Back to the Trees and Caves takes readers on a rollicking canoe adventure through the Canadian wilds and asks if we can still find wilderness on this rapidly shrinking planet.
Longtime USFS wilderness manager and adventurer, Jonathan Klein, heads off on an epic canoe journey in the search for the authentic wild in his new book, Back to the Trees and Caves. In this exclusive excerpt he talks about how he built a career that kept him in the outdoors and how all we have left that’s protected here in the Lower 48 is really only “Wilderness-ish.” Buy the book from local bookseller The Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, Montana, here.
Chapter 16
Wilderness-Ish
The life of a wilderness ranger is fabulous, providing one can manage without plumbing, be continually outside in all kinds of weather, work like a beast, smell like a horse, and tolerate long periods of being alone. That’s me in a nutshell. I liked the job so much that I often went backpacking on my days off, a busman’s holiday.
However, the calling does have its drawbacks. Chief among them is that it does not constitute a career. There is no wilderness ranger retirement, health care, or future other than a gimpy and impoverished old age. After five seasons, these hard truths became evident and it dawned on me that I could not do this kind of work forever.
Here I was, thirty-three, with no permanent job, few prospects for finding one, and a single-minded ambition for a career managing wilderness. It seemed a pipe dream, but I decided to pursue it anyway, this time in Montana. Montana had been my state of mind ever since Wisdom, and not a day passed in the intervening years that I didn’t yearn to return.
Whether by chance or portent, my homecoming coincided with April Fool’s Day. The calendar alleged it was spring, but it didn’t seem so with all the snow still blanketing the streets of Bozeman. Although delighting Otter, my Siberian husky, the cold and snow left me feeling lost, alone, and vulnerable. I parked my truck on the campus of Montana State University, secreted behind the football stadium, and slept in the back, under a shell, cozied up to Otter for warmth and emotional support.
The next morning, I paid a visit to the Gallatin Forest Supervisor’s Office, a five-story building that passes for a skyscraper in downtown Bozeman. I was hoping for a lead on a job. With only $200 to my name, I needed to find one fast. The forest’s recreation officer was wonderfully helpful.
“There are a couple of possibilities,” she said.
One was with the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (FWP) as a seasonal ranger on a river in west-central Montana, the Smith, and the other with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), as river/wilderness ranger for the agency’s first designated Wilderness Area, Bear Trap Canyon, in the southwestern part of the state.
The news about the BLM job had me over the moon. I’d been trying for years to land a permanent position doing the only thing I wanted to do, but there were few openings for these jobs in the best of times and now, with Ronald Reagan downsizing government, there were essentially none. But suddenly, here was a chance. I was eminently qualified too, except for the river ranger part, but that was remedied when FWP hired me for the Smith.
The next two months, while patrolling the Smith River by canoe and raft, I fretted over the Bear Trap job, anxious for news. BLM was apparently in no hurry to fill it. I made a pest of myself, continually checking in to ask when the hire would be made and chatting up the official who would make it.
When the call finally came offering me the position, I had to be scraped off the ceiling. After a decade of itinerance, I could finally settle down. No more couch surfing, bunking in cabins, truck beds, tepees, and tents. I could unpack my books and knick-knacks from cardboard boxes and put them on shelves, eat off crockery instead of aluminum, build Otter a doghouse, and maybe even get a cat. I would have a home.
The Bear Trap suited me. The office had a ceiling open to sky, granite walls, and plenty of running water—class III and IV. Once or twice a week I floated the nine-mile stretch of canyon in the government raft.
Otter always came along, sometimes in the boat, but usually preferring to follow from shore, Siberians not being a water breed. It was a happy time, and I figured to do it ’til doomsday, but three years later, when a recreation position opened with the Forest Service in Ennis, offering a promotion and greater responsibility, I traded in BLM’s neoprene for Forest Service green.
For the next twenty-four years, until the day I retired, I managed Recreation and Wilderness for the Madison Ranger District of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest. An administrator now, I spent more time in the office than I cared to, doing things managers do, like budgeting, personnel, and planning.
As to planning, the Forest Service does an inordinate amount. Although I never planned to be a planner, it seems everyone in the agency is eventually sucked into it.
I was not a fan, seeing much of the planning we were required to do as a waste of time, and worse, taking time from more important things, like being in the field clearing trails, spraying weeds, patrolling, and otherwise assisting the public in ways that mattered.
Of course, some level of planning is necessary, but the Forest Service has gone overboard, diverting vast sums from fieldwork to paperwork until funding fell like virga rain, evaporating before ever hitting the ground. Instead it was used for vision statements, mission statements, white papers, and lists of goals and objectives that filled bulging binders soon marooned on backroom bookshelves and forgotten.
