THE WILDEST PLACE N E WSLETTE R OF TH E SE LWAY B ITTE RROOT FR AN K C H U RC H FOU N DATION
SUMMER 2022 1
SUMMER 2022
FROM THE
STAFF
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
SALLY FERGUSON
JIM HEIDELBERGER
Executive Director
Chair - Moscow, ID
CAITLIN STRAUBINGER
DEB GALE
Community Engagement Director
Vice Chair – Corvallis, MT
SUE WEBSTER
Treasurer – Boise, ID
Membership Assistance
KRISSY FERRITER Volunteer Coordinator
IAN DAVIDSON
JONI STRIGHT CARLOS DIAZ Secretary – McCall, ID
NANCY FELDMAN Past Chair – Boise, ID
Program Director
KARLISSA SKINNER Wilderness Project Liaison
CLINT KINGERY Nez Perce-Clearwater Lead Wilderness Steward
JAY MAJERSKY Nez Perce-Clearwater Trail Crew Leader
CAMDEN LONG Nez Perce-Clearwater Trail Crew
BOB BECKLEY Missoula, MT
CHARLES MILLER Hamilton, MT
ED KRUMPE Moscow, ID
JERRY RANDOLPH McCall, ID
JOHN LLOYD Ketchum, ID
The 2022 SBFC season is off to a great start! The entire Board of Directors was in Missoula the third week of May to, among other things, meet our 2022 class of Wilderness Ranger Fellows. These 12 young adults are college students from across the country. They have completed 3-4 weeks of training and are now serving on an 11-week Fellowship on one of the five National Forests that comprise the Selway-Bitterroot and Frank ChurchRiver of No Return Wilderness areas. These Fellowships are made possible by your donations. Thank You! You are helping to develop the wilderness and conservation leaders of tomorrow. The first round of grants from the Connie Saylor Johnson Wilderness Education Fund have been awarded and many of these projects have already been completed. It is super exciting to see the interest in these grants. We are now taking applications for the 2023 round of Wilderness Education Grants (see page 5 for information). This is another way SBFC educates our future wilderness stewards. A week from writing this letter, I leave for a weeklong SBFC volunteer project; this one at Sulphur Creek in the Frank. There will be 10 volunteers from Moscow plus Caitlin, our Community Engagement Director, and Karlissa our crew leader. Many in our group describe this as ‘the best week of their year,’ and I agree with them. Please consider joining a SBFC volunteer project and check our website under "Get Involved". Thanks again for being part of SBFC!
MANDY GRANT
Nez Perce-Clearwater Trail Crew
MICHAEL WANZENRIED
AMTULLAH NORTON
PAUL PEMBERTON
Nez Perce-Clearwater Trail Crew
McCall, ID
LAUREN SIMMS
Missoula, MT
Salmon-Challis Lead Wilderness Steward
MADELINE WILLIAMS
Boise, ID
STEVE KIMBALL CONNIE SAYLOR JOHNSON 2006 - 2018
Salmon-Challis Wilderness Steward
NICHOLAS CAPILLE Bitterroot Lead Wilderness Steward
AMBASSADORS BUTCH HARPER CLARE O’CONNELL DIANE PETTIT
BOISE OFFICE
GINNY ELLIOTT
322 E. Front St., Ste. 420F P. O. Box 1886 Boise, ID 83701 208.373.4381
JANE HOLMAN
WESTERN MONTANA OFFICE 120 Hickory Ave, Ste. A Missoula, MT 59801 406.880.1927
KERRY MCCULLEY LARRY SWAN MARK WETHERINGTON PHIL JAHN SARAH WALKER TOM KOVALICKY
The Wildest Place is the membership newsletter of the SelwayBitterroot Frank Church Foundation. With the support of members, local businesses, and generous grantors, the Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation assists the Forest Service in providing stewardship for the Selway-Bitterroot and Frank Church-River of No Return Wildernesses and surrounding wildlands through boots on the ground work, public education, and partnerships.
