A Wise and Humble Man
(pretty close)
“Be humble. Learn from your mistakes.”
Occasionally you’ll meet someone who epitomizes the best of an era. I first heard of Bud Moore while conducting research for our 2003 program, “Conflict in the Clearwater.” The half hour show explored the major issues facing one of America’s great national forests, once known for massive white pines, huge ocean-going chinook salmon, one of the largest elk herds in the world, and the immense Fire of 1910.
We had interviewed more than a dozen individuals – sportsmen, scientists, policy makers, enviros, residents – for the show we knew would be heavy on policy and controversy. The consensus was that the Forest Service was not effectively managing the 1.8 million acres in north-central Idaho.
And yet all those we interviewed knew and respected retired Forest Ranger Bud Moore. He was able to listen and talk with all of them; personally, I think it was because he really believed in using the land. Plus, he was a good man. “He’s knowledgeable, honest and ethical, generous, and respectful of all, including the wildlife,” explained a friend who knew Bud, “and he’s got a charmingly childlike quality about him. He couldn’t wait to show several of us a new bear claw he had discovered on a tree on his 80-acre ranch. He was thrilled there was still a bear presence in his neighborhood.”
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On the long drive up to Powell, Idaho, along U.S. Highway 12, I had brought Bud’s book with me: Lochsa Story: Land Ethics in the Bitterroot Mountains. I was hoping for an autograph.
The book was a pleasant surprise: a hefty 450 pages written by a man with forest smarts and an 8th grade education. It contained a lot of history, which was no surprise, but it also focused on the preservation of self-renewing ecosystems and how humans should treat the land.
I knew from the book that Bud had roamed the Bitterroot Mountains between Idaho and Montana as a boy, first as a trapper and hunter for his family; then as a fire fighter for the Forest Service; and then as District Ranger of the Powell Ranger District. He continued his rise up the Forest Service ladder, to Deputy Supervisor of the Lolo National Forest in Ogden, Utah. He even spent time in Washington, D.C., as chief of the Branch of Employee Development and Training. I should have asked him if he could trust people who never left the concrete and the asphalt. He probably would have just smiled.
In 1969 Bud returned to Missoula, Montana, as chief of fire and aviation for the U.S. Forest Service. Along the way he picked up an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Montana. The man had seen all sides of the U.S. Forest Service and was delighted to return to what he called his “home ground.” I was looking forward to the interview.
But there was a problem. At least I thought there was a problem. Bud was now 85 years old and possibly housebound. How sharp would his mind really be? Was he still relevant? Would he even be up for a lengthy interview?
The man we met that day in Powell certainly made a good first impression; he was a towering man with a ready smile and friendly eyes. I remember thinking, if the Grim Reaper does show up to take him, Bud will either charm him to death or wrestle him to a draw. Either way, we’d get our lengthy interview.
“This was my anchor point on earth,” he began. “This is where I came at a young age to put my early life together. I worked for the Forest Service in the summer and trapped furs in the winter. At one time I had seven cabins and 80 miles of line. I had found my Heaven. It was a big time for me. I thought I’d stay forever, but World War 2 yanked me out. I look back at it now as a great adventure. These mountains are who I am, really.”
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Turns out I had no reason to doubt Bud’s mind or his relevance, especially when he cranked up his one-man sawmill and began turning pine trees into 2x12 boards. “The challenge here really is to get some income back from the land. I couldn’t keep this place if we couldn’t get something back from it,” he said, pointing to his sawmill. “This is the centerpiece, where the payoff comes.” Bud had learned early on that if his boards were straight and precise with correct dimensions, contractors and home builders would seek him out; he wouldn’t have to advertise. Sure enough, he was able to sell every 2x12 he produced.
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Bud was one of the first in the Forest Service to use the term “ecosystem management.” To him the phrase meant respecting the animals and the land, while taking what we humans need to exist. He called it “keeping all the parts,” something he didn’t think the Forest Service understood. Like the good teacher he was, Bud decided to show, rather than tell, using his own 80 acres just across the Montana border.
“I’ve often said I can log for beaver; I can log for salmon, I can log for whitetails,” said Bud. “Come up to our place, and I’ll show you a sawmill sitting in the forest where game have a good hideout, and I take lots of wood out of there. We can do it, but if politicians and interest groups keep the civil wars going, this country is going to look pretty bad in the future.”
The chances of finding agreement in the complicated Clearwater forest were slim, as Bud knew; too many strong personalities and interest groups involved. “But let’s at least get to healthy disagreement with respect,” he said. “That brings out so much. We’re in that mode in Idaho more than in Montana, but we’re all dependent on this land. That’s our future. As the land goes, so goes our way of life.”
