Branching Out

Karlissa Skinner

Wilderness Project Liaison

Season Summary

Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness & Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness

This season, the Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation introduced a new position, Wilderness Project Liaison, which I had the honor of spearheading. My primary responsibility was to lead and support a variety of volunteer projects, working collaboratively with our tireless superstar Volunteer Coordinator, Krissy, to coordinate and organize tools, gear, and food for each project. And I’ll admit: I was feeling a little apprehensive about the season. I spent February through May traveling in Costa Rica and Colombia, and immediately started my second season with SBFC on June 1 – not much time for transition! Not to mention all the new responsibilities and unknowns I was stepping into. But I was also so excited and curious about this new opportunity, for both SBFC as an organization and myself personally. And now that the season has come to an end I can genuinely and enthusiastically say that I had an exceptionally positive experience. Here are some glimpses of the awesome partner groups and individuals I had the opportunity to work with this summer:

Cheers to the Whisky Society for clearing 550 trees in 1.76 miles, yikes!

Stunning views of an encroaching thunderstorm from St. Mary Peak.

The youth of America (specifically high schoolers with partner group Johnson County Conservation all the way from Iowa) is out clearing trails in the snow, folks. There may be hope yet!

Sierra Club and high schoolers with Inspiring Connections Outdoors. These folks came from New York, California, Texas, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Iowa to tackle some very technical trees on the Big Sand Lake Trail.

More environmentally passionate youth! From Dallas County Conservation in Iowa, this group broke their record for number of trees cleared from the Tom Beal Trail they have been stewarding for years.

An incredibly exciting and inspring new partnership with HereMT, helping diversify and expand outdoor access and representation of BIPOC folks (photo credit to Alex Kim).

Before

& After! With some fun folks from the American Hiking Society.

All women’s trail crew (plus Bill the packer)! Pulaski Users Group Pulaski-ing the patriarchy!

These valiant volunteers spent the day cleaning up ~20 pounds of trash and other unspeakables from Jerry Johnson Hotsprings. Anyone need a DVD player?

I worked with doctors, engineers, photographers, artists, entrepreneurs, tech folks, high schoolers, teachers, and more. We celebrated birthdays, belly-laughed over riddles, built snowpeople, outran thunderstorms, swam in alpine lakes, fed mules peanut butter, listened to poetry recitations, and ate great food. I was even graciously offered financial advice (crucial for a seasonal trail worker). But most importantly we never stopped marveling at and appreciating the special beauty of wild places, all while clearing hundreds of trees from the trails that provide access to these places.

I really underestimated how fulfilling it would be to work with so many different volunteers. I feel grateful to have met so many fun, kind, and inspiring Wilderness enthusiasts who choose to spend their free time giving back to the trails they love, as well as sharing their unique knowledge and gifts. If any of you volunteers are reading this- thank you! SBFC couldn't do what we do without each and every one of you. And I am certainly grateful for another rewarding season with SBFC. I hope to see everyone out on the trails again next season!

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KARLISSA SKINNER, WILDERNESS PROJECT LIAISON

Karlissa spent her summers hiking and camping around Helena, Montana. Her conservation corps experience doing trail work and living in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness helped her to discover her love for the natural world and wilderness conservation. Karlissa is an avid rock climber, backpacker, and river rafter.

Why Work in Wilderness

Clint Kingery

Lead Wilderness Steward

September 13-21

Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest | East Moose Creek Trail #421

The last hitch of the season is freshly over and trail #421 is clear from Elk Summit to Moose Creek Ranger Station once more.

This has always been a particularly hard time of year for me and for most of us in this line of work. We will soon be leaving a workplace packed with the best. Rent won’t be getting the same pause as our paychecks. Light and laughter is traded again for long nights and cozy blankets. When the pay is the same as what every teenager makes and it only lasts for a handful of months, it’s not hardly possible to put away much of a safety net.

