On the sixth and last stop of our Best Wild Places tour, Tom
Reed, of Trout Unlimited, spent a few days fishing and hunting in the
Yaak, situated in Northwest Montana. Here is Reed's report from day
one.
The Yaak. Never, "the Yaak Valley," or even, "Yaak, Montana." Always
just, "the Yaak." In Montana, it goes like this: "You ever been up to
the Yaak?"
"No, but I hear they've got some really good whitetail hunting. Always been meaning to go."
I'd been wanting to go to the Yaak ever since I started reading the
works of novelist and essayist Rick Bass. He wrote of hemlock and
larch, of places where ferns and huckleberry grew thick, where three
species of grouse burst from darkened coverts, and big buck whitetails
flagged white and were gone into the deep woods before your gun could
come to your shoulder. Bass's stories made me think of knee-high
lace-ups and red-and-black checked wool jackets, of L.C. Smith
side-by-sides and iron-sighted lever rifles. Places more like northern
Wisconsin or New Hampshire than Montana.
Now Ike and Echo, my two big male setters and I were here, in the
thick of it. Literally. It was our first day and while I waited for the
arrival of photographer Kevin Cooley, I decided to take the dogs out
for a spin up an old logging road behind the cabin where I was staying.
It had been eight long hours on the road to get here-all in my home
state of Montana-and the dogs were wound tight from all that kennel and
road time. I was anxious as well because after half a decade of living
in Montana, I was finally in the extreme northwestern corner of it, in
a place that is fabled among Montana sportsmen. Today, and for the next
several days, we would fish and hunt the Yaak and get to know her, just
a little bit. Here, within a holler of British Columbia, perhaps we'd
catch a rare redband trout, or shoot a spruce or blue grouse. Perhaps
we'd discover the allure of the Yaak and get to know what Bass wrote
about. Call it Yaak Magic.
There was an old logging road behind the cabins and immediately I
was on public land of the Kootenai National Forest. I followed the dogs
through dense vegetation, listening to the tinkle of their bells as
they burst out into the soggy forest-it had been raining ever since I
drove into the Yaak-and cradled my shotgun in hopes of a point, and a
shot.
I was staying with outfitters Tim and Joanne Linehan, good friends
who came to the Yaak 20 years ago and never left. Tim came first, those
many years ago, to guide fishermen for a summer. He'd never been there,
but it immediately felt like home.
"It reminded me of New Hampshire, you know what I mean, pal?" Tim is
a quiet, honest man who is passionate about hunting and fishing and
showing his clients a good time. Within a few weeks, he knew he'd never
leave. He ended up starting the business and now the Yaak is in his
blood.
So much so, in fact, that Linehan is on the front end of an effort
to keep the Yaak and her mountains just the way they are, and perhaps
make them even better.
Two decades ago, the timber industry was going strong in the valley,
cutting larch and hemlock and spruce, and bringing jobs to towns of
Libby and Troy. Getting out the board-feet. But then times changed.
People with divergent interests fought each other in courtrooms and
barrooms. Then Montana's timber industry fell on hard times and the
market fell apart and the jobs went away. When that happened, Linehan
and a few others decided to get together and plot out a plan for the
Yaak's future. What if, they wondered, we all worked together? If we
diversified? What if sportsmen got together with the few remaining
loggers who were around and tried to do something as partners rather
than adversaries? Don't we all live here for the same reasons-the
fishing and hunting and fresh air and Montana lifestyle?
Thus was born a partnership that was called the Three Rivers
Challenge: a coalition of sportsmen and conservationists and loggers
and motorized recreationists, all working together for a shared future
on a shared forest. Ninety-seven percent of the ground in the Yaak is
public land, forests that Linehan depends upon for game and fish, and
that loggers depend upon for a reliable supply of timber. The concept
was this: set aside some of the Yaak as wilderness under the Wilderness
Act. Set aside some of the Yaak as a National Recreation Area where
motorized users-ATV enthusiasts and snowmachiners-would be welcomed,
where loop trails could be built and riders ride. Designate some of the
forest for sustainable, long-term logging where companies could harvest
some trees under a tool known as stewardship logging. This kind of
logging would mean that the money could come right back to the woods
instead of going to Washington, D.C. In the forest, the money could be
put to use on the ground to repair places in the forest where past
practices had left hillsides shedding sediment into bull trout streams,
where culverts blocked fish migration, where road densities harmed elk
hunting success.
We've got far more in common than we have differences, said the
folks in the Yaak and they brought their plan to Senator Jon Tester, a
freshman Democrat in D.C. Tester, a practical, likable man with a
distinctive flat-top haircut, and the only active farmer in the U.S.
Senate, saw something practical in the proposal. Moreover, there was a
common thread between the work of the folks of the Yaak and that of two
other Montana groups. Indeed, three proposals with the same theme
simultaneously came across his desk in his first months in office:
people working together.
"I saw people in Montana working together and that's exactly why I
came to Washington in the first place: to work together and get
something done," said Tester.
In July of 2009, Tester introduced his Forest Jobs and Recreation
Act, a proposed bill that would mandate 100,000 acres of stewardship
logging on three national forests, designate more than 300,000 acres of
motorized national recreation areas, and add some 670,000 acres of
wilderness for the state of Montana. Backed by groups such as Trout
Unlimited, and thousands of working Montanans, the bill covers much of
western Montana and includes lands of the Kootenai, Lolo, and
Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forests. The Yaak is a part of the bill.
Over the next few days, we're going to explore what the Yaak is all about, and learn more its magic.
In the two hours the dogs and I spent up the overgrown road, we
didn't see any grouse, but we walked right up on a nice whitetail buck,
his antlers dark and thick. He watched us and then trotted off. Bow
season was open, but apparently the buck knew a bird dog man from a
camo-clad archer and he waved his tail lazily and faded into the sodden
underbrush.