Clearwater Basin

Day Three: Exploring Idaho’s Clearwater Basin

Online Editors — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:41:39 -0500

by Hal Herring

Hansen Meadows is about five miles away. We’re on a fairly level trail that skirts the toe of mountains that wall the north side of the valley. Gary Peters is leading on his mule, pointing out some of their hunting country as we travel. The creek is far away, but we can hear it sometimes through the harsh jumble of deadfall and obstacle course of thimbleberry, fireweed and young lodgepole.

It’s been 100 years since the 1911 fires, and a glance at the mountains all around shows the lodgepoles that were born in 1911. They’re now dying from old age and beetle infestations. A lodgepole is a tree that it truly native to the Western mountains. It has adapted to the one constant of the Western mountains: fire. That’s because lodgepole cones are serotinous, meaning they will only release their seeds and start new trees after being burned. A big black bear spooks out of a patch of elderberry on the hillside and glides downhill into the bottomland tangles, moving with a grace that seems impossible for its size.

We bail off the trail as the country suddenly opens, ride across a wide sucking bog of horsetail and break through a fortress of willows. We emerge into the warmth and heat and tall grass of Hansen Meadows. I tie Ruby quickly because I’m anxious to get at the water, which runs deep and fast and green right along the grass – the ultimate place to throw a big hopper. As I’m rigging up, I notice a strange camp in this wild place. There is a fire ring and a bizarre, labor-intensive wikiup big enough to shelter two people. The wikiup is made of small sticks, birch and willow branches bent and fastened with bits of nylon cord and cordage made of bark and twisted grasses.

I crawl inside. There is nothing special, but I like the idea that someone was patient and here long enough to build this structure. I wonder who built that wikiup, where they came from, where they went. It looks too elaborate to be made by a child, so the builder might have been someone traveling with children or someone who retained a child’s sense of wonder. I’m reminded of an old Louis L’Amour western I read as a kid. The hero is on the run and finds a secret cave in the far reaches of the desert. There is a fire pit and a cup hanging from a stick, left for some fellow traveler to use inside the cave.

But to heck with that, it was time to fish. And the fishing was very good right off the bat. Cutthroats are among the world’s most beautiful fish. I landed and released a couple of 13- and 14-inchers that rose to a big gray foam hopper cast right under the overhanging grass.

For all their beauty, cutthroats are unsophisticated fish. They live in an unforgiving world. The cold, clear water they call home is locked away in ice for much of the year, and then flushed hard with snowmelt for months. It gets dangerously low in most years by the end of August (this past year was an exception, with record snowpack in these mountains). A cutthroat has to seize the moment and attack in order to survive and breed. Caution is not a virtue. That is one reason why cutthroats often fade away quickly in easily accessible areas. A good fisherman with a can of worms and no scruples can singlehandedly clean out a whole creek.

There are holes on that stretch of Kelly Creek that look like something from a fisherman’s dream. Places where you cast your hopper from far away, delivering it to the tail of the pool upstream and take a 14-incher. Places where you can release a fish, cast just upstream from where that one hit and take another. Some of the best fish lie in the churn, out in the current, in what at first seems like the most unlikely holding water. It’s exhausting fishing, but it’s full of glory.

Brad Brooks, a fanatic hunter and fishermen who works for the Wilderness Society, reminded me that before the construction of Dworshak Dam Kelly Creek, cutthroat fishing was just as spectacular as it is today. However, the annual runs of monster Chinook salmon and steelhead overshadowed it. The tiniest tributaries would boil with big fish that had only recently been keeping company with sharks and tuna in the Pacific Ocean. That idea seems impossible nowadays, considering how much of our natural wealth we have squandered. Yet, just looking at the river and those cutthroats, an embarrassment of riches remains. We stopped fishing around 3 p.m. and headed back to camp.

I had another day in that valley, or at least the better part of one, just to roam around and look at things before the long ride back up to the ridges and the trailhead. I noticed that, for all the incredible array of flowering plants in that valley, I didn’t see any honeybees. Instead, I saw a different set of pollinators: a dozen smaller bees I’ve never noticed anywhere else, and a whirl of butterflies, moths and bats flying in the bright sunlight. I don’t know if that has any significance, but it was new to me.

There will be continued debate as to how much and how to protect Kelly Creek; whether there will be an allowance for chainsaws in the new wilderness to clear trails, where the roadless boundaries will be established and set. It seems that a growing number of Idahoans agree that what is currently found here is worth keeping for the long run. As both Scott Stouder and Brad Brooks explained to me, “It’s not a political issue any more at all. Idahoans know why we love this state, and why so many people want to come here to live and visit. It’s not just about good-looking potatoes. It’s this, right here, that people want, and what they cannot get anywhere else.”

