Rick Bass wrote about the Yaak River Forest Council in our Summer 2006 Scenarios. The Council, a tiny grassroots group formed to advocate for the protection of the Yaak’s wildest places, joined up with the Lincoln County Coalition four years ago. By working together and bridging historic divisions, the Council’s dream is on the verge of coming true.

—The Editors

In 1987, looking for a big blank spot on the map, looking for a new home in the mountains, and in the forest, my girlfriend and I left Mississippi and drove west, traveling for weeks, until one day we drifted over a high pass and down into the low little green valley of the Yaak River in northwest Montana, right on the Canadian line, and snugged over hard against Idaho. It seemed the best of both worlds, made lush from the Pacific Northwest maritime weather systems, yet existing also at the western edge of the central Rockies’ fire- and ice-dominated mountains. A rainforest, yet a mountain redoubt. It was love at first sight. I settled in, began the serious business of trying to become a writer, and went hiking all the rest of the time.

After a year, though—four full seasons—I realized what was being lost, as hundreds of new miles of roads and thousands of acres of clear cuts appeared in just that short time. And I realized, too, that the Yaak’s wildest places needed protection—needed the gold standard of wilderness designation. In the million acres of public land north of the Kootenai River, all the way up to Canada and over to Idaho, there wasn’t a single acre of designated wilderness.

For a long while, I thought wilderness would come easily to the Yaak—in the blink of an eye, with only a very little bit of publicity, maybe twelve to eighteen months’ worth. I thought there wasn’t any designated wilderness simply because no one knew about it. I told myself I’d start writing articles and op-eds about the need to protect those farthest places.

I could even understand how it was passed by, when the Wilderness Act of 1964 was passed, for the Yaak is a swampy, buggy, densely-forested low-elevation landscape—a biological wilderness, not a recreational wilderness. As such, it grows big timber, too, and because of its seething vegetative diversity, there are numerous other species of birds, mammals, invertebrates…. Rarely is a hiker able to get up above timberline, and when he or she does, one can better view the thousands of clear-cuts that stipple the low hills. (The Yaak River’s confluence with the Kootenai is the lowest point in Montana, at 1880 feet).

Nor was there a significant local constituency; only 150 people live year round in the upper Yaak, which is 97 percent public land (Kootenai National Forest).

I had no idea what I was in for. Twenty-two years of fury and fear, fighting one hostile Forest Service administrator after another, or sometimes several at once; hostile neighbors, too, afraid of government’s heavy hand, and the protective covenants that would be attached to those wilderness lands. It was and is a hardscrabble land where many folk, accustomed to living by themselves far back in the woods, are not disposed to compromise in any form.

A tiny group of us—six—decided to start a quixotic little grassroots group, the Yaak Valley Forest Council (YVFC), dedicated to advocating for the protection of the Yaak’s wildest places: to give local voice to these values, and to show policy makers and agency (USFS) officials that the large timber corporations did not speak for everyone in the region, nor for the roadless lands.

That in itself was useful and revolutionary, but we didn’t stop there. Instead of only saying No to the various proposed timber sales that would have wrecked those last wild areas, we came up with thinning proposals that we could support in the less-wild places—the front country around people’s homes.

Our Yaak Valley Forest Council grew very slowly. It wasn’t an easy thing, in the local culture, to affix your name to such a group. There are only 19,000 people in all of Lincoln County (3,700 square miles), and the largest town, Libby, has fewer than 3000 people. But over the years, we have had remarkable support from other state, regional and national activists, each of whom took time away from their own titanic struggles to give us advice and counsel. Though we had no idea what we were getting into, there was never a shortage of individuals or organizations willing to teach us.

We spent several years playing defense: raising the flag, standing our ground, defending against one proposed timber sale in a roadless area after another, earning a strange mix of local respect as well as enmity in a way that seems to exist peculiarly and particularly in small rural communities. We fought, but we also sought out places where we could agree. It was tedious, exhausting, soul-beating work. We have a full-time staff of only one, but a vigorous volunteer board, and a part-time Forest Watch coordinator, a part-time Conservation Education coordinator and a part-time Program Development officer. That’s it.

~*~

This year, Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) has introduced a wilderness bill, S. 1470, the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act, which will designate the first wilderness in Montana in nearly 30 years.

The bill represents a turning point. After 45 years of failure to protect any wilderness in the Yaak, we decided to split our opposition, half of whom were anti-government ideologues who would fight wilderness with every last breath on principle alone, while the other half truly might have some legitimate fears and, like our own, legitimate dreams. Rather than talking about wilderness, these folks were interested in talking about jobs that would allow them to keep working in the woods. Could we find a small patch of common ground with this subgroup of opponents?

We could and did. Instead of asking them what they didn’t want—wilderness—we asked what they did want.