The upcoming month will be full of job interviews that follow the format “So, it looks like you are a seasonal worker, will you be leaving us next May?” and “Thanks for your application, but we are going to go with a candidate that will stay with us long term.” In the past few winters, I have worked front desk at a hotel, I have worked for an arborist that didn’t believe in hard hats or chaps or insurance, I have punched data into a computer, I have cleared snow, I have called and found resources for the ill and housebound.

This is the most challenging thing about modern Wilderness work. The off-seasons make hauling tools and 9 days of food up just shy of a mile in elevation feel easy. They make driving icy spears of rain feel almost comforting. They make you nostalgic for the clouds of biting flies. They make you look at soft skin and wish it was sun-scorched and blistered and peeling again.

So why do we do this? Well the cheap answer is ‘Wilderness is worth it’. And those of us wearing holes in the soles of our boots know this. It is true. It is worth it. I could wax poetic for years about all the good that we do for the micro and mega fauna, for the grand cedars and the soft moss, for the hikers and the hunters and the pilots and the rafters and the outfitters and the firefighters, for the surrounding communities that are built on opportunity created by Wilderness, for the smell of the crisp fall mornings and the dry grasses and sub-alpine firs, for our strong backs and stronger legs, for preservation of history and protection of indigenous heritage, for traditional skills, for equity and empowerment, for place and belonging, for adventure and freedom, for the honor and memory of those that preceded us, for the well-being and wonderful naive passion of those that will follow us, for a July strawberry ripened in the sun.

But that good that we do doesn’t even start to answer why we do this. That doesn’t make the off-season any easier. That doesn’t keep my car running or my belly full. It doesn’t mean I can suddenly afford that dentist appointment that I have been putting off for the last decade. It doesn’t mean that the daily trauma I put my body through during the season is magically healed and ready for another year. It doesn’t benefit us directly like a steady paycheck would.

If you were to ask me if I would keep working in and for Wilderness, I wouldn’t hesitate to say yes. If you were to ask me if you ought to get into Wilderness work, I wouldn’t hesitate to say yes. If you were to ask me if SBFC is a good place to do Wilderness work, I wouldn’t hesitate to say yes. I’ve included some pictures that might start to explain why we do this. But if you were to actually ask me why we do this, the only honest answer I’ve got for you is: “I don’t know, I just work here.”

Charlie near snowline on Boulder Creek Trail #211 in the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest; Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.

Mysterious granite ball found in Surprise Creek near Seven Lakes, in the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest; Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.

Nick & Jacob’s caterpillar photo shoot.

Charlie and Mack demonstrating crosscut saw use to Idaho Trails Association volunteers on Goat Ridge Trail #526 in the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest; Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.

Bre and a grouse nest on Rock Creek Trail in the Bitterroot National Forest; Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.

Smoke over East Moose Creek from near trail #486 in the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest; Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.

That’s a wrap! Walt on Storm Creek Trail #77 in the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest; Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.

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CLINT KINGERY

NEZ PERCE-CLEARWATER NF LEAD WILDERNESS STEWARD

Clint grew up in Helena, Montana. He first discovered his love for Wilderness while working on trails in the Sawtooth Wilderness. He has also worked in the heart of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness and knows the Moose Creek area well. Clint is uncompromisingly passionate about Wilderness.

SBFC Board Project

Jim Heidelberger & Deb Gale

SBFC Board Chair & Vice Chair

Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest | Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness

From left: Julie, Jim, Ed, Deb, and Gil

While summer is the time for weddings, family reunions, hiking rafting, etc., a few SBFC board members made their way in July to Elk Summit in the southeast corner of the Powell-Lochsa Ranger District of the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest.

The view from Diablo Lookout

Three board members and two spouses camped at Hoodoo Campground at the edge of the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness for our board’s annual volunteer project.  Arriving a day early allowed us to hike to Diablo Lookout and gaze into the spectacular East Moose/Selway watershed reminding us how vast these wildlands are.