Day Two: Exploring Idaho’s Clearwater Basin

Online Editors — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:20:04 -0500

by Hal Herring

Mornings in the Five Bears camp start about seven a.m. if you are not working there. John Ronson, the camp cook, has been working since before dawn, and you can take a cup of coffee from the kitchen tent and walk out the length of the camp--the sweet smell of the horses and mules rising with the sun--and find a cow and calf elk easing through the timber to get a lick of the salt laid down for the stock. A darker shape there is a moose, staring at you wide-eared. Kelly, the older of the two Karelian bear dogs in camp, ignores the moose and the elk.

She is deaf, cloudy-eyed and white-muzzled—a veteran of adventures, guarding and confrontations with bears, wolves and coyotes that most dogs could not imagine--much less survive. In her sleep, she twitches and growls softly, dreaming a warrior’s dreams. Kelly is Shadow’s mentor--a younger, sassier version of Kelly--who would clearly like to chase the moose but does not. Both dogs spend the night outside, and when Ronson gets up and starts the fire, they come in to the kitchen tent and sack out in front of the stove, their shift over for a while.

As a stranger whose presence in camp has been approved by Gary Peters, both dogs tolerate me, but they both watch me closely. If I speak to them, I am carefully ignored. I drink my coffee and stand in the strengthening sun and talk with the two wranglers, young Orrin Parker and Gary’s nephew Jeremy Peters. They have saddled their riding horses and are loading a brawny pack mule with tools, a shovel, a Pulaski, a pick, two small Stihl chainsaws, gas and oil for a day of clearing trail, which is a big part of life here in a forest where age and pine beetles are killing square miles of lodgepole pine that fall like giant Pick-up Sticks with every windstorm.

Today, as much as the fishing is calling to me—crying out to me would be a better way to put it—we are going on a long ride to see the country. My experience in the Bitterroots—many years’ worth—is almost entirely from the height of a hiking boot’s sole, so I am eager to see this place from the best possible vantage point, which is high in the saddle with the saddle cinched tight on the surefooted and good natured mule, Ruby.

We eat a logger’s breakfast of hash browns, pancakes, bacon and eggs; then saddle up and hit the trail again, going up yet another fork of Kelly Creek threading the lush little meadows in the shade of towering spruce trees, studying the tracks of bear, moose and wolf until we come to a hidden fork that seems to go straight uphill to the sky.

We climb it, up and up, the mules setting each foot carefully through the kind of brush field that, as far as I know, only exist in the Bitterroots. These yawning southern exposures of the mountains are a tangled maze of plant life, a bear and elk heaven nourished by water seeping from the hold-out snows high above, water purified by passage through a million miles of roots, tons of granite, acres of bog plants, to trickle finally into the tiny tributaries that will create Kelly Creek itself.

After a couple thousand feet of stiff climbing, the mules blowing and sweating, we top out on the ridge in a stand of wide-spaced lodgepole pines, the ground carpeted with grouse whortleberry bushes, the berries not yet ripe. The trail is flat now. We tie the mules and take our lunches out of the saddlebags and follow Gary on foot down the ridge. The pines get thinner, the granite slabs more prevalent until the ridge is just a wide edge of rock in the sky, and we stand there taking it all in.

There are the rock spires of Kelly’s Sister and Bruin Hill, the long Toboggan Ridge—it has a road on it that eventually leads to the bridge where I stood on lower Kelly Creek in 1993. You can see the big valley of Cayuse Creek arching in from the south and see the place where Cayuse joins Kelly Creek a few miles below Hansen Meadows, where we are going to fish tomorrow. Way to the south snakes the ancient Lolo Trail where the Salish traveled west to the mighty Lochsa River for the salmon run, and the Nez Perce travelled east to the buffalo plains.

West of us, beyond the Kelly Forks of the Clearwater River are the shadowy cedars of the Wietas Creek country, and north of that are the peaks of the Mallard-Larkins, a place that has been a proposed wilderness area since the 1960s. We sit on a jumble of house-sized boulders up there in the sky talking about the country; about wolves, mules, dogs and elk hunting, about how best to try and keep the last wildest places like this one from joining the long list of wondrous wild rivers and lands in our country—and around the world—that have been swept into the flood of business-as-usual, recreation-as-usual--places that were once like this--mysterious, rich and pristine; but are now loud, trampled, and just plain too much like everywhere else.

It can’t happen here. There’s too much at stake.

