I prefer to stumble through the woods slowly but others favor jogging and getting there fast. On a proposed northern route through the Yaak Valley of northwest Montana, a nationally-targeted destination would send all manners of hikers--ethical, experienced, and inexperienced--into one place grizzly recovery cannot afford a single mistake, a single messy campsite.
Hiking routes for humans range from game trails to the so-called high-volume industrial recreation super trails like the much touted and travelled Appalachian, Continental Divide and Pacific Crest hiking super highways, which are collectively called the “triple crown of long distance hiking.” They all have their place and uses. What may be practical for one popular region might be an abomination in a more remote area.
I’ve bushwhacked all my life, though as a writer, I can see the attractiveness of bagging one of those triple crowns: it’s a ready-to-go memoir with the mileage signs delineating the book’s structure. You could do it for a speed record or have mid-life crises along the way—making for a solid read.
The faint trials I bushwhack are less suitable for linear story telling and more a metaphor for tripping and exploring your way into the unknown, maybe during periods of seeking in your own life. All kinds of backcountry travel are appropriate at different stages of your life’s journey.
I remember when I first told my friend Rick Graetz, the fine photographer and publisher, about Rick Bass’ protectiveness of the Yaak’S roadless areas and its grizzlies. Graetz said he didn’t get it: The Yaak was claustrophobic, green, brushy, full of ugly mosquitoes with no views of distant peaks or snowfields. It’s not like a high ridge in Glacier or a vast meadow complex in Yellowstone crawling with wildlife.
Now the Pacific Northwest Trail Association (PNTA), along with USFS acquiescence, has proposed a nearly straight line route from Glacier Park west through critical habitat for the isolated Yaak grizzly population of perhaps as few as 19 bears with 2-3 females of breeding age. I happen to like grizzly bears and eventually cramming 4000 or more hikers per year through this tiny corridor will destroy the Yaak grizzly population; encounters along the trail are inevitable and almost always settled with the bear losing her life.
Also, the PNTA favors “going high,” for the views of which the Yaak Valley does not have. Why would a hiker on a 1200-mile journey seek to actively avoid the lowest elevation in the state, and the incredibly scenic Kootenai river, largest tributary to the Columbia, with its side waterfalls and ghost towns? My old friend, the late Chuck Jonkel, studied this problem because 28 miles of the proposed Yaak trail went through critical grizzly habitat. Chuck said a better, safer, more scenic route lay to the south, linking lookout towers by ridge tops with great views all along the trail.
People and grizzlies are incompatible because humans are ignorant of grizzly behavior; a charging mother grizzly is not necessarily a dangerous situation; I’ve been charged by sows almost two dozens times and merely stood my ground inoffensively. No bear has touched me. * Recently a Wyoming wildlife warden shot a killed a mother grizzly with three now-abandoned cubs. Fish and Wildlife officials along with the sheriff applauded the warden. As long as these false and misinformed views prevail, the Yaak grizzlies are doomed by this massive influx of hikers, many of whom will be armed.
Promoters of the high-speed trail cite Glacier National Park as a place where humans and grizzlies mostly get along. I filmed bears and worked as a lookout in Glacier for over a decade and one of the reasons people don’t run into bears all the time is because popular hiking trails often have an adjacent drainage that is without a trail. The grizzlies can get away. Like the North Fork of the Flathead or Many Glacier—there’s not a trail up every creek. The Yaak Valley trail will constitute much more of a defile inviting animal tragedy. It should be noted also that Glacier is a nationa park, with a huge protected land mass; the Yaak is not a park, or at least not yet.
Don’t build a high-volume super-hiking trail in the Yaak.
Write the Kootenai National Forest or the federal advisory committee.
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Doug Peacock
Montana