Saturday, bright and early Phil Ralston, the Elk Summit host and former Powell fire crew member from the  1970’s, started with a safety briefing and our project description.  Our mission: to install new signs and posts along the local access road and camp loop drives within Hoodoo Campground.  Snow, wind, and vandals had damaged and degraded the existing signs over time and due to COVID related staffing constraints the replacement of the signs had been delayed.

Board Chair, Jim Heidelberger and his wife Julie, Board Vice-Chair, Deb Gale and her husband Gil and John Lloyd, a board member and retired homebuilder from Sun Valley all grabbed shovels, picks and pry bars, and starting digging new holes and removing old signs to replace with new signs.  By day’s end we had put up the nine posts and signs that had been provided for us. 

Before replacing a sign

After replacing the sign

The crew at work!

Saturday evening, a group of young men from Wisconsin hiked into the campground.  They had started near Hamilton a few days earlier and crossed over Blodgett Pass.   Although they were in good physical shape, it seems they had not planned their food allotment well enough.  Fortunately, as so often happens on camping trips, we had more food than we could ever eat.  So, the young men were invited over for dinner with us and for coffee and breakfast the next morning before they pushed off for Moose Creek.  Everyone left happy and well fed and later this summer followed up with a very kind note of thanks.

We headed home on Sunday, having spent three wonderful evenings together in this remote and beautiful setting.  The meals were great and the conversations involved lots of laughs and good stories.  The central attraction stationed in the kitchen was Jim’s world class “Detonator.”  A colossal stainless steel French press with a handle like a blasting plunger, capable of producing about a gallon of fine coffee. We all agreed how lucky we are to be able to enjoy these magnificent wilderness areas that surround us. 

Holding on to Wilderness

Jay Majersky

Trail Crew Leader

Nez Perce-Clearwater NF | Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness

When it comes to field work, there is so much that you experience: the comfort of a warm sweater on a cool night after a hot August day; laying in a hammock with stars up above you on a moonless night as frogs and crickets chirp in chorus and a lone bull elk bugles far far away; the hoppy scent of pine trees and the smoky aroma of cedar, or the rich smell of petrichor, wet leaves, and creek water as you walk -tools in hand- to the worksite a few miles away from where you set up camp. Let’s not forget the mornings when you wake up to frost and are camped at snowline, or the storms, the heat, the bugs and any other things that make this job difficult.

In the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests- Selway Bitterroot Wilderness

Yet, every single year I am routinely reminded that the most important thing is that people and not places make the experience. It’s best to hold on to the laughs shared, the mud-caked boots circling around a campfire to dry out, the foraged mushrooms shared and sauteed and added to dinner, or the crew gathered around a propped up phone and watching a movie, or “going it alone” in a game of Euchre. The moments when teamwork prevails and the impossible becomes reality; building bridges you’ve been planning for weeks to do, the feeling of pointing out different peaks when you finally get a break from brushing and get to climb up to the peak of a mountain you and the crew have been working on for months.

The last few nights I spent during our last hitch of the season I would lay down and think about how it could be possible to hold all of Wilderness in one’s heart? What shape does it take internally and what does that look like? Was it even possible? Maybe it is only possible to contain the entirety of any space within yourself through the memories you share with others and the feelings you experience within yourself.

SBFC’s 2022 Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest Trail Crew

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JAY MAJERSKY, NEZ PERCE-CLEARWATER NF TRAIL CREW LEADER

Jay hails from Connecticut. They started doing trail work when they moved to Missoula in 2017. Jay started backpacking when they spent three months on the Appalachian Trail in 2015 and has gone on to work in nine different Wilderness areas across Idaho, Montana, and Arizona over the last six years. Having a job that allows Jay to backpack, work, and explore these wild and remote areas of America feeding their wanderlust is a surreal dream. This is Jay’s second season with SBFC.

Seasonal Transitions

Madeline Williams

Wilderness Steward

Hitch #7 | August 30-September 7

Salmon-Challis National Forest | Frank Church Wilderness

A plume of smoke rises in the distance, an unfavorable fall trait.

