Connor Adams
Lead Wilderness Steward – Nez Perce Clearwater National Forest
Hitch 1 – 6/6/23-6/14/23
Nez Perce Clearwater Lead Wilderness Steward Connor Adams takes his turn reading from The Hobbit after a long workday.
“He sat himself down with his back to a tree, and not for the last time fell to thinking of his far-distant hobbit-hole with its beautiful pantries.”
So goes an oft-repeated refrain in The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien, a quintessential adventure story, and not by accident the only reading material available at Horse Camp cabin in the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness (unless you also count the 1998 edition of the Field Guide to Noxious Weeds of Idaho). My crew of Wilderness Fellows and Karlissa, our guest for the hitch, happened to overlap the first five days with the SBFC trail crew at Horse Camp, and we returned from work on Thursday to find Pete reading aloud from the book to his crewmates. Obviously, we were enthralled, and storytime with The Hobbit became something to look forward to every day. In fact, everyone agreed that Bilbo’s narrative was eminently relatable, and it became easier and easier to find parallels between his travails and our own.
Nez Perce Clearwater Fellows Olivia Hinds and Kieran Wilder clearing a tricky green tree out of Trail #211.
Bilbo encountered nasty weather of all kinds (it rained on us nearly every day of hitch), found himself next to starvation several times (we ate as well as one can on a backpacking hitch, but no one denied that they found themselves thinking about food almost every minute of every day), and he had to shoulder a pack that weighed nearly as much as himself when he ventured into Mirkwood (even after 8 years leading Wilderness crews, nothing can prepare you for the overwhelming weight of the pack on the first hitch after a long winter). We too thought often of our warm and dry hobbit-holes back home, but we got to see a great deal of wild country and have almost as many adventures as Bilbo, and in the end we slayed the dragon as well (which is to say we had a very productive and successful hitch).
Posing with Horse Camp’s brand new sawbuck. (Hitch 1 - NPCNF - Horse Camp Cabin - L to R Kieran Wilder, Connor Adams, Olivia Hinds, Ryan Murphy - taken by Karlissa Skinner)
Our main program of work for our first hitch was to monitor campsites in the Boulder Creek drainage and the Horse Camp area, and to clear as much of trail #211 as we had time for. The Fellows got a very varied taste of Wilderness work in their first few days. Olivia and I hiked 17 miles out to Gold Hill, over hundreds of downed trees and no few snow patches, to monitor campsites. Kieran and I did 12 creek crossings in one day to do the same. Ryan got to practice his new skills with the crosscut and the axe as we cleared #211 nearly up to Fish Lake Saddle. And we all enjoyed a morning of backcountry construction, as we finished building a new sawbuck for Horse Camp, and promptly used it to cut, split, and stack firewood for the cabin.
Traditional tools…it’s not just crosscuts and axes.
Bilbo was never far away from our minds throughout our projects, and we were lucky enough to finish the book as a crew on the last night of hitch. We cleared 5 miles of trail, monitored 42 campsites, and left the field with a newly named crosscut saw (Sting, of course) and the bonds that only come from a week of suffering and succeeding together. It’s easy to think about the comforts of home when your pack is heavy and you’re getting rained on every day, but I think we too were in the end grateful for our adventure. I’m looking forward to four more!
The Nez Perce Clearwater Fellows crew arrives in the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness at long last. (Hitch 1 - NPCNF - Trail #211 - L to R Olivia Hinds, Ryan Murphy, Kieran Wilder, Connor Adams - taken by Karlissa Skinner)
CONNOR ADAMS, LEAD WILDERNESS STEWARD
Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest
Frank Church-RONR Wilderness
Connor has been a wandering Wilderness person for almost a decade now. After some years overseas and a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, he made his way to Montana and immediately fell in love with the wild places of the Northern Rockies. He has worked in The Bob Marshall Wilderness, the Gros Ventre Wilderness, and spent four years with SBFC in the Selway Bitterroot and Frank Church.