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The day we were there, Bud and some of his neighbors met to discuss the landscape analysis of their respective properties, to help guide them as they managed their private acres for the animals as well as for humans.
“I think Nature has, over eons of time, come up with a scheme that we just can’t beat. That’s the way I look at it,” explained Bud. “So we work with that. But we’re part of this thing, too, and we have to take something out of it, too; we have to survive. And so right in there is the challenge. What I do in our forest is try to figure out all those natural processes going on.
“I remember when I was logging, conventional forestry would prune up the tree branches, to let more light in. But what about the old bull elk coming down here in the winter? This is a critical movement area. He’s reaching for that black moss. Why not leave him some branches for it to hang on? Little things like that I think are important. I do some of them; I don’t know how important they are. All I know is there is a reason for them.”
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In one of his short stories, author Norman MacLean wrote that, in the early days, the Forest Service picked its rangers by finding the toughest guy in town, the one who could beat up the others. “I think he overstated it,” said Bud, “but there was some truth to that. They tried to get the best woodsman, who could take care of the forest at the time.”
Being a forest ranger in the 1950s was a truly respectable profession. There was even a popular TV series featuring the famous collie, Lassie, who lived and worked with forest ranger Corey Stuart. The show was must-see TV for this 10-year-old boy. I still remember being chosen at the North Dakota State Fair in Minot to join Lassie on the outdoor stage and perform some simple tricks with the beautiful collie. I would make a round circle with my outstretched hands; Lassie would jump through the circle, and the audience would applaud. I was pretty sure Lassie and I had become fast friends.
But once we Baby Boomers began spending more time in the forest and seeing those huge clearcuts around the bend, even Lassie couldn’t stem the sense of betrayal many of us began to feel. It doesn’t take too many large-scale clearcuts on a multi-day hike to anger and sadden someone who had convinced himself the Forest Service wore the white hats. Turns out, many in the Forest Service felt that same anger and sadness, too.
Bud explained it this way. “There came a point in the 1960’s where the timber harvest program became the dominant value. It was lucrative, with strong constituencies that tended to override other values. So that carried us too far in one direction.
“I called it the timber cut syndrome,” he said. “The budget would come out from the district, saying ‘You need to do this and this, but be sure you cut this much timber.’ No matter what we did, rangers had to crank out a certain amount of timber. That’s where the mistrust began."
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I think he was right; the late '60s were a time of major upheaval, but the Forest Service was its own worst enemy. “I often said poor timber management practices created more wilderness than all the wilderness people put together," said Bud. "People would see that; they couldn’t buy it; it was too rough. Leaders in the Forest Service were torn apart, too. They loved the land but were still trying to get that wood out. They were damaging other values, and they knew it.
“The thing we don’t have yet is the public’s trust. Just how in the blazes can a ranger run his show with the public fighting each other, the public he’s supposed to be working for, the lumber industry, the outfitting industry, the environmental groups. How can you do it?
“This is a democracy, and you’re just stalemated until we join up a little bit. Working together works. That’s what I’d like to see, and that’s what I’m trying to represent in whatever way I can.”
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Bud Moore’s belief in a managed forest was something I could get behind. I had already experienced one of the benefits of it, but on a much smaller scale.
I had built my cabin at a 4,000-foot elevation, perfect ponderosa pine country. Many of the trees on my property were mature, 100 feet tall and two feet in diameter. On one of the shows we worked on, our 1994 “Health of Our Forest,” a young University of Idaho forester said something that stuck with me. For optimum health of the forest, ponderosas should be at least 30 feet apart. Clearly, my trees and my neighbors’ trees were much too close. Some of the canopies were even touching.
One day my Forest Service entomologist cousin from Oregon dropped by for a visit, took one look at our woodland subdivision and made a bold prediction: the western pine beetle was coming our way, and it would devastate those lovely ponderosas.
He grabbed an orange spray can and began marking every other tree on the three acres. “Those are the ones to cut,” he said. “It’s the only way you’ll save those other big trees on your property.” He explained that thinning improves the vigor of the remaining trees by making more water and nutrients available. A thinned forest is less attractive to bark beetles, he said, and healthy trees can often survive a bark beetle infestation.
I quickly bought into his message. Besides, the fire season in Idaho seemed to be growing longer and hotter. Living next to the Boise National Forest, in what’s now called the “wildland-urban interface,” was becoming risky business.
But as the marked trees started falling, neighbors began questioning my judgment. Hadn’t I read the subdivision covenants? There was to be no clearcutting.
