Logs, Roads and Wilderness 



At Rock Creek, conservationists and sport- 

 smen were alarmed by Forest Service plans to cut 

 at least 60 million board feet of timber'^ (about 

 7,500 acres of clearcut) throughout the drainage 

 during the early 1970s. This was to be made prac- 

 tical by a new bridge from the interstate highway 

 across the Clark Fork at the mouth of Rock Creek." 

 In addition, the average size of clearcuts on the 

 Deerlodge lept to more than 57 acres in 1971, from 

 an average of about 34 acres during the 1960s. 

 While small clearcuts provided potentially healthy 

 ecological "margins" for big game — with forage and 

 timber shelter in close proximity — large clearcuts 

 were considered destructive of wildlife habitat. As 

 the conservationists saw it, only aggressive com- 

 munity organizing could halt disastrous timber sales 

 along Rock Creek. 



"Those were the days when the Forest Ser- 

 vice kind of did what they pleased, without a lot 

 of public scrutiny," recalls Dr. Gary Eudaily of the 

 Western Montana Fish and Game Association.''* In 

 the summer of 1969, the Sierra Club, Trout 

 Unlimited and the Environmentalists, a campus 

 group, asked the Lolo National Forest to send a 

 representative to a public meeting in the Liberal Arts 

 building on the University of Montana campus. The 

 conservationists wanted foresters to explain plans 

 for a timber sale on Kitchen Gulch, near the mouth 

 of Rock Creek. They armed themselves with 

 printed questions and, as Robert Bassett, a founding 

 member of the Montana Sierra Club Group puts it, 

 "humiliated" the Lolo Forest spokesman. The 

 Forest Service, at least in this region, had never seen 

 anything like it. 



"They fried him," says Lolo Forest Super- 

 visor Orville Daniels, then deputy supervisor. "It 

 was the first militancy of that sort used to embar- 

 rass us. Our man was in no way prepared to deal 

 with the attacking nature of that meeting. This was 

 the first effort by environmentalists to organize in- 

 to an effective force. It really preceded the big bat- 

 tles on the Bitterroot."" 



Bassett, who owned the Elkhorn Guest 

 Ranch in Rock Creek canyon, recalls the Forest Ser- 

 vice as "extraordinarily defensive. They were not 

 used to being questioned. It was not really their 

 fault; it reflected a changing era." 



It was an era of growing environmental con- 

 cern nationwide, spurred by such events as the 

 publication of Rachel Carson's "The Silent Spring" 

 in 1962; the oil spill off Santa Barbara that coated 

 13 miles of California beaches in 1969; the 



discovery of huge amounts of DDT in salmon and 

 other foods; the first smog alerts in Los Angeles, 

 when people were warned not to breathe too deep- 

 ly; the anaerobic "death" of Lake Erie and the 1969 

 fire on the waste-filled Cuyahoga River. These 

 events prompted environmental activism on a scale 

 never known before, and led in turn to passage of 

 the Wilderness Act, creation of the National Wild 

 and Scenic Rivers System and even an Army Corps 

 of Engineers environmental advisory board. The 

 decade of environmental activism climaxed with 

 the first Earth Day, celebrated in Missoula and across 

 the nation in April, 1970. 



At the same time, the National Environmen- 

 tal Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) was working its way 

 through Congress, requiring federal planners to 

 prepare an Environmental Impact Statement before 

 undertaking major actions that might "significant- 

 ly affect the quality of the human environment'. 

 When NEPA became law on the first of January, 

 1970, nobody, neither the Forest Service nor the 

 lawyers at the University of Montana, knew quite 

 what constituted a "major action." But they would 

 soon learn.'* 



Conservationists weren't the only ones 

 organizing. Everett Miller, a Philipsburg sawyer, 

 miner and outfitter, feared the new-found en- 

 vironmental activism would bust his region as sure- 

 ly as S3-a-barrel oil would wreck Texas. "Natural 

 resources built the state of Montana," says Miller, 

 whose grandfather came west in 1843. "Without the 

 natural resources we have nothing."'^ Miller, who 

 helped found Granite County K.E.E.P (the Com- 

 mittee for Economic and Environmental Protection) 

 bitterly remembers the first tremors along a political 

 fault-line that was to split the people interested in 

 the Rock Creek watershed. Miller had worked at a 

 local sawmill that closed in the 1960s, and felt any 

 restriction on logging would further erode jobs in 

 Granite County. The conservationists protesting in 

 Missoula in the late 1960s struck him as a bunch 

 of misguided, elitist newcomers exerting "outside 

 influence." In 1970, Miller's angry group of 

 Philipsburg citizens brought Missoula conserva- 

 tionists to the Granite County courthouse for a 

 public meeting, seated them, ironically, in the jury 

 box,' 8 and berated them on the subject of logging 

 and blue collar jobs. The Philipsburg judgment: 

 "They didn't understand logging or mining or 

 anything else," says Miller. 



In years to come, the antagonistic constituen- 

 cies of Philipsburg and Missoula would affect the 



