Not long ago I was assigned a story for
an outdoor magazine. The idea was to find a small portion of the
Lewis and Clark trail that remains relatively unchanged since their
storied journey, to go there and immerse myself for a couple of
days, following their footsteps, and report on the experience.
No problem, I thought. Montana has more Lewis and Clark
trail than any other state, especially if you add in the border
country near Lolo Pass on the Idaho side, and, I assumed, more
pockets of wild land than any other state along their route. Surely
I could find a fragment of territory sufficient to support a
vigorous weekend hike that would echo Lewis’s and Clark’s
experience of the Western landscape, even if today’s herds of
buffalo are few and fenced, the wolves beleaguered and scarce, and
the throat-catching rapids tamed by dams.
I didn’t
expect to be chased around by grizzly bears, as Lewis and Clark
routinely were, or to run rapids on the pre-dammed Columbia River
so fierce that Native Americans lined up by the hundreds to watch
the white explorers drown. Yet the phrase, “essentially unchanged
since the days of Lewis and Clark” has been bandied about by
various tourism agencies and government offices around here ever
since the bicentennial hoopla started up. Reading some of their
brochures, you’d think nobody had followed their example and come
West in the last 200 years.
It didn’t take long before my
naive optimism started to fade. I studied maps. I contacted
government agencies, talked to Lewis and Clark coordinators, called
environmental groups, compared notes with hiking friends, read
through the expedition journals. Every time I thought I had a
promising lead — just the right sort of spot — I’d find that the
“pristine” country was more a patchwork of clearcut and logging
road, or a 4-wheel drive road, or agricultural land, or only half a
mile from a state highway, or only long enough to escape the sound
and sight and clutter of settlement for a few hours at a stretch.
I kept talking to my editors, explaining my plight.
Initially we all assumed that it was only a matter of time before I
found a suitable hiking trail, that it was all a sort of historical
scavenger hunt with the prize sure to turn up around the next bend.
But it didn’t.
There is no place that qualifies,
anywhere. There isn’t one spot of the route where people can lose
themselves for a three-day hike and feel that they are treading in
the intrepid footsteps of the Corps of Discovery, in the kind of
wilderness the explorers experienced throughout their 28-month
expedition.
Nothing.
OK, the editors said. How
about wild country that qualifies close to the route, something in
the vicinity of the route, maybe someplace from which you might be
able to catch a glimpse of the route?
Eventually, I had
to settle for that compromised strategy. Given that broader focus,
I could consider the wilderness of the Bitterroot Mountains, or the
roadless areas on the Montana/Idaho border known as the Great Burn,
the Sapphire Range, the Anaconda Pintler Wilderness. I went for a
long weekend into some lovely, If constrained, backcountry and saw
views similar in scope to those witnessed by the explorers (as long
as I was willing to look in the right direction). I read excerpts
from their journals from the exact same days, thought about the
fortitude and endurance and sheer conspiracy of luck that allowed
that journey to succeed.
But I couldn’t shake the
profound disappointment of not being able to find just 15 or 20
miles of wild trail where I could sense the ghosts of history. Mind
you, I wasn’t surprised that things had changed profoundly in the
centuries since. I know full well the impact of settlement, of
highway construction, of clearcut logging, of mining and
subdivision and grazing and cultivating and damming. I know. A lot
has happened in 200 years. What was a surprise was how complete and
uncompromising the transformation was.
I wrote my story.
I extolled a nearby fragment of wild landscape. I liberally quoted
the explorers and compared our experiences. But the whole thing was
permeated and overwhelmed by an inescapable sense of loss. I had
been unable to uncover even a fragment of untrammeled land left
along the legacy of this formidable trail. So now, when I see
brochures boasting about the landscape, saying that it is possible
to experience what Lewis and Clark must have felt, I know that it
is a bald-faced promoter’s lie.
Alan Kesselheim
is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He lives and writes in Bozeman,
Montana.
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