Much of the planning involved the Lee Metcalf Wilderness, 250,000 acres administered between two National Forests and the BLM. Working with a team of specialists, we drew lines on maps like urban planners, dividing the area into zones—pristine, backcountry, and transitional—and established standards and objectives for each.
We inventoried, monitored, measured, quantified, and yammered on in never-ending meetings about threats and issues that had no solution, at least none practical, affordable, or palatable. The academic nature of these discussions convinced me that a single wilderness ranger in the field was a far better investment for the U.S. taxpayer than a room full of well-paid planners.
Wilderness planning has limits. You can plan for a high level of air quality, but how do you prevent polluted air from drifting over? And acid rain won’t be stopped by a standard. Social impacts are likewise difficult to address. Wilderness is ideally managed to provide opportunities for solitude, but what does that mean?
How many people can enjoy solitude together, and how many are too many? Social scientists may provide a number, but what does management do once that number is exceeded? The only tool that comes to mind is a permit system to restrict the number of people allowed within wilderness at any one time, but permit systems are prohibitively expensive, to say nothing of unpopular, and will never be implemented for an area like the Lee Metcalf when budgets aren’t even adequate to maintain trails.
People are the problem. There are simply too many of us, and the pressures we exert on wildlands constantly diminish them. Wilderness planning can mitigate impacts to some extent, but only family planning will solve them. Take Bear Trap Canyon, for instance. This unit of the Lee Metcalf is a measly 6,000 acres, just nine miles long and only a mile-and-a-half wide where it narrows.
The trailhead is a scant thirty-minute drive from Bozeman, now the fastest growing community of its size in the country and bursting with Patagonia-clad outdoor enthusiasts. The first three miles up the trail follows an old Jeep road, and as you walk it, you’ll pass plenty of fishermen angling for trout native to Europe and smile pleasantly at the multi-colored multitudes hiking with their hounds.
You’ll wave to boaters floating in rafts and bright plastic kayaks on a river released from an upstream dam. And, if you know what you’re looking at, that pretty purple flower is knapweed, a nasty invader from the steppes of Russia, and like the tsars, intent on empire.
Cross Bear Trap Creek, if you dare, atop a slippery log, to gain the next rise, and you will be rewarded with a magnificent view of the inner canyon, the river flowing beneath swarded hills and dark gray cliffs; but looking up you’ll see something else: cell phone towers piked to the sky along a distant ridge. Check your phone. Service is guaranteed.
The Forest Service portions of the Lee Metcalf are similarly compromised. Established in three non-contiguous sections to allow for a snowmobile trail from West Yellowstone to Big Sky and to reserve the most productive timber lands for logging, the area is ringed by highways, bordered by clearcuts, and riven with resorts, golf courses, and million-dollar mansions.
From the summit of Cedar Mountain, in the heart of the area, Ennis can be seen in one direction and, in the other, linear striations of ski runs cut through the forest of an exclusive gated community for the ultra-rich. On calm summer nights, the strains of rock and roll can be heard wafting up from Scissorbill’s Saloon, the happening spot in Big Sky.
And, in winter, supercharged snowmobiles roar up improbably steep slopes right to the wilderness boundary, and sometimes, if the lure of powder proves too great, beyond it. Several times each day, jets ply the wilderness skies coming and going from Bozeman’s Gallatin Field, and in summer other aircraft may pass over, perhaps with firefighters who jump from planes to douse the flames of wildfires essential for ecosystem health but which can’t be allowed to burn due to the proximity of human development.
Or helicopters, landing to rescue someone fallen from a horse, to monitor wolves, or dump non-native fish into high mountain lakes so anglers have something to catch. Meanwhile, back on the ground, the masses from the ever-expanding metropolis of Boz-Angeles troop in from every portal, seeking solace and solitude, the elusive wilderness experience, only to meet others, like themselves, coming the other way, seeking same.
Managers will struggle on, planning and doing what can be done in the attempt to keep wilderness wild, but sadly, wilderness-ish is about the best they can do.
Jonathan Klein was not born in the right place. Raised in San Francisco by a single mother determined to mold her only child into a sophisticated urbanite, he instead surrendered to an innate ferality. Moving to Montana as a young man, Jonathan found work as a ranch hand and later discovered his true calling as a wilderness manager for the USDA Forest Service. His adventurous spirit has led to a slew of dubious exploits including hopping freight trains, a very short stint as a rodeo rider, bull fighting in Portugal, and several expeditions by canoe and kayak to the far north. Jonathan lives in Montana with his wife, Marianne, and a couple of cats.
Photos Courtesy of Jonathan Klein
