The Spirit of the Snake: A Brief History of the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area

The Rattlesnake National Recreation Area, located minutes from downtown Missoula, is part of the Lolo National Forest. Many know the Rattlesnake as Missoula’s backyard, offering ample outdoor recreation opportunities and access to the adjoining wilderness area. But did you know that in the 1930s there were homes, mines, a school and telephone lines scattered through the forest?

This week, the commissioners were joined by Andy Kulla, the former Recreation Area and Wilderness Manager for the Rattlesnake. Andy details how the grassroots efforts to preserve the area from development led to its designation by Congress in 1980. They also discuss how changes in the logging industry, wildfire research and recreation trends influence public land management.

Related links:

• Learn more about the ongoing Lolo National Forest Management Plan Revision and upcoming engagement opportunities
• Read the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area and Wilderness Act of 1980

Thank you to Missoula's Community Media Resource for podcast recording support!

Transcript

Josh Slotnick: [00:00:00] Welcome back to the agenda with the Missoula County Commissioners. I'm Josh Slotnick and I'm here with my fellow commissioners Dave Strohmaier and Juanita Vero. Today we are joined by a guest who is also a fan of the podcast. Can you imagine that? It's the first one.

Juanita Vero: [00:00:13] That it might be.

Josh Slotnick: [00:00:15] First fan to become guest transition?

Dave Strohmaier: [00:00:18] Yes!

Josh Slotnick: [00:00:18] Here. Would you introduce yourself? Good sir.

Andy Kulla: [00:00:20] Thank you. Josh, my name is Andy Kulla and I am a fan. I mean, it's like the agenda. Bob Dylan, Tom petty, John Mayer, you know, John Prine.

Josh Slotnick: [00:00:31] Can we get John...

Andy Kulla: [00:00:31] John Prine, John Prine for sure, yeah. Thank you. And I appreciate getting to be here. I worked on the Lolo National Forest for 30 years in recreation management, and then for the last 20 years of my career, I was a National Recreation area and wilderness manager for the Rattlesnake. Wow. And I wrote the management plan for it in 92. And I'm not tooting my own horn. I'm just saying that I'm pretty familiar with it and I know a little bit about it.

Josh Slotnick: [00:00:55] It's a good thing because you are here today to talk about the rattlesnake.

Andy Kulla: [00:00:57] And this is nothing about me. It's not about Andy. This is about the resource. It's about the Rattlesnake and what it means to Missoula.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:01:04] So let's let's just dive right in. Uh, let's roll back the clock to, I don't know, the Ice age. Uh, wherever you want. To start, talk to us about this gem that we have come to know as the Rattlesnake.

Andy Kulla: [00:01:15] Well, as we talk about the rattlesnake, uh, history and culture, it's almost like a summary of civilization. It's a story of love and loss, recovery, built and burnt bridges, literally healing, learning that we can't grow complacent and take things for granted. And that we, as accomplished, can always be taken away when we're no longer tend and protect what's dear to us. So when you think about the history of the rattlesnake, you got to think about the history of the Missoula Valley. Take yourself back to 1860. Back at that time, CP Higgins and Francis Warden opened a trading post called Hellgate Village on the Blackfoot River near the eastern edge of the valley. It was the first white settlement in the valley. By 1866, the settlement had moved five miles upstream and had been renamed Missoula mills, later shortened to Missoula Mills provided...

Juanita Vero: [00:02:03] Credit to Higgins wife.

Josh Slotnick: [00:02:04] Really, the original settlement was pretty close to the confluence of the Blackfoot and the Clark Fork.

Andy Kulla: [00:02:10] Yeah, originally.

Josh Slotnick: [00:02:12] It wasn't in the valley?

Andy Kulla: [00:02:12] No. It was. It was called Hellgate Village on the Blackfoot, near the eastern edge of the valley. The Salish name for the area. And forgive me for the pronunciation ni Missoula taku, from which the word and the name Missoula was derived. So back then we're back at 1866 and forward. The rattlesnake was the closest and easiest drainage to get the natural resources that civilization needed firewood, railroad ties. And with those came splash dams, by which they were floated down to the town. They floated thousands of cords of firewood and railroad ties down the creek, drinking water. That was a big one. And dams to support drinking water supplies. Um, there was a lime kiln up there that provided lime for concrete in town and whitewashing, which seals wood and protects from the elements.

Josh Slotnick: [00:02:59] And the interrupt, does that mean they were mining lime up there? Yes. Burning. And then. And what's the kiln process on lime? I don't know what you what you mean there?

Andy Kulla: [00:03:08] The manufacturing of lime is something I do not know.

Josh Slotnick: [00:03:13] But it gets baked in a kiln.

Andy Kulla: [00:03:14] There's a site up there called the Lime Kiln, which is currently a hole in the ground with some artifacts around it. And there's about a two mile road going up there from Biscoe Creek still in place. Exactly how they did that, I don't know. Um, there is even a gold mine. There were 19 people call them homesteads, but there maybe farmsteads that they weren't properly homesteaded. 

Josh Slotnick: [00:03:37] Oh, in terms of the Homestead Act?

Andy Kulla: [00:03:38] Yeah.

Josh Slotnick: [00:03:39] And squatting basically.

Andy Kulla: [00:03:40] Yeah. A lot of those came from squatting and some of them where they were squatting. They found out that they didn't own them, and they had to rebuy them from the Montana Power Company in the early 1900s.

Josh Slotnick: [00:03:51] Did the Montana Power Company owned most of the valley?

