During the summer of 1972, I was a wilderness ranger in the Sawtooth Mountains. My patrol area included the Stanley Lake Creek, Iron Creek, and Goat Creek drainages. I lived in a ten-by-sixteen wall tent a mile up Iron Creek from the end of the road, and from there patrolled Goat, Alpine, Sawtooth, McGowan and Hansen Lakes.

I was one of about twenty young people hired that summer because of Public Law 92-400, which established the Sawtooth National Recreation Area. The old Sawtooth Primitive Area, which had allowed motorized equipment but not motorized travel, was abolished. The new Sawtooth Wilderness, expanded and much more regulated, replaced it. Wilderness rangers were there to transform the old semi-wild into the new and improved wild. We mostly picked up garbage. When we thought it might work, we politely asked tourists to pack out their garbage themselves.

But in August of that year, I was told to stand down. PL 92-400 had been introduced and shepherded through Congress by Senator Frank Church. It passed in early August but would not go into effect until August 22, and in that interim, helicopters would land on the ridge above Sawtooth Lake, which wasn’t wilderness yet. The helicopters would carry Frank Church and the regional forester from the Ogden office, the newly-designated head of the SNRA, the supervisor of the Sawtooth National Forest, and a bunch of lesser regional officials, to a camp-out.

Church wanted to spend the night in the wilderness his bill had created. A small tent city had been packed in on horses and set up at upper McGowan Lake, not far from the designated helipad. A cook had been hired. An old, gentle horse had been reserved for the senator for the trip over the ridge to Sawtooth Lake, the biggest and arguably the most beautiful of the new wilderness’s lakes.

The SNRA was a project that carried the hopes and dreams of the entire agency, because it was engaged in a war with the U.S. Park Service. The Park Service had been quietly assessing Forest Service lands for inclusion in the national park system, and when they found an area like the mountains of central Idaho, they would lobby for a new park, and with it, vast new appropriations of federal money.

The Park Service was under the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service was under the Department of Agriculture. It is hard to overestimate the intensity of the rivalry between the two agencies and the anger and contempt they held for each other. A system of National Recreation Areas had been designed so the Forest Service could, in effect, have its own parks and not feel like the National Forests were being cherry-picked for their best lands.

Wilderness was a part of the NRA concept, because national parks, with their millions of annual visitors, roads, hotels, and giant commercial sprawls snaking along park boundaries, were demonstrably at odds with Henry David Thoreau’s concept of wilderness as preservation of the world, an idea enshrined in the 1964 Wilderness Act and a centerpiece of the new NRAs. Forest Service planners had realized that wilderness could be weaponized for interagency warfare.

Of course, it wasn’t long before the Park Service developed its own concept of what was wild—bigger, better, and more regulated—and began enforcing it, restricting tourists to boardwalks and trails and abandoning the greatest good for the greatest number ethic that had prevailed in the parks since the Civilian Conservation Corps had built the first great log lodges. If you wonder why most national parks contain huge areas functionally off-limits to tourists, it’s a legacy of a battle that—at least here in Sawtooth Valley—the Park Service lost.

 

Fifty years have passed since that summer, and the Forest Service is not showcasing a sparkling constellation of National Recreation Areas. The reason? A flaw in the system. NRAs aren’t independent from the National Forests whose borders they lie within, and every NRA, including the Sawtooth NRA, has had its budget pillaged by other forest districts within its forest. Wildernesses, it turned out, didn’t require NRAs, and NRAs required expensive personnel. The number of people assigned to maintain the SNRA wildlands, thirty-seven when I was a wilderness ranger, is now two. Forest Service planners, faced with budget cuts, stayed in their offices and eliminated the jobs of the seasonal workers who had once executed their plans.

Ultimately, the Forest Service started running their NRAs as ordinary ranger districts. Wilderness was managed by moving trailheads far from wilderness boundaries, discouraging visitors except in sacrifice areas (e.g. Sawtooth, Alice, and Saddleback Lakes in the Sawtooths) where tourists were herded up and down trails like sheep.

NRAs were dragged into the light only when local Chambers of Commerce started bleating about the millions of tourists and billions of dollars a national park would bring, and then only to prove that they wouldn’t be as bad for the areas they were in as a park would be. The public had come to be seen as swarming and destructive, and the measures National Recreation Areas adopted against it were straight out of Vietnam: figure out ways to deny the enemy territory, and corral it in areas where it can be controlled.

Nobody in 1972, least of all the Forest Service officials from the Ogden office, thought that the NRAs were going to decline into crowd control measures. Instead, they were going to save Forest Service jobs and pull in congressional appropriations, in front of a backdrop reminiscent of the studio flats of the Tetons that show up behind Alan Ladd in Shane. It was a narrative of the Forest Triumphant, of Good winning over Evil, of Eden replacing The Wasteland, of A Good Man (Senator Church) on a Horse.

It was important for us to be good guys, in 1972. It’s still important, which is why I’m telling you this story as I remember it.

 

This good guy was posted on special assignment to the White Clouds during the camp-out. It wasn’t that I was a loose cannon. It was that the Forest Service officials in Ogden and Twin Falls depended on Congress for their funds, and they were going to have a real live Senator in a tent, far away from civilization, and they wanted him all to themselves.

As his congressional power and duties had increased, Church had become isolated from his constituents. He didn’t get to talk to people who weren’t lobbying for one thing or another, and his Forest Service minders knew that any distraction—such as a young person of draft age, during a war that Church was actively opposing—would wreck their agenda.

