The map shows federally protected wilderness areas. Although many additional wild public lands exist, they lack federal protection.
The framers of the Wilderness Act, believing that automobiles led to the ruination of nature, prohibited anything related to a road or a motor in designated areas. When Congress established the River of No Return Wilderness on Forest Service land in 1980, commercial and private boating was in high gear and couldn't be rolled all the way back. Motorboats may still operate on sections of the Salmon River. Outfitters of rafting trips are permitted to fly their parties to launch points deep within the woods. More than two dozen landing strips were grandfathered into the legislation creating the wilderness, along with numerous private lands belonging to individuals, outfitters, ranchers, and mining companies. All of that explains why the Frank (the name of Idaho senator Frank Church, a champion of the Wilderness Act, was added in 1984) is not the fortress of solitude that it might have been. But outside of Alaska, few parts of the National Wilderness Preservation System are.
The act exempts the managing agencies if they need motorized devices to do their jobs—if they have to deploy helicopters to rescue a hiker or to fight a fire, say. But the law says the exceptions must be "as necessary to meet minimum requirements for the administration of the area." When scientists seek permission to conduct studies, the agency interprets "minimum requirements" to mean that the studies should be performed with as little mechanization as possible. Experiments are frowned upon, because the wilderness is supposed to be left alone—"untrammeled," the act says, free from human constraint or manipulation.
"The image that comes to mind is that the wilderness is there and that you just go out and use it," says Ken Wotring, the wilderness coordinator. A Forest Service employee, Wotring is the first and only such coordinator in the Frank's history. "But there are requirements because of that designation, for management and for science."
One of the management problems thrives in the Middle Fork, the famous white-water tributary of the Salmon River. As a result of the popularity of rafting, noxious weeds have spread along the river corridor, and recreationists have left their own unwelcome traces in the soil. On a plane chartered by the Forest Service, I fly about 65 miles down the 100-mile length of the Middle Fork. My destination is the Bernard landing strip, where a Forest Service crew is working on weed eradication and human-waste disposal, two responses to threats borne from the outside.
The primary targets of the spraying are spotted knapweed and rush skeleton weed, two exotics from Europe that are common in the rangeland of Idaho and Montana. The state government has listed these species as noxious because cattle and wildlife avoid eating them and because the plants tend to outcompete the native grasses, especially after a fire or grazing has disturbed the soil. The seeds hitchhike into the wilderness on airplane wheels or hikers' boots, in stock feed, or by various man-made vectors. Seeds may also be blown in or washed in naturally from the lands surrounding the wilderness area.
Keeping spotted knapweed and skeleton weed and a dozen other foreign plants out of the Frank entirely is impossible, however. The agency has decided to focus its efforts on the narrow strips of land lining river corridors, where the invading weeds take hold.
Wotring and I climb into a rubber raft, the pilot taking the oars. We nose into the current, three other craft following behind. Sun pours down on the canyon. Brooding stands of Douglas fir parade by, followed by open slopes with long ravines and grass so dry it looks baked. We pass a fractured wall of black rock, pierced by pale granite and powdered by yellow-green lichen.
Every few miles along the river corridor the crew members stop and fill the containers of their backpack sprayers. Brandishing wands, they fan out to kill weeds on the grassy banks. The herbicide, a mixture of 2,4-D and Tordon, is dyed blue-green so that treated areas will stand out. According to the "minimum tool" strictures, the spraying of weeds by hand is permissible, but yanking the plants by hand is even better. The Forest Service and the Sierra Club have run float trips on the Salmon River with volunteers who pull out spotted knapweed by its taproot.
We spend the night at the Survey Creek campsite. A flat-topped bluff stands 200 feet above the water. I walk onto a rocky pinnacle and look down on the murmuring river, where an oarsman steers a blue raft carrying a red-jacketed fly fisherman. The man flicks his line into the wilderness. Meanwhile, across from our campsite, bathers from a large party at another camp are edging into the water. At discreet intervals, float parties pass along the Middle Fork as if they were chained together in an amusement-park ride.
"Wilderness and this river corridor are antithetical," says Sheri Hughes, the blunt-talking manager of the Middle Fork. When I stop by her office in Challis, a town east of the wilderness, Hughes gives me figures showing that 11,000 people floated the Middle Fork in 2004. A yearly flux of 11,000 visitors who each spend six to eight days rafting in a tight canyon necessarily results in significant amounts of human waste. Hughes hands me a report, "Better Bathrooms for Boaters," prepared for the Interagency Task Force on Human Waste Management, a national group of river managers. The report's most arresting statistics apply directly to the Middle Fork: "An average person produces approximately 0.5 pound of feces (moist weight) per day. On just one of the rivers in the study area, which handles 60,000 user days a year, this translates into about 30,000 pounds of human waste that could be left in the canyon."
When rafters were few, the riverbanks of the arid West could handle the modest amount of buried waste. The Colorado River was the first to be overwhelmed, according to the report: "Through the 1960s and 1970s use on the river increased dramatically, and the popular camping beaches and the popular sightseeing stops began to stink. The problem was not just unpleasant odors, it was a serious health risk—one study conducted in 1972 found that over one-half of the river runners through the Grand Canyon experienced gastrointestinal illness."
On the Middle Fork in the 1980s, the Forest Service centralized the solid waste in pit toilets and outhouses, but these proved inadequate. Researchers learned that decomposition in the thin riparian soils was slower than they hoped. Moreover, there just wasn't enough room. "People were digging into the old pit toilets and finding that the stuff was dry and hadn't decomposed much," said Hughes. "It was buried too deep. . . . That's when we said, 'OK, we're going to do something different. We're going to pack it out.'"
The first take-out toilets were old ammunition cans with watertight screw tops. Lined with plastic bags, the so-called rocket boxes could be reused, but after a while landfills refused to accept the bags of waste. "So high-tech porta-potties were developed," Hughes says. When the river trip is over, the rafters take the sealed cans from the rafts to a Forest Service "scat machine" for emptying and cleaning. To follow the process from beginning to end, I later visit the cleaning facility, located outside the wilderness, and find it to be spanking clean, a tiny sewer plant with a fine view of the Salmon.
