Lessons of Glacier Peak Wilderness

A 20th century story about wilderness in the North Cascades of Washington is a hopeful one, and encourages us not to forget wilderness in the face of a multitude of challenges in 2025.

As Donald Trump once again becomes president this year, we conservationists must dig in to resist the inevitable attacks on everything accomplished for environmental protection in the last century. He seems not to care about conserving anything, least of all the natural world, about which he knows very little, having spent his life in luxury in New York City and Mar-a-Lago. His outdoor adventures seem to have been largly confined to golf courses. One of his mantras is, of course, “drill baby drill,” he denies there is any global climate crisis, and it’s unlikely he has ever heard the word “biodiversity,” or if he has heard of it he has no conception of its meaning.  So, as I suffer another Trump presidency, I fear for the future of much I care about, especially the future of wilderness.

Trying to find something to do, however small, to resist what is already happening early in Trump 2.0, I’ve decided to focus at least part of my activism in defense of wilderness. Susan Morgan and I have been working on a biography of the late, fierce wilderness advocate Dave Foreman who, if he were here today, would be roaring, as he did throughout his career, in defense of the wild and “wildeors.” In the face of myriad Trump threats to democracy, civic values, decency, justice, global peace, and the welfare of millions of innocent people across the world, the cause of wilderness may seem to many far down the list of priorities in responding to this crisis, but to many of us it is paramount. I’m concerned about all of these other threats but feel that some of us who know and love the wild must remind everyone what is at stake from those who would develop and devour every “natural resource” they can. I define wilderness broadly, encompassing not only “Big W Wilderness” as in America’s National Wilderness Preservation System, but “small w” wilderness like that I grew to love growing up in the 1950s in a small New Hampshire town.

Back then I didn’t know the word. The first time I really considered the wilderness idea was when, as a college student, I read of it in a book by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. He titled it A Wilderness Bill of Rights and I read it soon after it was published in 1965. I also at that time read Interior Secretary Stewart Udall’s The Quiet Crisis which revealed a history of conservation in the United States, another story new to me. None of this was part of my college work, and I was blithely unaware of the long history of destruction of the natural world outside my small New Hampshire world. When David Brower, then executive director of the Sierra Club, spoke to a required lecture series of my entire senior class at Dartmouth College in fall of 1965 on his countrywide tour to raise opposition to proposed dams in the Grand Canyon, I was truly shocked. I had of course heard of the Grand Canyon and believed it and other national parks were sacrosanct (I had yet to visit one), but I was appalled to learn that major developments had long since defiled Yosemite National Park (the Hetch Hetchy dam) and threatened America’s most spectacular landscapes, like the Grand Canyon. There was actually a plan to build dams there? I was outraged.

After Brower finished his talk, I joined fellow students lined up to meet him. I wanted to ask him what I could do to help save the Grand Canyon. He reached into his vest pocket, pulled out a membership application, and said “Join the Sierra Club!” I did, soon found myself in Oregon as a grad student working with Sierra Clubbers there on a campaign to create a North Cascades National Park, and in August of 1968, a month before the park campaign was successfully realized, started a job in Bellingham, Washington. North Cascades National Park, signed into law by President Johnson a month later, was almost literally my back yard. From this point I began exploring wilderness on a scale I could only have imagined growing up in long-settled but still somewhat wild and wonderful New Hampshire woodlands.