The camp-out was a trap. Frank Church had walked into it.

I had been trudging up and down to the same lakes all summer, so I welcomed a change of scenery. During the week, I walked from one side of the White Clouds to the other, taking notes. I had been told to identify roads, buildings, and mining artifacts that would need to be removed or hidden once the White Clouds became wilderness a couple of years later.

(When it did finally become wilderness, forty-three years had gone by. My notes weren’t part of the proceedings.)

At the end of the week, one of my fellow wilderness rangers picked me up at the Livingston Mill.

“How’d it go with Senator Church?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “Catastrophe,” he said. “Complete catastrophe.”

“He fall off his horse?” I asked.

“Worse,” he said.

 

The Sawtooth Forest had hired a recently-discharged Vietnam vet that summer. His name was Ben. I can’t remember his last name. He was older than the rest of us, and he had a serious case of what I now recognize as PTSD. At the time I just thought he couldn’t stop telling us the same story over and over again: he had been steering a patrol boat in the Mekong Delta when his best friend, standing in the bow, had been decapitated by a rocket-propelled grenade. His friend’s body had remained upright long enough for Ben to understand what had happened.

Ben told this story to anyone who would listen. He kept changing details, which didn’t do his credibility any good. He had been sent to us from another part of the country, and I remember my boss grumbling that he hadn’t had any choice in hiring him, which didn’t get him off to a good start. When he talked to tourists the conversation quickly turned to his war experience. Contrary to regulations, he wore his fatigue pants, combat boots, and jungle hat with his Forest Service uniform. He didn’t take direction well. He forgot what he was supposed to be doing. We got complaints about him showing up at backpackers’ campsites and not leaving until they fed him dinner.

When all of us were assigned areas in the Sawtooths, Ben was given the area from Atlanta to Spangle Lakes, where he was not likely to meet more than twenty or thirty people all summer, and most of them would be on horses. Ben didn’t like horses, and our supervisor figured that would limit the conversations.

One other thing: Ben was estranged from his parents, and during his time in Vietnam had lived with a Vietnamese family. I don’t know how he arranged living with them—he may have been a LURP, which was the acronym for Long-Range Reconnaissance and Patrol. I didn’t make that connection when I knew him, or I would have been afraid of him, because I knew what LURPs did. I was a little afraid of him anyway, because I thought he was nuts.

 

Ben found out about the camp-out from radio traffic and walked thirty-five miles from his campsite at Spangle to McGowan Lake. He barged into camp, found Frank Church, introduced himself as a Vietnam veteran, and said he wanted to talk about the war.

The senator wanted to talk about the war as well, and the two of them spent an evening in deep conversation while the important people who had arranged the camp-out stood around, cursing wilderness rangers in general. Church told them to feed Ben and figure out a place for him to sleep. Finally, after three or four shots of Forest Service whiskey, the thirty-five miles caught up with Ben and he went to sleep.

They got rid of him the next morning, telling him to pack up and walk out to the Iron Creek Trailhead. He did, and he was picked up by the same ranger who picked me up in the White Clouds.

The camp-out had been ruined. Ben had told the story about his headless best friend to Church, and Church told the regional forester something I later found out he had, early on, told to Lyndon Johnson: “We’re wrecking our young people with this war.”

To his credit, the regional forester recognized he was talking about Vietnam and not the war with the Park Service.

Ben did not show up for work the next week. I never saw him again, but whenever his name was mentioned, our boss would get angry.

“Ben is an emotional cripple,” he would shout. “A loose cannon. Something is really wrong with that guy.”

 

Well, yeah. Something was wrong with that guy. A long time later, after the fall of Saigon, I talked to my boss and found out that once Ben had lost his job, he had bought a one-way ticket back to Vietnam, planning to live with the Vietnamese family that had taken him in. Nobody knew what had happened, but given events in Vietnam then and thereafter, that was probably the end of Ben’s story.

It was the end of my boss’s story, too. When he told me about Ben, I had quit wilderness rangering and was teaching in a small private school in Sun Valley. One night I was working late, and a group of people were meeting in one of the schoolrooms. They were arranging a trip to Greece, not for a vacation, but because in Greece was a clinic where they could get legally injected with interferon, then touted as a cure for cancer. My boss was one of them.

My boss was fair-complexioned, and a mole on his lip, there since he was a child, had finally become a melanoma.

His name was David O. Lee, and there’s a peak in the White Clouds Wilderness named after him. Before he died, I had a goodbye conversation with him. He had been a good, caring manager, and even then I knew they didn’t come along that often, and I was able to tell him that I appreciated him. He had worked his way up through the Forest Service ranks to become head of the Wilderness Zone of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, and I told him he had meant a lot to the thirty-six people who worked for him. He had treated people fairly and had acted as a mentor to a bunch of young people in their first real jobs.

“You gave us a good example,” I told him. “You got the best out of the people who worked for you.”

“I tried to,” he said. “It wasn’t always easy.”

Then he said, “The Sawtooth Forest isn’t going to replace me. That’s the worst thing they could do to me. I put my whole life into my job, and figured I had created something worthwhile, a core group of people who could meet people out in the wilderness and remind them that they owned it and needed to protect it. All that is gone.”

There is no wilderness zone in the SNRA’s organization chart now. There’s no David O. Lee in the world except the mountain that bears his name. There’s no more Frank Church, and it’s been years since I’ve met a wilderness ranger out on the Sawtooth trails. The Forest Service spends most of its budget on administrative work. And it’s hard to talk to a Forest Service officer at any level who isn’t working from a script.