Back to the Bob: Returning to Montana’s vast Bob Marshall Wilderness

I’ve always had humble appreciation for people who flourish in the inconvenience of a wilderness lifestyle. The 11-year-old daughter of a Montana guest ranch operator sliding off her horse with a trick in mind was just another example.

While Simone Biles was in Paris winning Olympic medals to the cheers of thousands, Kyra was deep in the Bob Marshall Wilderness performing for no one in particular her signature backcountry gymnastics move – a cartwheel on a slender silvery blowdown log at the edge of our camp.

Nearby, under a rain tarp roped to trees, her mom, a third-generation wilderness outfitter, was preparing Dutch-oven lasagna for 14. Shannon is the daughter of Jack Rich, whose parents moved their family outfitting business from Yellowstone Country to the Seely Lake area in 1958 to be next to the Bob.

As the last mules were unpacked, nine horse-riding guests were pitching tents after a 20-mile ride to a new campsite. Some were making plans for the next day’s trout fishing around a small campfire, where the conversation had already touched on the elk that would soon be bugling in frosty high basins.

The unseen wolves that howled and woke everyone that morning just before daylight were merely a passing thought by now, even though the pack had left tracks in the trail 200 yards from our tents.

The crew of three men and another woman were cutting firewood with a hand saw, digging a latrine with a shovel, tapping a spring with a 2-foot-long pipe for drinking water and rewarding the saddlehorses and pack mules for their work with freedom to graze in the mountain meadow.

Two of the mules mingled among the guests around camp like pet dogs looking for affection.

This was just another routine trip day for a Rich’s Montana Guest Ranch crew. They get it done with muscle power 20 to 30 trail miles from the nearest road, motor or mechanized equipment, all of which are prohibited within the wilderness boundaries.

On the trip was a friend with whom I’ve shared outdoor adventures since we met at the University of Montana 50 years ago. This was a return trip we’d vowed to do.

In 1998, we spent a week backpacking 60 miles across this wilderness, which sprawls along the Continental Divide south of Glacier National Park.

We endured trail stretches of ankle-deep mud and climbed high passes fueled with not-quite-enough oatmeal, prunes, peanut butter, jerky and freeze-dried dinners.

Daily storms during that trek sometimes came upon us with the delicacy of a cougar pouncing on a lamb. We were tentbound for a day of rain and pummeling hail during a deafening siege of thunderstorms. Lightning shattered a tree just 50 yards away.

“If we survive, we’ll have to do this again,” I yelled to Scott as we cowered from the flashes.

This summer, we returned as septuagenarians – with our adventurous wives – to cover 80-100 backcountry miles in 10 days with four strategically located camps. We entered the Bob on our surefooted steeds at Pyramid Pass, fished mountain lakes, the famous South Fork Flathead River and tributaries, and exited at Holland Lake.

This time we were comfortably sustained by hearty meals rivaling the cuisine at good city diners. We let horses do most of the walking.

“If I get blisters,” Scott said, “they’ll be on a different part of my body.”

We ranged from Seattle to Florida and ages 15 to 75. It was humbling to observe all the skills and heavy lifting the crew had mastered to comfortably usher a pack string and this group through one of the largest roadless areas in the lower 48 states.

“I’d never ridden a horse before,” said Ben, a retiree from Ohio. “I’ve never been in a place this wild.”

We booked the services of Rich’s Ranch because of recommendations, including one from a North Idaho veterinarian who’d done a similar trip last year and praised them for their expertise and quality of stock.

“They treat their horses and mules like family,” she said.

Although something like 30,000 people trickle into this wild area during the three months or so that snow or runoff doesn’t block access, the concept of preserving wilderness isn’t primarily about visitors.

The Bob was recognized with special management in 1940 and its expanse of 1,009,352 acres was one of the first 54 areas officially protected by Congress in the Wilderness Act of 1964. Two other adjoining wilderness areas – the Great Bear and Scapegoat – were designated later, adding 526,636 acres. Together, they are managed by the U.S. Forest Service as the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.

The complex is further buffered from development by a cushion of mostly public land that involves three national forests and nearly 4 million acres.

In wilderness, size matters.

The Bob is the only ecosystem in the nation where the grizzly bear still ventures to the prairie as it did when Lewis and Clark explored Montana, a state wildlife biologist once told me.

Hundreds of grizzlies and perhaps 1,000 or more black bears roam this region. Yet visitors, including our group, often see little more than their tracks or scat. Serious wildlife watchers pick the right times to hunker and glass distant slopes with binoculars.

