A history runs through it: Zinke public lands bill follows long trail

People have been trying to protect the wild country of the Blackfoot River headwaters since at least 1962.

That’s when Cecil Garland learned about a U.S. Forest Service road-building plan for his favorite hunting area around Scapegoat Mountain north of his home in Lincoln, Montana. Garland helped lead what was the first successful citizen-initiative wilderness designation two years before the Wilderness Act of 1964 became law. But it took until 1972 to get the 240,000-acre Scapegoat Wilderness added to the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.

As large as that was, the Scapegoat Wilderness left loose ends along the fringe of its map between Lincoln and Seeley Lake. Two decades of debate over those parcels took an unexpected turn on Sept. 9 when Montana Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke announced a bill called A River Runs Through It Act, which would create 132,000 acres of new wilderness alongside 181,000 acres of forest restoration areas and 60,000 acres where motorized and bike recreation activity would be permanently authorized. Another 60,000 acres would become Conservation Management Areas that allow current commercial and recreation use but prohibit future mining, roadbuilding or other development.

“The major piece of this has been floating out there for a long, long time,” University of Montana political scientist Rob Saldin told Mountain Journal. “And a lot of the trouble it ran into in the past was more political than substance. All the Republicans were desperate to keep Tester from getting any wins.”

Tester is Jon Tester, who as a first-term Democratic senator in 2009 introduced the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act. That sprawling bill linked three wilderness/logging collaboratives in the Lolo, Kootenai and Beaverhead-Deerlodge national forests of Montana. It would have created 666,260 acres of additional wilderness, 369,501 acres of recreation areas, and mandated logging and thinning on more than 100,000 acres across the western part of the state.

(One gauge of how history has passed: The North Fork Preservation Association warned its members seeking a map of the affected lands: “It’s about a 3.5MB download, so go get a latté or something if you are using a dial-up link.”)

The FJRA, as Tester’s bill became known, split the state’s public land advocates between those who rejected any agreements that traded logging for wilderness and others who supported collaborative deals where all stakeholders got something they wanted. Motorized recreation groups attacked as well. Tester got the legislation inserted into the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2010, a must-pass spending bill packed with earmarks from both parties that failed at the last minute.

Tester reintroduced FJRA two more times without success. He then brought it back in 2017 as the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act, focusing on the Seeley Lake parcels while pruning away the portions of the Kootenai and Beaverhead-Deerlodge. It would have added 79,000 acres along the edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.

At the time, fellow Montana Sen. Steve Daines and then-Congressman and now Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte, both Republicans, were pushing their own bills to strip Wilderness Study Area status from more than 500,000 acres of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management land. Those bills have also evolved, with Daines and Montana Republican Rep. Troy Downing now backing the Montana Sportsman Conservation Act which would downgrade the Hoodoo and Wales Creek WSAs to regular national forest status, along with a third WSA in the Middle Fork Judith area near White Sulphur Springs. That bill cleared the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Federal Lands on September 2. Zinke’s bill also downgrades the Hoodoo and Wales Creek WSAs.

Protecting wild lands has been a jump-ball issue across the nation lately. In July, President Donald Trump ordered the reduction of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments from a combined 3.23 million acres to 302,000 acres. Meanwhile, a Montana Wildlife Federation survey reported 79 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans supported the last version of Tester’s bill before he lost reelection to Republican Tim Sheehy in 2024. That bipartisan support for additional wilderness has continuously appeared in larger academic opinion polls as well.

Throughout that time, a network of wilderness, agriculture, recreation and timber representatives kept playing Cecil Garland’s game of continued talking and congressional pressure. The Blackfoot-Clearwater members had been meeting formally since at least 2006, according to several of the longer-serving attendees at Zinke’s September 8 Missoula gathering. A second group, called the Lincoln Prosperity Proposal, has been following a similar playbook for the past 15 years for lands on the eastern edge of the Blackfoot watershed.

“I appreciate Ryan doing this,” Tester told Mountain Journal after Zinke announced his A River Runs Through It Act. “The Lincoln component that wasn’t in mine was a very positive addition. Anytime you go with an on-the-ground collaboration, it’s a winning formula. It’s an opportunity for people to back up what they say.”

Tester, however, added that Zinke had not spoken to him about picking up the pieces of past legislation. And he said he was also struck by the “crickets” he was hearing from Zinke’s fellow Republican delegation members, Sens. Tim Sheehy and Daines and Rep. Downing. All three have not publicly responded to Zinke’s announcement or returned Mountain Journal requests for comment.

At the announcement meeting in outfitter and wilderness advocate Smoke Elser’s Missoula barn last week, speculation abounded on how this project has returned to life. 

