The Hills of Roaring River How Shall We Love Them?

from the November 2001 issue of Heritage, the newsletter of the Missouri Parks Association

by John Karel

One of the crown jewels of Missouri’s park system is Roaring River in Barry County. Visitors to this park, or readers of Exploring Missouri’s Legacy, are already aware that Roaring River is dramatically scenic, set in the rugged, mountainous hills of the western White River Basin. It is centered on a natural feature of striking beauty, Roaring River spring, which generates the cold clear water that draws visitors from far and wide to fish for the rainbow trout that have been stocked in the spring branch for almost one hundred years. Since Native American days, the valley along this branch, set deeply amid these glorious hills, has been a haven for people to gather, recreate, and refresh their spirits.

The human history of this 3403-acre state park includes rich local folklore, an eccentric donor, and a wealth of log and stone buildings in the appealing rustic style of the 1930s Civilian Conservation Corps. The natural history of Roaring River is likewise rich and diverse. An unusually large number of native plant and animal species make their homes at Roaring River, including many that are rare, threatened, or endangered-in the nation, the state, or the park system. The park is also home to one of the original units of the Missouri Wild Area system: Roaring River Hills Wild Area. This 2045-acre portion of the park is one of a series of eleven such areas in Missouri state parks set aside by formal designation to preserve forever their wilderness-like qualities as a resource of permanent value and benefit.

Recently, several of the key values embodied in the hills of Roaring River have seemed to come into conflict, causing considerable discussion among park division staff, the State Parks Advisory Board, the Missouri Parks Association (MPA) and other citizen groups, all of whom support the natural and cultural heritage values of our state parks. The issue is complex, having to do with the desirability of maximizing biodiversity, on the one hand, and preserving the wilderness character of the designated wild area, on the other. The background review that follows is offered with the hope that all resources involved can be enhanced.

One of the areas of expertise that guides the park division in the stewardship of the natural resources at Roaring River, and at other parks as well, is a relatively new field known as restoration ecology. This is a field that has expanded around the country in the last decade or so, but no state park system has shown more skill or determination in applying its tenets than Missouri’s.

Restoration ecology endeavors to maximize biodiversity by restoring natural landscapes with species and biotic communities that were present prior to Euro-American settlement but that have been effected by recent human activities. A variety of clues are used to determine the nature of such presettlement landscapes; and when the still-evolving restoration techniques are fully applied, the results can be dramatic. Typically, such restoration projects employ the use of prescribed fire, or even mechanical removals of trees or brush that have colonized areas that were once open or grassy before human efforts to restrict wildfire. Examples of restored landscapes in Missouri parks include unglaciated upland prairie at Prairie State Park, wet bottomland prairie at Pershing, western Ozark glades and oak savanna at Ha Ha Tonka, and igneous glades and savannas at Taum Sauk Mountain. Related efforts apply to natural area protection and recovery programs for specific rare or endangered species or habitats. The Missouri Parks Association supports these programs and is proud of the prominence our park staff has achieved in this field.

At the same time, the tri-partite mission of Missouri’s park system emphasizes a careful balance between natural resources, cultural resources, and outdoor recreation. Most of the time these priority missions reinforce and complement one another, but on occasion initiatives from one mission conflict with values from another. Then we must use prudence as we sort out the most critical resources and the most important long-term benefits for the people of Missouri. As an example, park planners may find that a site that offers a choice location for a modern campground turns out to have also been used by native Americans and is thus now of archaeological importance, or perhaps the site is home to a rare species of plant or animal. We are fortunate that when such issues arise our park staff is trained to evaluate them with skill and sensitivity. But some situations are easier to resolve than others. Such a tough situation confronts us now in the hills of Roaring River, and the values at stake are of direct concern to all of us.

Many would argue that one of the original and powerful contributions to world civilization coming from the American experience has been the concept of wilderness preservation. When the settlers first encountered North America, wilderness was a condition against which most of them struggled, to establish homes, livelihoods, and communities. As the settlement of our nation proceeded, there began to grow the notion that the rapidly dwindling pockets of untrammeled wilderness might have value to the American spirit-that such wildland was after all the raw material out of which we had built our nation.

The impulse to set such areas aside derives from our conservation tradition and love of expansive scenery, but also, perhaps even more deeply, from our American cultural experience of encountering the original untamed landscape-an encounter that was in part, to be sure, a confrontation, but was also a profound and satisfying engagement. Every region experienced a version of this encounter, and the history of every state, including Missouri, has been shaped by it. As we inexorably triumphed over the wilderness, a rough national consensus eventually emerged that the remnant vestiges of wild land did have value, and in 1964 Congress embodied this consensus in the Wilderness Act, which established the National Wilderness Preservation System. This system included only federal lands, and at first was applied almost exclusively in the mountain West.