Man is not dominant here. The earth’s forces have given the Bob its flora, fauna and classic scenery, including the Chinese Wall, a limestone escarpment said to average 1,000 feet tall for about 22 miles along the spine of the wilderness. Mountain goats find security along the wall, and visitors develop sore necks. It’s impressive.

Fires have room to run wild here, playing a major role in maintaining a natural abundance of forage for wildlife. We rode horses through landscape revised by 2017 wildfires, some of the biggest in the history of the Bob. Instead of being engulfed by dense forest, we had many vast views through the snags over purple waves of blooming fireweed.

Charred snags that fall into the tributaries of the South Fork Flathead River create aquatic habitat harboring insects that nourish the world-class fisheries of native cutthroat and bull trout.

The proximity of bears tends to hobble the wildlife consciousness of many visitors, that is until September, when hunters dominate the clientele packing in. They’ll pursue deer, mountain goat, bighorn sheep, black bear and especially elk. A few hunters draw special permits to bag moose.

Wilderness icons such as wolverines and lynx come and go here with little notice. Bald eagles and ospreys are obvious as they compete for fish in the rivers and lakes, but I was startled to see a pair of sandhill cranes fly 50 feet above my head while I was casting into the South Fork.

The only major wildlife component missing since Lewis and Clark probed the area in the early 1800s is the free-roaming bison.

Most of this wildlife pizazz thrives outside of human awareness. The wilderness is not a national park with crowded roadside viewing turnouts. Hunting occurs here in set seasons. The animals, with the notable exception of some camp deer, retain an edge of wildness.

The wealth of critters is attributable to the hugeness and diversity of the Bob’s landscape with its many niches among the windswept prairie ridges, deep canyons, vertical rock walls, peaks rising to 9,400 feet, dense forest, unpolluted wild rivers and super-sized meadows.

But even with some 1,800 miles of trails, the Bob isn’t big enough to accommodate all recreational desires or avoid all human conflicts. Mountain bikers are angering purists and outfitters by lobbying Congress to gain access to wilderness areas. Hikers find many trail sections difficult to negotiate after being chewed up by the hooves of horses. There’s always a backlog of trail maintenance for Forest Service crews despite help from hundreds of volunteers.

The biggest change to the Bob in recent years is the influx of floaters with ultralight gear congregating in the larger stream corridors. Backcountry anglers who may have seen just a few other people during a July day of fishing on the South Fork might nowadays encounter several separate groups of pack rafters parading downstream.

But all of this is easier to deal with than the potential for an influx of bulldozers, chainsaws and ATVs had Congress not protected this ecosystem as wilderness.

The namesake of this backcountry bonanza had the means to melt away into a wilderness lifestyle and avoid the spotlight, but he recognized that preserving large tracts of land was an urgent cause larger than himself.

Born in 1901 to a wealthy New York family, Bob Marshall lived a simple life. While enrolled in Harvard, he became legendary for his eagerness to hike – up to 70 miles a day. Later, working on a doctorate, he wrote a thesis called “The Problem of the Wilderness.” Admirers called it the Magna Carta of the wilderness movement.

Valleys that once knew “only the footsteps of wild animals” now know “the terrors of modern highways,” he said. Gone is the ground cover of fresh sorrel and twinflower. Here to stay is “asphalt spotted with chewing gum, coal dust and gasoline.”

That was 1928.

He devoted half a million dollars of inheritance as well as his work as a professional forester to promoting wilderness management.

“The universe of the wilderness, all over the United States, is vanishing with appalling rapidity,” Marshall wrote in his first major report for the Forest Service. “It is melting away like the last snowbank on some south-facing mountainside during a hot afternoon in June.”

As the agency’s chief of recreation and lands, he proposed a radical idea at the time: protecting 45 million acres – 9 % of the nation’s commercial timberland – as wilderness.

Before he died in 1939 from a heart ailment at age 38, he had co-founded the Wilderness Society and was instrumental in paving the way toward the National Wilderness Preservation System, a network now comprised of 806 areas totaling 112 million acres.

On a planet that’s becoming filled with human impact, a huge ecosystem that runs pretty much as nature intended is evermore rare and priceless.

But conservation is an ongoing challenge rife with inconvenience, said Jack Rich during our shuttle between the trailhead and the ranch.

“We’re just starting to figure out how long it takes to grow a thousand-year-old tree,” Rich said.