Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
The Jewel Basin Hiking Area in the Swan Range east of the Flathead Valley was designated a foot travel only administrative reserve under Regulation U-3a, the last of Bob Marshall’s famous U Regulations still in effect after the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964. The designation protected the wilderness values of the Jewel, but the Forest Service wasn’t protecting it until it could be added to the wilderness system. Instead, the Forest Service — which loathed wilderness — was trying to prove that it could manage the Jewel without the benefit of the Wilderness Act, thus keeping the area out of the wilderness system.
Remarks made to the Missoulian last week by the Flathead National Forest’s forest plan revision chief prove that the goal of keeping the Jewel out of the wilderness system isn’t something that the Forest Service has gotten out of it’s system:
“There are a lot of different management areas besides the recommended wilderness designation that continue to provide protection,” said Joe Krueger, the Flathead Forest’s forest plan revision team leader. “And things change. In 1986, we recommended a wilderness designation for the Jewel Basin. But during the 2006 planning process, we concluded it was getting so much use, it might not meet wilderness standards. Now we’re reevaluating those positions as we speak.”
This is the old anti-wilderness purity doctrine that the Forest Service used after the Wilderness Act to try to disqualify land from consideration for wilderness designation. There’s no legal basis for it, as Rep. Morris Udall and Sen. Frank Church made clear during the debate over the Endangered American Wilderness of 1978.
Hiking certainly has increased in the Jewel, especially from the west side, where one can drive to 6,000-foot Camp Misery. Resorts, church camps, and people who like to hike in large groups, are giving the trails as hard a pounding as received in wilderness next to major urban areas. In some areas of the Jewel, solitude is in short supply. But man is still a visitor who does not remain. Step off the trail a few hundred feet and the Jewel and its glittering lakes provide the same sense of grandeur and isolation that existed before humankind discovered the place.
So Krueger’s suggestion that the Jewel might not meet wilderness standards is what one smells on the horse trails in the Bob Marshall Wilderness on a hot day in August.
Krueger’s under pressure from snowmobilers, probably from resorts and other apostles of organized recreation, from haters of wilderness inside and outside his agency who still want to use the Jewel to prove the Wilderness Act wasn’t necessary; who still want to prove the Forest Service can protect wilderness without direction from Congress. His remarks are a spit drenched finger in the wind, a trial balloon. He’s trying to see how much opposition not recommending wilderness for the Jewel will generate. He’s trying to see what he can get away with.