One day in May, Travis Bullock found himself in a situation he had once dreamed about. He was in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, in Idaho, with a chainsaw.
“You know, I may not have this chance again,’” he thought to himself. “I'm going to make this trail look really good.”
Bullock is an outfitter; he owns a hunting and fishing guiding company. That day, he was cutting fallen trees that were blocking trails. He does this each year, clearing paths where he’ll lead clients on hunting trips in the fall.
What was unusual about this time was his tool: chainsaws are generally prohibited in wilderness areas. The Wilderness Act of 1964 bans motorized vehicles and equipment. Trail work is normally done with hand tools.
Early in the morning, Bullock saw the notice he had been waiting for on his computer. The U.S. Forest Service had granted permitted outfitters in Idaho an allowance to use chainsaws to clear trails in the Frank Church.
While the Wilderness Act allows for exemptions to its motorized prohibitions to “meet the minimum requirements” for managing landscapes, one of this scale is unusual, and it’s opened up fierce debate about what wilderness areas are for, and how they should be managed.
Without missing a beat, Bullock, his son and an employee loaded their horses and mules onto a trailer and drove two hours to a wilderness trailhead.
“There was a little bit of me that was pretty spiteful over the years, over the decades that I've been told, ‘No, you can't clear those trails,’ and I was frustrated,” Bullock said. “I was like, ‘You know what, I'm going to be the first outfitter in Idaho to use a chainsaw legally.’”
In a video, Bullock’s son attacks a giant log a couple of feet thick, covering a trail. A cloud of sawdust forms as he cuts through it in seconds. Bullock estimated they cleared four or five hundred downed trees that first day.
“It felt good,” he said. “The reality is, if we'd had the same three people with a crosscut saw, it would have taken us a week.”
Minimum tool necessary
The process to get there started last year. The Idaho Outfitters and Guides Association asked the U.S. Forest Service for an exemption to use chainsaws, saying massive debris from wildfires and disease had piled up over the years. IOGA executive director Erik Weiseth said some trails had been effectively impassable.
Windstorms this winter added more downed trees to the backlog.
The Forest Service conducted an analysis and concluded that gas-powered chainsaws were the minimum tool necessary for clearing the trails. In May, the agency authorized outfitters to use them on 542 miles of trails in the Salmon-Challis portion of the Frank Church, for up to seven months a year for three years.
“This action is necessary to restore safe public access while minimizing impacts to wilderness character and remaining fully compliant with the Wilderness Act of 1964,” Amy Baumer, a spokesperson for the Salmon-Challis National Forest, said at the time.
What is wilderness for?
Bullock said he needs clear trails to lead people safely into the backcountry, often on horseback, and to access spots where he’s authorized to lead hunting trips but can’t get to.
More than that, he said, he’s seen trails he went to as a kid all but disappear because of lack of maintenance.
“When we allow the trails to get so bad that the people cannot go back there and travel safely, then the people can't fall in love with Central Idaho,” Bullock said. “And when that happens, we're going to lose it. Wilderness was not intended to keep people out.”
The Wilderness Act, in poetic language, defines wilderness as a place different from other landscapes: an area “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”
To George Nickas, the recently retired executive director of the nonprofit Wilderness Watch, this means that while wilderness areas are great places to recreate, they require visitors to accept nature on its own terms.
“If you’ve got to climb over some logs or if you've got to go on a different trail because that one's closed for a while, so be it,” he said. “A lot of people see wilderness as nothing but a backcountry recreation area, but it's way more than that. It's really not even about us. It's about nature. It's about the places. It's kind of nature's bill of rights.”
Wilderness Watch, which several years ago sued to block the Forest Service from using chainsaws in wilderness areas in Colorado, called the authorization in the Frank Church “illegal.”
Nickas disapproved that the authorization went to those with business interests in the wilderness and that the agency did not ask for public input.
He worries it could lead to more exemptions – outfitters in Wyoming have also asked to use chainsaws – and open the door to other activities that are typically banned. Plus, the Trump Administration is reviewing wilderness policies at other agencies more broadly.
“If they can chip away and chip away and chip away at it, and make it less and less meaningful, and make it more and more allowable for more and more kinds of uses, then pretty soon it's wilderness in name only,” he said.
He also said the problem was a “self-inflicted wound” created by the Forest Service by cutting staff, particularly those focused on wilderness, not just during the Trump administration, he said, but over the past two decades.
“We got rid of trail crews, and then we say, ‘Look, we can't even keep the trails open. We've got to let these commercial interests come in and start clearing all the trails with their chainsaws and let them do the job,’” he said.
Trail work
In the same part of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness where outfitters are now authorized to use chainsaws, a youth crew was working trails this summer the old-fashioned way.
They were preparing to tackle a tree lying almost perfectly on top of the trail lengthwise.
Marlena Nelson, their leader with the Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation, gives them advice on how to approach it. Groups like this partner with the Forest Service to help with trail work, and they use traditional hand tools permitted under the Wilderness Act.
“It kind of heightens the wilderness experience,” Nelson said. “It's really easy to kind of rush through things if you can go as quickly as possible, if you have a motorized tool to kind of do a lot of the heavy lifting. But here, this work really requires a lot of teamwork, it requires communication. It requires thoughtfulness.”
The teens chopped the branches off the fall tree with an axe. That makes it easier to scoot off the tail when the job is done. Then they took out a four-foot-long, metal crosscut saw. They sunk its teeth into a log and used their whole bodies to push it back and forth.
Over five days, they hoped to clear a roughly three-mile stretch leading to a lake. This is what wilderness trail work usually looks like.
Bullock said he appreciates the work that crews like this do. But he said chainsaws are needed to make a real dent in the backlog.
In July, he was preparing for another trail-clearing expedition before fall hunting season, this time in the Payette National Forest’s portion of the wilderness. The Forest Service had just approved a second chainsaw authorization there.
“We're gonna get some trail cleared,” Bullock said. “We're feeling good.”
The Idaho Outfitters and Guides Association said thousands of trees were cleared this summer, some in piles of debris ten feet high. Data reported to the Forest Service could signal how effective the chainsaws have been. They said they’ll be back next year to clear more trails.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
