Stewart Brandborg leans against his home where a bear-clawed Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness sign hangs. Brandborg, who once worked for the National Wildlife Federation and later headed up the Wilderness Society in Washington D.C., has spent his lifetime working to preserve wild lands. In September 2000, the Wilderness Society bestowed its highest honor, the Robert Marshall Award, to Brandborg for his tireless dedication to wilderness. Photo by JEREMY LURGIO - Ravalli Republic

For 40 years the vast expanse of wild lands - now the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness - that Brandborg roamed as a teenager, has carried the protective designation that ensures its preservation for countless generations of Americans.

But at 79, the gritty, lifelong conservationist said he sees the nation's 106 million acres of wilderness - 97 million of which were added after the country's first wilderness areas were designated in September 1964 - as a glass half full, a good start to forever protecting America's remaining premier wild areas.

Brandborg is the only person alive who was involved from start to finish in the eight-year process to gain passage of the Wilderness Act. But long before the fourth-generation Montanan left home for Washington, D.C., to work on behalf of wilderness, he was hiking and packing in the very wild lands he would later help protect.

The son of Guy Brandborg, who for 20 years served as Bitterroot National Forest Supervisor and who was an early advocate for protecting roadless areas in the national forest, Stewart moved to Hamilton in 1937 and continued nourishing a love affair with the great outdoors sowed by his parents. Brandborg's mother, Edna S. Brandborg, grew up in a mining camp near Deer Lodge, where her grandparents settled before Montana was a state.

"My family had a great love of nature," he recalled. "I remember my earliest wilderness experiences with my dad; we would take pack trips from Burnt Fork Lake to the Pintlers."

Brandborg said he recalls as a child meeting Gifford Pinchot, founder of the U.S. Forest Service, and the legendary Bob Marshall, founder of the Wilderness Society.

"When I was about 12, Bob Marshall was at our house after walking from White Cap Peak in the Selway to Boulder Creek up the West Fork," he said. "I remember him sitting at this table and there being an animated discussion between him and my dad. Marshall saw the big drive for roads in the forest and very much wanted to prevent that."

In 1942, at age 17, Brandborg took a seasonal job with the Forest Service and worked in Montana, Idaho and Oregon doing range and forest surveys, trail maintenance, and serving as a fire lookout. Two years later he had risen through the ranks to train other fire lookouts.

"I had been a fire lookout for two seasons," he said. "The war came along and all the good men in our forest left in the summer of 1944. I became headquarter guard at Darby. I was a smokechaser and I trained other lookouts."

By then Brandborg was studying Wildlife Technology at the University of Montana, and during the summers he continued to work in Western forests before most had roads, he said.

"On a cloudy day in undulating country you were damn glad you had your compass," Brandborg said of his years in the woods. "Those were great years in exposing me to wilderness, although at the time the word was not yet in my lexicon. I just knew I loved that country - the high peaks, the song of the pine trees, ... it became part of me."

Even though he was pursuing a career in science, Brandborg said, he quickly recognized the knowledge of the men who'd spent their lives in the backcountry, and he made every effort to glean that knowledge.

"I had a great appreciation of the mountain men," he said, "and I got along with them right off. They knew game animals like no one else. That was at a time when Fish and Game wanted technically trained people. My supervisors didn't have a feeling for the mountain men."

In 1951, Brandborg earned his M.S. in Wildlife Management from the University of Idaho, and in 1953, after seven years of field study, wrote one of the most comprehensive works to date on the life history of mountain goats in the Northern Rockies. That same year, he received an offer to work in Washington, D.C., as assistant conservation director of the National Wildlife Federation.

"They needed a Westerner who knew something about natural resources," he said. "I had a big argument with my dad who felt strongly that I should remain in the West. But I decided to take a chance and in January 1954 moved to Washington."

During his four-and-a-half years with the federation, Brandborg said he learned the congressional process and became closely associated with Howard Zanhiser, director of the Wilderness Society and principal author of the first Wilderness Bill, drafted in 1956 with bipartisan support of Senators Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and John Saylor of Pennsylvania.