The amount of light gradually dwindles each day like the amber leaves of an aspen tree. Mornings become colder and damper, making it rather tempting to stay bundled up in my sleeping bag. The geese say their farewell as they head towards warmer climates. The rivers and streams flow with less velocity as the high-mountain snow no longer has anything to give. The chipmunks, squirrels, and pikas are in a race to collect and store as much food as possible. This is fall. This is change.

As the winter equinox draws closer, the sunrise peaks later in the day.

Each year, when the season transitions from summer into fall, I am humbled by nature’s ability to react and respond for the sake of survival. There is an innate impulse to move, to change. It’s as if an internal clock has alarmed. What causes this phenomenon to happen? Even humans don’t fully understand. However, we can embrace the fact that something is beyond us, that change will happen regardless of our comprehension.

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Madeline Williams, Salmon-Challis National Forest Wilderness Steward

Madeline grew up in a small community in Southeastern Idaho called Soda Springs. She has been engaged in environmental-related work from a very young age. She has experience in outdoor education, water sampling, rangeland management, and more. Her passion for the outdoors stems from a combination of personal and academic experiences. Madeline is committed to doing everything in her power to protect and preserve natural areas and those that inhabit them.

Wilderness Snippets

Bre Scott

Wilderness Ranger Fellow

Payette National Forest | Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness

This week, instead of sharing written blogs, we’re excited to share a video! Every summer at the end of the Wilderness Ranger Fellow season, we ask Fellows to present a final project to SBFC staff, board members, and friends. The projects range from deep dives into wildlife (birds and bugs were highlights this year!), to odes to work pants, to parody Yelp reviews of trails they worked on.

This year, one of the Fellows created a video recap of her season. We love this glimpse into life in the wilderness and hope you do too!

Wilderness Ranger Fellow- Bre Scott- Final Project

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BREANA SCOTT

Payette National Forest | Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness

Texas State University

Major: Recreation Administration

Breana grew up in Odessa, Texas and will graduate in May 2022 from Texas State University with a degree in Recreation Administration. She plans to continue her academic career and work towards a graduate degree. At sixteen, Breana worked at a Boy Scout Ranch and fell in love with the idea of being an outdoor professional. In 2021, she did conservation work in Oregon and Washington. This experience shifted her career and personal priorities. It fueled her interest to contribute to wilderness lands through conservation efforts. Breana loves adventuring, including kayaking, canyoneering, or backpacking.

Micro Wildlife

Jacob Mick

Trail Crew Member

Hitch #6: August 17-24th

Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest | Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness 

The wilderness is a great place to go if you're trying to have intimate encounters with wildlife. Unfortunately when you're doing trail work, you're often making too much noise to get many of those experiences.

This season I'd only really seen a couple whitetail deer and a frog (and millions of mosquitos) until my last hitch.

It was an ordinary day of trail work, we were doing some retread on trail 220, when I looked downslope to see the biggest and brightest caterpillar of my life! I brought it to the attention of Clint and Nick who also were amazed by the size and color of the caterpillar.

We proceeded to have a short wilderness critter appreciation moment before returning to work; it was really neat.

So I may not have seen a majestic moose or burly bear this season, but I did see one coooooool caterpillar.

Editor’s Note: We believe this caterpillar to be a Cercropia Silk Moth Caterpillar, which will turn into a giant silk moth! Learn more: https://www.insectidentification.org/insect-description.php?identification=Cecropia-Silk-Moth

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JACOB MICK

Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests Trail Crew

Jacob grew up in Michigan and went to college at Northern Michigan University (NMU). While attending NMU, he took a trail building class and proceeded to do trail work with a local nonprofit after graduating. Jacob is passionate about wilderness because it's where he finds solitude and recuperates from the humdrum of modern life.

