Episode 28 : Rangers at Moose Creek : an interview with Bruce Farling [trancsript]

00:00:00:00 - 00:00:29:15 Debbie Lee: Welcome to the Subway Bitterroot Wilderness History Project, which is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The University of Idaho, and Washington State University. Part of the project’s mission is to collect, preserve, and make public oral histories documenting the history and people of the subway. Bitterroot wilderness. For more information, please visit our website at SPW lib argue Idaho redo.

00:00:29:17 - 00:00:54:15 Debbie Lee: And then I think people, I think people get so much out of being in a wilderness setting. Once you take away cars and money and telephones, people are different and they are different to each other, I think. and and then they draw on things in themselves that maybe are a little rusty from our crazy life out here.

00:00:54:15 - 00:01:25:15 Debbie Lee: Now, I think the ways that people get along when they’re isolated in a place like that, that they place that they want to be, are really it’s a wonderful thing.

00:01:25:18 - 00:01:55:04 Debbie Lee: Thank you for joining us for the 28th episode of the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness History Project. In this episode, titled Rangers at Moose Creek, Bruce Farley describes his duties while he worked as a wilderness ranger in Moose Creek from 1980 to 1988. Bruce, who obtained his degree from the University of Oregon, first became acquainted with Moose Creek Ranger Station in the mid 1970s as the policies for managing wilderness were being written after the passage of the Wilderness Act.

00:01:55:07 - 00:02:08:15 Debbie Lee: Later, as a ranger, Bruce helped to educate users on minimal impact wilderness use and reveals how the job honed his own wilderness ethic and his approach to human interaction with pristine lands.

00:02:08:17 - 00:02:11:03 Debbie Lee: You were Wilderness Ranger at Moose Creek from.

00:02:11:11 - 00:02:12:00 Bruce Farling: 82, 80.

00:02:12:00 - 00:02:20:29 Debbie Lee: Eight, 82, 88. Okay, that’s quite a long time. What were your duties as a wilderness ranger? But.

00:02:21:01 - 00:02:40:19 Bruce Farling: we had a whole array of things that we were kind of responsible for doing. there, for most of my time there, there were three of us. We split the district up, and at the time, it was all wilderness. And so we split it up and and we were sort of like many district rangers in some respects and responsible for a particular part of the district.

00:02:40:22 - 00:03:19:16 Bruce Farling: And I was responsible for the, the western part, and worked out of, a end of the road cabin at Lost Horse, which is actually in Montana, but up, up near that, up near the boundary. And, our duties were administering outfitter permits, some trail maintenance, fire monitoring, wildfire monitoring, law enforcement, picking up trash, educating the public about, you know, being, as much as possible, sort of low trick, you know, minimal trace sort of uses of wilderness.

00:03:19:18 - 00:03:42:21 Bruce Farling: And then we occasionally get projects that, one of the interesting things about the jobs was had so much variety. We had a project at the forest or the region needed to do a research project. one year Warren and I were involved, and we had to run a project to sample High Lakes for, acid. Acid?

00:03:42:25 - 00:04:15:25 Bruce Farling: Acid rain. it, changes. And what we did is we we were trained up to collect water samples, and but the it was an EPA project in partnership with the Forest Service, wherein we and we spent about a month or so on this where the EPA, as it should for a project of this sort of scientific rigor and stuff, they they randomly picked lakes and some of these lakes were just a bear to get to and required.

00:04:15:25 - 00:04:35:07 Bruce Farling: Some people kind of knew how to get back into that kind of country we had, because we had to haul boats and we had to haul in all this sampling equipment, all this sort of stuff. So we got involved because, we had kind of the skills to do that sort of stuff. And then we did the sampling and, because we would, we knew how to use pack stock and we get pack stocked.

00:04:35:07 - 00:04:52:00 Bruce Farling: Some of these lakes couldn’t get pack stock. Do we get them as far as we could. And then we’d backpack all the gear in the boats and we did stuff like we, we hired, due to an early fall off the lakes, it turned over. We hired some jumpers on detail because we figured, what’s the next best thing to have on a mule?

