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Thirty-one years ago, after the 1985 summer re season cooled under August rains, a group of men and women ventured into the Bob Mar- shall Wilderness Complex on a “Show Me Trip.” The 1.5 million-acre tract of untrammeled earth spans portions of four national forests — Flathead, Helena, Lewis and Clark, and Lolo — south of Gla- cier National Park, and enjoys the high- est level of conservation protection for federal land. No roads cut through, few permanent structures blemish the ter- rain, and most commercial enterprises
are prohibited. Aside from one particular mark of humankind, the “Bob” possesses a primitive character preserved when the creep of civilization is shut out and man is a mere visitor.
The Show Me crew was there to see that one human imprint: a vast system of trails then totaling 2,500 miles, created in large part by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in the years before World War II gripped the United States. As the nation recovered from war, trail creation and maintenance on Montana’s public lands dropped low on the country’s pri- ority list.
Without a way to nance more work- ers, the forest was reclaiming sizeable portions of the Bob’s trail network. That left Regional Forester Tom Coston with a problem. He wanted to keep those endan- gered trails alive and provide access to the remote corners of the Bob for posterity.
“He’s the one that said, ‘Let’s do some- thing before it’s too late,’” said Dave Owen, a volunteer packer on the Show Me Trip, a founding member of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation, and an honorary board member today. “The idea was to get a volunteer organization that would help resurrect the trails, pick
up the trails ... that had been abandoned.” While some retired U.S. Forest Ser- vice employees occasionally pitched in, volunteers were mostly “unheard of” at the time, according to Fred Flint, the foundation’s current board president who worked in the Flathead for the majority of
his 30-year Forest Service career.
“That changed by necessity,” he said. The answer, Coston reasoned, was an
e cient organization to attract and coor- dinate volunteer labor. He arranged for a group, composed of local change-mak- ers and some Washington, D.C. o cials, to travel through the Bob for ve days on
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AUGUST 3, 2016 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM
COVER
BOB MARSHALL WILDERNESS FOUNDATION
THE PATH LEAST TRAMMELED
The Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation celebrates 20 years of volunteer work to keep trails open in one of the United States’ largest wilderness areas
BY CLARE MENZEL