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At the Continent's Crest As Lewis and Clark and their guide, Sacajawea, made their way westward across the Rocky Mountains, they encountered primeval forests alive with wolves and grizzlies. Nearly two centuries later, these symbols of the frontier West still survive in the Rockies, along with lynx, wolverines, bison, pronghorn, and elk. No other region in the Lower 48 has retained so many of its wildlife species--and no other contains such large expanses of wildlands. National parks lie at the core of two of the Rockie's largest preserves: Yellowstone (mostly in Wyoming) and the Glacier/Waterton complex (on the border between Montana and Alberta). A third vast wilderness lies in central Idaho, with the Salmon River and the Selway/Bitterroot Wilderness at its heart. Even these preserves cannot ensure the survival of wide-ranging predators such as the wolf, however, which roams a territory of 40 to 400 square miles. "The problem in the Rockies is twofold," says Larry Mehlhaff of the Sierra Club's Northern Plains office. "The core areas are not as wild as they used to be. And the wildlife corridors between them are rapidly being chopped up into tiny, lifeless fragments." View a map of the core ecosystems and the key wildlife corridors. The Sierra Club hopes to defend the Rocky Mountains Ecoregion (which extends from Canada through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico) by adding OVER 16 million acres to the 9 million acres of national-forest land already protected as wilderness. These additions would shield the three largest areas form development, as well as two smaller ones: Rocky Mountain National Park (in Colorado) and the San Juan Mountains in Colorado and New Mexico. The latter two lack some of the species that Lewis and Clark noted, but are still expansive and pristine enough to offer hope for restoration. The Sierra Club is also urging Congress to revise statutes that encourage commercial exploitation of public lands, while holding federal land managers accountable to the enlightened provisions that require them to focus on stewardship--not on politics or timber receipts, MINERAL royalties or grazing revenues. "The native home of hope," author Wallace Stegner once called the Rocky Mountains. Fittingly, the Sierra Club's goal here is ambitious. Over the next few years and decades its activists hope to preserve and restore no less than fully functioning natural ecosystems in this still-magnificent land. Key Objectives
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