Day One: Exploring Idaho’s Clearwater Basin

Online Editors — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 09:00:58 -0500

by Hal Herring

Gary Peters, a Montana outfitter, has been riding these trails in Clearwater country since 1989. He breeds, trains and maintains a string of some of the best hunting and packing mules in the West. Peters has the calm, soft-spoken demeanor that is the trademark of a true stockman—of a person who spent most of his life in the woods taking on the responsibility for caring for his guides, clients, and string when they’re far from any kind of help. It’s a burden that he seems to bear without much trouble. He and his crew have weathered some major adventures in Kelly Creek: from blizzards and aggressive bears to human mishaps and the shear challenge of making a living doing what they love. Some of Peters’ toughest times came with the recovery—some would call it an “explosion”—of wolves in Clearwater country.

“There were packs here with 20 wolves in them,” says Peters, with no trace of the fury that is often the norm when Idaho elk hunters discuss the wolf issue. “We’d come down the trail, and the snow would just be churned up with wolf tracks.” Elk numbers and hunter success plummeted during those years. The Clearwater elk herd was once Idaho’s largest. The wolf recovery came at a bad time for that herd, and the wolves hit them hard.

The open country and re-growth from the 1911 firestorm made this area an almost perfect habitat for elk. But time heals the country and when the timber came back, the canopy closed over the old burn scars and shaded out the forage. The good winter range shrank and the replacement range was far away through dangerous country. Elk hunting was tough, and got tougher. But for diehard Kelly Creek inhabitants like Peters, cutting and running was never an option. He and his crew held on. The number of elk is slowly coming back up and the number of wolves is declining. The mud in the trail shows the heavy splay footed tracks of a cow and calf moose on the move. Bear hunting, which was always good, has never been better. And the cutthroat fishing is among the best on earth. As with most people who make their living in the woods, Peters is wary of any new regulations or restrictions for the place he knows and loves best. “What I want,” Peters says, “is for this place to stay just like it is now.”

It’s late July and we’re riding in a long line across brush fields flush with Indian paintbrush, horsemint, purple cone and foam flowers. A doe flushes below us and draws a quick stare from my mule, a small and bombproof traveler named Ruby. As the doe leaps away, a giant buck in velvet stands up from the lush tangle of grass and flowers. Peters grins and says nothing. My other companions —Scott Stouder of Trout Unlimited and his wife Holly Endersby—and I stare drop jawed as the buck disappears into a little grove of Douglas fir down creek.

It’s funny where and how life will take you. Stouder grew up in a logging family in Oregon and was a professional logger most of his life. He ended his professional logging career when he was 41 years old, after a long stint cutting big timber on steep ground in Alaska. “I just decided that it was time, after all those years, to try something new,” he says. He became a freelance writer, ran some hay ground, built up a small packstring of his own and spent a heck of a lot of time hunting and roaming Idaho’s backcountry. He then focused on conservation work, which seemed a natural progression for someone who had been a subsistence hunter his entire life; he depended on the country for both a job in timber and for food.

“One fall weekend, when my brother and I were in high school,” he tells me, “my dad came to us and asked us, ‘Okay boys, are we going duck hunting in the morning, or fishing for steelhead?’ Then he made some quick calculations. The limit on ducks was six, and there were three of us, so that would be 18 ducks, or maybe 36 pounds of meat. The limit of steelhead was 10, and they’d weigh maybe six or eight pounds apiece. Well, that would be 50 or so pounds of fish. ‘So, boys, we’re going steelheading!’”

Endersby was a high school principle when she started hunting 13 years ago, at age 50. “I started thinking a lot about where my food came from about then,” she says. “And I was driving all the way to the city to buy grass-fed beef or free-ranges chicken or whatever, and then paying all that money for it. I decided that was not right for me on several levels. I was still kind of passing the responsibility on to somebody else to do my killing for me. So I decided to take up hunting, and I found out that it was perfect for me. I loved it, and I still do.”

She strongly believes that wilderness and wilderness hunting is “the gold standard” for the hunting and conservation of watersheds and landscapes that provide the best fish and game. Her work at Backcountry Hunters and Anglers seemed a natural fit. “I’m a 63-year-old grandmother, and I’ve made a personal decision to stay in shape so I can do these things that I love—to hunt way back in, handle the stock, hike a long way. I know it can’t last forever.” Like Stouder, she says, “When I can’t do it anymore, I’ll be more than happy to pass it on to the hunters and fishermen that can.”

The opposition by some hunters against increased wilderness protection baffles her sometimes. “Even if you don’t go far into these areas,” she says, “they still serve as the refuge for game herds that then travel across more accessible hunting lands. Wilderness is the pump that puts bigger herds out there where people who only hunt closer to roads will have a chance to take an animal. Without it, you lose hunting opportunities across the board.”

