Lolo National Forest

Lolo National Forest wraps the mountains around Missoula, Montana -- on the order of two million acres of northern-Rockies country, from ponderosa benches and gold-in-October larch to the high lakes of the Rattlesnake Wilderness, tucked behind a national recreation area that starts almost at the city's edge. Its valleys carry the Clark Fork and the Blackfoot -- the trout river of Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It -- and its southwest corner holds Lolo Pass, the low saddle in the Bitterroots that the Nez Perce, and later Lewis and Clark, used to cross some of the hardest country in the West.

The place

Lolo National Forest spreads across western Montana -- on the order of two million acres of national forest wrapped around the mountains that frame Missoula, with its western edge riding the Idaho line along the Bitterroot crest. This is the classic northern-Rockies working forest: ponderosa and larch on the dry south slopes, dark cedar in the wet draws, and a skyline of peaks in every direction from town. The Rattlesnake Wilderness rises straight out of Missoula's back door; the Clark Fork and the Blackfoot -- the river of Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It -- run through its valleys; and over its southwest shoulder sits Lolo Pass, the low saddle in the Bitterroots that the Nez Perce, and later Lewis and Clark, used to cross some of the hardest country in the West. The supervisor's office is in Missoula.

History

The forest took shape in the early 1900s out of the federal forest reserves of the northern Rockies, and carries the name of Lolo Creek and Lolo Pass -- though where "Lolo" itself comes from, nobody's quite sure. The stories range from a corruption of a French-Canadian trapper's name to a word borrowed from Chinook trade jargon; take your pick. Long before any of that, the pass and the trail over it were an ancestral route of the Nez Perce, who crossed the Bitterroots here for generations. In 1805 the Lewis and Clark Expedition followed that same corridor west over the mountains, and returned across it in 1806 -- some of the hungriest, hardest days of the whole journey. In 1877 the Nez Perce came back through during their long flight toward Canada; the route is remembered today along the Nez Perce and Lewis and Clark national historic trails. And in 1910 the "Big Burn" -- the enormous wildfire that swept the northern Rockies that August -- roared across this landscape along with millions of acres of neighboring forest, an event that seared fire into the young Forest Service's identity for a century afterward.

Wildlife & plants

Lolo is big, varied habitat, from dry ponderosa benches to high alpine basins, and it holds most of the northern-Rockies cast. Elk, moose, mule and white-tailed deer, black bear, mountain lion and gray wolf all range here; mountain goats work the high crags and bighorn sheep the open slopes. Toward the forest's northern and eastern edges -- the Scapegoat country and the wild ground north of the Rattlesnake -- you are on the fringe of grizzly range as bears push out from the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, so bear-country habits matter. It is also habitat for two of the West's hardest animals to ever see, the Canada lynx and the wolverine. The cold streams hold native westslope cutthroat trout and threatened bull trout, a fish so fussy about clean, cold water that biologists treat it as a gauge of a healthy river. The forest itself is a mix worth noticing: ponderosa pine and Douglas fir on the sunny slopes, lodgepole in the burned-and-regrown country, western larch that turns brilliant gold in October, and, in the wettest draws, big western redcedar that hints at the Pacific.

Notable features

The forest's signature piece is the Rattlesnake -- a National Recreation Area whose main trailhead sits just a few miles north of Missoula, so close that people head in after work, with the Rattlesnake Wilderness and its chain of high lakes rising in the backcountry beyond. Lolo also holds the small, rugged Welcome Creek Wilderness in the Sapphire Range, and shares in two big wild landscapes at its edges: the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness along the Idaho line and the Scapegoat Wilderness, which forms the southern end of the vast Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex. Its rivers are famous in their own right -- the Clark Fork running west past Missoula, and the Blackfoot, the trout river Norman Maclean made immortal in A River Runs Through It. Over the southwest corner is Lolo Pass on the Montana-Idaho line, with a visitor center on the historic trail and Lolo Hot Springs (a private resort) just down the highway; above the north end of the Bitterroot valley stands Lolo Peak, a snow-streaked skyline landmark rising to around 9,100 feet on the forest's edge.

Cool to know

• The Blackfoot River, running through the forest's eastern valleys, is the river of Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It -- one of the most beloved pieces of writing ever set on a trout stream, later made into a Robert Redford film.
• Lolo Pass, on the forest's southwest edge, is the low saddle in the Bitterroots that the Nez Perce crossed for generations and that Lewis and Clark struggled over in 1805 -- cold, lost and half-starved, it was some of the worst country of their entire expedition.
• The Rattlesnake Wilderness starts so close to Missoula that its trailheads are practically in town -- a rare thing, a designated wilderness you can reach on foot from a city's streets.
• Nobody's entirely sure where the name "Lolo" comes from -- the leading guesses run from a French-Canadian trapper's name to a word from Chinook trade jargon, and the truth is simply lost.
• The great "Big Burn" of 1910 swept across this and neighboring forests in a matter of days, killing scores of firefighters and burning millions of acres -- a disaster that shaped how the Forest Service fought fire for the next hundred years.
• Missoula, the forest's headquarters town, is also home to one of the country's best-known smokejumper bases -- the Aerial Fire Depot -- where firefighters have parachuted into remote country to fight backcountry blazes since the World War II era.