Meadow Creek
November 27, 2024
Meadow Creek is 215,000 acres watershed on the Nez Perce National Forest. A vital fishery for salmon, steelhead, and bull trout, and needed addition to the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.
Kelly Creek Roadless Area, also known as the Great Burn. Haverstick Photo.
Wilderness has been a concept in many cultures for millennia, but before congress passed the 1964 Wilderness Act, “wilderness” did not have a legal definition.
The framers of the act believed that the absence of roads—the arteries of human industrial society—was a main way to tell if somewhere was wild. The fewer roads, the less direct control humans had over a landscape.
The Wilderness Act required public land agencies to inventory what places in the US could become part of the National Wilderness Preservation System. Those inventories have used roads (or rather, the lack of them) as a criterion for wilderness designation.
The Forest Service catalogues these not-yet-protected wild places as Inventoried Roadless Areas, or IRAs (the BLM calls them Wilderness Study Areas, or WSAs). The Forest Service frequently updates the borders of existing inventories, for example, when a forest plan is revised.
Roadless areas, whether formal IRAs, those identified through the forest planning process, or those missed by federal agencies, are basically unprotected wildernesses.
IRAs make up about 58.5 million acres of the United States, or about 2.5% of the entire country.
Most roadless areas have:
As one saying goes, “the deer doesn’t cross the road, the road crosses the forest.” It can be easy to see nature from a human-centric view, where roads provide access to resources and communities.
From nature’s point of view, roads introduce many problems, such as:
Constant sediment pollution in streams and rivers, degrading habitat for trout and salmon
Increased encounters between grizzly bears and humans, which are often deadly for bears
Decreased security for elk, leading to smaller bulls and problems in calves
Noxious weed expansion along roadsides
Changes to groundwater flow, including increased landslides
Motorized impacts, which disproportionately affect sensitive species like wolverines
There are over 260,000 miles of system roads on the national forests, about five-and-a-half times more than the US interstate system.
That doesn’t include many closed roads, “temporary roads”, or motorized trails. In comparison, there are just 5,000 miles of roads in all the national parks.
Most roadless areas in the US are regulated by the 2001 Roadless Rule, which generally prohibits roadbuilding and logging within them. The Forest Service created separate rules for Idaho and Colorado that allow for more development than the national rule.
Since 2001, tens of thousands of acres of roadless country has been developed through legal loopholes in the 2001 National Roadless Rule and the Idaho Roadless Rule. A Friends of the Clearwater investigation shows that development in roadless areas has ramped up since 2010.
As development continues in roadless areas, roads fragment and degrade wild country and make roadless inventories less accurate.
When it comes to wild places, size does matter—protecting large, connected areas is better than small, isolated areas—especially for large mammals like grizzly bears.
The five largest roadless areas in the Clearwater each top 100,000 acres in size. Together, their million acres represent some of the best unprotected wildlife habitat in America.
Meadow Creek is 215,000 acres watershed on the Nez Perce National Forest. A vital fishery for salmon, steelhead, and bull trout, and needed addition to the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.
Ferns, red alder, cedar, and fungi mark the inland rainforest of the Mallard-Larkins. This large roadless area is overwhelmingly green, excepting the stony peaks of the Pioneer Area.
Fish and Hungery creeks (the largest tributaries of the Lochsa) are prime steelhead streams. The roadless area lies between the Lochsa to the south and the Lolo motorway to the north.
Weitas Creek is the largest roadless area in the Clearwater Basin. It is a verdant and diverse landscape, bounded by the North Fork of the Clearwater to the north and the Lolo Motorway to the south.
The Great Burn, named in memory of the epic 1910 wildfires, is the crown of the Bitterroots. It stretches from Kelly Creek in Idaho to nearly the Clark Fork River in Montana.
Friends of the Clearwater has been monitoring the Clearwater basin wildlands for nearly 40 years. In that time, we have created our own inventory of undeveloped roadless lands that occasionally differs to the official boundaries of the Idaho Roadless Rule, but better reflects on-the-ground conditions.
We advocate for several roadless areas at the fringes of our mission area, including the Bitterroot Face and Lolo Creek (eastern additions to the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness), Rapid River and Salmon Face (in the Greater Hells Canyon area), and Mosquito-Fly, Sheep-Stateline, and Midget Peak RAs (in the Idaho Panhandle Nat’l Forest).
The following is a list of every large (5,000 acre plus) undeveloped roadless area in the Greater Clearwater.
*O’Hara-Falls Creek and Lick Point RAs are separated from the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness by one and two roads, respectively. Dixie Summit/Nut Hill is divided by one road from the Gospel-Hump Wilderness. These three are the “adjacent” areas in the complexes and are separate Wildernesses in the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA).
†Acreage for John’s Creek is a rough estimate. It is not inventoried.