00:04:52:00 - 00:05:26:08 Bruce Farling: To get to that lake? We hired some jumpers, and those guys loved it, you know, didn’t have anything else to do. So, so, so we would occasionally get projects like that. There were some fish projects that I did. that were, inventory fish barriers on streams for the where there were logjams that may have blocked anadromous fish and did that, the forest fishery biologist who I still know is in Missoula, he was a friend at the time, would get some extra money from BPA to do these, sort of indigenous fish restoration projects.

00:05:26:10 - 00:05:48:01 Bruce Farling: I did a little bit of survey stuff. We actually got to go and do some hook and line sampling, which I loved, to find out what was in some lakes that nobody had really done any sort of, you know, scientific sampling of the sea, you know, Idaho fish and game and put some particular trout species in there years ago, and nobody went back to see they were.

00:05:48:04 - 00:05:52:10 Debbie Lee: Do you remember what lakes those were?

00:05:52:12 - 00:06:16:19 Bruce Farling: there were some of the ones on the, the western part of the district or the eastern part of the district. So it would have been like, Oh, well, some of the ones above Bear Creek, Diamond Lake, Mole Lake, Spruce Lake, and I can’t remember some of the other ones. And they also had there was also a crew that did the same thing to the seasonal crew that worked a couple of years.

00:06:16:19 - 00:06:34:16 Bruce Farling: I remember, so basically, you know, we had these general duties, which was an array of things. And then we also had these occasional projects that would float in from some, you know, some other folks on the forest. We did range work. We work with what we.

00:06:34:18 - 00:06:35:25 Debbie Lee: What does that mean?

00:06:35:28 - 00:06:53:09 Bruce Farling: basically we we sort of initiated and actually Dick Walker was very influential in setting this stuff up with DEQ was in there. We monitored range trend. You know, we had recreational grazing permits and the outfitters had and we had to sort of determine when it was too much pressure.

00:06:53:11 - 00:06:58:15 Debbie Lee: And so what does that mean exactly? too much pressure.

00:06:58:18 - 00:07:06:05 Bruce Farling: Too many horses and mules on in a particular pasture in the fall that that outfitters were using. We don’t want them to grind it into dirt.

00:07:06:07 - 00:07:23:24 Debbie Lee: So when you decide that there is too much pressure in a campsite or a or, grazing site, what steps do you take? And were there any incidents where you actually have to confront people now, generally.

00:07:23:27 - 00:07:43:09 Bruce Farling: The general shtick was to first of all, we tried to contact as many visitors as we could. That was a very large part of our job. We tried to steer them away from certain places voluntarily. And so, you know, don’t go here if you don’t mind not camping in this area, because we’d try to get let it grow back because it’s just got pounded.

00:07:43:11 - 00:08:04:15 Bruce Farling: So we do that. But there was a few instances where some places were actually close to camping. some places over in the crags on the west side of the district, Cove Lakes, for example, was a particularly, tough place to, to, get people to, you know, reduce the pressure on it, get beat up pretty good.

00:08:04:18 - 00:08:14:24 Debbie Lee: So the thinking behind that is that if you steer people away, that the wilderness will kind of reclaim the land and and it keeps it more pure or.

00:08:14:25 - 00:08:42:15 Bruce Farling: Yeah. you know, the whole idea and we were pretty, pretty, I gotta admit. I mean, I really did home. I sort of wilderness ethic back there. I hadn’t really thought about a lot of this stuff, but our job was to is our primary job at Wilderness Rangers and actually was the district’s deal was to it was the ethic that ran through that place for a long, long time, was to reduce the impact of human beings as much as possible in there.

00:08:42:18 - 00:08:54:22 Bruce Farling: Not saying human beings could use it, but, you know, work with people and educate them to use it in its, you know, in a fashion that with this little disturbance as possible.