An important part of the North Cascades National Park story, and of wilderness in the North Cascades, is that of Miners Ridge and the Glacier Peak Wilderness. I didn’t visit this wilderness for several years, exploring the more immediate back yard where the ice-clad volcano Mount Baker dominated a region of many smaller peaks and ridges, though Mt Shuksan, close by and in North Cascades National Park, was a formidable though not volcanic companion peak. From Baker’s summit on a clear day I could gaze across ridge after ridge of snowy peaks to Glacier Peak, rising above all the others off to the southeast, also an ice-clad volcano. Soon I managed to climb this beautiful, classically shaped strato-volcano, my introduction to the Glacier Peak Wilderness. My buddy and I hiked nine miles on the White Chuck River Trail, camped near Kennedy Hot Springs (now buried by a huge rock and mud avalanche), and climbed the mountain the next day. We ascended in clouds, then rose above them and gazed across a white blanket torn by a few sharp summits. “Our” Mount Baker stood tall off to the northwest. We summited in swirling mist, couldn’t see much of the surrounding country, but we knew it was wild out there, one of America’s first congressionally established wilderness areas. We saw no one else on the mountain that day, and vowed to return to experience 566,057 acres that the American people declared in the Wilderness Act should be left “unimpaired for future use and enjoyment as wilderness.”

I went back many times and from many directions to hike and climb, sometimes with a few friends, other times with students on backpacking field trips. Several of those visits involved long hikes up the Suiattle River Trail to a camp at Miner’s Creek, then up to either Suiattle Pass or up the steep trail directly to Miners Ridge. Either way, we spent considerable time on the ridge, always visiting Image Lake. This famous and popular spot offered a unique and marvelous view of Glacier Peak to the south. On some days, when the lake was calm, we could look across it and see the mountain and its perfect reflection in the lake, which is not much of a lake, rather a small tarn but big enough to provide a mirror image of the mountain.

Over the years, as I learned the history of the area and of wilderness in the United States, I came upon a story that provided for me a very deep rationale for protecting such places as Glacier Peak and Miners Ridge. The ridge is not especially noteworthy except for being in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, the presence of Image Lake, and a large deposit of copper that lies beneath Plummer Mountain which rises from its east end. Since copper is a valuable mineral, there were big plans to dig an open pit mine in Plummer Mountain to access it. In the heart of wild and beautiful country, a congressionally designated Wilderness, to be left “unimpaired” for future generations? The Kennecott Corporation purchased the right to open the mine in 1954. The Wilderness Act forbade development in designated wilderness ten years later, with the exception of mining – a big exception and significant weakness in the legislation – and the issue of an open pit mine on Miners Ridge, which the company intended to dig in the late 1960s. This would be a test case of whether this recently approved legislation could really protect such places. Kennecott had the legal right to mine there and to build whatever infrastructure it needed to do so.

What I want to explore here is how the Miners Ridge issue has provided for me a powerful rationale for wilderness protection. The trail we followed to reach Miners Ridge followed the Suiattle River, boiling white with glacial flour from its headwaters draining Glacier Peak’s eastern and southeastern flanks. This trail, rising slowly, was in many stretches carved into sidehills, forests rising steeply above and north to Sulphur Mountain and eventually to Miners Ridge and Plummer Mountain. When time allowed, a short side trip up Milk Creek from the trailhead across a footbridge over the river might take us in a couple of miles to a magnificent stand of old growth Douglas firs, a cathedral of pillars rising into the clouds. From the Miners Creek camp, another footbridge offered access to the east slopes of Glacier Peak, to alpine country on Gamma Ridge where mountain goats grazed and we could look for tufts of goat “wool” shed in the heat of summer. We could ponder how Indigenous People in this region “picked” this wool where goats scratched and shed it, weaving it into a valuable trade item exchanged for coveted marine mammal items from tribes living in the Puget Sound lowlands to the west. While this was a popular backpacking destination and a stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail, we seldom encountered others even in the peak of summer.

A camp at Suiattle Pass allowed side trips to Miners Ridge Lookout, Image Lake, or eastward over Cloudy Pass to Lyman Lake and the remnants of rapidly retreating Lyman Glacier. One morning, camped at Suiattle Pass, we were startled when boulders came loudly bounding down a steep ridge into the meadow just below our camp, followed by a large black bear looking for lunch, turning over rocks, and sending them down to us. As our group watched anxiously, the bear lumbered down the face of the ridge, took a drink from the small creek at the foot of the slope, then wandered off with barely a glance our way. It was comfortable in its wilderness domain, undisturbed by our quiet presence. As we watched it go, our comfort in this wild place returned.