In retrospect, poised here at the edge of success, it seems so simple. What remnant timber industry remained, after being outcompeted on the global market and recession-hammered, wanted those jobs in the woods—thinning, restoring damaged watersheds, anything. Some ecologists believe the Yaak was once comprised of as much as 50 percent old growth, though now, due to heavy clear cutting, roughly two-thirds of the Yaak’s forests measure sixteen inches diameter-at-breast-height or less. Many forests, particularly those along open roads close to communities, are overstocked: a profusion of second-growth trees with too many small trees for any of them to prosper, and which are drought and heat stressed in a warming world. For a moderate group such as our own, willing to work for solutions rather than fighting with no goal of solutions, there is room for common ground.

We found common ground with the snowmobilers, as well. The Yaak is not really snowmobile country; rarely do its peaks get up above treeline. There are only a couple of areas that local snowmobilers use—places where they have current legal use—and so we agreed to support their continued legal use there (as long as the needs of winter wildlife are met) for the few months of each year that they are active; the rest of the year, those lands will be protected from logging, mining, road building or any other motorized activity. We also set aside a permanent non-motorized area for backcountry skiers who do not want to encounter snowmobiles, and a couple of wildland reserves (off-limits to snowmobiles) to serve as displacement areas for wildlife in the vicinity.

The local guide and outfitter, Linehan Outfitting, supports the proposal, as does the Libby Rod & Gun Club, knowing that the remote backcountry—particularly wilderness—supports the trophy animals their clients like to pursue, as well as the priceless wilderness experience involved in those pursuits.

To make the proposal palatable for our moderate county commissioner, we had to agree to protect—for now—only one wilderness area, the 30,000-acre Roderick Mountains, with permanent non-motorized management for other areas in the valley, including a primitive area at Mt. Henry in the upper Yaak, the iconic massif that is visible from almost anywhere in the valley.

Year after year, then, we’ve been lobbying in the Yaak, believing, dreaming, hoping and making real on-the-ground progress with a small local coalition of widely disparate interests. No proposal will ever get everyone to support it, but we managed to get everyone who has any skin in the game; and most important, now, we have Senator Tester championing our small community’s local efforts. We’re humbled that a US Senator is directing his time and passion and the resources of his staff to such a relatively small but vital matter. As Senator Tester says, “It’s small, but it’s the right thing to do.”

Similar community projects have been going on in two other places in Montana—on the Beaverhead and Deerlodge National Forests, and in the Blackfoot Valley, near the community of Seeley Lake. Those communities have also presented Senator Tester with a request for legislation that commits to logging (focusing on front country wood, and/or vast swaths of beetle-killed pine) while also designating wilderness, and protecting some existing legal usage by snowmobilers in other areas.

Senator Tester has bundled the three areas—the Yaak, the Blackfoot and the Beaverhead-Deerlodge—together in his historic legislation. One of the things that interests me about the Tester proposal is, while each of the three projects are similar in that they assemble common ground interests, there are also interesting differences. The Beaverhead-Deerlodge was assembled and promoted largely through the efforts of a large statewide wilderness organization, Montana Wilderness Association, with approximately 7500 members. The Blackfoot proposal has as its main creator a national organization, The Wilderness Society. The Yaak proposal, on the other hand—called the Three Rivers Challenge, named for the district in which the agreements have been made—is being driven by an extremely grassroots group, the Yaak Valley Forest Council, with its tiny budget and full-time staff of one.

I think Congress can learn valuable lessons from each of the three proposals. There will be advantages to each, but again, I’m most interested in what the Yaak has to offer. If such extremely local and small community organizations as the YVFC can help draft and pass wilderness legislation—and in such contentious areas—then surely wilderness is not out of reach for any community, or any watershed, anywhere in the country. And best of all for wilderness-lovers, passage of a successful Montana wilderness bill will help detoxify the word “wilderness”—a cultural toxicity that has prevented wilderness legislation from passing in Montana for all those decades. The Tester bill is small, but it’s a good bill, and a strong start. And certainly, the template for this issue—mapping common ground between historically disparate and even oppositional groups—is immediately applicable to other projects around the country, such as downtown revitalization, education reform, open space initiatives or any other concern, be it social, economic or ecological.

In the Yaak, once the various parties sat down with the intent of passing legislation, it took four-plus years of shouting, tears, quitting, then coming back, to hammer out even this modest agreement, which is small because nobody gave anything up. It’s a map of common ground, starting with the least contentious areas, and a desire—a hardscrabble commitment—to end the 45-Year War.

Wilderness is coming to the Yaak, and Senator Jon Tester and this little community are to be commended for their courage. It’s so much harder to make peace than war. In many ways, it’s so much more revolutionary.

Rick Bass is the author of more than 20 books. His first short story collection, The Watch, set in Texas, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award, and his 2002 collection, The Hermit’s Story, was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories. His latest novel, Nashville Chrome, will be released in September, 2010.