TRAIL RIDERS of the WILDERNESS

In 1993, two events--one that made headlines, one that didn't--set in sharp contrast two philosophies of exploration and travel. In the more heralded event, and airplane flow over the summit of Mount Everest, symbolozing the 20th century desire for quick access to nature via the internal combustion engine.

The less glamorous footnote in the history of wilderness travel took place in the hinterlands of the American West. Largely unheralded, it involved a corps of ordinary citizens who eschewed the internal combustion engine. This historical moment didn't change the fate of nations, but it did change lives and attitudes about the meaning and value of wild places.

In July of 1993, 22 men and women settled into saddles and made their way deep into Montana's rugged Flathead national Forest, bound for what remains one of the largest expanses of roadless wilderness in the lower 48. For seven days the trail riders looped through the South Fork Primitive Area, riding seven to 18 miles per day through green timber, vernal meadows, and craggy mountains. On the afternoon of July 17, the party made landfall in Missoula, and sent a telegram back to the American Forestry Association (now AMERICAN FORESTS) in Washington, DC.

"Entire party of Trail Riders Trip Number One has returned," the telegram read. "Trip was complete success and through country we never dreamed existed." A half-century before the twinned notions of adventure travel and ecotourism would turn the travel industry on its head. AMERICAN FORESTS' Trail riders of the Wilderness program started off with a bang. Or, at the least, with the pleasing, steady clop-clop of horses' hooves on a sun-backed trail.

The early ecotourism program has been gone for almost 20 years, but people still recall the pleasant memories and long-lasting friendships they made during more than 50 years of Trail Riders adventures. Horsepack guides hand-picked by AMERICAN FORESTS led moderately priced adventures into the remotest corners of the country's national forests and national parks. Pack trains latticed the country from the saguaro cactus flats of Arizona's Superstition Wilderness to the lush coves of North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains. In later years, canoeing, wagon train trekking, and sea kayaking trips were added to the itinerary, but these were far outnumbered by horsepack trips. By the time the program was suspended in the mid-1980s, some 15,000 of the organization's members had signed on and saddled up for some 900 unforgettable trips into the American backcountry.

"Oh, they were real expeditions, just wonderful trips," says Mary Ellen Walsh, who ran the program from 1971 through 1986. Walsh was the spirit and soul of the Trail Riders, as much as Western skies and steaks cooked over an open fire. She hand-picked outfitters and approved new routes, eventually shepherding and many as 43 trips in a single year, and was a fixture on the trail each summer. This even though she had never spent a night out-of-doors nor ridden a horse when she was hired.

But Walsh didn't change the emphasis of the trips just to suit her initial greenhorn status. For half a century, these were real wilderness expeditions, probing deep into the backcountry, which appealed to folks who didn't mind bathing in a frigid stream or picking fire ash out of their pancakes. No bed-and-breakfasting, this. On most trips guests pitched their own tents, packed their own gear, and dealt with the vicissitudes of wilderness weather.

Dr. Robert Christie, a Lancaster, New Hampshire, physician who accompanied more than half a dozen Trail Riders expeditions as trip doctor, recalled a harrowing climb up the flanks of the Maroon Bells, rugged Colorado mountains known for their spectacular alpine wildflowers.

"It was about two in the afternoon," Christie said, "and we were above tree line in one of the worst thunderstorms I'd ever seen. We picked our way across a boulder strewn, exposed slope while lightning flashed all around--there was nothing we could do but ride. I've been through World War II and on expeditions to Greenland, and I don't think I was ever as scared as I was riding through that storm."

Thankfully, Christie had but one serious accident to attend to on his Trail Riders trips, when a horse stumbled, throwing an inexperienced rider, then rolled over her. (The rider was evacuated by helicopter to a hospital some 60 miles away, and fully recovered.) Otherwise, he treated "everything from morning sickness to altitude sickness," and racked up memories from Idaho's Salmon River country, the Colorado Rockies, Arizona's Superstition Wilderness, the High Sierra, and the Wyoming Tetons.

But the Trail Riders program was about more than high adventure; it served an educational purpose, too. A Trail Riders trip offered something that privately outfitted expeditions did not: The chance to meet and talk with forest rangers and land managers whose job it was to protect the nations's wilderness areas.

One of the signature aspects of the Trail Riders program was Involvement with the U.S. Forest Service. The night before departure, at each trip's get-acquainted dinner, a Forest Service ranger would visit to introduce them to the region they were about to explore and explain how land managers were working in the woods.