Dugan Lake in the Beartooth Mountains of Montana (Photo courtesy of Bill Schneider).
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was a young, hard-driving member of the Montana Wilderness Association Council, and I contributed as much money as I could to the organization. Now, after watching MWA abandon its efforts to permanently protect our last roadless lands as wilderness, I no longer support the organization.
With the MWA leading the way, the ’70s and ’80s were the glory years of Montana’s Wilderness preservation movement. In 1977, with the leadership of late-Senator Lee Metcalf, we passed the Montana Wilderness Study Act. Three major wilderness bills soon followed: the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Act (1978), the Rattlesnake Wilderness and Recreation Act (1980), and the Lee Metcalf Wilderness Act (1983). In 1988, Congress passed a bi-partisan bill creating 1.4 million acres of wilderness in Montana, but President Ronald Reagan pocket-vetoed the bill.
Hence began the wilderness drought. No real wilderness bill has been introduced into Congress for 36 years and counting. Instead, we have seen at least five major collaborative proposals that basically divide up the last of wild Montana, some for wilderness, but much wilderness-quality lands compromised for other land uses.
I’m not opposed or afraid of compromise. All of the above-mentioned bills were full of compromise, but not deals that gave away huge slices of our last roadless lands.
When I was active in MWA, there was no talk of splitting the baby. We only had around 6 million acres of wilderness-quality lands remaining, and MWA wanted to protect it all. That seemed reasonable because if we succeeded, the vast majority of Montana (somewhere around 93 percent) would be devoted to all varieties of commercial development.
When lobbying our congressional delegation for Absaroka-Beartooth bill, we were faced with strong opposition for a unified wilderness from the communities of Cooke City and Big Timber. Commercial interests there wanted the road that follows the Boulder River south out of Big Timber to continue over to Cooke City, creating a commercial corridor between the Absaroka and Beartooth mountain ranges.
The MWA wanted a unified wilderness, and the battle came down to a last-minute, who-will-blink political moment, and we prevailed. Now, thankfully, because of a strong, pro-wilderness stand by the MWA, we have a unified Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness.
With this victory under our belt, we started working on the Lee Metcalf Wilderness bill and deja vu. Ennis and Big Sky wanted a road through Jack Creek in the Madison Range connecting the two communities and splitting the main Lee Metcalf Wilderness from The Spanish Peaks Primitive Area.
The congressional delegation at the time leaned toward the split Wilderness, so the MWA Council was faced with a difficult choice. Should we compromise and get a two-part wilderness or hold fast for a unified wilderness?
Everybody knew what would happen. Even though the late Chet Huntley, the founder of Big Sky, assured Montanans that he only wanted a little local ski hill on Lone Mountain with no real estate development, we could predict the future of the beautiful valley along West Fork of the Gallatin River.
At a pivotal MWA Council meeting, we had a long, fierce debate. Should we give up Jack Creek? There was a split vote. I voted to hold out for a unified Lee Metcalf Wilderness, but the majority of the Council voted to give up Jack Creek to insure the bill’s passage.
We all know what happened. Take a drive up above Big Sky nowadays and you can see it. The road is still, barely, a private road owned by Moonlight Basin, but various permits allow some traffic to and from the Ennis area, and there is constant pressure to make it a public road.
The point of little history? Thinking back at that pivotal MWA Council meeting, this might be when it happened. This is when the MWA started changing from a champion of our last roadless land to what we have today. It was a gradual transition, but the end result is clear.
We, in fact, no longer even have a Montana Wilderness Association. It’s history, in name and otherwise. It’s now officially named Wild Montana. Taking the word, wilderness, out of the name really tells us all we need to know.
Preserving wilderness is no longer the top priority. Instead, Wild Montana has spent years and millions engineering a series of collaborative proposals similar to the Gallatin Forest Partnership. These collaborations keep splitting the baby, giving up prime, wilderness-quality lands to other uses such as logging and mechanized recreation in exchange for some wilderness which often ends up being the high, rocky spines of mountain ranges where there are no competing commercial uses. For example, under the current management, would we have a unified Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness or would we be able to drive on a paved road all the way from Big Timber to Cooke City?
MWA has morphed into a corporate non-profit with around 30 employees, a big, expensive headquarters building in Helena and massive budget compared to my time on the MWA Council when we had one employee, a tiny rented office, and dedicated volunteers doing basically all of the work.
In the 1980s, MWA championed Alternative W, a proposal to protect almost all of the designated Wilderness Study Areas in Montana as wilderness. Now, you can’t find a single word about Alternative W on the Wild Montana website.
I’m not saying Wild Montana isn’t an effective conservation group. With such a large staff and budget, they do many good things. I’m just saying that the group no longer prioritizes saving all of the last roadless lands. That vital role has been taken up by the Alliance for the Wild Rockies.
So, in summary, if you agree that we should permanently protect our last roadless lands, the Alliance is your group, not Wild Montana. The Alliance is a small, low-budget organization that spends much of its limited resources suing federal agencies over a continuous stream of illegal proposals, most of which would trim away chunks of our already dwindling base of roadless lands. The Alliance often prevails in these lawsuits and therefore has saved many thousands of acres of roadless lands that might someday become wilderness.
Instead of the collaborative, split-the-baby approach now enshrined by Wild Montana, the Alliance has a bill in Congress (Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, S.1531) to preserve all our roadless lands. A long list of conservation organizations support NREPA, but surprisingly (or not surprisingly?), Wild Montana is not on that list.
Bill Schneider is retired publisher, outdoor writer and columnist living in Helena.