Valley Views
Defending the ancient forest at Black Ram
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To get there, you head up the Pete Creek Road #338 in the Yaak (no one seems to know who Pete was, and I’m keen to know the name the first people called it before Pete rolled into the country), way on up past Mushroom Mountain. At the dust blown hairpin curve left, continue straight into what looks like a giant Walmart parking lot. Once and not so long ago there was an old forest there, on the banks of the West Fork of the Yaak River, near the place where water first comes into Montana. From here, you need to go on foot: cross the wooden bridge that spans that wild rushing river and follow Road #523, which was clearcut and widened as a “fire line” for a little fire back in 2018. The road goes north ‘til it can’t go any more, dead-ending at the forest wall that is Canada. On your left lies a forest that is possibly the oldest in the Yaak, and which is scheduled for clearcutting. “These trees,” Leslie Caye says, with significant understatement, “are too big to hug.”
Perhaps like no other forest in Montana, the “Black Ram” forest in northwest Montana’s Yaak Valley is built on its ancestors. They guide it and direct it. Beneath its ancient canopy of giant cedar, hemlock, spruce, subalpine fir and even larch, down in the wet alpine soil composed of the patient investment of centuries, a secret world exists in which the roots of all the living communicate with one another. We can’t hear it, but we know it’s there. The soil created by the fallen giants of the past conduct electrical signals between the roots, distributing nutrients to those trees in need. Across the centuries, the old forest continues to take care of its own.
We would not have found out about this forest had the U. S. Forest Service (USFS) not brought it to our attention with a proposal to effectively clearcut it. In addition to being the place where water first comes into Montana. It’s never been logged, and the agency’s maps show large areas of it possess no fire record.
We have been in the old forest at Black Ram. You can look up at the elder trees and become dizzy, they’re so large around and rise so tall. But what one really notices are the elders upon whom the giants stand. The history, written just beneath the surface. What is the voice of such a forest?
I want to tell what the forests were like, wrote the poet W.S. Merwin, I will have to speak in a forgotten language.
Here in Montana, we have not forgotten this language. A master luthier, Kevin Kopp, was gifted a piece of wood about the size of a whale’s vertebrae from an ancient spruce the USFS damaged when building a road to the proposed clearcuts. It’s a beautiful instrument, with a clear bright singular sound that speaks to the centuries of light received from above as well as the slow dispensation of nutrients from her ancestors below. The guitar’s voice asks us, “Can one tree save a forest?”
“These old trees at Black Ram didn’t need to be in this dialogue,” Leslie says. “They’re one of a kind. You’re not going to be able to cut these down and find any more like them. Someone might get some dollars, but they won’t be mom and pop dollars.” A high volume thru-hiker trail is also being expanded into this area, which will disturb the valley’s last tiny handful of female grizzlies-with-cubs. “These bears should be left alone,” says Leslie, “to live the life that they live.” There are other trail options.
The old wet forests in the Yaak hold far more carbon than other forests. They extend in a fringed, breathing curtain of green along the imaginary dotted line that separates us from Canada. There are larch in Black Ram estimated at 600 to 800 years old—living reminders from the last time the world grew hot. They survived, and for what? To be cut down by chainsaws because they are viewed as no longer being “resilient”—whatever that means?
“There are other better places to work in the forest,” says Leslie.
A single note of music can be an idea. An idea can be a single seed. Why are we not studying the mysteries of the ancient forest at Black Ram? The light that comes down from far above in this old forest is like waves of sound made visible. Clearcutting the forest at Black Ram will not save us from fire, but instead move us deeper into the burning.
We are asking that the Kootenai National Forest follow the direction of President Biden and take Black Ram off the books and manage it instead as the nation’s first Climate Refuge, and in such a way that Kootenai people can resume the Sun Dance in these ancestral lands. As recently as the 1930s, the summer drumming ceremony of the year-long Sun Dance was held in the Yaak. For two weeks, drummers would drum all night. Those sounds still vibrate in the wood of every tree that was living then. And they echo still in the guitar.
When we go into the old forest at Black Ram, we wonder how many more hours it has left. We listen to the rush and roar of the West Fork. We walk up to a dead tree leaning against a living one, which, on windy days, rubs back and forth like a bow across a violin or cello. We put our ear to the old snag and listen.
It creaks and sings. We find ourselves smiling. We can’t take our ear away from it. It is the forgotten language, and the language of the future, both.