EDITING: Caitlin Straubinger DESIGN & LAYOUT: Kelsey Selis CONTRIBUTORS: Sally Ferguson, Jim Heidelberger & Michael Wanzenried COVER IMAGE: 2022 Wilderness Ranger Fellow, James Perkins, during pack stock training at the Lochsa Historic Ranger Station. The Selway-Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
SELWAYBITTERROOT.ORG facebook.com/selwaybitterroot
selwaybitterroot
JIM HEIDELBERGER Board Chair
Moscow, ID
JACOB MICK
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BOARD CHAIR
FROM THE
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR The summer 2022 season is full steam ahead and we are set on an action-packed trajectory. We launched this season mid-May in Missoula and welcomed 9 SBFC staff and 12 new Wilderness Fellows. By the time you read this these individuals will have been trained and are currently opening Wilderness trails and monitoring Wilderness conditions on the Nez PerceClearwater, Bitterroot, Salmon-Challis, and Payette National Forests! I spent a week and a half with our staff and Fellows for training in Missoula and on the Lochsa. The Binninger family joined us with horses, mules, and mantis. They spent the day teaching the group the basics of stock handling and packing. As always, Jon, Flora and Clem dazzled everyone with their expertise and friendliness. Don’t miss the new blogs and photos posted by staff and Fellows each week, on our website. I look forward to these delightful, funny, and touching wilderness “snapshots” all summer long. It’s a terrific way to stay current with what we’re doing and live vicariously through our youthful staff and Fellows. Eighteen volunteer projects have been scheduled for this season. By the time you read this, four will have been completed. We still have room for you so come on out and volunteer with us! This year we are adding a “Women Only” project on the North Fork Elk Creek in the Salmon-Challis National Forest. We are excited to launch the program and looking forward sharing the Wilderness experience with some “wild” women. We have a few slots open (August 17-24), so register today if you’re interested. This season we are happy to partner again with the Bitterroot National Forest and Montana Open Air. Angela Cieslewitz-Pierson has been selected as the 2022 Artist in Residence. Angela will be creating art while she serves as a host at the historic Lost Horse Cabin in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. We can’t wait to see her work! And finally, we are beyond excited to announce that we’re back on board for Mountainfilm at the Egyptian Theater in Boise, ID on Friday, October 14. We are all looking forward to seeing “our people” once again! Each season, I’m reminded that our Forest Service partnership is essential to making all this wilderness education and work possible. I want to especially thank each of the FS wilderness managers on each Forest Ranger District. Thank you for your dedication and ongoing support of SBFC’s staff and Fellows. I’m pleased to welcome two new Idaho members to the SBFC board of directors, Mandy Grant, in Moscow and Paul Pemberton, in McCall. Both are enthusiastic Selway-Bitterroot and Frank Church Wilderness hikers and backpackers who bring professional experience to the table. I wish to extend a warm thanks to departing board members Jane Holman, Tom Kovalicky, Phil Jahn, and Butch Harper for their many years of service. They have been instrumental in our growth. I’m happy they will stay close and continue to support SBFC’s wilderness mission!
SALLY FERGUSON Executive Director
WHERE ARE THEY NOW? SUSIE (IRIZARRY) SIDDER 2014 WILDERNESS RANGER FELLOW
WHY DID YOU WANT TO JOIN SBFC AS A WILDERNESS RANGER FELLOW? I did the Fellowship right after finishing my master’s degree in Natural Resources at the University of Idaho. I moved to Idaho from the east coast to study wilderness and natural resources management from a human dimensions perspective. I wanted to understand people who are recreating on public lands, specifically what are their behaviors and how can we change behaviors to protect resources? Ed Krumpe, an SBFC board member, taught two of my wilderness classes at the University of Idaho. Through Ed and those classes, I learned about the Wilderness Ranger Fellowship and thought that it would be an excellent opportunity to be on the ground and see what working as a manager is like.
WHAT EXPERIENCES STOOD OUT TO YOU THE MOST DURING YOUR TIME AS AN SBFC FELLOW? MOST MEMORABLE, OR MOST POIGNANT? The main thing that sticks out to me from the experience was how empowering it was as a woman to push myself in the wilderness and know that I could do it! It was so formative to enter the space of learning traditional wilderness tools and growing the confidence to be able to problem solve and do work in the backcountry. I’m from Florida originally and my family did not grow up camping and backpacking. These are skills I’ve learned as an adult. Living in Idaho was my first exposure to truly wide-open spaces. Getting my brain wrapped around wilderness as a management entity was impactful… I had read about crosscut saws and traditional tools and skills and understood the terminology, but actually doing it was so empowering!
