The Place

In a state as wild as Idaho, even designated Wilderness areas can be overlooked. The Gospel-Hump Wilderness is the overlooked middle child of Idaho wildernesses, located just to the west of the (much more well-known) Selway-Bitterroot and Frank Church-River of No Return. The Gospel Hump lies on the divide between the Clearwater and Salmon drainages, roughly 20 miles southeast of Grangeville, Idaho.

Overlooked doesn't mean undeserving. This 200,000-acre wilderness area embodies the rugged beauty of two very different ecoregions in Idaho.

The northern portion of the Wilderness is moist and heavily forested country, green with grand fir, Englemann spruce, and Pacific yew in its wetter locations. Numerous fresh-water streams and sub-alpine lakes flow south into the South Fork Clearwater, including high-quality fisheries like John's Creek.

The southern portion is steep and sparsely vegetated, particularly along the Salmon River Breaks. This is dry country, blazing hot in summer and bitingly cold in winter. The often treeless hillsides support bunchgrass, prickly pear cactus, and curl-leaf mountain mahogany. High winds, dry conditions, and frequent summer storms make this region subject to relatively frequent fires that ascend the canyon walls with astonishing speed.

The northern and southern areas are separated by a rugged, glaciated divide, which contains the peaks for which the Wilderness is named, Gospel Hill and Buffalo Hump.

History

The United States Congress designated the Gospel-Hump Wilderness in 1978 under the Endangered American Wilderness Act. The Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness is located to the northeast of this area, and the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness lies just to its south and east. The entire southern boundary of the Gospel-Hump Wilderness runs along the Wild & Scenic Main Fork of the Salmon River. The area has a total of 205,796 acres and is managed by the Forest Service.

Elevations 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. Weather patterns vary by location and can be quite unpredictable. Temperatures can soar to 100 degrees Fahrenheit along the Salmon River, while rain and snow often falls in the high country. Moose, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, mountain lions, wolves, and anadromous fish all make their home here. Wild steelhead and Chinook salmon still make their annual migration up the Main Fork of the Salmon.

Seasonal roads of fair-to-poor quality surround the Wilderness, and are often impassable due to late snows. Some of these roads offer access to trails that lead from the Salmon River Breaks into the high country, which many hikers would classify as very challenging. Some choose to head southeast from Grangeville, while others access the area from the South Fork of the Clearwater drainage to the north.

Management

There is much room for improvement in the stewardship of the Gospel-Hump Wilderness. Unlike in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, domestic livestock graze the Gospel-Hump Wilderness. If the Forest Service retired these grazing allotments as soon as possible, further damage to soils and riparian areas could be prevented. Motorized recreation has also been reported inside the Wilderness, a blatant and unacceptable violation of the Wilderness Act of 1964. A robust wilderness-character monitoring effort could substantiate and quantify impacts from grazing and off-road vehicle and snowmobile trespass so actions could be taken to address those impacts. Jet-boating activity on the Main Fork of the Salmon River also disrupts what would otherwise be a profoundly primitive experience.

The Gospel-Hump Wilderness is contiguous to the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness. If the area were managed as a single unit, as is done with the Bob Marshall Complex in Montana, adequate funding and attention for this Wilderness area could be better ensured.

Wildlife

The northern portion of the wilderness (and the roadless areas adjacent to it) are ideal habitat for the fisher, a large relative of the weasel. Fishers are rare in the Clearwater due to logging and trapping, and could warrant protection under the Endangered Species Act.

The Big Wild

It's easy to describe the Frank Church-River of No Return, but difficult to do so without superlatives. Words like biggest, wildest, ruggedest, remotest. The River of No Return (also called "The Frank") is one enormous rectangular-ish block of wild country, the largest contiguous wilderness outside Alaska (Death Valley Wilderness is larger, but broken into smaller sections by roads). It protects the unruly Middle Fork of the Salmon River watershed as well as portions of adjacent watersheds.

This wilderness is 2.36 million acres, most of which is in Central Idaho. This doesn't include unprotected roadless country adjacent to it, nor the Gospel-Hump Wilderness, separated only by the Main Salmon. All together, this wildlands complex is about 3.25 million acres (5,000 square miles), or just a little smaller than Connecticut (a state of 3.6 million people).

And yet, even in the center of this wilderness you are little more than 17 miles away from the closest road as the crow flies. Just to show how small our biggest wildernesses are.

Only a portion of the Frank is north of the main Salmon River, administered by the Bitterroot National Forest and Nez Perce National Forest. That portion includes Bargamin Creek as well as the headwaters of the Selway River. Friends of the Clearwater is most focused on this section, as it is directly adjacent to or part of the Clearwater.

The Frank is actually only separated from the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness by one dirt road, the Magruder Corridor, which runs from Elk City, Idaho to the Bitterroot Valley near Darby, Montana, and is loosely overlays the southern Nez Perce Trail.

