Why thru-hiking would be a disaster for the Yaak Valley

Suppose that nearly 50 years ago, a man in a faraway city, who knew nothing of the blank spots on a map, thought it would be nice to bulldoze a straight-line, high-use recreational hiking trail through the Pacific Northwest. It would resemble the moving walkway at an airport, only with a “zone of disturbance” a thousand feet wide, and it would run through the heart of the region’s rarest and most unprotected ecosystem.

And even if the draftsman knew nothing of the country — that it was public land and home to the greatest concentration of threatened, endangered and sensitive species of any national forest in the West — a rational person might assume that such a shortest-route, Golden-Spike-railroad application might not be the most intelligent, ecological or economical choice, nor even the most enjoyable for the travelers the trail-dreamer prophesied.

This, however, is not the opinion of the Pacific Northwest Trail Association, which continues to push for a 1,200-mile trail straight from Montana’s Glacier National Park to Port Townsend, Washington. And what lies between those two points? The association seems not to know, but I do. In a stretch that is proposed to follow the Canadian border in the Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana lies 50 miles of swamp, bog orchids, mosquitoes, dark interior forest with no sightlines. There are also 20 grizzly bears, hanging on for dear life. The bears are protected only by the Endangered Species Act, and by the dark shadows of those swampy patches dedicated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to their recovery, according to law and the wishes of the American public.

Fish and Wildlife says it wants to recover the grizzly population in the Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem to 100. Achieving that goal is a borderline fantasy, given that the Yaak Valley is in the Kootenai National Forest. Local forest managers have never been good to the Yaak’s grizzlies, pushing one controversial timber-cutting sale after another. And, so far, the Forest Service — claiming it has no time to do otherwise — has backed the trail, which would send up to 4,000 hikers a year through country the Forest Service has also deemed core grizzly habitat.