After exploring the area, sometimes sitting on the north shore of Image Lake and marveling at the image of Glacier Peak reflected in it, we hiked below the east face of Sitting Bull Mountain, then down heavily forested Agnes Creek, exiting the wilderness at High Bridge on the Stehekin River in the Lake Chelan National Recreation Area. Camping at Harlequin Campground a few miles upriver from Stehekin Village, we could browse in the village and its visitor center, enjoy the bakery and a good meal, then head out over either Cascade Pass or War Creek Pass to complete our 75-mile trip. This was a wilderness idyl, but for decisions made decades earlier about the future of Plummer Mountain and its surroundings, the whole region would have been very different.

The development that might have been, but wasn’t, would have split the Glacier Peak Wilderness in two. To reach the mine site on Plummer Mountain, a road would have been bulldozed where the Suiattle River Trail traversed above the river, then up to Miners Ridge. A power line would have been installed, perhaps along the road or more directly up to the ridge. On the ridge, Kennecott proposed to dig a hole a thousand feet deep and 1600 feet wide, and waste from this pit would have been deposited in a tailings dump contained by a 250 foot tall dam. Helicopters had been servicing crews exploring the mine site since the mid-1950s and would probably continue coming and going. All of this would generate a lot of noise, and a mill to concentrate the ore and a village to house workers would also be built. Miners Ridge would have become, in short, a major industrial site. A big swath of the Glacier Peak Wilderness would be impaired.

Valuable timber stood above the Suiattle River, like the cathedral stand of Douglas fir on Milk Creek, and big timber was also present in the valley of Agnes Creek. Development for the mine would have opened up a large “resource rich” area and one can only speculate what might have transpired as “side effects” of punching a road into the area, perhaps logging those Doug fir stands along the Suiattle River, the timber in the Agnes Creek Valley, and almost certainly a road down Agnes Creek for access to the village of Stehekin at the upper end of Lake Chelan. The Forest Service might have opposed such development, though confidence in their will and ability to do so was not strong given their ineffective opposition to the proposed mine. Also, the National Park Service really liked to encourage access to the areas it “managed,” and it was difficult to reach  Stehekin in the new Lake Chelan National Recreation Area. Access was either on foot or by boat or plane, as is still true in 2025. In the late 1960s even that agency was not opposed to development, as its recently completed Mission 66 program had shown, and plans were still being made for the new North Cascades National Park Complex.

This prospect was too much for the robust conservation community of the Pacific Northwest, and with national support from the Sierra Club and others, it mounted a vigorous defense of Miners Ridge and opposition to the whole project. The story of their opposition is well told in a 2020 book titled An Open Pit Visible from the Moon: The Wilderness Act and the Fight to Protect Miners Ridge and the Public Interest by historian Adam M. Sowards. It was a royal battle over what both sides – Kennecott and the conservationists – defined as the public interest, non-material values of wilderness versus material values of an important mineral and jobs associated with the mine.

In the end, no mine was dug and Kennecott gave up the claim, a win for the conservationists, for the bears, the mountain goats, and lovers of the wild. After careful analysis, Sowards suggests that it was economics that ultimately doomed Kennecott’s project, “a comparatively weak and unsteady economic argument for the mine . . . .”[1] Because of the mining exception in the Wilderness Act, they could not legally be prevented from developing their claim, but the strong public opposition undoubtedly was a factor in the ultimate outcome. Sowards writes, “As much as anything, then, the story of Miners Ridge and Glacier Peak Wilderness Area in the north Cascades is a story of public citizenship, of engaging actively with a place and with people and with structures of power to find resolution and to stop what everyone outside the copper company believed was simple desecration.”[2]

How, then, does this Miners Ridge story, and the continued integrity of Glacier Creek Wilderness, stand for me as a powerful rationale for wilderness preservation today? First, the Wilderness Act, a product of compromise, was new and untested in the late 1960s, and Kennecott’s Miners Ridge plans could stand as a test case of how the mining exception could be exploited. The company had claims in other wilderness areas, as did other companies, and if Kennecott dug their mine in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, they and these other companies would likely do so in designated wilderness elsewhere. A precedent would be set. Resource specialist John D. Leshy has written that Miners Ridge was “a watershed in implementation of the Wilderness Act’s compromise on mining in wilderness.”[3]

