Jamie Lennox, Alliance for the Wild Rockies

Jamie Lennox is membership coordinator for the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and a board member of the Wild Rockies Legislative Action Fund. He previously worked for the Missoula Independent, a weekly newspaper. He lives in Missoula, Mont.

Roadlessness is next to godliness. "What is a roadless area?" one might question. Conservationists define it as 1,000 contiguous acres or more without human-made roads.

The Wilderness Act of 1964 defines a wilderness area as 5,000 acres or more. Wilderness advocates are now working to include 1,000-acre areas as designated wilderness. There are more than 20 million acres of unprotected roadless public lands in the northern Rockies, all of which are included in the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, otherwise known as NREPA or HR 488.

The definition of federally designated wilderness under the 1964 act is a place "where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man is a visitor who does not remain." Traditionally, wilderness included scenic ice and rocks and not much prime wildlife habitat at lower elevations. But this visionary act can offer the strongest protection available for wildlands, biological diversity, and clean water. The single most important word in the act is "enduring," in that the act's basic purpose is to provide an enduring resource of wilderness for this and future generations.

Recently, friends and I visited the Great Burn, an approximately 275,000-acre unprotected roadless area straddling the Idaho and Montana border. In 1910, raging flames stormed over the Bitterroot Divide 30 miles west of Missoula, Mont., leaving charred snags, barren slopes, and expanses of open sub-alpine tundra on a quarter of a million acres in this area. Down in the drainage bottoms are groves of old-growth cedar trees which take three or more people to hug.

In late June, we searched the Great Burn for evidence of the great bear, the grizzly. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service claims there are no grizzlies in the area, yet there have been numerous sightings.

The USFWS wants to reintroduce grizzlies to just 5,000 square miles of the Salmon-Selway-Bitterroot Ecosystem as an "experimental, non-essential" population, though there are more than 20,000 square miles of habitat in the area.

Alliance for the Wild Rockies has been promoting a better option, the Conservation Biology Alternative. The CBA is based on the premise that if we protect their entire habitat area, the grizzlies will come. If need be, the CBA would reintroduce bears with their full protection under the Endangered Species Act as "threatened," rather than the limited protection afforded to experimental populations.

During our trip to the Great Burn, we found a large bear scat; we hope it's from a grizzly. The scat has been sent off to a DNA lab for testing. In addition, we found grizzly food: sedges, huckleberry bushes, elk, deer, and more.

Wilderness designation for the Great Burn and other important roadless lands would help ensure lasting protection for grizzlies and a wide range of wildlife.