Logs, Roads and Wilderness 



mining and the potential tor new mines might make 

 wilderness designation impossible for Welcome 

 Creek, Moore felt. Instead, he asked that the timber 

 sale be cancelled until public meetings could be 

 held The Forest Service regional office rejected his 

 recommendation. 



Moore's Welcome Creek report might have 

 ended in the dustbin but for Bill Cunningham, a 

 longtime wilderness advocate from Missoula who 

 was in VC'ashington DC. during the late 1970s work- 

 ing for the VC'ilderness Society. Cunningham was 

 helping U.S. Rep. Morris Udall (D-AZ) and Sen. Frank 

 Church (DID) draft a bill that would sweep lots of 

 scattered bits of undeveloped land together and add 

 them to America's wilderness. 



'One of the things I was trying to do was 

 to knock down some of these purity ideas that 

 would keep an otherwise qualified area from pass- 

 ing into wilderness," says Cunningham, who got 

 hold of Moore's Welcome Creek report and found 

 it fit the bill. "We felt the old cabins and mining 

 diggings were not an adverse impact but a piece of 

 histor\- gradually falling into the ground. We wanted 

 to reclaim the area."'" 



The Forest Service had failed to recommend 

 Welcome Creek for wilderness in large part because 

 of a road built across the northeast corner, but that 

 didn't stop Cunningham either. 'The Forest Service 

 never should have built that road. It was one of 

 those 'get-ahead' roads they build before a timber 

 sale to make the sale more attractive. So this was 

 an opportunity to dramatize the Forest Service 

 abuse of the public trust. They used tax money to 

 build a road that shouldn't have been built and then 

 used that as an excuse to exclude 30,000 acres from 

 wilderness." 



When Congress passed the Endangered 

 American Wilderness Act of 1978, Welcome Creek 

 was one of three Montana roadless areas to gain 

 wilderness designation.*" 



"Intent and Spirit'— Monitoring the Monitors 



By then, the Rock Creek Advisory Commit- 

 tee had disbanded. The committee held the last 

 meeting of its stormy and productive life on June 

 29, 1976.51 The Forest Service had expected to 

 spend about $1,000 a year on the process." But for 

 much of its life, the committee was the only ad- 

 visor.- group operating under the Forest Ser\'ice and 

 was a high priority experiment. Washington officials 

 flew out to attend meetings, records and minutes 



were transcribed for the Secretiiry (jf Agriculture. 

 Money was no obsucle. One participant calculates 

 the Forest Service spent 12.7 million on the com- 

 mittee." 



Not everyone agrees the committee was a 

 success. Although Everett Miller stuck it out as 

 representative of Granite County KEEP, he has since 

 concluded bitterly that all the advisory committee 

 did was "educate my opponents." Though Howie 

 McDowell, who repre.sented timber interests, agrees 

 many conflicts remain unresolved, he believes the 

 "emotional scenes" of early meetings gave way to 

 "frank discussions and some solid decisions." 



For a while, the committee's legacy of strict 

 monitoring seemed sure to guide Forest Service 

 policy on Rock Creek lands. The Forest Service 

 used committee guidelines to produce regulations 

 covering the entire drainage. It also acknowledged 

 that any logging in Rock Creek canyon would de- 

 tract from the scenic value of the area and would 

 have to be subsidized. It concluded that no logging 

 should occur there.''' But even as the Rock Creek 

 Advisory Committee was preparing to disband, the 

 National Forest Management Act of 1976 was work- 

 ing its way through Congress.'' Soon, the Forest 

 Service regulations reviewed and approved by the 

 Rock Creek Advisory- Committee were shuffled aside 

 for an entirely new planning process.'* And although 

 the moratorium on timber sales was not officially 

 lifted until 1983,'' heavy logging was resuming along 

 such tributaries as Upper Willow- Creek.'* 



With the advisory committee gone and con- 

 servationists counting on a defunct moratorium, the 

 state Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department (former- 

 ly Fish and Game Department) became for a while 

 the only whistle-blower State officials concerned 

 about elk habitat kept tabs on new- logging roads. 

 By 1980, more than 60 percent of all the land in 

 one Upper Rock Creek hunting district (216). was 

 within a mile of a road. This compared with bare- 

 ly half that— 34 percent— in I960, and 39 percent 

 in 1970." 



In 1982, simmering hostilities between the 

 state and the Forest Service boiled over State of- 

 ficials demanded to know why their comments 

 about fish and game habitat were ignored in a draft 

 of the Lolo Forest Plan.*" The recommendations of 

 the Rock Creek Advisory Committee were also be- 

 ing ignored, they said. Lolo officials didn't deny it; 

 they insisted that while water quality monitoring 

 was optional, cutting timber \\-as mandatory under 

 Forest Service regulations"' 



