“The Smoking Place” is one of the historic sites along the Lewis and Clark Trail. Photo © Randy Beacham
“The most terrible mountains I ever beheld.”—Lewis and Clark expedition member Patrick Gass, describing the Bitterroots.
On a cold September day nearly 200 years ago, the Lewis and Clark expedition crossed the Rocky Mountains into present-day Idaho. There, in the Bitterroot Mountains, they would not find an easy portage into the Columbia River as President Thomas Jefferson had envisioned. Instead, they discovered a sea of dark mountain peaks stretching to the horizon.
For the expedition, this was wilderness in the bleakest sense of the word: a vertical, rock-strewn landscape cloaked in dense, nearly impenetrable evergreen forests. It was a land devoid of the herds of bison, elk, pronghorn and deer they had feasted on as they crossed the Great Plains. Their subsequent eight-day traverse across 100 miles of mountainous country is forever engraved in maps of the region. At one streamside, Clark recorded in his journal, “Encamped on a bold running Creek passing to the left which I call Hungery Creek as at that place we had nothing to eat.”
The Lewis and Clark expedition struggled miserably through the Bitterroots, but the Nez Perce Indian tribe, whose trail the expedition followed, were sustained by this same landscape. For the Nez Perce, the Bitterroots were not brutal wilderness—they were home.
But they knew when to be there. The Nez Perce lived in these rugged mountains in the summer, avoiding the heat and mosquitoes of the lowland while subsisting on camas and fruit-bearing plants such as huckleberries, chokecherries and serviceberries. They fished for salmon and trout in the crystal-clear tributaries of the Clearwater River and hunted for elk, deer and bear in the meadows and forests.
The Nez Perce reservation lies near the Clearwater National Forest along the river, and tribal members still exercise their 1855 treaty rights to visit the national forest land, to hunt, fish or gather for ceremonial purposes. Other visitors include people like me, who want to experience the natural world as Lewis and Clark saw it. In some areas of the Bitterroots it is still possible to literally walk in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, who in turn walked in the footsteps of the Nez Perce. Portions of the historic trail through the Bitterroot Mountains known as the Lolo Trail (or K’useyneisskit, The Buffalo Trail, to the Nez Perce) are still intact 200 years after Lewis and Clark’s journey.
Along the trail you can look up at towering western larch, a deciduous conifer that drops its golden needles to the forest floor each fall. Bunchberry, which the Nez Perce may have used as a poultice for wounds, grows in moist cedar hemlock forests. You can stoop down in a wet, shady forest to examine the delicate and beautiful rose-pink Fairy Slipper as Meriwether Lewis did along Fish Creek on June 16, 1806, or listen for the flute-like call of a varied thrush. And when you walk along Cedar Creek, notice the ancient western red cedars, some of which looked down upon the Lewis and Clark expedition as it passed through.
In his famous 1960 Wilderness Letter, Wallace Stegner wrote, “We need wilderness preserved—as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds—because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.”
Yet even in a land as rugged as the Bitterroots, and along a trail with as much historical significance as the Lolo, we are losing our wild lands and heritage. On both the eastern and western sides of the Lolo Trail many miles of the historic route have been obliterated or relocated to allow timber harvest. According to a report released in September 2004 by trail researchers Glenn and Mollie Eastman, the Lolo Trail continues to be degraded, while a thorough inventory of the archaeological resources has not been adequately completed.
A wilderness designation may save the historic Lolo Trail and the wild lands through which it passes.ÊPortions of the route, including the North Lochsa Slope Roadless Area, have been included in wilderness bills as recently as 1994, without success. Perhaps future efforts will be informed by the words of Nez Perce tribal member Otis Half Moon: “We now must all speak for the land, no matter what color we are. We are human beings here walking on the earth. We must protect those resources. We all must speak for that.”