What Moose Means to Me

The opportunity to finish what we started—and witness the power of nature’s hand in forest renewal—compelled me to return to 1U1.

Stories have led me to enchanting places, but few resonate deep within me like the Idaho backcountry.

Our commitment to the Recreational Aviation Foundation and its mission to preserve access to wild, wonderful airstrips we treasure led us to return to Moose Creek USFS (1U1) in the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness in early October by Daher Kodiak 100. This time around, having the freedom to share my personal connection to the mission is a gift—pure gold like the aspens turning and shivering in the breeze. We flew in on a Friday, with plans to work through the weekend, rebuilding fence and joining fellow pilots and enthusiasts in the camaraderie such effort engenders.

My 7-year-old self carried a little backpack on our family trip to Glacier National Park in the late 70s, just a short flight north of where we’re bunking down for the night. So it feels like returning home, snuggling into a sleeping bag in the loaner tent we put up hours before—at little or no risk to our marriage. It was perfectly chilly on Friday night, just below freezing but enough to keep my beanie on through ’til morning. From a tent at Oshkosh this year to this place… two of the happiest places on earth to me. But in honesty, the more perfect one is this, miles and miles from any road. The silence of the pillaring pines covers us like a blanket until the wind filters through them. So many snapped off at the shoulders from a violent yet brief windstorm, a microburst that hit on July 25 after the Moose Creek Complex fires of ’24 raged through, led by the Wye Fire in late July.

The Moose we knew last October—when we put up the first tranche of fence—has been left shaken by the impact but repairable by both human and invisible hands. Power tools had been called in to assist: The special dispensation to use chainsaws to break down the massive trunks left akimbo after the storms speaks to the size of that task. To do so with the hand saws normally allowed by the Wilderness Act would take years.

The forest will regenerate on its own terms and timeline. It always does. It needs the fire and the wind and the deep snows to renew itself. 

We flew in Daher’s serial number one Kodiak last year—the same one that made the model’s first flight 20 years ago—on October 16, 2004, and not far from this place. That was N490KQ, which continues to fly under experimental status. It’s in flight test on Aerocet floats at the time of this writing, in fact. This year we met Bob Miller at KMSO in N504KQ, another Daher-donated critical airlift provider. The short flight over bumped us around a fair bit at 8,500…but as promised after we descended below the ridgelines it smoothed out completely. The winds aloft hadn’t made it down yet, thankfully. However, a front would power through later that evening, raining on us briefly with a twist of wind swirling around the treetops. Fred the cook accelerated our dinner plans so we didn’t get caught out. 

The campfire around Bill’s Solo stove waited ’til Saturday night, which stayed calm and cool with a billion stars above us streaking across the Milky Way. By that time, we’d completed the rest of the fence surrounding the pasture—courtesy of another load brought in by Kodiak in the clutch. We were short 36 cross-bucks in the original materials flown and hauled in earlier, so the turboprop-that-could was dispatched to Missoula Saturday morning to pick up more.

The infusion of lumber meant the world to us on the work crew—to leave the fence just a dozen yards short would have triggered compulsive feelings of incompletion for an agonizingly long time. And it meant a lot to the agencies participating in this particular project—the U.S. Forest Service, certainly, but also the Montana Conservation Corps and the Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation (SBFC).

Two outhouses also burned in the August blaze… so the materials brought in included a pair of IKEA-style latrine kits—and Craig, who was the expert on putting them together. Within a day, we had two fully functional outhouses painted in Oxford Brown down at the southern end of the runways, in the “triangle.”

Our meals shared around the picnic tables in front of the cookhouse expanded to fit the ~60 folks who showed up in more than 40 airplanes. Mealtime also gave us two special canine companions, Roux and Tate, who followed the enticing aromas of barbecue over from an outfitter’s campsite on the north edge of the complex. 

No one could know how my heart clenched in a fist as Tate cautiously came up under my hand for a scratch behind his ears and a bid for food—he looked so much like Eddy, the pup we lost tragically to an accident in May, who possessed similarly soulful eyes. Every nibble of pulled pork, every flipped potato chip—he caught them along with the spirit of the crazy sweet dog we miss every day. Throughout this past sorrowful summer, hikes on the Appalachian Trail and marathon training runs had worked to heal my heart somewhat…but I really needed the mountains to swallow up the gaping hollowness inside me. I got my mountains twice this season—Colorado at the end of August, and the October week in Montana and Idaho. The honest work, lifting logs to my shoulders to portage like a canoe, back and forth, powered by Trish McKenna’s cookies, begun healing me in other places as well. Grief isn’t linear; it comes in waves. Tears mix well with sweat; they have a similar saline composition.

Speaking of flowing water, Stephen and I hiked down to the confluence of the Selway and Moose Creek on Sunday morning, to witness more of the fire’s effect and record in photos this passing of time and memory. Any time we can scramble around rocks, we’re content, and the rounded river pebbles we felt under our feet will outlast us all.

The RAF crew finished this project ahead of schedule—many hands making light work indeed—and so we flew out a day earlier than planned. Bob Wells came to fetch us, again in N504KQ, and though we didn’t have the Missoula Tower making mother-in-law jokes on that segment, the flight was seasoned with the smoke from the Sheridan Fire blowing up from Wyoming. 

As the last of the leaves fall, I know someday we’ll return to 1U1, though other projects and other places beckon. But there’s a bond I feel with “Moose” that will go on as long as I do.