A significant percentage of Americans had come to value highly the opportunity occasionally to renew that elemental American encounter with our native wilderness. The key satisfaction in that experience is the sense of contact with untamed wildness - landscapes that are not overtly managed by humans but rather are affected primarily by the raw forces of nature. This experience has become highly cherished by many Missourians and is considered a form of recreation, though many would also consider it to be at least as much a cultural or even a spiritual experience. Many find it of great comfort that our society has mustered the reverence and self-discipline to leave some land, as much as possible, alone. Even from a scientific perspective, it can be argued that we have yet much to learn from such land, that we are wisest not to assume that we have arrived at all the answers about natural communities and biodiversity. Wilderness can serve as an instructive comparison to lands we manage more actively.

The Wild Area program in Missouri dates back to the 1970s, when the nation as a whole was deliberating about how to apply the benefits of the Wilderness Act to qualified lands in the eastern states. Congress recognized the need, and finally acted. Each eastern state, including Missouri, developed its own proposals and struggled to build the needed political support. In the end, a very broad coalition of civic and conservation groups worked with the Missouri congressional delegation in the 1970s and early 1980s for the designation of a total of eight Missouri areas. In the course of this lengthy campaign, it became apparent that the universe of wildland resources in our state was severely limited, and that of this limited resource, not all was on federal land. Critical portions of Missouri's remaining wildlands, including some of the most beautiful and representative, were on state parklands. Missouri conservationists worked with the Department of Natural Resources to develop a policy whereby such wild areas could be recognized and protected in an enduring way, and also made accessible for use and enjoyment by the people of Missouri in such fashion that their wilderness qualities would remain unimpaired for future generations. A program was developed based as closely as possible on the federal system.

This policy was adopted by DNR in 1978, after which state parklands were surveyed to see what areas might be suitable for inclusion in the new Wild Area System. As a result, over the next several years a total of ten areas were designated, including Roaring River Hills. In part owing to the restrictive criteria, the system has been conservative, with few enlargements except in 1995 when the newly acquired Goggins Mountain was added as the eleventh area, bringing the total acreage of the system to nearly 23,000 acres. This system, now approaching its 25th anniversary, represents a thoughtful and serious commitment on the part of the State of Missouri to its citizens.

In order to conserve the fragile resource of wilderness on these specially designated lands, DNR has adopted special guidelines for their management, modeled on those for federal wilderness areas. Our state areas are generally smaller than federal wilderness, and as a result some criteria and management techniques are necessarily modified, but the principles and the goals are the same: to maintain for the visitor the sense of encounter with a landscape that has been shaped by the forces of nature-in the words of the Wilderness Act, “untrammeled by man” – and to do so in a spacious setting with ample opportunities for solitude and primitive types of recreation.

This system has been popular, but it has also remained modest in scope, recognizing that Wild Area policies are restrictive of other uses and of management prerogatives. They place a special burden on managers to preserve the wilderness atmosphere, and that is another reason that there have been few additions to the system since its founding.

One of the management tools that has been considered to be compatible with the Wild Area policy is prescribed fire. Although controlled fire can be, and is considered by some, a human intrusion, fire is presumed to have been a factor in native ecosystems in Missouri for a least a thousand years, and several Ozark landscapes, including glades and savannas, are dependent upon periodic fire to retain their characteristic appearance and species composition. Since fire has been excluded from most Missouri landscapes for many years, such fire-related ecosystems have often seen changes in their vegetation, and especially in the Ozarks an increase in eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana). A focus of restoration ecology in state parks generally has been to control red cedar and re-open old glades. Some of these cedar-grown glades are located in designated wild areas, and DNR policy has permitted the use of fire in these areas to maintain or restore the glades. This practice has not been particularly controversial, though there are still debates among professionals about the exact role of fire in presettlement Missouri, and even about the degree of naturalness of that fire, since much of it seems to have originated with Native Americans.

