‘A gentle wilderness’: How a bear hunt led to the push to protect the Salmo-Priest Wilderness

SALMO PRIEST WILDERNESS – Sullivan Creek Road begins east of Metaline Falls and follows its eponymous creek for miles. When the road turns north, the climbing starts. It winds high into the Selkirk Mountains and dead ends on a ridge close to Salmo Mountain. Then there are no more roads.

From there to the Canadian border lies the Salmo Basin, a deep drainage filled with a cedar and hemlock forest that’s threaded by the South Fork of the Salmo River. A trail begins there and dives downhill to the river, cutting through a dense cedar and hemlock forest to begin a 19-mile loop through the Salmo-Priest Wilderness.

The horseshoe-shaped area covers more than 41,000 acres of wild country in Washington’s far northeastern corner, where caribou once roamed and grizzly bears still do.

Permanent federal protections arrived for the Salmo-Priest 40 years ago with the passage of the Washington Wilderness Act. The law expanded some wilderness areas and created 19 new ones, protecting more than 1 million acres in all. It was part of a wave of legislation nationwide that made 1984 the biggest year in history for wilderness designations.

For the Salmo-Priest, it was the culmination of a battle that started more than a decade earlier, with a bear hunt and the discovery of plans for a new road.

Survey stakes

Ray Kresek is best known as the region’s leading expert on the history of fire lookouts. His house on the far north side of Spokane doubles as the Fire Lookout Museum, and it’s overflowing with U.S. Forest Service artifacts – old tools, Smokey Bear memorabilia, even a mock lookout in the backyard.

He’s also the guy who started the push to protect the Salmo-Priest.

“It’s a long story, but it was a tough one,” Kresek said.

It began in the late 1960s, when Kresek went bear hunting in the Salmo Basin, one of his favorite spots.

He didn’t get one, and he was glad. The forest was so thick he thinks there was no way he’d have ever gotten it home. He did find something else, however.

When he got down to the river, he saw that survey stakes had been pounded into the ground. They continued on the other side of the river, and he followed them up another creek drainage.

“I thought, ‘for God sakes, are they going to put a road down here?’ ” Kresek said.

On his way back to Spokane, he stopped at the Forest Service’s Sullivan Lake office to ask about what he’d found. Sure enough, there were plans to extend the road from the top of the ridge down to the Salmo River, and for logging the basin.

The way Kresek puts it, he “had some whiskers back then.” He was president of the Spokane Mountaineers, and he had connections to a broader network of outdoor clubs in the West, including the Sierra Club.

He marshaled an army to fight the Forest Service’s plans and to call for protecting the basin. Initially, they weren’t thinking about a wilderness designation, but Kresek said it became clear that was the only way to permanently preserve the basin.

He drew up a boundary, designing it to include as much roadless land as possible. It looks mostly the same as the shape that is shown on maps today – a U-shape around the top of the Sullivan Creek drainage, wrapping around Crowell Ridge, the Salmo Basin and the Shedroof Divide. He also extended the border into the Priest River drainage in Idaho, which completed the name.

There was plenty of opposition. Loggers and local officials argued the area was full of valuable timber, and that it needed to stay open to industry to keep the lumber supply steady and fuel the local economy.

Kresek argues that the trees weren’t worth the effort it would take to log them. A firefighter by trade, he was teaching wildland fire classes at Spokane Community College at the time. One summer he had some students go to the basin with a bore to see what was inside the cedar trees. The work showed that the trees were hollow.

That didn’t do much to quiet the opposition. In a Spokane Daily Chronicle story from August 1970, Pend Oreille County officials lambasted the proposal, criticizing its backers as outsiders who were ingnoring local voices. Kresek countered that the land belonged to everyone, not just those who live in Pend Oreille County.

Still, the wilderness supporters pushed forward. Thousands of petitions supporting the designation were signed, thanks in part to the efforts of Kresek’s wife and kids, who gathered signatures outside a local grocery store.

