Logs, Roads and Wilderness 



halted timber sales, harried forest supervisors and 

 haunted forest plans lives in a one -page, three- 

 paragraph letter from the supervisors of the 

 Deerlodge and Lolo National Forests. '' Their May, 

 1973 letter agrees simply to honor the Rock Creek 

 Advisory Committee's monitoring standards.*° 



That didn't end the contentious committee 

 meetings. "It was three happy years of calling each 

 other sons of bitches across the table," says Gary 

 Eudaily. Adam Michnevich recalls one evening 

 meeting in 1974 when the battle lines shifted. 

 "George Smith, the Deerlodge supervisor, used to 

 squat on his heels on his chair — like this," 

 Michnevich says, climbing onto a straight-back chair 

 in his Rock Creek dining room. "A Forest Service 

 employee — 1 don't remember who — started com- 

 plaining about wasted time. Smith stood up on the 

 chair and loomed over the guy," Michnevich says, 

 chuckling and wagging his finger. "He said, 'you're 

 on salary and you have no right to complain while 

 these people are sacrificing their own time.'" 



Likewise, members noticed a change in Or- 

 ville Daniels, who returned to the Lolo National 

 Forest as supervisor in 1974. "There was a sort of 

 'greening' of Orville Daniels in all this process," says 

 Tom Huff. "He grew up in this melee over Rqck 

 Creek; he realized the need to manage the forests 

 properly and he became one of the best at dealing 

 with the public." 



By 1974, conservationists were carpooling to 

 meetings with Forest Service officials, and even 

 with representatives from the logging and mining 

 industries. Many issues, of course, were never 

 resolved. Wilderness designation was hotly 

 debated, with no result other than a heightened 

 understanding on the part of the Forest Service that 

 the public cherishes Rock Creek's wildlands. (The 

 ■Wilderness Act of 1964 included the headwaters of 

 Rock Creek in the Anaconda-Pintlar wilderness. 

 Then, starting in 1970, the Forest Service began tak- 

 ing inventory of other undeveloped areas; National 

 Forest supervisors were required to recommend 

 those that might be added as wilderness.)"" 



Wilderness Reclaimed — 

 The Welcome Creek Story 



Public debate over Rock Creek's roadless 

 areas polarized along the usual lines. Mining and 

 logging interests opposed any new wilderness as a 

 lock-up of valuable resources. Conservationists 

 suspected the Forest Service of a cynical attempt 



to set aside token parcels, while releasing vast 

 forests to development. "The Forest Service wanted 

 to get the environmentalists off their back, "says 

 Gary Eudaily of the Western Montana Fish and 

 Game Association. "They wanted to hasten the 

 release of a lot of additional lands and let those 

 wilderness freaks have the goat rocks." 



Eudaily and others on the Rock Creek Ad- 

 visory Committee accused the Deerlodge and Lolo 

 Forests of chopping up roadless areas with artificial 

 boundary lines and therefore lessening the chances 

 that any would be adopted as wilderness.*-^ "We 

 could have had wilderness on both sides for a full 

 50 miles,"says Eudaily. "Most of it's still roadless. We 

 still could. " 



Indeed, some 269,638 acres — nearly 60 per- 

 cent of all Forest Service lands in the Rock Creek 

 drainage— remain roadless,"' though the Forest Ser- 

 vice has recommended only 60,830 acres for com- 

 plete and permanent protection as wilderness.'''* In 

 addition, some 50,000 acres in the Sapphire 

 Roadless Area are temporarily protected by Con- 

 gress; The Montana Wilderness Study Act of 1978 

 forbids development "until otherwise determined 

 by Congress."'" But only one roadless area, the 

 29,235-acre Welcome Creek Wilderness Area, is 

 guaranteed to stay that way^ 



The 1978 decision to preserve Welcome 

 Creek had a lot to do with the way one Forest Ser- 

 vice fire fighter celebrated his retirement. When 

 William R. "Bud"Moore retired as regional direc- 

 tor of aviation and fire management for the Forest 

 Service in the summer of 1974, he decided to hike 

 from Rock Creek canyon over the Sapphire Divide 

 to the Bitterroot Valley. So taken was Moore with 

 the Welcome Creek tributary of Rock Creek that he 

 returned to stay that winter, hauling traps to help 

 pay his way with furs. Moore followed game paths, 

 found ruins from placer mining days and in 

 springtime walked out over the Divide with a jour- 

 nal that was to become the basis of a crucial 

 report. "*' 



Welcome Creek already was controversial. 

 The Forest Service had not recommended it for 

 wilderness designation. A ten-year- old timber sale 

 in the Welcome Creek area had never been revok- 

 ed, though the purchaser hadn't yet found a way 

 to cut the trees economically. And logging was 

 creeping toward the creek from two directions. 

 Though Moore was "fascinated by the history and 

 by all that water, with springs right up on top,"''« 

 he was also worried: Extensive evidence of placer 



