Climbing Accident Turns Conqueror Into Defender

Dave Willis was on Lone Pine Ridge, looking down into the rugged canyons where the Cascade Range, Great Basin and Siskiyou Mountains come together, when he began to put the energy he once devoted to climbing mountains into saving this wild place.

“I first wanted to protect it because I knew it was wild,” said Willis, recalling that day nearly 20 years ago. “I learned about the scientific and ecological aspects later. The bulldozers and chain saws were coming, and I said, ‘We can’t let them come here.’ ”

When Willis came to southwestern Oregon in 1979, the area popularly known as Soda Mountain was just another chunk of U.S. Bureau of Land Management timberland. Cattle grazed the high meadows and creek bottoms, as they had for more than a century. Loggers cut where the few roads let them haul timber out of the forest. Dirt bikes roared over the bulldozer tracks and logging spurs.

But when Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt put out the word last year that he was looking for special places for a new generation of national monuments, places that focus on protecting ecosystems and not just scenery, Soda Mountain found its way to his desk.

Last June, President Clinton followed through on Babbitt’s recommendation and created the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, banning logging and mining and questioning the future of grazing on 52,000 acres of public lands, despite objections from timber and ranching groups.

Caring for Creation

Willis was a big reason it happened this way, says Rich Drehobl, a federal Bureau of Land Management field manager.

Willis used to climb mountains until he lost his hands and most of his feet to frostbite on Mt. McKinley in 1976. Reared a Baptist in Corvallis, he spent much of the ensuing years refining his vision of God and wild places. He went to seminary in California, writing a thesis subtitled, “If You See Bigfoot on the Road, Don’t Shoot Him.”

“This God cares about all creation more than we know,” Willis said. “The more we understand and sense how much this God cares for creation, the more we, too, will care.”

He focused on Soda Mountain, this place in his backyard where mountain, high desert and river ecosystems come together to create a place scientists recognize as one of the most biologically diverse on Earth.

Wildlife biologist Bruce Boccard recognized the biological richness of the creeks, forests and meadows in the rugged country sloping down to the Klamath River. He created the Soda Mountain Wilderness Council to press Congress to protect it, but never lived to see it, dying in 1987.

“He had the ecological eye,” Willis said of Boccard. “I just saw one of the last wild places. He saw juniper next to Shasta red fir, chaparral marching up from the valley, the whole ecological mulligan stew, as Marc Prevost called it.”

Prevost, a field coordinator for the Oregon Natural Resources Council, an environmental group, took up where Boccard left off. He got the region designated an area of critical environmental concern --bureaucratic language that blossomed into a closer look by BLM at the ecological values. He, too, died before his time, from a brain tumor.

Active in the council since 1983, Willis took over as chairman in 1993. Unable to walk far enough to explore the wild canyons, he bushwhacked on horseback, reins gripped between his wrists.

He invited anyone who might help his quest--federal land managers, congressional aides and environmental leaders--to join him on the rugged ride to let the land speak for itself.

Soda Mountain nearly fell off the tightrope several times. One key moment came in 1987, when BLM almost dropped it from consideration as wilderness. Willis called Bill Luscher, the new state director of BLM, and invited him to ride the canyons. Afterward, Luscher agreed to keep Soda Mountain a wilderness study area.

“I felt very strongly that the area deserved protection,” Luscher said. “I also really admired Dave Willis and his tenacity to keep going after something.”

To someone driving by at 65 mph on Interstate 5 over the Siskiyou Pass, the new monument does not look like much. The wonder is in the plants and wildlife--some 600 species in all.

Since biologists began looking for butterflies there, they have found 108 species, an incredible number for such a small place. Each one feeds in its larval stage on a different kind of plant.

Seven or eight kinds of bats, depending on whether one rare species is actually there, fly through the trees at dusk.

Jenny Creek is home to rare snails and an isolated population of redband trout, a subspecies of rainbow trout normally found on the east side of the Cascades, that was apparently stranded here by Ice Age flooding.

In the forests clinging to canyon walls, juniper native to the high desert can be found standing next to Shasta red fir, native to the high Cascades. Along the creeks there are bigleaf maple, black oak and cottonwood.

The 138 species of birds range from the peregrine falcon to the mountain bluebird.

Though visitors will be welcome, BLM does not plan to make it any easier to see the monument than it already is. The emphasis is on protecting the plants and animals inside.