Bruce Farling, 2011
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Episode 28 (13:23)
Thank you for joining us for the twenty-eighth episode of the “Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness History Project.” In this episode, titled, “Rangers at Moose Creek,” Bruce Farling describes his duties while he worked as a Wilderness Ranger at Moose Creek from 1980 to 1988. Bruce, who obtained his degree from the University of Oregon, first became acquainted with Moose Creek Ranger Station in the mid-1970’s, as the policies for managing wilderness were being written after the passage of the Wilderness Act. Later, as a Ranger, Bruce helped to educate users on minimal impact wilderness use, and reveals how the job honed his own wilderness ethic, and his approach to human interaction with pristine lands.
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Audio Clip
Interviewee: Bruce Farling
Interviewer: Debbie Lee
Location: Missoula, Montana
Date: April 14, 2011
DL: What… you were Wilderness Ranger at Moose Creek from…
BF: ’80 to ’88.
DL: ’80 to ’88. Okay, that’s quite a long time. What were your duties as a Wilderness Ranger back there?
BF: Uhm, we had a whole array of things that we were kind of responsible for doing. For most of my time there, there were three of us; we sort of split the district up. At the time it was all wilderness, and so we split it up, and so we were sort of mini district rangers in some respects, and responsible for a particular part of the district. I was responsible for the western part. I worked out of an end-of-the road cabin at Lost Horse, which is actually in Montana, but up near the boundary. Our duties were administering outfitter permits, some trail maintenance, fire monitoring, wildfire monitoring, law enforcement, picking up trash, educating the public about being as much as possible, sort of low-trace, minimal trace users of wilderness. Then, we’d occasionally get projects that… it was one of the interesting things about the job. It had so much variety. We had a project that the Forest, or the region needed to do, a research project. One year, Warren and I were involved, and we had to run a project, to sample high lakes for acid rain changes. What we did was, we were trained up to collect water sampled, but, it was an EPA project, in partnership with the Forest Service wherein… we spent about a month or so on this, where the EPA showed, for a project of this sort of scientific rigor, they randomly picked lakes, and some of these lakes were just a bear to get to. It required some people who kind of knew how to get back in that kind of country, because we had to haul boats in, and we had to haul in all this sampling equipment, and all this sort of stuff. So, we got involved because we had the skills that sort of stuff. Then, we did the sampling, because we knew how to use pack stock, and we could… some of these lakes you couldn’t get pack stock to. We’d get them as far as we could, and then we’d backpack all the gear and the boats. We did stuff like we hired… did it in early fall after the lakes had turned over… we hired some jumpers on detail, because we figured what’s the next best thing to having a mule to get to that lake, and we hired some jumpers. Those guys loved it. They didn’t have anything else to do. So, we would occasionally get projects like that. There were some fish projects that I did, that were inventorying fish barriers on streams for the… where there were log jams that may have blocked anadromous fish. I did that… a Forest Fisheries Biologist that I know; he’s in Missoula; he’s a friend… at the time would get some extra money from BPA to de these anadromous fish restoration projects. I did a little bit of survey stuff where I actually got to go do some hook-and-line sampling, which I loved, to find out what was in some lakes that nobody had really done any sort of ling in them, to see… Idaho Fish and Game had put some particular trout species in there earlier, and nobody had gone back to see…
DL: Do you remember what lakes those were?
BF: Uhm, there were some of the ones on the western part of the district, or the eastern part of the district, so it would have been like, oh hell, some of the ones above Bear Creek. Diamond lake, Mo Lake, Spruce Lake, I can’t remember some of the other ones. They also… there was also a crew that did the same thing too, a seasonal crew that worked a couple of years, I remember. So, basically, you know, we had these general duties, which were an array of things, and then, we also had these occasional projects that would float in from some other folks on the Forest. We did range work.
DL: What does that mean?
BF: Basically, we sort of initiated…Dick Walker was very influential in setting this up when Dick was in there. We monitored range trend. We had recreational grazing permits, that the outfitters had, and we had to sort of determine when there was too much pressure…
DL: So, what does that mean, exactly, “Too much pressure?”