“Those of us fighting against wilderness for a long time nevertheless understand that wilderness is an important part of our landscape,” said Russ Ennes, president of the Montana Trail Vehicle Riders Association. He recalled 15 years of arguments over forest health, changing snow conditions and finding ways to add 20 miles of snowmobile trail that could link 70 miles of riding loops. The Otatsy riding area previously set for snowmobile development in Tester’s bill has been swapped out due to declining snow levels for the Elsina Bowls on the fringe of the Mission Mountain Wilderness across the valley — another long-time snowmobile riding area that would receive permanent status under Zinke’s bill. 

Lincoln resident Bill Cyr, a retired forester with the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, pointed to the addition of some federal Inventoried Roadless Areas, or IRAs, to the lands designated for logging and other commercial work. Most of that is in the Lincoln Prosperity Proposal part of the bill, including 13,000 acres of the 20,500-acre Cooper Lake area, 12,000 acres of the 26,500-acre Lincoln Gulch area, 21,000 acres of the 42,000-acre Ogden Mountain area, and 10,000 acres of the 32,000 Marsh Creek area.

Those last two areas bracket the proposed Nevada Mountain Wilderness, which would add 30,000 acres of “Big-W” federal wilderness to the package that wasn’t in Tester’s earlier bills. Nevada Mountain’s remote wildlife habitat contains a long stretch of the Continental Divide Trail. It also has a growing number of cabins and vacation sites along its edge, which prompted several boundary tweaks to the final maps to win local acceptance, according to Barb Cestero, Montana director of the Wilderness Society, which helped organize the coalition.

“It’s an important stepping stone in the linkage keeping the Crown of the Continent and Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem connected at landscape scale,” Cestero said. “These are really surgical decisions based on data and local knowledge. They identified specific IRAs to protect forest health and reduce fire hazards, while protecting the highest wildlife and wild land values.”

One reason the Blackfoot-Lincoln coalition remained viable while other parts of the FJRA faded was local timber industry support, says retired Pyramid Mountain Lumber executive Gordy Sanders. The recently shuttered sawmill in Seeley Lake was an early backer of Tester’s legislation, and benefited from several other federal forest management programs that passed while the wilderness proposals stalled.

“It’s about the bigger picture of a watershed perspective, from ridgetop to ridgetop,” Sanders said. “We started having more meetings with the Lincoln and Blackfoot groups. These things developed over the last two or three years.”

Winning wilderness expansions has mainly been a Democratic political move. Former Sen. Max Baucus successfully added all three forks of the Flathead River in the Wild and Scenic River System in 1975, at the start of his congressional career. He went on to win federal protection for the 32,976-acre Rattlesnake Wilderness and Recreation Area north of Missoula in 1980, the 259,000-acre Lee Metcalf Wilderness Area south of Bozeman in 1983, and the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act of 2014 that added 67,000 acres of wilderness west of Choteau along with 208,000 acres of Conservation Management Area land. That new designation has carried forward to some of the Lincoln-area parcels in Zinke’s A River Runs Through It Act.

But Baucus’ biggest wilderness move, a 1988 bill that would have put 1.43 million acres of Montana into federal wilderness, died by President Ronald Reagan’s pocket veto in what was widely seen as a campaign move to help Republican newcomer Conrad Burns defeat Democratic Sen. John Melcher that year. Baucus didn’t log another win until Tester defeated Burns in 2006. Still, it took until 2014 for the Rocky Mountain Front bill to pass, and the pair couldn’t push through Tester’s wilderness proposals.

Meanwhile, other community efforts to add wilderness continue wandering in search of political support. The Gallatin Forest Partnership hopes to bring in the Greater Yellowstone Conservation and Recreation Act, would create 102,000 acres of wilderness in the Gallatin Range, much of it within the 155,000-acre Hyalite Porcupine Buffalo Horn Wilderness Study Area, along with another 22,000 acres of existing units of the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. The Great Burn Conservation Alliance has been pushing for wilderness status of a 1.9-million-acre stretch of the Montana-Idaho border. Friends of Scotchman Peaks has a similar goal of protecting 88,000 roadless acres south of Troy. 

Zinke’s timing question now shifts to how much congressional attention he can muster before his term expires in January. Zinke announced he wasn’t seeking reelection last March. Although three months remain in the calendar year, the House has only 21 session days scheduled as of Sept. 25, including just one day in all of October.

“It’s a very short amount of time in the span of the way Congress works,” said UM’s Saldin. “Normally you’d have a hearing and have time to revise the legislation and so forth. But there might be a package of public lands bills that gets cobbled together after the election. That definitely has a precedent, and it’s a pretty common thing in lame-duck session.”