Susie in 2021, preparing to hike to Little Yosemite Valley as part of a training and field scoping trip for an ongoing project wilderness character and travel pattern study with Yosemite National Park
Susie working as a Fellow in 2014
I’m 5’2” and was definitely intimidated by the idea of carrying a 50+ pound pack plus tools in my arms. However, I had a strong sense of determination going into the Fellowship. The staff at SBFC were so supportive and working with the other women (and men) in my cohort was great.
WHAT HAS BEEN YOUR CAREER PATH SINCE YOUR TIME WITH SBFC? Right after SBFC I worked in consulting with the National Park Service to implement social science broadly throughout the NPS and address visitor use and social science information needs to inform park planning and management. Some of the projects I contributed to touched on wilderness, but most were geared to protected areas more broadly. Now I’m a PhD candidate at Oregon State University, focused on applied social science and human dimensions. I’m still focused on wilderness and understanding travel patterns and behaviors of both users in remote/difficult to access and in high use wilderness around Yosemite. My research is geared to predictive modeling of recreational visitor movement in protected areas, with the goal of providing managers with information and maps to help in proactive management and resource stewardship. My academic and career trajectory has always been working towards federal lands management… either through partnerships, private sector work, or academic cooperatives. Today, I continue to work in the public lands management arena, not as a land manager, but as a researcher to support planning efforts and research on the ground. I plan to finish my PhD in the Fall. I’ve been teaching a Wilderness Management course at Oregon State for upper level undergraduates for the past two fall quarters and am excited to teach it one last time during the 2022 Fall term. As I wrap up my degree, I’m starting to look for the next opportunity, ideally continuing to work on applied land management and wilderness issues as a federal land manager or as a partner.
Susie and other WRF/volunteers on a hitch in 2014
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Wilderness Education Grants This spring, the Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation awarded five inaugural Wilderness Education Grants to various stakeholders in Idaho and Montana. The Wilderness Education Grant and Endowment was established in 2019 to honor the memory of SBFC board member, Connie Saylor Johnson. This fund enables SBFC to provide incentive grants for educators and educational organizations to incorporate the stewardship of wilderness and natural ecosystems into classroom and/or outdoor curriculum. The grants will be awarded yearly.
Grantee Spotlight: The Grangeville Elementary School was awarded a grant Lake and the Mammoth Exhibit and one to Hammer Creek Recreation Area. At each field experience, local for second and third graders to take field trips to local Forest Service personnel, Bureau of Land Management natural ecosystems to learn about wilderness. employees, and volunteers, led interactive stations Grangeville Elementary School teacher, Melissa Smith, for the students to experience. said: Stations included water table demonstrations, Leave “We had great success with this grant and cannot No Trace training, water safety and PDF fittings, thank SBFC enough for the opportunity to enrich native animal skull and pelt identification, and salmon our students’ lives. This grant helped to make two lifecycle and art projects. field trips possible for 120 students. Not only did our students and teachers benefit from this project but our According to Melissa, the students “learned lifelong partnerships were strengthened within this project. We lessons about the wilderness areas and the history formed a partnership with the Chamber of Commerce, of the Grangeville area. They also learned how our rivers are part of our everyday life. In addition, our Forest Service, community members, BLM, and many partnership with the community was strengthened. parents who joined us for the field days.” To be successful in the classroom, we feel it is The school supplied each student with science paramount to partner with our community to form notebooks for recording observations. They enjoyed the strong bonds that will move us forward, together.” two field experiences in the spring of 2022: One to Tolo 4
Call for Wilderness Education Grant Applications: Applications are open for the second round of CSJ Wilderness Education Grants! To learn more and apply, visit www.selwaybitterroot.org/csjwef-grant.
APPLICATIONS ARE DUE BY OCTOBER 31, 2022. Grant purpose: To support wilderness education for future generations by providing teachers and educational organizations with incentive grants to incorporate the stewardship of wilderness into classroom and/or outdoor curriculum. Who can apply? Elementary and secondary teachers and schools, museums, libraries, historical societies, arts organizations, colleges, and universities.
