CHAPTER ONE 



'To Protect and Improve" 



Logs, Roads and Wilderness 



Clearcuts and Conservationists — The Debate Begins 



It is sometimes easy to forget that the baby 

 boomers did not invent conservation. By the end 

 of the 19th century, Americans already were realiz- 

 ing that their country's natural resources, however 

 plentiful, were finite. We were overworking fertile 

 farms and grazing lands. On our public lands 

 which, since 1812, had been managed by a General 

 Land Office, we were mining wastefully, dirtying 

 rivers and clearing vast forests. ' But with the grow- 

 ing conservation consciousness of the new century, 

 the government created National Forests, National 

 Parks, National Monuments and wildlife refuges to 

 afford lasting protection to chosen lands. 



The Forest Service, created in 1905, was 

 given, among other treasures, custody of a big 

 swatch of land in western Montana called the Rock 

 Creek drainage.^ The agency was expected to "pro- 

 tect and improve'all of its lands, even while pro- 

 viding "a continuous supply of timber. "* Exactly 

 what that means has been subject to interpretation 

 over the years. Timber sales in the Rock Creek 

 drainage have been controversial for at least two 

 decades. 



Long before serious logging began, though, 

 foresters already were changing the face of Rock 

 Creek. Natural fires used to sweep the basin every 

 10 to 15 summers,"* but by the late 1800s, the Forest 

 Service manned ten fire lookouts supplied by 

 horses and mules and scattered across the high 

 peaks overlooking the drainage. As fire suppression 

 grew more sophisticated, the once open Ponderosa 

 forests of the Rock Creek area grew dense with 

 brush and such shade-tolerant species as Douglas 

 fir.' 



The government first became a major 

 employer in the Rock Creek drainage during the 

 1930s, when various New Deal programs helped 

 develop campsites and improve the roads alongside 

 the creek. But it wasn't until the 1950s that the 

 timber harvest began in earnest. Equipment 

 developed after World War II made the rugged 

 country of western Montana accessible to loggers 

 for the first time. The post-war housing boom also 

 created a big demand for timber.* People came to 

 depend on the government to provide jobs in 



directly through companies that log and mill trees 

 grown on Forest Service land. 



Many outdoor enthusiasts who saw the 

 results of commodity- oriented management dur- 

 ing the 1960s began to wonder whether the Forest 

 Service had forgotten its custodial role in western 

 Montana." The concept of sustained yield still of- 

 ficially guided Forest Service timber sales. But even 

 if timber production could be sustained on the 

 mountainsides, such groups as the Western Mon- 

 tana Fish and Game Association found it incompati- 

 ble in many cases with scenic hiking, hunting and 

 fishing. Membership in the association swelled to 

 7,000 during the timber and wilderness controver- 

 sies of the 1960s. 8 This group, and others like it, 

 would play a pivotal role in efforts to preserve Rock 

 Creek. 



From 1948 through 1969, more than 10,000 

 acres— about 87 million board feet of timber — were 

 cut in the Rock Creek drainage on its two National 

 Forests, the Lolo and the Deerlodge.' The small 

 wooden bridge connecting Rock Creek Road to the 

 highway during this time wouldn't hold logging 

 trucks. But timber was hauled out the back door- 

 over the ridges to the east and west.'" It wasn't long 

 before hikers, hunters and state officials began com- 

 plaining about denuded slopes; clearcutting was 

 creeping down Kitchen Gulch and Gilbert Creek 

 on either side of spectacular Rock Creek canyon. 



The Montana Fish and Game Department 

 (now called the Montana Department of Fish, 

 Wildlife and Parks) vowed in 1968 to fight Forest 

 Service road building in key elk areas of the Rock 

 Creek drainage, including calving grounds and both 

 winter and summer ranges." The following year, 

 the Montana Sierra Club Group formed in Missoula 

 specifically to work for protection of Rock Creek, 

 and soon after. Trout I'nlimited formed its West 

 Slope chapter in Missoula. 



Rock Creek was not the only battle front 

 forming in western Montana during the 1960s. 

 Citizens of the Bitterroot Valley, to the west, were 

 also organizing to identif\' and promote conserva- 

 tion interests. There, too, the concern was inten- 

 ■^i^(.■d logging on national forest lands 