00:08:54:25 - 00:09:17:11 Debbie Lee: I’ve heard some people say that because it was an all wilderness district for many years, that the district actually set the standard for wilderness management for the country. To you, what’s your opinion about that? And can you give me any examples?

00:09:17:14 - 00:09:41:22 Bruce Farling: We used to think we did, and I don’t know if we did or not, but I you know, I do think that we were leaders, absolutely. Leaders in a couple of ways in terms of through the education approaches on minimum impact, use of wilderness. And also, I know we were definitely leaders in continuing the use of so-called primitive skills.

00:09:41:25 - 00:10:10:08 Bruce Farling: and that is, these are cross-cut saws, the use of an ax, but minimum impact kind of trail maintenance and construction. and, you know, a lot of the skills that, that I learned in there, I mean, I, you know, I still don’t use it very much, but, I mean, I learned how to swing an ax in there, and, and I still go out, I go, you know, I go on hiking anymore.

00:10:10:08 - 00:10:27:17 Bruce Farling: And I always look at how the trail crews, no matter where I am, cut a log, and I can always tell. But they didn’t have any training. It looks like a beaver was no. And and so, you know, I mean, we prided ourselves in that stuff. And actually trail crews, seasonal trail crews over the years were very competitive about it.

00:10:27:19 - 00:10:39:23 Debbie Lee: So what is the benefit to wilderness, to having primitive skills and using them over, say, chainsaws and, four Wheeler, you know, ATVs to.

00:10:39:25 - 00:11:01:10 Bruce Farling: You know, designated wilderness. You can’t use that stuff. unless, you know, there’s some special exception for some special, circumstances which were always a battle. And, but there’s less of an opportunity for the Forest Service or the BLM or the parks Service when they’re managing designated wilderness to slip and say, you know, it’s going to be too hard.

00:11:01:10 - 00:11:21:08 Bruce Farling: We gotta use chainsaws. If you’ve got a cadre of people who know how to use these other tools, right. And we pride ourselves in that stuff, you’d have a big jack straw of logs, you know, that blew down, just stacked up one another and and, you know, most a lot of people, a lot of folks in the forest says, well, Guy, we really need to get a chainsaw on every other, you know, because we’ve got sharp saws.

00:11:21:08 - 00:11:27:14 Bruce Farling: We know how to use them. I mean, these are skills that, you know, 100 years old and stuff like that.

00:11:27:14 - 00:11:35:04 Debbie Lee: And, so, it’s preserving, sort of of a folk art or, or a skill sort of.

00:11:35:04 - 00:12:03:07 Bruce Farling: Yeah. It’s sort of a folk art ethic, but, but it’s a practice. But it’s more than art. It’s, it’s a, you know, it’s a pragmatic, approach to doing work and doing it in a way that’s sort of consistent with, with wilderness, you know, no mechanized that, advantages. So that was very cool. I mean, I still, you know, I.

00:12:03:10 - 00:12:34:00 Bruce Farling: Still remember how to do that stuff. Also, you know, we use pack stock. Not too much. We used, you know, we also prided ourselves on a lot of Forest Service. Wilderness management in this region was really packs stock oriented. We use pack stock, but we were also backpack oriented. We have backpack trackers, which was kind of unusual, not totally unusual, but unusual that they went out with ten day hitches, with ten days worth of food and a crosscut saw and and the Pulaski year and ax or something on their back.

00:12:34:00 - 00:12:57:01 Bruce Farling: And, you know, with 80 pound packs very uncommon. It’s uncommon today. It was uncommon back then in the Forest Service most of the year, pack stock supported truckers. But these guys were quick hit and run. You know, our trail crews and wilderness rangers did the same thing. You’d have to bring, you know, deal with all that expense and food for dealing with pack stock.

00:12:57:04 - 00:13:22:04 Debbie Lee: Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness History Project, which has been made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Idaho, and Washington State University. The project coordinator is Debbie Lee, recorded and produced by Aaron Jepson.

00:13:22:06 - 00:13:24:06 Debbie Lee: Which.