Group Profile
Great Burn Study Group: In the Air, Winter Monitoring On the Ground
By Brooke Hewes, 3-27-06
The view was stunning. Rugged, snow-capped peaks. Rock crags towering over frozen alpine lakes. Mountains as far as the eye could see…um, well, as far as most eyes peering out from the backseat of a four-passenger airplane cruising over Montana’s northern Bitterroot Mountains could see. Mine were shut — my mind busy with more pressing things, like not puking all over the leather seat in front of me.
The pilot and other passenger, however, seemed unperturbed by the jostling, or the dark storm clouds crowding the thin air between the mountains and us. They were too busy looking back and forth from a Lolo National Forest map spread across the cockpit and the proposed wilderness in the Great Burn below. Equipped with a digital camera and GPS, both men were ready to document any snowmobiles or snowmobile tracks in areas they shouldn’t be. My tumult, and their surveillance, was part of the Great Burn Study Group’s winter monitoring program.
And according to the Missoula non-profit’s board president, Dale Harris, what they were doing was “diligence.”
“We are keeping them honest,” says Harris, speaking not just of snowmobile riders, but the U.S. Forest Service. The national agency manages the 275,000-acre area, named after the fires that roared through the area in 1910. In fact, says Harris, “we’re out there doing the work the [agency] should be doing but isn’t.”
The Forest Service is responsible for monitoring recreation and enforcing travel restrictions on the 155 forests and 20 grasslands they manage, and since the Great Burn straddles Montana’s Lolo and Idaho’s Clearwater national forests, Harris is right — it is their job to ensure that those areas closed to vehicles stay that way. However, it’s not that easy, or simple, says Rob Harper, a district ranger on the Lolo National Forest. While local managers are doing the best they can, resources for on-the-ground surveillance are tight.
“We have one guy covering Superior, Thompson Falls and Plains ranger districts and more than one million acres (to monitor),” says Harper. “It takes him two hours just to drive from one side of his area to the other, and that’s taking two-lane highways.”
With more snowmobile riders and more powerful machines, Harper says keeping up with monitoring is a problem, especially along the Idaho-Montana stateline where most illegal use occurs. To this end, aerial photos provided by the Great Burn Study Group have helped stretch resources. In fact, the study group is part of the reason the agency has called on state and county law enforcement to boost patrolling in the area. There is a need for monitoring, says Harper, and the GBSG helps fill it.
If you haven’t heard of the Great Burn Study Group, you’re not alone. Since they started in 1971, they have laid low. They don’t have a Web site, they don’t hold fancy fundraising events, and they don’t pursue the press. What they do, says Harris, is “sweat.”
The Great Burn Study Group’s mission is twofold: to designate the Great Burn as federally protected wilderness and to preserve the wild character of the adjoining Lolo- to-Lookout Pass area — a 1.8 million-acre swath of land larger than Glacier National Park and home to wolverines, wolves and 42 inventoried roadless areas. From 1971 to 2003, however, the group has focused on the Great Burn, inspired by a 21-day backpacking trip by Harris and a group of his forestry buddies from the University of Montana.
“Talk about falling in love,” says Harris, whose refrigerator pays homage to the place, decorated with more than 30 years of camping trips in the Great Burn. And though his hair has gotten shorter and his muscles a bit less defined, his adoration has only grown.
The plane trip was not my first visit to the Great Burn. Shortly after moving to Missoula four years ago, I spent three nights at Moose Lake, where, in addition to waking up to the lake's namesake paddling through the morning steam rising from the water, I saw wolf tracks and wildflowers. To my delight, I did not see a single person –besides the six in my group. Seclusion so close to Missoula surprised me. Over the course of the trip, however, evidence of use slowly turned up: a campsite littered with empty cans of beans and enough trash to fill three oversized bags; weeds where native wildflowers once grew; wide, all-terrain tire tracks through a puddle since colonized by small frogs. And while national forests have a multiple-use mandate, more users and more aggressive use have raised concern not only for places like the Great Burn, but for all our national forests.
So much concern, in fact, that Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth recently named unmanaged recreation as one of the four gravest threats to the national forest system, pointing primarily to the explosion of off-highway vehicle use.
From 1972 through 2000, OHV use jumped from 5 to 36 million, according to Forest Service figures. This increase, says the agency, in addition to technology that enables four-wheelers, snowmobiles and other OHVs to access remote, rugged terrain has intensified soil erosion, the spread of invasive weeds, wildlife disturbances and user conflicts.
But with increasing motorized and other use of national forests (the Forest Service reports an 18-fold increase in visitors from 1946 to 2000), the number of full-time USFS positions decreased from 2002 to 2004 by almost 600, nearly 200 of which were for inventory, monitoring and law enforcement.
In fact, according to “Roaring from the Past,” a study authored by the Missoula-based Wildlands Center for Preventing Roads, only 6 percent of forests FOIAed by the group provided record of adequate monitoring between 1987 and 1998; 46 percent of the responses provided no record of monitoring; 43 percent “did not monitor reliably enough to determine impacts” from OHVs.
All of these pressures, in combination with taxed personal bank accounts, pushed the Great Burn Study Group to step-up and formalize its advocacy effort six years ago.
“About 1998 we started getting nervous,” says Harris. “There were not enough resources to keep up with the increased use and motorized technology.” The group became an official non-profit in 2000 and has since added three part-time employees, two full-time seasonal monitors and a board of seven. Still, despite growth, the group remains quietly modest and focused on year-round monitoring.
In winter, volunteers, board member and staff strap on snowshoe or cross-country skis or, stomachs willing, airplane seat belts. In summer, they don backpacks. Among other things, monitors note prevalence and location of noxious weeds, motorized and non-motorized recreation, and wildlife. Last summer, 99 volunteers spend 185 days on 26 different trips between Lolo and Lookout.
In addition to providing the Forest Service with data, monitoring is also used for litigation, both to prove illegal use as well as legal use the group deems inappropriate. Also, says Harris, spending so much time on the ground lends more than an authentic appreciation of place — it teaches the importance of rural lifestyle and community partnerships.
“Our approach is cooperative and integrative,” says Harris. Rather than take an adversarial stand against government and motorized recreationists, they work with them. “We meet with county commissioners, school boards, industry, fish and game commissions.”
They have met and shook hands, says Harris, with “the timber guys,” and shape their tactics by pragmatism rather than idealism.
“We could be seeking wilderness designation right now,” says Harris, “but the politics aren’t favorable. Instead, we put all that energy into influencing management —into making sure that existing safeguards are respected.”
This approach and these relationships—such as the one between Superior District Ranger Rob Harper and Harris, which both call “unofficial” yet respectful — is part of what makes the Great Burn Study Group so unique. And, says Harris, it is a big part of what has helped them protect so much in an era marked by increasing development and recreation.
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