Questions: Contact csj@selwaybitterroot.org
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SBFC’S ROLE IN WILDERNESS STEWARDSHIP MONITORING: PART 2 AUTHOR: MICHAEL WANZENRIED, SBFC BOARD MEMBER
Stewardship for the Selway Bitteroot Frank Church Foundation is delivered in a number of forms. Typically, it’s the physical and photogenic grit of the work the Wilderness Ranger Fellows do, two of them working a cross-cut saw while another grubs a trail, that appear in our newsletters. Less celebrated are those work moments of lesser visual gravitas but of equal value. Filling out standardized forms and entering data into a database, for example, don’t lend themselves well to promotional materials. But for wilderness units as large and remote as the Frank Church or the Selway-Bitterroot, assisting the Forest Service in monitoring the condition of wilderness areas is as much a component of comprehensive stewardship as repairing a washed-out trail. It may seem counter-intuitive that wilderness is something that needs to be monitored. Perhaps it’s the –er that separates the romantic notion of wildness from the bureaucratic construct of wilderness or the thought that humans have less of an impact when they are engaged in supposedly dispersed recreation. In places where wet soils, lumpy geology, or steep terrain impinge upon human comfort, people will continually return to any location that is more ideal for a tent. The death of wilderness, in many cases, is simply a death from a thousand steps. And while some of the best stewardship is knowing how to compliment natural processes, monitoring conditions over long periods of time helps determine whether acts of small restoration, like dispersing fire rings, are adequate and when more significant interventions are needed. Every year, when SBFC crews go out on their projects, they coordinate with National Forest specialists about which locations need to be monitored and the kind of monitoring protocol to follow. For any campsite, whether they are using the Modified-Cole Impact Index or Frissell Condition Class Standards (both recommended reads), monitoring will assess
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almost identical kinds and intensity of impacts. A Fellow’s thought process guiding their assessment probably looks something like this: Are there any developments aside from fire rings? Yes, two corrals and four excavated tent pads. Are there bare areas or mineral soil exposed? Uh, huh. More bare mineral soil is evident in the stock area then last year. Multiple photos taken. How clean have people left this campsite? Oh, my. We dismantled and dispersed three fire rings and I don’t know how or want to quantify the rest of what we found. This kind of information and other data points (e.g., date, camp name, longitude/latitude) are entered into Forest Service hosted databases at the end of each hitch. This data is reproduced in table form and spatially on an app like Arc-GIS, which provides multiple ways of using the data to plan for future field seasons. At a more basic level, however, monitoring is all about tracking how close or far away parts of the wilderness landscape are from the ideal characteristics of wilderness as roughly outlined in the Wilderness Act. As conditions start to stray from the imperfect and sometimes contradictory Venn diagram of natural, untrammeled, undeveloped, and opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation, having reliable data allows the Forest Service to make better-informed decisions about how to use available resources. This in turn provides the foundation from which SBFC can continue its impactful and meaningful stewardship of these irreplaceable landscapes.
NATIONAL TRAILS DAY ACCOMPLISHMENTS SBFC celebrated National Trails Day on June 4 with a hardworking group of volunteers on the Colgate Licks National Recreation Trail in the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forests.
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Volunteers
2
Wilderness Ranger Fellows
7
Trees Cleared From Trail
5
Drains Cleaned
New Bench Boards Installed
WILDERNESS STEWARDSHIP As of June 7, 12 Wilderness Ranger Fellows and 9 SBFC wilderness staff were working hard on their respective forests (the Nez-Perce Clearwater, the Bitterroot, the Salmon-Challis, and the Payette) in the Selway-Bitterroot and Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness areas. They received three weeks of training in traditional tool use, packing and stock handling, wilderness trail maintenance, Wilderness First Responder, and more. Keep up with the work of our Fellows and staff through their weekly blogs this summer! Be sure to sign up for SBFC emails and follow us on social media. Want to join the Fellows and staff for a wilderness stewardship project? Sign up for a volunteer project at www.selwaybitterroot.org/volunteer!
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Selway-Bitterroot Foundation INC PO Box 1886 Boise, ID 83701
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REMEMBER THE SELWAY BITTERROOT FRANK CHURCH FOUNDATION IN YOUR ESTATE PLANS We hope you will consider the Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation in your estate planning. Memorial gifts and bequests are placed in a special fund so that these gifts can permanently support wilderness protection in the Selway-Bitterroot and Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness areas. We welcome your inquiries about bequests and other kinds of giving. Please call or email Sally Ferguson, 208-871-1906, sferguson@selwaybitterroot.org.
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