AT HOME IN THE WOODS

For most people, wilderness is a place to visit. For Fred Flint, wilderness is often home.

Flint, of Columbia Falls, spent much of his career working in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex and even after retirement, he spends weeks on end volunteering in the woods for the Forest Service.

Flint was born in Missoula, but spent much of his youth traveling the country with his father, who was in the military.

After high school, however, he went to the University of Montana and graduated from the School of Forestry in 1966. He enlisted in the Army, managed to avoid being shipped to Vietnam, and got out of the service in 1969.

His first job was a seasonal dispatcher and forestry technician in Superior. From there, he worked for the Forest Service in the Priest Lake District on the Kaniksu National Forest in Idaho for six years, returning to Montana and the Spotted Bear District in 1976, where he would become a resource assistant with the wilderness recreation lands program.

Flint worked on the creation of the Great Bear Wilderness early on and would later move to the Hungry Horse/Glacier View Ranger District in 1983, where he spent most of his career.

All told, he’s spent 42 years in the Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex.

“The land is pretty much the same,” he said in a recent interview. “The biggest change is fire. When I started, all fires were bad and we put them out.”

But over time, views of fires changed and in the wilderness, they were seen as a natural part of the landscape.

Today, fires are managed to protect resources like buildings and structures, but most fires that are expected to stay in the wilderness, are allowed to take their course.

The result is a dynamic landscape, where some places have seen fires multiple times, while other areas support old-growth forests that have survived for centuries.

As far as visitor use, he said there’s less horse use, but more hikers than the past. People aren’t going as far into the woods, either.

“People are doing shorter trips and not penetrating the core,” he said.

Flint would know. While he’s retired, he spends an awful lot of time at either Schafer Ranger Station in the Great Bear or Big Prairie in the Bob Marshall. Big Prairie, on the main drag of the South Fork can get busy, with as many as 100 horses in the meadows in the height of the summer season.

Though Schafer has an airstrip, overall, it’s often quieter, Flint noted. The Middle Fork doesn’t have the vistas that the Bob does, and attracts less people.

Flint retired back in 2003, but he still spends more than two months every summer volunteering back in the wilderness. The last stint was at Schafer, where he spent several days helping refill the stack of firewood to heat the place, using a horse to drag downed and dead lodgepole back to the station where they bucked them up with a crosscut saw.

“I usually do 30 days in the spring and 30 days in the fall,” he said.

It’s wilderness and no mechanical tools, which includes chainsaws, are allowed.

After retirement Flint served on the board of the Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation for 16 years and was president. He just recently stepped down. The Foundation paid for him to attend a Forest Service program on how to sharpen crosscut saws and he’s been sharpening the foundation’s saws, and many others, ever since.

It takes two to three hours just to tune a saw, he said. Since the first of the year, he’s sharpened more than 100 of them. The old saws are the best, he said, brands like Simonds, Disston and Atkins.

The lure of the wilderness is a simple love.

“It’s a place to go with peace and quiet,” he said. “You get away from the technology if you’re willing.”

It’s also about as close as one can get to seeing how the original forest once was, with trails instead of roads.

His advice for the wilderness enthusiast is simple.

“If you’re able, go see it. If you’re not able, at least support it,” he said.