Wishing for wilderness

Wilderness program manager for the U.S. Forest Service, Ralph Swain, right, helps Ed Zahniser prevent blistering on his foot during the hike into the Rock Creek Roadless Area. Photo by Dustin Bleizeffer, Casper Star-Tribune.

By DUSTIN BLEIZEFFER
Star-Tribune staff writer

BIGHORN NATIONAL FOREST -- The first few water crossings were somewhat challenging, though refreshing.

After carefully picking a rock-to-rock course over spring-fed Rock Creek down in the shade of a rocky canyon, Ed Zahniser paused to pick a wad of crystallized spruce sap from a tree and popped it into his mouth. A little bitter and grainy at first, he explained, but it would serve as good chewing gum for the next couple of days.

Zahniser was 10 the last time he stepped foot in the Bighorn National Forest in 1956 in what turned out to be a historic trip. His father, Howard Zahniser, took his family, along with some local friends, to Lake Solitude, where a battle was being waged between would-be dam developers and conservationists who argued the area deserved protection from the industrious desires of man.

Howard Zahniser's trips to Lake Solitude in the 1950s inspired a series of essays, including his famous "Lake Solitude Sermon." As executive secretary of The Wilderness Society, Howard Zahniser became an instrumental advocate of preserving the nation's wild places.

He wrote 66 drafts of what eventually became the Wilderness Act of 1964, signed into law three months after he died. Howard Zahniser is credited for much of the language in the Wilderness Act, including this quote describing the concept of wilderness:

"A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."

A new wild

Ed Zahniser, the youngest of Howard Zahniser's four children, grew up to become a noted conservationist himself, promoting the spiritual virtues of an "untrammeled" wild, and spending much of his time enjoying the waters of the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York.

He returned to the Bighorn National Forest last week with his wife, Christine, to join a three-day outing with the Wyoming Wilderness Association into the Rock Creek Roadless Area northwest of Buffalo.

The Bighorn National Forest, in its revised forest plan, recently recommended Rock Creek be designated wilderness, which would essentially add 33,857 acres of the lower-elevation forested country to the adjoining Cloud Peak Wilderness Area -- currently an "elevationally challenged" alpine island residing mostly between 11,000 and 13,000 feet above sea level.

The Wyoming Wilderness Association hopes the same legislation that protects Lake Solitude and the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area today will be extended to Rock Creek, a vast area of canyons, creeks, towering rock spires and meadows interrupted by long, rocky spines and thick groves of trees.

Liz Howell, executive director of the Wilderness Association, said that unless the area is designated wilderness it will remain open to possible oil and gas drilling, logging and mining.

Only Congress can make a wilderness designation. With that in mind, the Wilderness Association has focused its lobbying efforts on Wyoming's senior congressional delegate, Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., who holds high-ranking positions on natural resource and forestry committees.

"The senator is certainly willing to consider this proposal, but right now he's gathering information," said Thomas spokesman Cameron Hardy.

Wyoming's other two delegates said they haven't been asked to take on the proposal.

Hardy noted that Thomas sent a field staff representative on the Wilderness Association's Rock Creek hiking trip last week to help gather information.

Thomas recently received praise from many in the environmental community when he helped trim the number of acres in a recent federal oil and gas lease sale in the Wyoming Range. He then backed away from a comment in which he offered blanket opposition to further oil and gas leasing on U.S. Forest Service lands, but nonetheless gave groups such as the Wilderness Association cause to believe that a new wilderness designation may be possible.

Opposition to the wilderness designation is rooted in the fact that the area would be closed to road-building, logging and future oil and gas development. Though developers haven't considered any definite commercial activity in the area, many consider a wilderness designation as symbolic of steadily shrinking access to public lands.

Ernie Schmidt, president of Wyoming Sawmills and of the Wyoming Timber Industry Association, has said further wilderness designations on the Bighorn National Forest may be unhealthy for the forest.

"Locking everything up for wilderness is just going to lead to fire and disease," Schmidt told the Star-Tribune in 2005. "There's certain numbers of people want that to happen, and so I disagree with them."

Others worry that a wilderness designation would attract a large influx of visitors to the area -- a concern shared by many in the Forest Service itself.

Trekking Rock Creek

Wild raspberries along the creek make for a sweet snack, and huge metallic-looking horseflies encourage hikers to keep moving. The modest Rock Creek is about 5 percent snowmelt runoff now at the apex of a dry year, but a large spring maintains a steady flow of cold mountain water over deep pools too clear to conceal the colorful flutter of brook trout.

Many visitors here are boarders at various guest ranches, including the HF Bar guest ranch to the east, and the Paradise Guest Ranch and South Fork Mountain Lodge to the south.

Along on the Wilderness Association's recent Rock Creek hike were Ralph Swain, wilderness program manager for the U.S. Forest Service, and Matt Brownlee, a seasonal ranger for the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area. Because Rock Creek could become wilderness, the two wanted to become familiar with the area.

Brownlee noted that a switchback trail out of Rock Creek canyon didn't have any water-bars to prevent washout. A PVC pipe to facilitate drainage below the trail would have to be removed. The same drainage can be accomplished using rocks, Brownlee noted.

In a thickly wooded area Brownlee and Swain stopped to observe a rather large cluster of noxious knapweed. Brownlee entered the location into a GPS, and Swain collected the seed-heads. The information will be passed along to local Forest Service authorities.

Overall, the Rock Creek area appears to be in good health, Brownlee and Swain agreed. Both even seemed happy about the possibility of adding the area to the nation's 106.6 million acres of protected wilderness areas, though they worry that budget constraints already challenge federal agencies to properly maintain the wild areas.

Despite those concerns, Zahniser said there's a sense of duty in trying to keep areas like this as wild as possible.

"Preserving wilderness shows restraint and humility," Zahniser said during a discussion before the hike. "It is critically important to keep in mind that when we talk about federally designated wilderness, we are talking only about lands that belong to all American citizens, that are owned in common by all American citizens."

At last count, that included approximately 299,239,914 people.

While resting trailside Wednesday, Zahniser recalled that famous trip to Solitude Lake 50 years ago. The family had a pair of ski patrol tents, olive green on the outside and bright white on the inside. The morning sun made it unbearably hot inside, but it was still freezing outside in the morning.

Zahniser recalled fishing in the alpine lakes in what is now the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area. He and his siblings caught about 20 trout each in less than 30 minutes.

"That kind of ruined me for fishing in the Adirondack," Zahniser said.

Reporter Dustin Bleizeffer can be reached at (307) 682-3388 or dustin.bleizeffer@casperstartribune.net.