Kresek made the case for wilderness at public meetings, occasionally in front of unfriendly crowds. At a meeting at a grange hall in Newport, he was locked in a kitchen and only let out once everyone had left. Another time, after leaving a meeting in Metaline, he found his car had two flat tires.

He also spent a lot of time in the place he was trying to protect. He and his family camped there and hiked all the trails. They liked it.

“It’s just a peaceful place,” Kresek said. “A gentle wilderness.”

The push for protections secured a big win early. Because the area was being considered for wilderness designation, the Forest Service shelved the logging and road projects and put a moratorium on development there.

Only Congress could go further. But Kresek said the conversation seemed to die down in the middle of the 1970s. There were times he thought it was dead.

“It kind of fell into limbo,” Kresek said.

Statewide push

In addition to immediately protecting 9.1 million acres, the 1964 Wilderness Act directed federal agencies to examine their lands and recommend additional areas to be added to the National Wilderness Preservation System. New designations followed relatively quickly. By 1974, the U.S. had 91 wilderness areas encompassing more than 13.5 million acres.

Still, progress wasn’t happening fast enough for some wilderness advocates. There were groups who wanted to see all kinds of places protected. It became clear to some advocates that the best way to go about it would be to package several proposals together in a single state-based bill.

Similar campaigns cropped up in multiple states. In Washington, the campaign was led by the Washington Wilderness Coalition, now known as Washington Wild. Founded in 1979, the group’s leaders traveled the state to gin up support for a statewide push to protect multiple areas.

The issue then became what belonged in a Washington wilderness bill. In the northeastern part of the state, there was significant support for two proposed areas: one in the Kettle Range, near Republic, and Kresek’s proposal for the Salmo Priest.

Congress considered a few versions of a statewide bill in the early 1980s, but the final version wasn’t set until 1984, after long negotiations among the Washington congressional delegation led by Spokane Democratic Rep. Tom Foley, according to a history published by Washington Wild.

There were intense negotiations over several areas, but the delegation finally came to an agreement that included 23 wilderness proposals – 19 new areas and four expansions of existing areas – and additional designations such as the Mount Baker National Recreation Area and the North Cascades Scenic Highway.

Not everything got into the bill. The proposal for the Kettle Range was carved out, a disappointment for supporters who had been campaigning to protect that area for years.

Meanwhile, the Salmo-Priest survived. Mountain caribou were a big reason why – the Selkirks were the last place in the Lower 48 that the animals still used, and a wilderness designation would protect their habitat.

Something to celebrate

The final version of the wilderness boundary was different from the one Kresek drew up years earlier. His proposal was for about 36,000 acres in Washington and Idaho. The version in the Washington Wilderness Act, which President Ronald Reagan signed in July 1984, was more than 41,000 acres and completely in Washington. The Idaho portion is managed as wilderness, but it has never been formally designated.

The caribou are now gone. The last known caribou in the U.S. portion of the Selkirks was trapped and hauled north into Canada five years ago.

Other pieces of the ecosystem remain. Wolves, grizzly bears, big cedar trees. The silence, the stunning views, the absence of roads.

Kresek hasn’t been back in 10 years or so, he said. He’s 86, and his hiking days are long over. The Salmo-Priest looms large in his head, though, and on the walls of his basement.

There’s a photo of the falls on the Priest River, in the zone he still hopes will one day be added to the wilderness area. There’s another of Kresek staring at a giant cedar.

And there’s one of him and his son Mike, standing next to the brand new Salmo-Priest Wilderness sign, all fresh and clean. It was taken in 1986, shortly after the sign was put up.

Kresek is quick to say it wasn’t just him. Without the help of the rest of the Spokane Mountaineers and the Sierra Club and many others who joined him in the fight, plus all the work it took to pass the Washington Wilderness Act, the designation might never have happened.

But the fight did take over his life for more than a decade. He’d say it was worth it.

“It was an experience of a lifetime,” Kresek said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Rep. Tom Foley’s political party. He was a Democrat.