BF: Too many horses and mules on a particular pasture in the fall, that outfitters were using, and we don’t want them to grind it into dirt.
DL: So, when you decide that there is too much pressure in a camp site or a grazing site, what steps do you take, and were there any incidents where you actually have to confront people?
BF: No, generally… the general schtick was to… First of all, we’d try to contact as many visitors as we could. That was a very large part of our job. We’d try to steer them away from certain places voluntarily, and say, you know, don’t go here, if you don’t mind not camping in this area, because we’re trying to let it grow back, because it’s just gotten pounded. We’d do that. There were some instances where there were some places that were actually closed to camping. Some places over in the Crags, on the west side of the district, Cove Lakes, for example, was a particularly tough place to get people to reduce the pressure on. It got beat up pretty good.
DL: So, the thinking behind that is that if you steer people away, the wilderness will kind of reclaim the land and it keeps it more pure, or…?
BF: Mmm-hmmm. We were pretty… I gotta admit, I really did sort of hone my wilderness ethic back there. I hadn’t really thought about a lot of this stuff, but our job was to… our primary job as wilderness rangers (it was the district’s deal), was to… and the ethic that ran through that place for a long, long time, was to reduce the impact of human beings as much as possible in there. Not saying human beings couldn’t use it, but work with people and educate them to use it in a fashion with as little disturbance as possible.
DL: I’ve heard some people say that because it was an all-wilderness district for many years, that that district actually set the standard for wilderness management for the entire country. Do you… what’s your opinion about that, and can you give me any examples?
BF: We used to think we did. I don’t know if we did or not. I don’t know, I do think that we were leaders, absolutely… We were leaders in a couple of ways in terms of some of the education approaches on minimum impact use of wilderness, and also, I know we were definitely leaders in continuing use of so-called primitive skills. That is the use of crosscut saws, the use of an axe, minimum impact trail maintenance and construction, and a lot of the skills that I learned in there… you know, I still… I don’t use them very much, but I learned how to swing an axe in there. I still go out and go hiking, and I always look at how the trail crews, no matter where I am, how they cut a log. I can always tell when they didn’t have any training. It looks like a beaver was gnawing, or something, you know? I mean, we pride ourselves in that stuff, and actually, trail crews… seasonal trail crews over the years were competitive about it.
DL: So, what is the benefit to wilderness to having primitive skills and using them over, say, chainsaws, and four-wheeler ATVs…?
BF: Well, in designated wilderness, you can’t use that stuff, unless there’s some special exception for some special circumstances, which were always a battle. But there’s less of an opportunity for the Forest Service or the BLM or the Parks Service, when they’re managing designated wilderness, to slip, and say, oh, you know, that’s going to be too hard, we’ve got to use chain saws, if you’ve got a cadre of people who know how to use these other tools right. We prided ourselves on that stuff. We’d have a big jackstraw of logs, you know, that blew down just stacked up on one another, and a lot of folks in the Forest Service would go, God, we really need to get a chain saw in there. We’d go, no, you don’t, because we’ve got sharp saws, and we know how to use them. These were skills that are hundreds of years old, and stuff like that.
DL: So, it’s preserving sort of a folk art, or a skill?
BF: Yeah, it’s sort of a folk art, but it’s more than art. It’s a pragmatic approach to doing work, and doing it in a way that is consistent with wilderness, you know? No mechanized advantages. That was very cool, I mean, I still remember how to do that stuff. And we used pack stock. Not too much, but we used… We also prided ourselves on a lot of Forest Service wilderness management was really pack-stock oriented. We used pack stock, but we were also backpack oriented. We used backpack trail crews, which was kind of unusual. Not totally unusual, but unusual enough…. You know they went out on ten-day hitches. Ten days’ worth of food and a crosscut saw, and a Pulaski or an axe or something on their back, with 80-pound packs, very uncommon. It’s uncommon today; it was uncommon back then in the Forest Service. Most of them were pack stock supported trail crews. But these guys were quick. Hit and run. Our trail crews and wilderness rangers did the same thing. You’d have to bring, you know… deal with all the expense and fooferah dealing with pack stock.
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