I’m sitting in a meadow just west of Sentinel Mountain and I’m looking at some other peaks that mark the Continental Divide. That’s where we’re going tomorrow. We had dinner around the campfire, the horses milling nearby and the wonderful music of their bells audible over our conversation. During the ride today we saw many signs left by bears and porcupines on the trees; no bears, though, and I can’t say I’m upset about that.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the land we’ve been riding through and what it means to the people who use it. There are three wilderness areas here, the Great Bear, the Bob Marshall, and the Scapegoat, all linked together and totaling more than a million acres. I’ve been surprised at just how much recreation use we’ve seen, from rafting and canoeing to fishing, hunting, hiking, and horsepacking as we’ve been doing. Then I think about all the public lands beyond these areas, places managed by the Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, or the Forest Service--tracts of land almost unimaginably vast. With people’s desire to protect our natural resources and to use these lands for recreation, and the scope of what’s out there, it seems frustrating to me that there’s not more funding to maintain these areas. Here in the Bob Marshall we’ve seen trail crews and volunteers hard at work but from traveling through the wilderness and talking to these folks it’s become obvious that there’s so much more to do.

If we really want to protect these lands and keep these opportunities open somehow we have to figure out a way to do it. You hear so much talk lately about resource management and protection, yet lately I can’t help thinking that we should be putting more thought and effort into people management. After all, if you manage the people you’ll end up managing the resource. Maybe this means education or maybe this means encouraging voluntary stewardship, but somehow it has to be done—these areas are too important to neglect. People need a place—maybe not a national park, maybe someplace closer to home—to stretch their legs and smell the grass, and they need to find a way to take care of these places so that we’ll be able to pass them on the way they were passed on to us.