Chainsaws are needed to clear trails in the Frank Church | Opinion
There is a question underneath the debate about chainsaws and the Frank Church Wilderness, and it is worth asking plainly. Who are the people fighting to protect public lands?
They come from public lands themselves. They remember being 12 years old, splashing through a wave on the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. They are the hunter on a ridgeline above Soldier Basin who felt, for a moment, like the world hadn’t yet run out of wild places. They are the backpacker who sat at the base of the Big Horn Crags and understood the meaning of silence. You do not become an advocate for a place by reading about it. You become one by going there.
Much is at stake in the trail maintenance crisis in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. The largest contiguous wilderness in the lower 48 states is closing, not by legal decree or political action, but by the slow accumulation of hundreds of thousands of downed trees across its trail system. Last fall, the Forest Service flew helicopters over 150 of the most heavily impacted trail miles and counted between 80,000 and 110,000 trees on the ground.
Working with the Salmon-Challis National Forest, IOGA identified approximately 542 miles of trail, nearly half that Forest’s trail system in the Frank, that are functionally impassable and need a unique intervention to reopen.
Every family that turns back at a blocked trail is a lost defender of this wilderness. Every hunter who finds their approach impassable might not return, vote, donate or testify the next time this land is under threat. Advocacy for the Frank Church Wilderness is not abstract; it is achieved by individuals who have experienced it.
Idaho’s outfitters and guides have been part of that advocacy since before the Central Idaho Wilderness Act passed in 1980. Our members live and work in the Frank Church. They have watched fire damage compound over bark beetle mortality, and windfall compound over fire damage, year after year, creating a deadfall backlog that the Forest Service’s own analysis confirms cannot be addressed with hand tools alone.
The agency’s Minimum Requirements Analysis, completed through the formal Wilderness Act process, concluded that chainsaws are the minimum necessary and viable tool to clear this backlog of choked trails.
We know that chainsaw use in the wilderness is not neutral. Neither is disappearing access. We engaged in the lawful process specifically because we take wilderness values seriously and understand that a decision reached through proper process is more durable than one forced by urgency.
The Central Idaho Wilderness Act of 1980, the legislation that created the Frank Church Wilderness, uses the word “shall” when directing the Secretary of Agriculture to clear trail obstructions annually. That is a mandate, not a suggestion, and yet it is not being met. The House Report accompanying that Act was explicit: Congress had no objection to chainsaw use for trail maintenance in the Frank Church, provided it is appropriately timed and sited.
The authorization we pursued is restricted to January 1 through August 1 each year, outside of peak hunting and visitor season, and capped at three years. The Forest Service ran the analysis and reached the same conclusion: the law requires these trails to be cleared and chainsaws are the minimum tool for the job.
Clearing these trails is not a compromise of wilderness values. It is an expression of them; it is the kind of active stewardship, done carefully and legally, that honors the generations who fought to designate the Frank Church in the first place.
The Wilderness Act envisions these places as living inheritances, providing outstanding opportunities for primitive and unconfined recreation, safeguarded for generations to come. A trail network buried under hundreds of thousands of trees is failing its purpose. The Frank Church was set aside so that we could encounter something larger than ourselves, and an inheritance no one can reach is no inheritance at all.
Erik Weiseth is the executive director of the Idaho Outfitters and Guides Association where he spends his time advocating for public lands, healthy resources and a thriving outfitter industry when he is not guiding on the river or recreating in the backcountry.