Landscape

Geologically, most of the area is part of the Idaho Batholith, an extensive . The northern edge of the River of No Return is an ecological transitional area. North Idaho, as the southern end of the inland wetbelt forests, tends to be lower in elevation, wetter in precipitation, and host more developed soils than the Salmon River country.

The Place

The Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness (SBW, or just Selway) is one of the great achievements of conservation in the United States. At more than 1.3 million acres, this wilderness area protects most of the Selway River basin in Idaho and the high Bitterroot mountains in Montana.

The Selway is one of the original wildernesses designated by Congress under the 1964 Wilderness Act and was expanded in the 1980 Central Idaho Wilderness Act. Only the Southern Nez Perce Trail (the Magruder Corridor), an unimproved dirt road, separates the Selway-Bitterroot from the even larger Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness to the South. Together, they would constitute the largest protected wild place in America outside Alaska.

The size of this wild area is matched only by its stunning diversity. The northwestern border of the wilderness abuts the Lochsa River, just 1800 feet (550 m) above sea level. This part of the Wilderness is wet and lush, supporting coastal disjunct species like Western red cedar and some of the only inland populations of Pacific dogwood. Visitors can camp at the Wilderness Gateway Campground on US Highway 12 to experience the Lochsa River and Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.

At the southwestern edge of the wilderness careens Selway Falls. Here, at the right time of year, visitors can see migrating steelhead and chinook salmon leap above the whitewater as they make their way to their natal streams. The entire Selway River is protected under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act; fish can swim its roughly 100 river miles without encountering a dam.

The further upriver you travel, the higher you climb. The headwaters of the Selway lie in the High Bitterroots: 9,000-foot (2600 m) granite peaks on the Idaho-Montana state line. Just to the east of this ridge in Montana is Trapper Peak (10,157 ft/3096 m), the highest point in the Bitterroots. These granite towers are steep, cold, and windy, too extreme for most trees. Wind-bent whitebark pine live here, providing nuts for Clark's nutcrackers.

During the Last Glacial Maximum, valley glaciers gouged out this whole area, leaving enormous U-shaped valleys not unlike those in Glacier National Park. These mountains are best seen and accessed from Highway 93 in Montana, where they form a massive palisade running north-south for nearly 50 miles, starting near Lolo and ending near Connor.

In between the hot, wet Selway canyon and the snow-bound, craggy Bitterroot crest is enough wild country to get lost in for a lifetime - and abundant great habitat for wildlife.

Wildlife

Diverse habitats support diverse wildlife. The lower Selway provides winter range for many ungulates and year-round habitat for moose, wolves, black bears, fishers, wolves, and possibly grizzly bears. Steelhead and salmon still make their way up the Wild and Scenic Selway River as they have done for millennia. In summer, harlequin ducks fly inland from the coast to nest along the fast-running streams. The avid birder may also see osprey, bald eagles, mergansers, spotted sandpipers, dippers, and kingfishers in the river canyon.

The high peaks of the SBW offer refuge for wolverines, snowshoe hares, mountain goats, and lynx. Recent studies indicate that the Bitterroot crest would make for top-tier denning habitat for grizzly bears, which are moving into the area. The cold mountain streams of the Bitterroots are ideal for Westslope cutthroat and Bull trout.

History

The Selway is an important place to the Nimiipuu, who have used the area for centuries. Trails 206 and 664, for example, closely follow one ancient trail that the Nimiipuu navigated on their travels between Clearwater Country and the Great Plains of present-day Montana along the Selway Crags.

The southern Nez Perce Trail, also used for reaching Montana, became the basis of today's Magruder corridor, the southern border of the Wilderness. South of that dirt road is the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.

Management and Threats

The Selway features many hiking trails as well as some remote spots without maintained paths. During the main floating season, the Forest Service allows just one party per day to launch non-motorized boats on the Selway River — a very popular trip.

Fires are mostly allowed to play their natural role, especially in the Idaho portion of the wilderness. Indeed, the Selway-Bitterroot was the first place where managers intentionally allowed a lightning strike to burn into a fire and go out on its own in the early 1970s.

However, the wilderness character of this area is harmed by overbuilt trails and Forest Service structures and sites, including landing strips in meadows, such as at Fish Lake. The Idaho Fish & Game Department also exerts political pressure on the Forest Service to promote highly manipulative game management rather than a wilderness-protection management mentality.

Unprotected Wildlands

Several roadless areas directly adjacent to the Selway-Bitterroot could be added to the designated wilderness. Together they add up to about 580,000 acres of unprotected wilderness. These include the following in Idaho:

• Meadow Creek (200,000 acres)
• Sneakfoot Meadows (23,000 acres)
• South Lochsa Slope (75,000 acres)
• Rackliff-Gedney (90,000 acres)

Two potential additions are primarily in Montana:

• Lolo Peak (18,000 acres)
• Bitterroot Face (123,000 acres)

The Bitterroot Face is currently at risk of development. Nearly all of that roadless area is targeted for logging and road-building under the Bitterroot Front Project on the Bitterroot National Forest.