Andy Kulla: [00:03:53] Montana Power Company owned 21,000 acres of checkerboard ownership up there. So if you looked at it, uh, it was Montana Power Company, Forest Service, Montana Power Company, and that was the straw that broke the camel's back. They got the fire started.

Josh Slotnick: [00:04:06] And power company was interested in that land for access to the water, to for a dam to make electricity. It was a drinking water. What was the what was the resource? They were interested in water for all the above power and and drinking?

Andy Kulla: [00:04:19] Yeah. They never generated power. Although there was at one point a dam proposed about two and a half, two and three quarters miles up, which on a topographic feature known as the Hog's Back. And there was a proposal at one point to build a dam across it. Wow. And dam. Wow. Yeah, that didn't go over too well. It didn't happen.

Juanita Vero: [00:04:38] Appreciate that. When was that proposal or like ballpark.

Andy Kulla: [00:04:41] What that was pre my time. Um I cannot.

Juanita Vero: [00:04:46] I oh but like in the 50s like.

Andy Kulla: [00:04:47] I couldn't actually give you a date on that. Um.

Juanita Vero: [00:04:50] Okay.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:04:51] Andy. So, so one of the, uh, places I have a yearly expedition to is Poe Meadow. I go up there, annual camp out with some friends. Every year. And you mentioned homesteaders or squatters over the years. Would that location be a part of that group of folks who lived up there, I'm assuming?

Andy Kulla: [00:05:08] Yep. And, uh, actually, I'll talk a little more about Forest and his father, who lived up there. Oh, okay. Yeah, they were a key part of that history. Documented and save some of it in a self-published book called life in the rattlesnake. And then there's subsequent oral histories that are available through the University of Montana, which he and his wife Flossie tell stories of the life of the rattlesnake. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah, he was a key character. There were these, uh, 19 farmsteads, homesteads, uh, the drainage had mail and newspaper delivery. Um, there was a hunting lodge. There were telephone lines. In 1919, a man caused wildfire, wiped out the whole drainage. 1919 my understanding from the recordings of Forest Poe was that only two home farmsteads burned.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:05:51] Those that burned, did not attend to the home ignition zone.

Josh Slotnick: [00:05:54] They didn't have metal roofs.

Andy Kulla: [00:05:57] And there was, of course, motorized on and off roads use.

Josh Slotnick: [00:06:00] Sorry in time period you're talking about, you imagine people driving early vehicles up the gut of the Rattlesnake?

Andy Kulla: [00:06:05] Oh yeah. Yeah, there were people that lived up there that worked in town. Wow. Yeah. Toward the end of the period with about 1935 1936, Montana Power Company bought out all of these home slash farmsteads with.

Josh Slotnick: [00:06:19] The folks sell voluntarily.

Andy Kulla: [00:06:21] Uh, they were eager to sell. I mean, back then, cash was skinny. I mean, nobody had cash. Nobody dealt in cash. It was all trade. It was all barter. It was all services. So the idea of coming in for, I think I've read of one of them selling for like $3,000 or $3,500. Big money. Okay. Big money and cash money. Yeah, yeah. Sell out. Get the money. Move to town. So the settlers did everything you could do to the land. And with that came pretty high impact. And not to make judgment. That was the context of the era. While all of this was pretty much individual impact and the work of one person or small groups of people from about 1840 to the 1970s, which you could kind of call maybe the final straw came in the 1970s, when Montana Power Company began industrial large scale logging and road building in the drainage. And you can actually see some relics of that in the what is now currently the Rattlesnake Wilderness in Lower Lake Creek and Wrangle Creek.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:07:17] So they were logging up there?

Josh Slotnick: [00:07:19] Yeah, industrial scale logging. Was there any popular response to that?

Juanita Vero: [00:07:25] Yes. Wait, how do we get the name rattlesnake? Because, uh.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:07:30] Oh yeah. How?

Andy Kulla: [00:07:31] The most likely name story is that a person was bitten by a snake while gathering firewood along the creek and died. A grave marker indicated how the person died, but was destroyed by railroad construction, which suggests that the person was buried down by the confluence of Rattlesnake Creek and the Clark Fork, where the railroad is.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:07:50] Damn railroads.

Andy Kulla: [00:07:53] John Mullan came through and who was an Army surveyor 1853 1854, and he named the creek Observation Creek. However, a few years later, in 1860, a map shows it as both Observation Creek and Rattlesnake Creek. Huh. Okay, so that supports multiple stories on name sources.

Josh Slotnick: [00:08:15] Andy, you mentioned industrial scale logging and road building in the Rattlesnake in the 1970s. The 1970s was really, one could argue, was a high point of environmentalism in the United States thinking about Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, things like that, where care for the environment was seen as really a bipartisan issue for probably its first and only time. So was there a popular backlash within Missoula to industrial scale logging and road building in what is now the Rattlesnake Wilderness area?

Andy Kulla: [00:08:45] Yes, and that's what sparked the movement to get the area designated.

Josh Slotnick: [00:08:49] What happened?

Andy Kulla: [00:08:50] Well, I'll tell you. Take yourself back to the 1970s. Uh Missoula was a freewheeling, real friendly town. A birthday parties, cowboys and hippies, drinking side by side, loving and fighting at the stockmen and top hat, a group formed in town called the friends of the rattlesnake. All right. Uh, the movement spread throughout the community and to Washington, DC to save the snake.

Josh Slotnick: [00:09:14] What year are we talking about?