The Struggle for Conservation

Lauren Simms

Lead Wilderness Steward

Hitch #6: August 17-24th

Salmon-Challis National Forest | Frank Church Wilderness 

The season up until now has been filled with excitement, challenges, new adventures, and a plethora of new places. This hitch I found myself and one other working as a two-person crew, an entirely new challenge in and of itself. To complicate matters, the Moose Fire in the Salmon-Challis continues to burn and spread, causing the shutdown of the Salmon River Road. This culminated in last-minute changes to our hitch plan, shifting us from being ferried across the North Fork of the Salmon River and packed up to Butts Creek Point Lookout to car camping off the side of Dagger Falls Road 568.

Lauren Simms sitting on a burnt log shaped like a mushroom that was cut just moments prior.

Last year this area burned in the Boundary Creek Fire, which left the first 2 miles of the Camptender Trail scorched and filled with fallen trees. We intended upon cutting out the first three miles of the trail and then bumping camp to the headwaters of the Boundary Creek, but the number of trees down put a damper on this plan. Within the first two days, we had cut over 70 trees and had only progressed a mile into the trail. This meant yet another change of plans, something that is integral to the world of trail work. Of course, the constant shifting of plans can be frustrating and overwhelming at times, but it is our passion for public lands that keeps us going. This work is not always glorious and very seldom can the work be called easy, but it is always rewarding and fulfilling.

This hitch was tough, no doubt about it. Not only was the work grueling but it is very easy to get lonely out there in the Wilderness, even with another person for companionship. For eight whole days, we only saw one other person. It is during these tough times that I truly get in touch with why I do this work. Even when it seems futile, when it is only two of us facing a seemingly endless parade of downed logs, I know that this work, each tree cut, fits into a greater scheme of conservation. I am here so that our public lands will stay public lands, and so that any argument made toward privatizing these lands can be met with concrete statistics and lived experiences. It is truly the work of stalwart individuals like us that creates not only the bulwark against private interests but also the foundation upon which all recreation and public land use stands.

Lauren Simms and Madeline Williams posing with the Camptender trailhead sign after a long day of work on the trail.

Large log cut by Lauren Simms and Madeline Williams on Camptender Trail 4027.

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Lauren Simms

Salmon-Challis National Forest: Lead Wilderness Steward

Lauren grew up outside of Philadelphia. She found her love for trails in Yosemite, where she was a youth corps member. In 2019 Lauren served 14 weeks as a SBFC Wilderness Ranger Fellow in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, her first experience in capital-W Wilderness. We are very happy Lauren has returned and is working on the SBFC Frank Church Wilderness crew.

The Last Hitch

Ethan Antle

Wilderness Ranger Fellow

Hitch #5: August 3-10 (Big Deer Creek)

Salmon-Challis National Forest | Frank Church Wilderness

“The Last Hitch” was a very fitting name for our trip out to Big Deer Creek in the Salmon-Challis National Forest, and not just because it was in-fact our last hitch as Fellows. It was a hitch that started off on the wrong foot, but though hard work and determination it ended up having the most lessons to teach.

There were some hiccups the first few days, between having to bump camp because of a dried up water source, having to climb a 1000 ft hill at the end of every work day, or literal clouds of mosquitos, it definitely wasn’t turning out to be the smooth last trip we all thought it would be, but such is life and while it can be easy to focus on the negatives you have to remember every dark cloud (yes even ones made of mosquitoes) has it’s silver lining.

Because of the large and very steep hill, we had an amazing view of the valley below. Because of the lack of water at the trailhead, we had to hike further in to find a good campsite, which just so happened to be in the middle of a huge huckleberry patch just as they were beginning to ripen. For every mosquito we saw, there were also signs of life everywhere, from wolf scat to deer and elk signs, and even fresh bear claw marks on the trees where it was eating sap.

Turning in for the night.

