land community with greater agency—where it is difficult to keep humanity and civilization at the forefront of the mind. Closer to wilderness, nature has more room to breathe and speak and (aided greatly by a lack of cell phone service) we are forced to become a listener. And, though we have little say in it, I have yet to meet anyone at the ranger station who isn’t made happier by that prospect.

 The closest wilderness area to us (the Selway-Bitterroot) is a hundred feet away—right across the river. In between the banks of the Lochsa, as a sort of gateway between a developed Powell and an undeveloped wilderness, is a small island where the Lewis and Clark party is said to have camped as they made their way over the Bitterroot Mountains. On the far bank is the beginning of a land which can make a visitor feel as if they are stepping back even further in time to before the first American presences. The wilderness areas, where signs of civilization are intentionally minimized, are spaces where nature is most free to speak and where humanity, when present, is most likely to hear a clear and individually unique message. I, for one, am excited to see what this particular wilderness has to share with me.

Trainees and instructors discussing Visitor Use/Campsite Monitoring during the Northern Rockies Wilderness Skills Institute 📷Verena Gruber

A morning view of the Lochsa River by Powell Ranger Station 📷 Kris Mueller

"The Frank" - A Rich History of Place

Tom Lang

Frank Church Wilderness Monitoring Coordinator

The Frank Church – River of No Return is a remarkably complex landscape. The nearly 2.4-million-acre wilderness is the largest in the lower 48, spanning across five National Forests. The folding canyons of the Salmon River Watershed make the area difficult to access, and extreme shifts in seasonal climate can produce unforgiving conditions. It is an intense environment, accentuated by slopes of decomposing granite which fall from the Idaho Batholith.

Nevertheless, this stretch of the Northern Rockies has attracted human habitation for thousands of years, which has established a rich history of place within the wildness of Central Idaho. 

This past spring, when I began working on a research project to help unify monitoring efforts throughout the wilderness, I struggled to understand the character and scale of the Frank. Eventually, I realized that it is a cultural landscape, and the label of designated wilderness only tells the most recent chapter in its story. I also discovered that the task of systematically observing 2.4-million-acres of roadless country is exceptionally difficult. For managers, the obligation of preserving wilderness character is one that coincides with the duty of acknowledging the historical components of the landscape. As a result, the Frank has a number of legally recognized traditional uses which make it a unique piece of the National Wilderness Preservation System. Based on these complexities, it was clear that the goal of monitoring recreational impacts across the landscape required a collaborative approach.

The first step in this approach was to connect with the five wilderness districts so that an understanding of the projects goals could be formulated. The opportunity to meet with managers and talk through their existing data allowed for the objectives of this project to present themselves. Additionally, the design process needed to consider the mandate of the Wilderness Act, which requires wilderness areas to be “affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of [humankind’s] work substantially unnoticeable,” and for such lands to offer “opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation.” Therefore, we needed a data collection system that effectively translates the social and biophysical conditions throughout the wilderness, and will eventually provide insight regarding long-term patterns of recreational impacts.  

Following the formation of a collective vision, it was necessary to join wilderness rangers in the field in order to understanding the existing challenges concerning data collection across the Frank. The local knowledge shared by wilderness rangers helped expand the scope of the project, and the perspective I gained allowed me to develop data collection tool that meet both the logistical and physical challenges of the landscape. Ultimately, what was produced is a data collection system that works to objectively monitor the impacts of recreational use on the social and biophysical conditions throughout the wilderness – which helps inform management decisions, and enhances our ability to be conscious stewards of the landscape.