Andy Kulla: [00:09:16] Roughly this is mid 1970s to 1980.

Josh Slotnick: [00:09:20] Okay. Do you mind rattling off just a few of the names of the people who might have been central to this group? Cass Chinski and you? Those are the two names that I associate with this.

Andy Kulla: [00:09:28] But and Cass didn't do it for personal recognition or personal credit.

Josh Slotnick: [00:09:32] No, it's his passion.

Andy Kulla: [00:09:34] It was his passion. It was the land. It was the spirit. It was nature.

Josh Slotnick: [00:09:38] Yeah. Were there others?

Andy Kulla: [00:09:39] Friends of the rattlesnake had a lot of members. About one of them was doctor Bill Brown.

Juanita Vero: [00:09:43] The veterinarian?

Andy Kulla: [00:09:44] Yep.

Josh Slotnick: [00:09:45] Nice job.

Juanita Vero: [00:09:46] Oh, fantastic. Yeah.

Josh Slotnick: [00:09:47] Even going backwards, you know, everyone, it's just amazing.

Andy Kulla: [00:09:51] I'm sure Smoke had a push in it too.

Juanita Vero: [00:09:52] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andy Kulla: [00:09:53] Smoke Elser.

Juanita Vero: [00:09:54] But. So this group got together. What was the mayor, the city council. What was the kind of. Political energy. Everybody Missoula at the time because then you ended up going to DC?

Andy Kulla: [00:10:04] The community support was widespread. I can't name individual political people beyond freshman Congressman Pat Williams who embraced it, who was Pat Williams, who actually carried it through Congress.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:10:15] So from the point in time when Pat Williams and maybe others in Congress started working on the legislation to when it got over the finish line, were there changes that happened there? Yep.

Andy Kulla: [00:10:27] There were changes that came through. It wasn't the Forest Service idea to do it.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:10:31] Oh, really?

[00:10:31] It was not a Kumbaya moment.

Josh Slotnick: [00:10:33] Yeah. What Andy, what was the pushback?

Andy Kulla: [00:10:36] The pushback was that member logging and development was king at that time? Yes, sir. I mean, I worked in superior at that time, and it was logging was king. That's what was happening. And the idea of not doing it had I.

Josh Slotnick: [00:10:51] Was here in the mid 80s and pushed back. Logging was king then in the Reagan era. And James what I think cut it, burn it, pave it was the mantra for how the West should be treated.

Andy Kulla: [00:10:59] It's interesting to note that the two wilderness areas, the Welcome Creek Wilderness and the Rattlesnake Wilderness on the Missoula Ranger District both became designated as wilderness areas as a result of specific citizen efforts to stop logging.

Josh Slotnick: [00:11:14] And were both of those I'd heard this. I don't know if it's true, but with Welcome Creek, maybe the same thing with the rattlesnake, that the creation of the wilderness area was attached to another piece of legislation, that the political climate of earmarks, encouraging folks from different parties to cooperate so they could each get something they want that might not affect the other, played a real role in at least Welcome Creek. I wonder if something like that played a role in the creation of the Rattlesnake. Well, they had.

Andy Kulla: [00:11:40] Actually already built a road into Welcome Creek to log it. The Forest Service had. That's how close it got and it was stopped. The Welcome Creek Road, you can still walk in, you know, like all political movements, it's a push and a pull and a compromise. And that's not bad. That's how it works. You know everybody, one of my bosses once told me, Andy, it's better to have half a pie than than no pie, you know, and that's that's good. That's all right. That's how we should be working. So in the.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:12:04] Case of the, the Rattlesnake was the pie of the wilderness larger to begin with, and it got scaled back or.

Andy Kulla: [00:12:11] My belief is they got well over half a pie. 

[00:12:14] Okay. And was it attached to anything else. Was there an earmark for. I'm just saying guessing like somebody got a bridge in Pennsylvania and we got the Rattlesnake Wilderness area.

Andy Kulla: [00:12:23] There's no indication of that. 

Josh Slotnick: [00:12:26] It was a standalone...

Andy Kulla: [00:12:26] The Rattlesnake Act of 1980 came down as a standalone act, not as an attachment or a rider or anything to anything else. It was hard fought, clean and dirty. There were a lot of alpha males butting heads. There was eco terrorism.

Josh Slotnick: [00:12:41] Eco terrorism!

Andy Kulla: [00:12:42] Eco terrorism.

Juanita Vero: [00:12:42] Burning bridges, literally.

Josh Slotnick: [00:12:44] Described literally burning bridges.

Andy Kulla: [00:12:46] Uh, Franklin Bridge, milepost eight. You've been there. I've been there. Beautiful concrete bridge. You know why that's a concrete bridge? Because it was a wooden bridge and an unknown person. Slash persons went up there at that time and burned down the Franklin Bridge to stop logging.

Josh Slotnick: [00:13:04] Oh, so it was a bridge that carried logging gear?

Andy Kulla: [00:13:06] It was a bridge, it went all the way up the corridor to the end.

Josh Slotnick: [00:13:09] You could have drove a big truck with gear on it. It wasn't a foot bridge. 

Andy Kulla: [00:13:13] No, it was a road bridge.

Josh Slotnick: [00:13:14] So they burned down a road bridge to stop logging.

Andy Kulla: [00:13:16] And, you know, and in civilization's wisdom and learning, they said, well, we'll just put in a concrete bridge. Problem solved. Yeah, yeah, it was very emotionally charged.