About halfway through our hitch we had finally cleared to our second campsite and had just gotten to the burn area where the lessons I alluded to earlier became very apparent to me. Walking up to the burn, you wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary. There were green trees and grasses, huckleberry bushes everywhere, and brush so thick in parts it took hours to cut all the way through it, but 30 yards down the trail and as far as the eye could see there was nothing but burned trees, grey and black charred dirt, and nothing else, as contradictory as night and day. After clearing our way through the desolation we came to a little stream that ran right through the middle of the burn, and on both sides of that stream you could see new plant life beginning to grow. What really stood out to me about those little plants wasn’t the fact that they were growing in the middle of a charred wasteland, it was how unbelievably green they were, much more vibrant and healthy than the plants we saw earlier in the day.  

I’ve always heard that life is about adversity and overcoming the challenges it throws at you, but seeing this laid out in front of me like that made it real. No matter how you start off in life, what soil you’re planted in, what is going on around you, or how well your hitch starts off, you can always make something better of it. The last lesson I took from Big Deer Creek is to me the most important and the most pertinent. Even though our time at SBFC has ended, like the forest, something new is right around the corner. Like my dad says, all you have to do is “keep on keeping on”.

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Ethan Antle

Salmon-Challis National Forest | Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness

University of Montana

Major: Wildlife Biology

Ethan grew up in the small town of Skiatook, Oklahoma and spent most of his childhood fishing and exploring the river bottoms of green country or hunting in the Ozark foothills. After he graduated high school, he joined the Marine Corps and was stationed in Kaneohe Bay. He’s had a passion for the outdoors and wildlife since he was a child, and he’s always looked up to people like Steve Irwin, Dr. Brady Barr and other Naturalists and wildlife biologists. Ethan has always loved animals and wants to do his part to keep our wilderness and our wildlife populations healthy.

Someday

Steven Adamson

Wilderness Ranger Fellow

Bitterroot National Forest | Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness

Before moving to Montana this summer and working for SBFC, the dream of living out West was always just going to be someday in the future. I had no clue when that would be or what I would be doing, but I knew that someday I would move out here and would love exploring the mountains.

As the fall semester ended, I had to find a summer internship that could fulfill my college credit, and the Wilderness Ranger Fellow position at SBFC looked amazing. An entire 3 months working on trails in Montana! How awesome would it be if someday I was doing that.

Eventually, I got the call saying that I got this amazing internship, and I would be out here working trails and in Montana where I have dreamed of living for years. Getting here was like a dream come true, and at the time, I had no idea what my future would hold or how amazing the trails we worked would be. Now that I am reflecting on the season, I am glad that it is finally someday. I have met so many amazing people, and I have seen such amazing scenery and learned about the western plants and wildlife. 

Lappi Lake in the Bitterroot National Forest

It all started when I arrived at the KOA in Missoula and met all of the other Fellows. We spent the next few weeks there training and getting to know one another. It would finally be time to leave the KOA though and all start working on our respective Forests. My crew moved to Darby and the Westfork Ranger Station and worked in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. We worked on 4 trails, Selway River Trail #4, Boulder Creek Trail #617, Lappi Lake Trail #324, and Hauf Lake Trail #309. All had amazing views; I felt very lucky to be working in such a beautiful Wilderness. 

Living in the Bitterroot Valley on my off hitches was also special, and I fell in love with the area. However, it provided me with my next someday adventure. Almost everywhere you go in the areas surrounding Darby you can see Trapper Peak, the tallest peak in the Bitterroot. I just kept thinking, “Someday I will go up there,” and on every off hitch, I got too busy and never made time for it. Finally, on this last off hitch Hannah, Veronica, and I made the trip up to the peak. It was the perfect cap to an amazing season. Once I was up on the top of the peak, I realized that someday can always be today, and I cannot wait to see what is in store for me someday down the road!

Steven on the Trapper Peak summit.

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STEVEN ADAMSON

Bitterroot National Forest | Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Major: Natural Resources and Environmental Science

Steven is a junior attending the University of Illinois, studying Natural Resources and Environmental Science with a concentration in Fish and Wildlife Conservation. He grew up in Sumner, Illinois, a small town in the southeastern part of the state. Being from a rural area, Steven has always had a passion for the outdoors because he grew up hunting and fishing, and it is through these activities that he came to appreciate and respect the environment.