That initial bill, he said, was the first legislation to propose a system to designate federally owned wild lands as wilderness, giving them protection within a National Wilderness System. While the bill had strong, broad-based support, its opposition by the "commodity interests" led to a protracted eight-year struggle, during which Brandborg was hired by Zanhiser as director of special projects for the Wilderness Society.

His new job afforded Brandborg the opportunity to garner support among "the good citizens of this country, who overwhelmingly supported the establishment of wilderness." He did this through grass-roots organizing which included a direct-mail campaign to a half-million people.

"The public was solidly behind the effort toward wilderness," he said. "And in the end the commodity interests were blown out of the water by the groundswell of interest in nature and wildness."

In May 1964, on the eve of the Wilderness Bill's passage, Zanhiser died and Brandborg was appointed to succeed him as executive director of the Wilderness Society.

In the months leading up to its September signing, Brandborg had to resolve differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill. In the end, he said, the final law represented what seemed like a whittled-down version of what had been proposed eight years earlier.

"The initial bill put everything that was wild in the system," he said. "What we were expecting was 50 to 60 million acres, what we got was nine million acres."

Besides cutting the amount of land protected, commodity interests, led by Colorado Congressman Wayne Aspinall, insisted that any additional lands beyond the original nine million acres had to go through a laborious process before being added as wilderness.

The complicated procedure - development of proposals and public hearings by management by agencies, departmental and presidential reviews, and Congressional hearings on authorizing bills signed by the President - were meant to hamper the protection of new wilderness, Brandborg said.

Looking back, however, it was this demanding process that allowed thousands of citizens to participate in determining the future of the nation's wild lands, and ultimately in adding 97 million acres to the National Wilderness Preservation System, he said.

"Leaders in some 40 states became prime movers in building the wilderness system within a process recognized as one of the finest demonstrations of our nation's participatory democracy," Brandborg wrote in a recent essay on the Wilderness Act. "They succeeded through public education programs and pressure on elected leaders in Congress."

Brandborg saw the Wilderness Act as a turning point in America's environmental movement, and after the bill was signed into law, he continued to head a grass-roots movement with the Wilderness Society to add millions more acres to the system through hundreds of Congressional hearings. He also garnered support to pass the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act and later led a legal challenge to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which the courts found violated NEPA.

"The Wilderness Act represented the maturing of the environmental movement," he said. "By the time we pushed it through the environment had become a prominent national issue."

Brandborg left the Wilderness Society in 1976 and remained in Washington until 1986, when he and his wife, Anna Vee, returned home to the Bitterroot. Since settling south of Darby, he's worked tirelessly at the grass-roots level on issues near and dear to his heart, including wilderness and land-use planning. He currently serves as president of Bitterrooters for Planning.

The biggest lessons he learned in his 32 years in Washington, he said, is that the power to change things resides within the people.

"The thing I realized early on was that we had to wholesale the process of involving grass-roots people - ranchers, hikers, hunters and fishermen who love the natural world," he said. "You can have a rapport with the Congressmen, but it's the people who vote them into office that really matter in the end."

With dozens of photographs and accolades adorning his office wall and the largest contiguous wilderness in the lower 48 within five miles of his back door, Stewart Brandborg has probably earned the right to sit back and rest. But the steely-eyed environmental activist keeps fighting.

Just days before, he penned a strongly worded letter criticizing the county commissioners for failing to curb "unplanned, unguided, chaotic subdivision development" in the valley and encouraging citizens to let their voice be heard.

"To paraphrase Dante, the hottest spot in Hell is where people stand in silence in times of crisis," he said. "In 32 years in Washington I had one hell of an experience, but if I sat back now it would be a mortal sin."

Still, Brandborg's twinkling eyes look tired as he peers at the distant Sapphire Mountains.

The same eyes that 67 years earlier watched Bob Marshall waving his arms on behalf of wilderness and later sized up two presidents and scores of congressmen on their commitment to the environment dampen a bit at the thought of what the Wilderness Act has meant for this country.

"You know you work so long for so many years to finally say to yourself 'this job is done,'" Brandborg said. "It makes a great beginning for all that must be done in the future. But to have a system in place for saving it, that's the greatest fulfillment to me personally."

Reporter Rod Daniel can be reached at 363-3300 or rdaniel@ravallirepublic.com

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