Josh Slotnick: [00:13:27] I remember when Earth first had their newspaper coming out of Missoula.

Andy Kulla: [00:13:31] Oh, there was tree spiking going on. There was all kinds of stuff going on back then.

Josh Slotnick: [00:13:34] Remember a newspaper? It was a thing you held.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:13:36] I've heard of such things. Yeah.

Juanita Vero: [00:13:38] Got ink on your finger.

Josh Slotnick: [00:13:39] Ink on your fingers.

Andy Kulla: [00:13:40] To this day, some of the parties that had a part in its designation and its current management, they'll have a strong dislike for each other. I mean, these were deep, deeply burned scars, you might say.

Josh Slotnick: [00:13:54] Were there people who were on the same side? Generally, they wanted rattlesnake being made a wilderness, but disagreed on strategy and then caused a rift there.

Andy Kulla: [00:14:03] Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, even between the friends of the rattlesnake and Pat Williams, there was dissent over the final wording, the congressional committee report from September 1980, the month before the act was passed, explicitly spelled out that it was closed. Development, logging, grazing resources extraction. Very explicit, pointed language that addressed the intent of the effort to get it designated. But by the time next month it had gotten to Congress for the passage of the act. In October of 1980, the Forest Service and other parties had had a hand in homogenizing the language to where it was not that explicit, but the intent was very well known to the community and to the Lolo Forest.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:14:50] So we're talking about the wilderness, but there's also this thing called the National Recreation Area. And is that something that. Was there at the very beginning of work on this piece of legislation, or did that evolve over time?

Andy Kulla: [00:15:04] Well, it morphed as many of these efforts go. Welcome Creek included, they start out as a movement or an effort for preservation, and they morph and they go through all these, like in Welcome Creek. They never started it, wanting it to be a wilderness. They just wanted to stop the logging. But by the time it went through all of the push pull political mechanisms compromise. It ended up a wilderness. It's interesting to note that the rattlesnake was originally called the National Recreation and Education Area.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:15:38] I never heard of an area with that designation.

Andy Kulla: [00:15:41] Yeah, it was called the NREA.

Josh Slotnick: [00:15:44] What about it would be educational.

Andy Kulla: [00:15:47] Well, the principle was that it was so close to Missoula the idea to let nature be the healer, because it's unusual that the Forest Service will go into a heavily impacted area and just back off and let it heal more typically and appropriately. In a lot of cases, they'll go in with equipment and kind of speed up the process, take out.

Josh Slotnick: [00:16:08] A road or...

Andy Kulla: [00:16:09] Take out a road, do some. I mean, back in those days, they never they never taken out a road with sacrilege. There was a time in the 1970s when the Forest Service actually had a program called pre roading. With pre roading. It wasn't the Forest Service, did it? Congress directed them. But Congress gave the Forest Service money specifically to road areas that didn't have roads. They were directed to find large tracts of unroasted land. And then the problem was defined for that large tract as it didn't have a road.

Josh Slotnick: [00:16:43] Not that it had trees that were of value or some other resource. Just go build roads?

Andy Kulla: [00:16:48]  Well, the trees didn't hurt a bit because what they did is they gave the Forest Service money to locate these areas and go build roads with congressionally appropriated money. And that was the project. And that fixed the problem, which was it didn't have any roads. And then the Forest Service could go in and put in a timber sale with these existing roads. But the timber didn't have to pay for the roads. And even now, with the Forest Service calls back, country was never in.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:17:17] Folks who are wondering, Andy is using air quotes around backcountry as we speak. Thank you, thank you.

Andy Kulla: [00:17:24] What is called now backcountry in the 1986 forest Plan and in the proposed action for the revised plan is just the areas they didn't get to back then because there were so much of them. They were like the leftovers.

Josh Slotnick: [00:17:37] Too far away.

Andy Kulla: [00:17:37] Just didn't have enough time. They were on the list, but never got to it because once the impacts of the heavy logging in the 70s and 80s became apparent, and the environmental regulation things that came out after that, prewriting went away. That was no longer a program.

Juanita Vero: [00:17:55] It was funding that was lost or a philosophical change or what what happened?

Andy Kulla: [00:17:59] Both.

Juanita Vero: [00:17:59] Okay.

Andy Kulla: [00:18:00] And it wasn't the Forest Service that decided we should pre-road this. Remember, these are things that Congress directed the Forest Service to do. This was the institutional thinking. I mean, in the 60s, the idea of clear cutting was a good idea because it was economical. You get a whole lot out with one big line. I mean, in the 60s, I mean, it was best science. Clear cuts were thought to imitate and duplicate fire.

Josh Slotnick: [00:18:19] Yeah.

Juanita Vero: [00:18:19] Right.

Andy Kulla: [00:18:20] When we found they're different. That's okay. You know, I mean, we always work on our best known science at the time, and you can't really judge past things by current values. It's just different.

Juanita Vero: [00:18:31] That's well said.

Andy Kulla: [00:18:32] It's just different.

Juanita Vero: [00:18:33] Can you go back to the education component of of the title?

Andy Kulla: [00:18:36] Well, there was actually when the legislation was first developed and shortly after passage there was talk of building an educational center. I mean, like a big building up there to be an education place, but with the emphasis on.

Juanita Vero: [00:18:50] Natural history or...?

