Bob Marshall Wilderness: The Largest Roadless Area in the Lower Forty-Eight

The Bob Marshall Wilderness itself covers roughly one million acres of the Flathead National Forest and adjacent Rocky Mountain Ranger District of the Lewis and Clark National Forest. Add the contiguous Great Bear and Scapegoat Wilderness areas, and the combined complex reaches approximately one and a half million acres, one of the largest wilderness complexes in the lower forty-eight states.

It is named for Bob Marshall, a Forest Service employee and writer who in the nineteen thirties argued that Americans needed large wilderness areas not as resource reserves, not as recreational facilities, but as a psychological counterweight to industrial civilization. His nineteen thirty essay, The Problem of the Wilderness, made the case in terms that surprised some of his Forest Service colleagues: he argued that wilderness was necessary for the development of character, for the specific type of physical and psychological challenge that only genuinely wild terrain could provide.

Marshall also co-founded The Wilderness Society in nineteen thirty-five, which eventually helped pass the Wilderness Act of nineteen sixty-four. He died in nineteen thirty-nine, at age thirty-eight, before he could see what his advocacy produced.

The wilderness he helped create is accessible only on foot or horseback. No roads exist within its boundaries. The Chinese Wall, a limestone escarpment that runs for twenty-two miles along the Continental Divide at roughly eight thousand feet, is the most recognized landmark. Grizzly bears, wolves, wolverines, elk, mountain goats, and bighorn sheep all live in the complex.

The Bob, as Montanans call it, takes about three days of hard travel to reach the center.