Bill includes 25 wilderness areas

The Jobs and Recreation Bill includes 25 new wilderness designations in Montana, many of them small, and Sen. Jon Tester says that is a reflection of how the bill was tailor-made through years of collaborative negotiations.

"There's a lot of smaller parcels. It's not one big block," Tester said in an interview Friday. "That's the result of folks sitting down and literally hammering through this stuff for years."

In all, the designations apply to 677,000 acres of federal lands statewide. But Tester emphasized that the bill also has important multiple-use provisions. The bill, for instance, 'releases' 76,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management wilderness study areas for other uses, including timber management and recreation.

It also mandates the U.S. Forest Service to carry out minimum timber harvests over a 10-year period, 70,000 acres on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest and 30,000 acres on the Kootenai National Forest.

The bill has one wilderness designation on the Kootenai National Forest, 29,869 acres covering the Roderick Mountain area in the Yaak Valley, to be called the Roderick Wilderness.

The bill's designations for wilderness on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest include:

Anaconda Pintlar Wilderness Additions, 56,680 acres.

Dolus Lakes Wilderness, 9,367 acres.

East Pioneers Wilderness, 76,7775 acres.

Electric Peak Wilderness, 4,653 acres.

Lee Metcalf Wilderness Additions, 18,950 acres.

Highlands Wilderness, 20,392 acres.

Italian Peaks Wilderness, 29,508 acres.

Lama Peaks Wilderness, 35,120 acres.

Lost Cabin Wilderness, 5,223 acres.

Mount Jefferson Wilderness, 4,465 acres.

Quig Peak Wilderness, 8,388 acres.

Sapphires Wilderness, 53,327 acres.

Snowcrest Wilderness, 89,798 acres.

Stony Mountain Wilderness, 14,261 acres.

West Big Hole Wilderness, 44,084 acres.

West Pioneers Wilderness, 25,742 acres.

The bill has several designations on the Lolo National Forest:

The Bob Marshall and Scapegoat Wilderness Additions, also called the North Fork Blackfoot-Monture Creek Addition, 71,378 acres.

The Grizzly Basin of the Swan Range Wilderness Addition, 7,599 acres.

The West Fork Clearwater Wilderness Addition to the Mission Mountain Wilderness, 4,501 acres.

There are designations for land managed by the Dillon Office of the Bureau of Land Management:

The Blacktail Mountains Wilderness, 10,667 acres.

The Centennial Mountains Wilderness, 23,256 acres.

The Farlin Creek Wilderness, 661 acres.

The Ruby Mountains Wilderness, 15,504 acres.

And there is a designation for land managed by the Butte Office of the BLM, 8,892 acres to be called the Humbug Spires Wilderness.

Tester's office has launched a Web site with maps and other information on the bill at: http://tester.senate.gov/forest