Andy Kulla: [00:18:52] Nature. I mean, this word is vague, but nature as the healer, nature as the teacher. It's the wind, it's the water, it's the soil. It's the spirit of the snake. So when the designation came down in 1980, it was a big deal. Through the sheer will and spirit of Missoula, the snake received the highest level of protection and recognition for the primitive undeveloped recreation resource in Montana. The recreation resource in the snake had been recognized on the same level as wildness and solitude is recognized for wilderness areas under the Wilderness Act. According to the law, the primitive, undeveloped recreation resource in The rattlesnake is the best that there is in all of Montana.

Josh Slotnick: [00:19:34] Andy, what do you think about the rattlesnake now? There's this big parking lot, trailhead, a bunch of trails in 1980, when this thing was made real. Was some of that there, or did all of that follow.

Andy Kulla: [00:19:45] The that followed the designation in 1980.

Josh Slotnick: [00:19:49] So the Forest Service built the parking lot, put in trails, the parking.

Andy Kulla: [00:19:52] The parking lot, the main trailhead was so controversial, really, that there were over 30 alternatives on the table at one point. What was.

Josh Slotnick: [00:20:00] Controversial?

Andy Kulla: [00:20:01] Everything! 

Juanita Vero: [00:20:02] Then you'd have people coming in. 

Andy Kulla: [00:20:02] The size, the location, the design. There was so much micro concern over overdevelopment.

Josh Slotnick: [00:20:11] My goodness. So given the level of use that that place has gets right now on a sunny Saturday, I wonder what the grandparents of the rattlesnake would have to say when they go up there. And it's completely full of cars and cars down over the bridge, and people biking up through whatever trail that is through the neighborhood below to get there. I mean, it's just packed with humanity. I wonder how to put you in that. One of the grandparents. So does it feel like, oh my goodness, it kinda backfired.

Andy Kulla: [00:20:37] Well, it would, except You know, there's magic to the snake. There's a spirit of the snake. And one of the things that differentiates the snake from what's called concentrated recreation, which is when you go to Blue Mountain in the, in the parking lots full, the hillside looks like ants. Yes. You go to Patty Canyon when everything's packed and you go out there and you see people. But one of the amazing things that you find about the snake is that when it's parking lots full, you go up there and you go a mile or two in. And where is everybody? There's so much by topography. It absorbs people well and naturally offers a experience of solitude and primitive, undeveloped recreation.

Josh Slotnick: [00:21:15] Are you concerned that we were loving it to death in terms of impact and use?

Andy Kulla: [00:21:20] Yes, I am concerned about that. And it should have its own management area like it does now and like wilderness does, which is the only other congressionally designated area on the forest in the state, but that it's going to need not only the current standards, but additional protective standards to protect it in the future as the population grows. Yes. As pressure on national forest recreation grows, as the impacts of public recreation on national forest grows.

Josh Slotnick: [00:21:47] The destructive force now is not industrial logging and road building. It's humans wanting to get their yayas out.

Andy Kulla: [00:21:54] Now the area, if you think about it, it's this roughly 60 to 62,000 acre block. The southern part of that is the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area. That's approximately 28,000 acres.

Josh Slotnick: [00:22:08] And this is the area that most people recreate in when they go to the rattlesnake.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:22:11] And Andy, why was that chosen to be a national recreation area as opposed to simply expanding the boundaries of the wilderness? Was it because it was already eroded to some extent or.

Andy Kulla: [00:22:24] Well, there was roads into the wilderness already, you know, other than, um, hypothesizing, I can't speak directly to that. How that decision came down, was it...

Juanita Vero: [00:22:34] Just like kind of the phasing into the wilderness? 

Andy Kulla: [00:22:39] Well, the proximity to the National Recreation Area, when it was designated, was intended to be a transition zone between the wilderness and Missoula.

Josh Slotnick: [00:22:48] So what are the things that can happen in a national recreation area that can't happen in a wilderness?

Andy Kulla: [00:22:53] There's no mechanized equipment allowed in a wilderness. It's not light handed management. It's no management, other than things as simple as trail building. It's managed for a setting and appearance. That is, quote, according to the Wilderness Act, untrammeled by man, where the signs of man and development and management are not apparent.

Juanita Vero: [00:23:16] Are ebikes allowed in the NRA? 

Andy Kulla: [00:23:19] No. The Forest Service, fortunately, still classifies e-bikes as motorized vehicles, which they are.

Josh Slotnick: [00:23:25] I saw a sign in Sawmill Gulch just a few days ago that said no e-bikes.

Juanita Vero: [00:23:29] Gotcha. Okay, so you can ride your bike to the wilderness area.

Josh Slotnick: [00:23:32] I rode my acoustic bike right by that sign. Would some of the and excuse...this is a question out of ignorance, but I'm just coming from a place of being aware that people are very spooked about the potential for catastrophic fire burning homes and businesses in the Missoula Valley. Think of what happened in California and Paradise, or the campfire, or in talent, Oregon. Are those sorts of viewpoints having an influence on the Forest Service? And people are saying, well, we really need to do much more active management in that recreation area because it's so close to town, because if it burns, we could get ember showers in Missoula and everybody's house goes down. So we got to really get into that, that 28,000 acres and actively manage it with big heavy gear or else. Is that part of the conversation or am I just projecting?

Andy Kulla: [00:24:21] No, no, that's what I call the chicken Little argument. The sky is falling.

Josh Slotnick: [00:24:25] So people, if we don't... that argument, I'm not making it. I'm just guessing.

Andy Kulla: [00:24:28] Oh yeah, that's very popular with Forest Service. I mean, and it's, uh, not only popular within the Forest Service, but there there's legislation, there's money in the Infrastructure or Inflation Reduction Act specifically for that. They're directed to do that.

Josh Slotnick: [00:24:42] For forest management or fuels mitigation or something like that.

Andy Kulla: [00:24:45] There's a tremendous number of terms that the Forest Service has for logging. I mean, it's almost like for my whole career, they tried to find a word that would make logging palatable. Um, there was new perspectives. There was ecosystem management. Meant there was a new paradigm.

Juanita Vero: [00:25:00] Fiber supply.

Andy Kulla: [00:25:01] Fiber supply, fuel reduction. A number of them. There's a number of 'em.

Juanita Vero: [00:25:06] Veg management.

Andy Kulla: [00:25:07] Vegetation management.

Josh Slotnick: [00:25:08] So are you saying those things managing a forest aren't. It's not real. It's not something that should be done.

Andy Kulla: [00:25:14] No, no, I'm not at all an anti-logging person. I think that there is a place for logging in the national forest, but the National Recreation Area, isn't it because of the intent of the act? I see, and and it's an important distinction. It's a huge distinction. And the importance of letting nature be the teacher and the healer. Now, that sounds kind of cosmic and out there and all, but that's what it is. And that's how this came about. And that's something that we have to confront. That's what I call the spirit of the snake.

Josh Slotnick: [00:25:43] Okay. So I just got asked this kind of more philosophical question. Let's say we need to go backwards. You talked about 1860 or, you know, back maybe even a little further. There were human beings living on this landscape in a way that wasn't destructive, as we understand destruction to be. Now, I have heard that folks who were living here then actively burned parts of the forest. They were doing essentially a version of forest management to meet some of their needs for game and for other things. Would you say human beings in 1820, living here in small bands were not in nature?

Andy Kulla: [00:26:16] Well, two things there I would suggest is number one, people back then were acting more individually and just didn't have the capacity or the capability for the large scale environmental impact that came with mechanized equipment, with Yarders, with.

Josh Slotnick: [00:26:32] They didn't have the tools

Andy Kulla: [00:26:32] They just didn't have the gear.

Josh Slotnick: [00:26:35] They didn't have the gear.

Andy Kulla: [00:26:37] Or the numbers. Yeah.

[00:26:38] or the numbers. Yeah. Pre 1860. There weren't even any white people here. This is just what I've heard. I'm in no way even pretending to be an authority. I had heard that those folks who are living here, native people used fire to quote, manage the forests to meet some of their own needs. And would that be considered nature, given those folks were here indigenously in the same way that deer and elk were here wild indigenously?

Andy Kulla: [00:27:03] Well, in the natural resource Forest Service business, there's like this line in time called Pre-settlement. Okay. And that is a pre-settlement era. And when they talk about the condition of the forest pre-settlement, it's when the native people were living and managing it. And that's considered a part of nature in the natural resource dialog on what is natural versus post-settlement. So when they talk about recreating a pre-settlement condition, it includes that use of fire by native people.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:27:36] Thank you. And I think arguably, and this might be a little different than what you're you're saying, Andy, but there is a cultural aspect to the landscape, even pre-European settlement, but it's perhaps qualitatively and quantitatively different than Post-settlement era manipulation of the landscape, which is still has its imprint of culture upon it, but in a way that is much more disruptive of those natural systems.

Andy Kulla: [00:28:02] Yeah, although there's a lot of stuff coming out now to make it less disruptive. I mean. When you talk about current day Forest Service logging, it's a whole different world and you can't bunch it with the with I mean, we used in those days, all it was about is what you're going to take out of the forest. When you marked a timber sale, I remember my first job with the Forest Service was marking timber sales in the Sierras, where they had these big four and five foot Ponderosa and Jeffrey pines. We called the pickles. And when you went out to lay out a unit, you went for the pickles. That's what you were there. You were there to get the volume, to get the big ones and leave the what they used to call a crop tree release, where you leave the crummiest worst to take the highest value. That's completely opposite. Now, when you see current Forest Service logging, it is hugely enlightened compared to that. Not only in terms of looking at what are you going to leave for a healthy forest, but the considerations for wildlife, for fish, for water quality, for and.

Juanita Vero: [00:29:03] All the equipment is totally enlightened as well.

Andy Kulla: [00:29:06] Oh yeah.

Juanita Vero: [00:29:06] Completely different than what it was in the 80s.

Andy Kulla: [00:29:07] Yeah. So yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't mean to make a value judgment on pre-settlement managers Post-settlement management. I'm just trying to say here's what it is and here's what we got, but it's greatly improved.

Josh Slotnick: [00:29:17] I was just trying to get to when you said nature be the healer. What that really meant.

Andy Kulla: [00:29:21]  [00:29:21]What that means in the spirit of the snake is to leave it alone and let it heal. And it really has done that. I mean, you go up the snake today, you would have no idea that it had been heavily cut over for railroad ties, for firewood, that it had roads that had had a big fire, that it had mines, that it had people running up and down the creek literally shooting each other. [00:29:43]

Josh Slotnick: [00:29:43]  [00:29:43]Wow. Yeah. [00:29:44]

Andy Kulla: [00:29:44]  [00:29:44]It was a wild and wooly place. [00:29:46]

Juanita Vero: [00:29:46] So the protection that that you and Cass in the in 1976, what's the date? Well, the act was 1980. Okay. But when you guys got together, when the friends of the rascal got together, I.

Andy Kulla: [00:29:57] Don't claim credit for anything in the 70s. That was completely Cass's thing.

Juanita Vero: [00:30:03] Okay, well, I guess what I'm getting at is, do you think such an effort could be successful today?

Andy Kulla: [00:30:08] Oh, yeah. It's already.

Juanita Vero: [00:30:09] In the current climate?

Andy Kulla: [00:30:09] Oh, you mean, for a new area? You know, with the divisive politics and this politics of hatred and misinformation in the internet, if we were to start on that today. Boy, that'd be a wild card. You know, it was different then. You know, there were spirit, there was unity, there was movements, the whole condition of the environment. Remember, we had rivers that caught on fire. Yeah, yeah. Kind of polluted. Yeah. You know, I mean, it was a different thing then. And there weren't these tools that we have now for misinformation.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:30:42] So Andy, I guess thinking about how we move forward into the future with planning of these wildlands and what they ought to look like, uh, for future generations, be that the Rattlesnake Wilderness, the National Recreation Area, or any other place. Let's just for a brief moment go back to 1980. So you mentioned that the Forest Service wasn't necessarily at the tip of the spear when it came to planning, but how did that so Congress acted then what? How did the agency respond at that point?

Andy Kulla: [00:31:12] Well, like I said, it wasn't Kumbaya. It was a push pull. It was a hard knock down, drag out fight. October 1980 act passed. The intent and spirit was very clear in the minds of the Lolo National Forest. Lolo National Forest then began working on one of the first forest plans in the country.

Josh Slotnick: [00:31:32] When was the Rattlesnake Recreation Area open as a recreation area?

Andy Kulla: [00:31:37] As soon as the act was passed.

Josh Slotnick: [00:31:38] They didn't have to build the trailhead.

Andy Kulla: [00:31:40] And no, the first thing they did, first thing they did was closed it to motorized use.

Josh Slotnick: [00:31:44] And that happened immediately?

Andy Kulla: [00:31:45] That happened right in their hair before or after.

Josh Slotnick: [00:31:48] And you said there was a fight about the trailhead.

Andy Kulla: [00:31:50] Oh, there. Well, there was, um, controversy.

Josh Slotnick: [00:31:53] It didn't just happen where the. No, it.

Andy Kulla: [00:31:55] Was uh, it was deeply and and what the fight was, was against overdevelopment. That's what the issues were, is that the proponents of the act and the community did not want it overdeveloped. 

Josh Slotnick: [00:32:06] What do you mean overdeveloped for recreational...?

Andy Kulla: [00:32:08] Too big to surfaced, too many structures. A little known fact is that the first 6/10 of a mile of road 99, the trail that goes up from the parking lot up...

Josh Slotnick: [00:32:20] The main coordiator?

Andy Kulla: [00:32:21] Up to Schoolhouse Junction, the first 6/10 of a mile was designated to be a wheelchair accessible trail and to be surfaced suitable for wheelchair travel. That was so controversial that when the Forest Service engineers were out there doing the surfacing and widening it to like, I think it's like six feet or something for wheelchairs.

Josh Slotnick: [00:32:40] it's pretty wide.

Andy Kulla: [00:32:41] ...Members of the public, FOR were out there with a ruler measuring to make sure that they didn't make it too thick and over develop it. I mean, this was a hot deal. So take that atmosphere and think about now we're going to build a trailhead here. What's it going to look like? Well, it ain't going to be paved. It ain't going to have big buildings. It ain't going to have a lot. And it is what it is.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:33:02] Eventually the Forest Service came around to some extent?.

Andy Kulla: [00:33:05] So they embedded the intent of it. Firmly in the 1986 Lolo National Forest plan. I came on in 1989. In 1992, I wrote the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area and Wilderness Limits of Acceptable Change based Management direction. You might think of it as the management plan. Sure. And then from there, the 1992 LAC plan that I described in longer terms was amended into that and became part of the Lolo National Forest Plan. And it added additional prescriptive standards to protect the primitive, undeveloped recreation resource with things such as trail standards for maintenance, for width, for condition, campsite density condition, a number of people, encounters to group size, encounters to protect solitude, all these sorts of things. It was like the model then for how you manage change. And the principle was that you knew change was going to happen, but you would identify thresholds. And then when those thresholds were met and exceeded, then you took management actions to bring it back to that threshold. I mean, the real heroes on this thing isn't me. It was the people who came in to work every single day, rolled up their sleeves and got their hands dirty with the resource. It was a people like Jack Fisher, my predecessor on the Missoula district, people like Joe Tippett, Jean Thompson, Bruce Johnson, Mila McLeod, with the cultural issues, these are the people who got down and did the real work of it. These were Forest Service people who took this intent and took these standards and made sure that they were implemented on the ground.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:34:41] So for folks who might be listening, who capture that, or understand or have a glimpse of the spirit of the snake, what would you tell them as far as ways in which they might both nurture that spirit and also contribute as a community to making sure that those core values of the rattlesnake remain for not only now, but years to come.

Josh Slotnick: [00:35:05] That's a that's a great question, Andy. So many of the people listening to this will be asking that very same thing. Kind of a well, what can I do?

Andy Kulla: [00:35:12] The Lolo Forest plan has a proposed action out in the comment period on it closed yesterday. What can people do? They're trying to revise the plan that was put in place in '86 and '92 to protect the primitive, undeveloped recreation resource.

Juanita Vero: [00:35:28] But to be fair, you've said you've said that. I mean, it's kind of this top down, cookie cutter approach that it wasn't actually generated from folks on the ground making these sort of recommendations.

