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Story and photos by Chris Peterson

The Great Bear Wilderness will see its 40th anniversary next month. It was codified into law on Oct. 28, 1978 and added 286,636 acres of wilderness along the Middle Fork of the Flathead River, from West Glacier east to the Trilobite Range of the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

The wilderness designation did not come easily and took decades to accomplish, advocates recalled.

Bill Cunningham, an outfitter, author and a former Montana representative of the Wilderness Society said that the first formal plans to protect the Middle Fork came in mid 1950s, when conservationists John Craighead and Clif Merritt floated the river in 1956 and 1957 and began formulating a river classification system that would evolve into the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

The Hungry Horse Dam had just been completed in 1953 and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had plans for dams on both the North and Middle Forks of the Flathead. The Middle Fork dam, eyed for Spruce Park about seven miles upstream from the river’s confluence with Bear Creek, was an earthen dam that would have inundated miles of the Middle Fork. But there was no traditional spillway with the project — water would be diverted through a tunnel to Hoke Creek in the South Fork and a power house would be built there, spilling the water into the Hungry Horse Reservoir and, in effect, dewatering the lowering Middle Fork.

A story in the Oct. 16, 1957 edition of the Hungry Horse News noted the estimated cost of the Spruce Park Dam was more than $83 million. The dam had the backing of the Columbia Falls Chamber of Commerce.

A decade would pass and no dams would be built, though there were plenty of calls for one, particularly after the 1964 flood, which inundated the Flathead Valley.

The Hungry Horse News ran a picture of a dam advocate with 4,000 signatures supporting the Spruce Park Dam.

But it was a roading and logging project that put in high gear a drive to designate the Great Bear as wilderness.

In 1969, Dale Burk was a reporter for the Missoulian when he learned of a Forest Service plan to road the upper Middle Fork. Burk learned of the plan from Missoulian publisher Lloyd Schermer of a secretive Forest Service meeting at Schafer Meadow airstrip with a group of civic leaders known as the Grizzly Riders.

Burk went undercover as a hand for outfitter Smoke Elser, so he could listen in on th meetings, Burk recalls in a story in his new book, “A Brush With a Wild Thing of Two in Montana.”

The Forest Service talked of their plans to develop the Upper Middle Fork and also showed them maps.

Burk went home, wrote his stories and asked for the maps when he returned. At first, the Forest Service denied their existence, but Burk had a source in the Forest Service that mailed him one.

The proverbial cat was out of the bag and locals, including the late Loren Kreck of Columbia Falls, began a concerted effort to advocate for wilderness protection for the region.

In 1970, the Middle Fork Preservation Committee was formed and Burked continued to pen stories on the proposed wilderness.

“My advocacy was writing about it and keeping it visible,” Burk said in a recent interview.

In 1977, he wrote “Great Bear, Wild River” a 159-page book that advocated for the protection of the Great Bear Wilderness.

By then, the wilderness designation was championed by Sen. Lee Metcalf, D-Mont. Metcalf had already helped pass the Omnibus Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, that placed the forks of the Flathead River into the Wild and Scenic River system in 1976.

But it wasn’t enough. The Forest Service was still pushing for logging in the upper end of the drainage.

“A river can be no wilder than the land it drains,” Cunningham recalled Merritt saying.

The Middle Fork was seen as a key landscape for a host of species, front and center, the grizzly bear, which at the time, was dwindling in numbers and in 1977 would be placed on the Endangered Species List.

The Great Bear would provide a safe haven for bears between Glacier National Park to the north and the Bob Marshall Wilderness to the south, conservationists argued.

It also provided a pristine watershed for native bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout and was key habitat for elk, deer and moose. The latter species were also of great concern and local sportsmen also got behind the effort to preserve their favorite hunting grounds.

“Such a vital spectacular wildlife community containing nearly every faunal species native to the northern Rocky Mountains is found nowhere else in the nation,” wrote renowned Whitefish author and biologist Doug Chadwick at the time. “Within this vast ecosystem such large animals are able to conduct daily movements and seasonal migrations unimpeded.”

But timber interests continued to oppose the wilderness designation and conservation groups also made concessions — the Shafer Meadow airstrip, which is still in use today, was allowed. The Wilderness Act broadly prohibits mechanized and motorized use of any sort.

While Metcalf championed the wilderness and the beasts that lived there, he wouldn’t see the wilderness come to fruition.

Metcalf died Jan. 12, 1978.

His successor, Paul Hatfield, saw the bill through to its passage, with help from fellow Democrat Max Baucus, who was a Montana congressman at the time.

“To (Hatfield’s) credit, he took up the charge,” Cunningham said.

The original bill also called for wilderness protections on part of the rugged Badger Two Medicine region, but those lands were trimmed out because the Blackfeet Tribe had concerns about a wilderness designation at the time impinging on their treaty rights.

For Burk, the area will always be a favorite place.

“It’s remoteness and the pristine nature of tributary streams ... is the kind of place cutthroat and bull trout need to survive,” he said.

But perhaps Chadwick summed it up the best, Burk notes in “Great Bear, Wild River.”

Chadwick points out that yes, the Great Bear could have meant a little money for timber and mineral extraction, but it would have cost the region in the long run from loss of revenue from tourism, hunting, fishing and habitat destruction.

“What would it cost us in the long run to live without animals such as the grizzly bear and wolf; animal which symbolize wild freedom? Creatures which add an entire dimension to our imaginations and our experience of nature? Once they are gone, all the money and resources in the world won’t bring them back,” he said.