Wilderness study areas are more wild and untouched than national parks. But a Republican proposal threatens this unique terrain, environmentalists say

The Big Snowy Mountains wilderness study area in Montana represents 91,000 acres of the wildest land left in America. Viewed from a limestone bluff high in a timbered gulch, no houses are visible. No transmission lines or roads interrupting the expanse of green. No smoke curling up from cabin stovepipes.

But all that could change in the near future. If a US senator’s bill passes, this tranquility could be shattered by the buzz of snowmobiles or the roar of excavators.



In early December, Senator Steve Daines, a Republican, introduced a bill that would eliminate wilderness protection from the Big Snowies as well as from another 358,500 acres in Montana that have been shielded from development since the 1970s. They are known as wilderness study areas (WSAs) because the government is considering them for permanent protections, and they are “wilder than half of all national parks” in the lower 48 states, according to a Wilderness Society ecologist, Travis Belote.

The five landscapes in Daines’s bill represent over a third of the wilderness study acreage on US national forests, and their loss would mark the biggest reduction of protected public lands in Montana history.

Daines’s bill comes amid a flurry of attacks on environmental and public land protections by the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress, from the controversial reduction of national monuments in Utah to the opening of the Arctic national wildlife refuge to oil exploration.

“The more attacks like this are successful,” says Scott Brennan, Montana state director of the Wilderness Society, “the more people who would sell public land or push for maximum development will feel empowered.”

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So what is on the chopping block? Some of the most pristine terrain left in North America, according Belote. He examined the five WSAs included in the bill, looking at noise levels, light pollution, proximity to population centers, presence of roads and human activity, wildlife connectivity, and the presence of large carnivores such as grizzly bears and mountain lions.

The Sapphires and West Pioneers WSAs have more intact wildlife communities than 95% of national parks in the contiguous US. The Big Snowies WSA is the “quietest and darkest” of the five.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kent Peak in the Sapphire wilderness study area. These regions are known for their intact wildlife communities. Photograph: Sally Carlson/Montana Wilderness Association

On a trail winding through spruce and ponderosa, there are hundreds of tracks in the snow, few of them human. There are mountain grouse, a bobcat on the trail of a snowshoe hare, mule deer and the occasional elk. The Big Snowies WSA isn’t showy but it does vital work: nurturing wildlife, growing trees, delivering clean water to the valley below.

Wilderness advocates believe Daines’s bill opens another line of attack on public-land protections that could have consequences beyond Montana. The US Forest Service manages 32 wilderness study areas in 10 states, totaling over a million acres – from high desert canyons in Nevada to alpine lakes in Washington and Idaho, including critical watersheds and endangered species habitat. Most were set aside after federal inventories in the 1970s.

The Montana WSAs came into existence through a bill sponsored by Lee Metcalf, a Democratic senator from Montana who anticipated a future of greater population density and increased demands on the wildest parts of his state – rich not only in scenery, but also in minerals, timber and recreational potential. Metcalf’s bill froze development of roads and infrastructure and commercial activities like mining, until the Forest Service could ascertain whether any of the acreage ought to be permanently protected.

For supporters, including Kerry White, a Montana legislator and ardent advocate for motorized recreation on public lands, the status quo is infuriating. “Over 80% of the Gallatin” – a vast national forest in the south-western part of the state – “is restricted to the elderly, the disabled, war veterans coming back who can’t walk to access these lands. Who’s to say they shouldn’t be able to go back there and ride these roads … on a four-wheeler?”

But arguments that pit motorized users against horsemen and hikers miss the point, said Natalie Dawson, a biologist and the director of the Wilderness Institute at the University of Montana. “Recreation is one of a multitude of benefits of wilderness, and yet it’s the only one that gets a voice.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wildflowers at the Big Snowy Mountains wilderness study area, part of the thousands of acres that have been shielded from development since the 1970s. Photograph: Zack Porter/Montana Wilderness Association

This principle is enshrined in the Wilderness Act, whose architects wrote that wilderness was to be “in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape … an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

All the wilderness study areas in question are accessible by foot or horseback. Some even allow limited motorized use consistent with 1977 levels. Several prominent figures from Montana conservation and wilderness not-for-profits said they did not expect every acre under protection to become wilderness, and that Daines excluded them from the scoping process despite their offer to participate. A Daines spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Daines says his bill comes at the urging of county commissions and local citizens, but he also has the backing of groups including the Montana Mining Association, the Montana Snowmobile Association and the anti-wolf organization Big Game Forever. A national representative of the Forest Service supported the bill in congressional testimony, apparently contradicting recommendations from Montana-based forest service officials that some of the landscapes be designated as wilderness.

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Back in the Big Snowy Mountains, a small group of locals recently hiked upward toward Lost Peak and came across a surprise: the tracks of a lone pine marten. “I’ve never seen a pine marten in the Snowies,” said Doug Krings, 38. Krings grew up in Lewistown and has hiked and hunted the Snowies his entire life. “I thought they were trapped out years ago,” he said.

At one point his four-year-old son, Cruz Krings, wandered off and stood on a boulder, gazing into the forest.

“What are you doing over there, Cruz?” Krings’s friend called.

The boy turned to him and said, “It’s just so quiet here.”

See more HCN reporting on Utah’s shrinking national monuments