About the Project

Human and Ecological Change in Big Creek is a project comparing historical and contemporary photographs taken along the Big Creek drainage in Idaho’s Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness, in conjunction with stakeholder interviews, to give insight into the human and environmental changes that have occurred in the past century, and the values of those changes. The research was completed by Micaela Petrini in 2019, who hiked throughout the wilderness area with her camera to rephotograph locations found in historical images, as well as to speak with people connected to the region.

This digital exhibit presents pairs of images collected by Petrini along with her descriptions. Each pair can be viewed individually or visualized overlapping by clicking the “Juxtapose” button.

Responding the contrasts often represented in each pair of photos one interviewee noted:

“A lot of times the historic preservation really depends on who you have working at the forest service or who you have that has an interest and not that people haven’t been interested but because of other management things going on. There has been a lot of the historic structures on Big Creek have disappeared. And that’s because people that have been managing it don’t believe that they are a part of the wilderness. And I come from more of the perspective of you can’t just erase all history. We as humans are as important to the landscape as anything else. And so you should at least– while we don’t maybe want 50 fire lookouts on the top of every mountain, they should have made more of an effort to save examples.”

“I mean, people were living there full-time and it is crazy now when you go back there and unless you knew that and knew where to look, it has completely been naturalized and turned back to wilderness. And I think that that’s a powerful thing not only just to look at it and look at the landscape but it’s also powerful to know that we as humans think that we have such this great impact on things. But it really doesn’t last very long which I think is neat.”

The research project was supported by the Confluence Lab and the exhibit was developed in collaboration with the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning.