Gospel Hump Wilderness

The United States Congress designated the Gospel-Hump Wilderness in 1978 and it now has a total of 205,796 acres. It is managed by the US Forest Service. They define it as : "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain...."

Gospel Hump Wilderness Area

Thousands of years before Lewis and Clark first laid eyes on this region in 1805, Nez Perce Indians (Nimíipuu) were living in harmony with the land, cultivating berries, local plants, making beautiful things to make their lives comfortable and yes, hunting the great salmon, elk, deer, and (rarely) black bears whose descendants still roam here - while today the Nimíipuu languish in marginalized pockets of land representing less than 10% of their original promised treaty area (which itself was an insignificant fraction of their ancestral territory) Westerners argue and fight about driving destructive "recreational" vehicles through pristine habitat for Endagered species.

Discovery of gold in the 1860s brought a flood of miners into central Idaho that didn't subside until after the turn of the century. Another brief gold rush occurred during the Great Depression, remnants of gold mining operations are evident in the acid drenched hillsides and water canon eroded mountains, arsenic poisoned children and lead filled nature.

Elevations in the Gospel-Hump Wilderness range from 1,970 feet at the Wind River pack bridge on the Salmon River to 8,940 feet at the summit of Buffalo Hump. The northern portion contains relatively gentle, heavily forested country that sweeps up the glaciated divide between the South Fork of the Clearwater River and the lower Salmon River, which flows out of the nearby Frank Church - River of No Return Wilderness. From the divide, the terrain becomes the steep and sparsely vegetated along the Salmon River Breaks. Moose, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, mountain lions, wolves and anadromous fish live here. The area sees extreme variations in weather, with temperatures sometimes soaring to 100 degrees Fahrenheit along the Salmon River as snow whitens the high country.

Seasonal roads of fair to poor quality surround the Wilderness, offering access to trails that lead from the Salmon River Breaks into the high country, which many hikers would classify as very challenging, and are often impassable due to late snows. Fortunately, it is very difficult to build roads here, so the wilderness has remained fairly intact in this region. The northern part of the Wilderness is moist and heavily forested the southern part is dry and sparsely vegetated. The two parts are separated by a rugged, glaciated divide which contains the peaks for which the wilderness is named.