Frank Church and the River of No Return

In the center of Idaho there is a place that resists description by any ordinary measure. The Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness covers about two point four million acres, making it the largest contiguous wilderness area in the lower forty-eight United States. No roads cross it. No power lines run through it. Twenty-six grandfathered gravel airstrips serve remote ranches, outfitter lodges, and backcountry visitors. The Middle Fork of the Salmon River cuts through its heart, dropping nearly three thousand feet over nearly a hundred miles in a canyon so remote that a commercial raft trip is one of the few ways most people ever see it.

The Salmon River itself, which the Lewis and Clark expedition considered and then rejected as unnavigable in eighteen oh five, earned its local nickname "the River of No Return" from the miners and early settlers who could float downstream but could not, in the era before motorized boats, get back up. Modern jet boats changed the equation somewhat, but the canyon is still one of the deepest in North America.

The wilderness designation came in nineteen eighty with the Central Idaho Wilderness Act, after decades of effort by conservationists who fought off proposals to dam the Middle Fork and to push roads through the batholith country. Idaho Senator Frank Church, who spent much of his Senate career on foreign policy as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, had also been a consistent advocate for wilderness preservation. After his death from pancreatic cancer in nineteen eighty-four, the wilderness area was renamed in his honor.

What the Frank Church Wilderness represents is a decision that was actually made, and then held. In a state where the debates over land use, logging, grazing, and water rights have never really ended, these roughly two point four million acres sit as a kind of permanent pause, a reminder that the country once decided some of this land should stay as it is.