Fighters & Friends on the Middle Fork

I never take a Middle Fork Salmon River trip for granted: floating 100 miles of crystal clear water running through the heart of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness is always a gift. But it is often easy to take for granted the fact that there IS a crystal clear Middle Fork and a 2.3 million acre wilderness surrounding it. These things seem so obviously right that anything else -- a dam, clearcut forests, an open pit mine -- seem inconceivable now. But of course it was only by the work of dedicated people that the Middle Fork and places like it are still the wild and untrammeled lands they are today.

Last week I rafted the Middle Fork with several of those individuals -- Bill Arthur, Debbie Sease, Jim Blomquist, Rose Kapolczynski, Russ Shay, Ken Gersten--who met one another in the early 70s as young environmental activists and are now senior leaders in organizations like the Sierra Club and the Land Trust Alliance. They're still fighting the good fight, working to keep places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from becoming an oil field. Should they succeed, future generations will no doubt find it crazy that the arctic plains would be anything less than the magnificent, wild and pristine land of caribou and wolf and polar bear. It will be so obviously right. But not without the passion and work of people like my new good friends. Thanks.