Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
BOB MARSHALL WILDERNESS FOUNDATION
restore a campground in “the bob”
NORTHWEST MONTANA
There is one hope of repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to
conquer every niche on the whole Earth. That hope is the organization of
spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness.
—Bob Marshall, author, conservationist, and big-time rabble-rouser
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If your backyard had more than a million acres, you'd probably bring in help, too, to
maintain trails and restore campgrounds. The Bob Marshall Foundation, a nonprofit organ-
ization that helps the U.S. Forest Service maintain the gargantuan wilderness known locally
as “the Bob,” organizes about a dozen volunteer trips each year. These day- to weeklong ad-
ventures, which start in June and run through November, backpack volunteers into one of the
largest protected wilderness areas in the United States. If you add the million acres of the
Bob Marshall Wilderness to adjoining Glacier National Park, you're talking a backyard that's
roughly the size of Connecticut. Except that in this backyard, you're straddling the Continent-
al Divide in an untrammeled wild vastness filled with high mountain lakes, alpine meadows,
crystal clear lakes, remote valleys, and a giant wall that looks an awful lot like the man-made
version over in China. The Bob's Chinese Wall, as it's called, towers 1,000 feet above the val-
ley floor. Its limestone cliffs are not quite as long as its counterpart in Asia (that one is 4,000
miles long), but even at 22 miles, we're talking a big wall.
If you haven't figured it out by now, the volunteer trips into the Bob are not for sissies.
Roads are outlawed in the Bob, and for miles the only living things, besides you and your fel-
low volunteers, will be grizzlies, lynx, mountain lions, wolverines, and gray wolves. The trips
involve long hikes, camping, and work strenuous enough to give a lumberjack pause. You'll
be restoring primitive campgrounds, bushwhacking trails, and removing trees. You'll be work-
ing with crosscut saws, axes, Pulaskis, shovels, loppers, and other primitive tools. Just getting
to your work site may mean a hike of 10 or more miles and a 2,000- or 3,000-foot change in
elevation.