One such area, in fact the area where park biologists feel that cedar colonization has been most extensive, is Roaring River Hills. Although generally forested, Roaring River is at the western edge of a natural region of the Southwestern Ozarks known as the White River Hills. One of the most distinctive characteristics of this region is the broad extent of open glades on the limestone and dolomite slopes. Fire treatments have been applied to glade areas at Roaring River and in the wild area for several years, but the fires alone have not had the result of clearing away the cedars. It is felt that this is due in part to the fact that the cedars are so dense and robust they tend to resist fire. Some park staff have proposed that in order to restore the open glades inside the Roaring River Hills Wild Area, treatments should be applied that would require a waiver of wild area policies: the physical removal of the cedar trees, possibly by commercial logging operations. This has already been tried on glade areas at the park outside the wild area.

The kind of operation that would result from such a waiver would certainly challenge the values that the wild area was established to protect. It would in fact be considered by most people to be highly irregular on state parklands in general. For many visitors, there is a great aesthetic and philosophical gap between, on the one hand, the effects of a fire which, even if prescribed, mimics the natural process that shaped the glade community, and on the other the outright physical removal of the native cedar trees. During the operation there would be vehicles and machinery inside the area, accompanied by the high decibel whine of chainsaws; following the event there would be visible for many years the telltale stumps of the cut cedars and other scars of the harvesting operation. Presumably, we would see on the newly cutover areas a resurgence of glade vegetation and glade-associated wildlife, including coneflower, collared lizards, and road-runners; and possibly also we might see on those same areas a corresponding decrease in cedar-associated wildlife, such as the prairie warbler.

All of this could be quite controversial. For those who value wilderness, the most troubling effects would be on the quality of the Roaring River Hills Wild Area as a sanctuary dedicated to the human need for areas “untrammeled by man.” Even if our goal in the cedar removal operation is to recreate landscape scenery and biotic communities that we are certain existed before white setters came to southwest Missouri, we would obviously have laid a heavy hand on the land to bring this about. This would strain, if not tear, the fragile sense of wilderness we seek to protect in this area, and which the state has pledged to provide.

More troubling still is the precedent that could be set. Whenever in the future the conservative guidelines for wild area management prove to be irksome or inconvenient for some competing purpose-perhaps less noble than landscape restoration, such as a powerline right-of- way, road or reservoir, or any of the myriad landscape-altering endeavors to which we humans are so prone-we will by this precedent have weakened our ability to defend the whole system, and thus our capacity to provide a secure resource of wilderness for future generations.

MPA has supported the wild area program from our inception, and we have also applauded and encouraged the restoration ecology program in the state parks. We support both programs and know that in the long run they are mutually reinforcing; after all, biological diversity ultimately came forth from wilderness. We would like to assist the park division in the resolution of this dilemma. In doing so, we urge that all parties acknowledge the integrity of the motivations for the cedar removal project at Roaring River, and also that all parties acknowledge the values of the wild area resource that are placed at potential risk by the proposed project.

MPA president Susan Flader and this writer have developed an alternative proposal for consideration by the park division. It is intended to respond to concerns about the glade ecosystems of southwest Missouri and also to retain intact the policies that govern and define the Wild Area System. It is offered as an outline, an approach to a solution:

1. On the 1300 acres of Roaring River State Park outside the wild area, continue to use aggressive techniques, including cedar removal, to reclaim known glade habitats.

2. There are still open glades in the Roaring River Hills Wild Area; use prescribed fire in a more aggressive way to retain and gradually expand these glade areas. If some stands of red cedar manage to grow to maturity, it seems reasonable to assume that they will prove of aesthetic and scientific interest in their own right.

3. Most importantly, we urge that this issue be considered from a bioregional perspective. The park is bounded on the east and south by Mark Twain National Forest lands, and the bulk of the public land in the White River Hills ecoregion is Forest Service-owned. We propose that a multi-agency task force be formed that will work with the Forest Service to manage its glade lands for biodiversity and apply a full range of restoration techniques. This approach could be modeled on the cooperative program in the eastern Ozarks known as “Pine Knot,” which is intended to restore old growth shortleaf pine savannas on a sizable scale. This would capitalize on the expertise that has been developed by park staff, and would expand DNR’s role in interagency partnerships. It would also do more to ensure a continuing resource of glade-associated biodiversity in southwest Missouri than anything we might do at Roaring River alone.

This proposed general approach has been submitted to the park division and to the State Parks Advisory Board. It is presumably under consideration, and will serve, we hope, as a starting point for further dialogue. In the meantime, we encourage all readers to give this issue thoughtful reflection. MPA pledges to work toward a solution that respects both biodiversity and wilderness as precious resources, a solution that will protect and enhance all native species and ecosystems and will also protect the fragile resource of wildness that still haunts the remote hills of Roaring River.