Andy Kulla: [00:35:39] Now, how did this happen? Well, back in '86, when the Forest Service... And '80 and '86 when the forest plan was written, and after that, the Lolo Forest was made up of long tenured forest supervisors, specialists, district people who had deep relationships with the community so that when conflict situations arose, they approached them as friends and said, hey, Josh, you know this isn't going too well. What can we do? And they worked it out, just cooperatively worked on things because they knew each other. They had deep relationships in the community. They had staff that had knew the land really well. The heroes in the 86 plan were conservationists like Greg Munther, who wrote the standards for the fish and who still now is a world class conservationist. Mike Hylis, who watched out for the wildlife, skip Rosequist, who watched out for the water, a Milo McLeod who was on board for the archeological. These people got down and wrote the hard standards and made it work, but they were long tenured relationships in the community. They knew the resource. Now, unfortunately, the Forest Service through budget cuts and pressure. I mean, I can't I'm not going to fault them. They're not evil people. They're getting a lot of pressure to be pulled in a lot of different ways. They don't have tenured people. They don't have people on the ground who know it. The Lolo Forest Plan Revision team consists of this cyber strike team, who is technically very capable in writing forest plans that comply with the 2012 planning rule.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:37:07] We may need to do a part two

Josh Slotnick: [00:37:09] I think we got to do a part two.

Juanita Vero: [00:37:10] We got to do a part two.

Andy Kulla: [00:37:11] Can I finish with what people can do?

Juanita Vero: [00:37:13] Yes, yes, yeah.

Andy Kulla: [00:37:13] They can get involved. The forest plan is layered and layered and has six plan components you look at. When I first looked at the plan, I didn't know which side was up front, back. I was like, what? And it was only through chance that I got onto it because another conservation group asked me to review the plan for them and I was overwhelmed. So I just said, I'm going to take a little piece of real estate like the NRA that I know about and see what it says there so you can get involved, get involved in a local recreation group. That's good, but try not to get into a recreation group that's winner take all. I'm in the ski club. To hell with everything else. I'm in the mountain bike club. I want trails for bikes everywhere. Try not to get in that. Remember that we got to share our cookies in the way that this thing is going to work is that we got to work together. We got to work together.

Juanita Vero: [00:37:58] Is there a recreation recreation group that you recommend?

Andy Kulla: [00:38:01] Well, you know, the group that I think is best suits the general conservation. Philosophy being protect public access to public land, keeping public lands public, and maintaining quality fish and wildlife habitat is a backcountry hunters and anglers.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:38:18] Is there still a friends of the rattlesnake?

Andy Kulla: [00:38:20] Well, they've kind of refired up with this proposed action. There's not as many of them there long in the tooth. I'm working with them. They're talking. They've commented. Get involved with recreation groups, write advocacy letters to your representatives at the state and federal levels explaining that the rattlesnake is important to you. Insist on clear and accountable standards and goals like are in the 86 plan in 92. Lack direction and insist accountability and clarity in the revised plan.

Juanita Vero: [00:38:50] We are running out of time, but we're going to have to do another one. So before we close, can you share with us a good book you read Nugget of Wisdom?

Andy Kulla: [00:38:57] Well, I'm all about conservation and music. Um, I've spent my life in the mountains. My favorite place is the middle and nowhere. We spend time on the ocean. I call it water ness. It's the same as wilderness, but with the topography below you. I read a lot of garbage cops and robbers stuff, but I've also read some good books that mean something to me. Um, there's a cops and robber author named Scott Turow, and he's written probably ten or more books. And aside from the cops and robbers stories, his insight into human behavior and human motivation in his characters is just incredible. Some of the books, I guess, on these topics, one that, um, should be required reading for anybody that lives in Missoula is Indian Creek Chronicles.

Juanita Vero: [00:39:38] That's a good one.

Andy Kulla: [00:39:38] By Peter Fromm. About a University of Montana student who gets his winter job to go up and tend some salmon fry. That's a keeper. Um, another fantastic book. I really appreciate what's called Hand Loggers by W.H. Jackson and Hand Loggers is a story of a young man in California in the early 1900s who goes up to a logging camp in Oregon, meets a guy who wants to go gold mining in Alaska, and he ends up hand logging the islands in southwestern Canada and then Alaska. What you did is you go along by boat, and you look at all the timber on these islands that is hanging over the water, and you go to Ketchikan or Sitka somewhere, and you get a contract from the mill for 5 million board feet of clear spruce, and you spend all summer dropping these logs into the ocean, yarding them up in a bay to make a giant raft. And at the end of the summer, you call the mill who holds a contract to say, I'm done. They come up with a tug and take away. But the one thing that Jackson said, which was really good, he said, the one thing that ruined wild places in the West more than anything was maps. Um, he was there when the maps first came out and it ruined it. He said before that only the people who lived on the land knew the land intimately, knew the places, and all of a sudden, all these people could come in there.

Juanita Vero: [00:40:53] People still say that today. Electronic maps. Yes, yes.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:40:57] Thanks so much, Andy. We really appreciate you coming in and sharing some of your wisdom and knowledge of this place that we all love and call home.

Andy Kulla: [00:41:05] Well, I wouldn't call it wisdom. I'd call it. I mean, I've made a lot of mistakes, but I try not to make them twice.

Juanita Vero: [00:41:12] Good advice. Thanks so much, Andy.

Dave Strohmaier: [00:41:14] Thank you.