I first came to Kelly Creek in 1993, the year without a summer, when it sleeted on us on the Fourth of July. I was working as a contract sawyer, cutting down yew trees down for an anti-cancer ingredient found in their bark. I was living in a camp on Lolo Creek, 25 miles of winding dirt road from the nearest cold beer in the town of Pierce. A buddy of mine told me about Kelly Creek’s crystal clear water, monster cutthroats and vast unspoiled river down from the confluence of Cayuse Creek. I drove there on a rare day off, gazed at the waters from the bridge and watched some grand hatch of bugs swirl in clouds over the water and high into the air. I never forgot.

Now I’m back—on a good mule, with good people and a flyrod. We rode for the better part of the day, about 12 miles or so. Peters’ camp on the North Fork of Kelly Creek is about 15 miles upstream from that bridge I stood on many years ago. I can smell the cold water, the hot sun on the lodgepole pines, the mint crushed under the mules’ hooves and the osier dogwood. It felt like I was coming home.

Best Wild Places: Clearwater Basin, Idaho

Online Editors — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:31:39 -0500

by Hal Herring

Few feelings in life can match it when you are going out there.

The narrow trail unfolds before you, cut into a steep sidehill that descends down—down a half-mile into a thicketed creek bottom, where through breaks in the willows and head-high elderberry and nettle, you can see the creek, tumbling whitewater and bits of long, green pools where you know the cutthroat trout have never seen a fly or a bait. The trail goes on and on, and around a bend, still high above the valley, there’s a long roll of last winter’s snow on the ridge far above you.

The view opens out. Forever.

The wild slopes of brush reaching to the heavens are crowned with endless lodgepole pines. The creeks down there meeting, building a river in a wide-forested valley center-shot with a torrent of whitewater shoals, canyons, deep blue holes, endless meadows and parks that look like God’s own version of elk country. The view goes on into a mist-shrouded distance, beyond your eyes’ ability to take it all in—no road to shatter the mystery of big wilderness. It’s a place where you travel on the terms of the land. This is Kelly Creek, central Idaho. When I think of backcountry bear hunting, Westslope cutthroat trout fishing, elk hunting or wandering in silence and utter freedom, this is the landscape that fills my imagination first.

I took a trip to Kelly Creek this summer with Scott Stouder, of Trout Unlimited; his wife Holly Endersby, of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers; and Gary Peters, a Florence, Mont. outfitter. We went there to fish, walk the old trails up the tributaries and ride some of the high country. Kelly Creek is part of the headwaters of the famed Clearwater River—the cold, silt-free waters that call those giant sea-run steelhead up the Clearwater every year.

This is the Idaho side of the Great Burn country, where monstrous forest fires rage—beginning in the drought year of 1910 and continuing through the even drier and hotter Dust Bowl years of the early 1930s. Firestorms of an intensity never witnessed by human beings before or since turned more than three million acres of forest into cinder. No roads were push into this region of the country because it was burned so hard that there was no timber to harvest. About 1.2 million acres remain roadless here, one of the planet’s last great expanses of truly wild country—set like a foundation stone as part of two million acres of public land. No place offers more opportunities for the American hunter and fishermen. Alaska may have bigger expanses, but much of that will be accessible only by costly boat or float plane trips, and much will be locked in frozen limbo for most of the year.

The Clearwater country holds the northern Bitterroot Mountains, which are well watered by rain and snow, awash in flowers, grass, creeks teeming with fish and thickets trembling with wildlife and birds. It is a rich, low altitude landscape tied together with ridges and valley trails that make for reasonably easy traveling for the strong and the willing. For Scott and Holly, who live southwest of here on the Rapid River, this country has become the focus of a big part of their working lives: teaming up with a diverse band of Idahoans—hunters, wildlands advocates, snowmobilers and Congressmen—to establish a permanently protected 250,000 acres of wilderness.

“A long time ago, Trout Unlimited realized that without real protection for the headwaters of these major river systems, they would always be playing catch-up in a rigged game,” says Scott. “They recognized that it was not necessarily trout fishermen that were in the backcountry, where all these creeks began. It was mostly elk hunters, bear hunters, people looking for trophy muleys. Those were the people who most wanted to see these places stay the way they are now. So they started looking to hire some hunters to work with them. And that’s how they found me. I’m not saying I don’t like to fish. I do. But my real love is elk hunting. That’s what Holly and I do every year, and that’s why we have the pack string, the mules and horses, and all the gear. We’re hunters and we know lots of other hunters who want to see this country protected for future generations of hunters.”

Scott and Holly are both in their early 60s. They say they know that there will be a day, in 10 or 15 years, when the wilderness will be too much for them.

“When that time comes, I’ll know that it’s out there for a new generation of elk hunters,” Scott said. “If we can get this protection in place, if I can rest knowing that it will always be out there like it is now, I can go to my grave a contented man.”

We saddled up on the Montana side of the line, at the end of the road on Schley Mountain and set off. Come and ride with us.