Citizen activists, as Sowards notes above, were key to slowing Kennecott’s plans to develop its claim. Many people loved the North Cascades, one of the few places “progress” had changed relatively little and they were hell-bent to do whatever they could to protect its wilderness character. They were very committed and capable defenders who used persuasion to generate strong public opinion against what Kennecott proposed to do. The company made all the usual arguments for the project – national security, jobs, their legal rights, a mine wouldn’t seriously damage the wilderness – which the conservationists effectively countered. Writer and conservation activist Harvey Manning eloquently made the arguments for the wilderness in The Wild Cascades: Forgotten Parklands. “There are many varieties of wilderness experience, and North Cascades travelers may argue among themselves which is the best. However, all agree that this is a wilderness which must be preserved undiminished and fully natural, for their sakes and for those of their children and great-grandchildren, and for all others who seek occasional refuge from the pressures of a steadily more raucous civilization.”[4] Wilderness defenders organized, persisted, made strong moral and political arguments, and, if indeed economics saved the day, fortunately and strategically stalled the project until it was uneconomic to do it. Here is a positive example for other defenders of wild lands, the second reason I think this case is so important. Such battles can sometimes be won.

“What if” is involved in my third reason for thinking what happened to Miners Ridge was consequential. Today there are nine wilderness areas in the North Cascades region established after the Glacier Peak Wilderness was achieved with passage of the Wilderness Act, and Glacier Peak Wilderness is the heart of one of America’s most significant remaining wild places. What if, before any of the other nine wilderness areas had been established, the Glacier Peak Wilderness had been emasculated, its heart cut out? The Miners Ridge struggle was not the only one in the North Cascades engaged in the 1960s. A long process to establish a national park, reaching back to the beginning of the 20th century, was nearing fruition. The park would be established in 1968, and much of it designated the Stephen Mather Wilderness in 1988. Of this, Sowards writes, “The metaphorical trail to North Cascades National Park had gone through Miners Ridge and been blazed by citizens whose joint efforts had influenced legislators and agency officials alike.”[5] Campaigns for a park preceded the fight over Miners Ridge, but that fight raised public awareness of what was at stake in the North Cascades and helped the park campaign along to a successful outcome.

Glacier Peak Wilderness, and its preservation against strong odds in the Miners Ridge battle, can be seen as a symbolic example of what is possible in the ongoing and never-ending battle to protect wild nature. How different the North Cascades might be if that mine had been dug? Wilderness advocates in the region, and even nationally, were heartened by what happened there at a time when they were engaged in participating in the wilderness reviews mandated by the Wilderness Act for the Forest Service and Park Service to recommend what roadless parts of their domains should be considered for wilderness designation. Certainly conservationists in the Pacific Northwest had proven their mettle in an epic struggle for wilderness preservation, but the battle for wild lands will never end, for various reasons. Sixty one years after Congress decreed that “wilderness areas” shall be managed to leave them unimpaired for future generations to use and enjoy, the future is here and established wilderness threatened as never before. Those future generations are enjoying them now, several generations after that decree, yet there are cries today, louder than before, that human needs, narrowly defined, trump preservation of nature. The copper is still beneath Plummer Mountain. How long will it remain there? I hope it remains there forever.

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[1] Adam M. Sowards, An Open Pit Visible from the Moon: The Wilderness Act and the Fight to Protect Miners Ridge and the Public Interest. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020), 174.

[2] Sowards, 175.

[3] John D. Leshy, The Mining Law: A Study in Perpetual Motion. (Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future, 1987.) Quoted by Sowards, 177.

[4] Harvey Manning, The Wild Cascades: Forgotten Parkland (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1965), 104.

[5] Sowards, 121.