It wasn’t until several years later, after the pine beetles had hit the region hard, and neighbors were losing most of their prized trees, that I became a true believer in one aspect of managed forests. My thinned trees --- with enough water to fend off the bark beetles --- had managed to survive the onslaught.
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Bud was not afraid to face things head on during his stint as district ranger. “It wasn’t somebody else allowing or disallowing me to do things. I was here, and I knew that this big job was mine. And I’d look in the mirror every night and say, ‘how did you do today?’ I didn’t look and say, ‘what’s the Supervisor thinking?’ My job was to steward this country, to know it better than anybody else.
“That was my first priority. The other was to help young people come here to work and to build them into good citizens. One of the greatest compliments is when they’d thank me for what we did here. They were young; they were excited; they didn’t have much experience. They were just trying to go from boys and girls to men and women. I believe it was one of the greatest accomplishments of the Forest Service.”
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There was never a question about Bud’s favorite animal. The grizzly bear once roamed the wild places of the Bitterroot Mountains, and Bud wanted the bear returned. His views didn’t sit well with a lot of people, including many of his friends and neighbors. “They’d say, ‘Bud, you oughta quit pushing this bear thing.’ But I always told them, I can’t abandon the bear. I’m pro-bear. We understand each other and love each other. But all sides, we were all pretty resolute in our thinking.”
His daughter Vickie tells the story of when Bud met a big Griz on the trail one day. "He was behind the main cabin, hunting, at the age of 89," Vickie related to The Missoulian. "He was following deer tracks down a game trail and heard something behind him. He turned around, and there was a big old male grizzly coming his way. The grizzly stood up, and they looked each other in the eye. That really impressed Pop, that they had eye contact for several seconds. Then it walked right around him about 50 feet away and got back on the game trail. It never looked back. Pop was pretty convinced the bear knew who he was, that he's the neighbor who lives in that cabin and won't do me any harm. I think of it as two old grizzlies sizing each other up."
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Bud remained optimistic to the end; he was starting to meet young foresters who were practicing some form of ecosystem management. Timber cutting was no longer automatically the Number One priority. There were other priorities to be considered, like water quality and elk habitat and having a place to escape from the hassles of civilization.
He was convinced something called prescribed burning was part of the solution. We accept that concept now, along with a “let burn” policy when appropriate, but Bud was light years ahead of others in the federal agency. “We need fire because fire performs many more functions than, say, logging would,” he said. “Logging takes a lot out, packs it away. Natural processes like fire don’t take anything out. It leaves it all there, but it recycles it."
There seemed something of a paradox at the heart of the man. He loved grizzly bears and wild creatures, yet he got his start as a trapper and hunted all his life. He joined the Forest Service as a fire fighter yet became somewhat of a renegade, pushing wildfire as a tool for forest health. “When we were starting this program,” he told me, “we got tremendous support from the environmental community. The biggest resistance we had was in the Forest Service.”
Bud took us for a ride into the forest on a dirt road that got us high above miles and miles of Clearwater forest. We could look down and see a patchwork quilt of major clearcuts. “We don’t need the big logging that just wipes out so many values and then waits for 100 years to where it comes back,” he said. “It will eventually come back, but it takes too long. What we do need, though, is stewardship logging that considers all the other values in the ecosystem.”
Our interview was winding down, and we were back at the Powell Ranger station. “This land has some broken pieces. For example, the grizzlies are gone. We lost something great, and the ecosystem won’t be whole until we get em back. The sea-run fish are hanging on, but they’re endangered, as you know. If we want to keep the place whole, we’ve got to work on that, too. Where we have damaged things, we ought to go back and try to fix it.
“So there are some broken linkages, big ones, that go clear to the ocean. He smiled. "I guess we’ve got lots of work to do.”
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Bud Moore passed away in 2010, at the age of 93. It’s possible that we conducted one of the last major television interviews with him. Hopefully, he appreciated our efforts. Bud penned a note in the inner jacket of Lochsa Country: “For the Outdoor Idaho crew with thanks for your professional dedication to Idaho’s places like the Lochsa. Enjoy the story and hold close to Nature.”
As I was reminiscing about Bud, it hit me hard that we’re losing the Bud Moores of the world. I’m just grateful we made the effort to spend two days with him on his “home ground.” And I’m glad that we decided to use Bud in several of our other shows, including our 25th and 30th Anniversary shows and our “Never Say Quit” show.
What I appreciated about Bud was his belief that we should use the land. But be humble about it, and learn from our mistakes.
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