Frank Church Wilderness: The Largest Roadless Land in the Lower Forty-Eight

Two point four million acres with no paved roads. No motors permitted. No mines, no dams, no clearcuts. The Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness is the largest contiguous roadless land in the continental United States, and it sits in the middle of Idaho in a geography so rugged that the first federal survey teams in the eighteen eighties came back and reported the country was essentially impassable.

The Middle Fork of the Salmon River runs about one hundred miles through the center of it, undammed, dropping from alpine meadows near Stanley through canyon walls that close in to a few hundred feet wide. The river drops twenty-nine feet per mile on average through the canyon section, which is why early trappers called it the River of No Return: boats could go down, but nothing came back up under human power.

The wilderness designation came in pieces: the first in nineteen eighty, under Senator Frank Church; a second addition in nineteen eighty-four. Preventing it from becoming a reservoir, or a network of mining access roads, required two decades of political fighting in Washington and the defeat of multiple dam proposals on the Middle Fork.

What it is now, as a result, is one of the least-disturbed large ecosystems in the American West. Mountain goats, bighorn sheep, wolves, and chinook salmon occupy it. You can float the Middle Fork for six days and not see a building, a road, or a power line. Most people driving through Idaho on the interstate never know this exists, roughly two hours north of the freeway.