Keith Hammer, somewhere in the Northern Rockies. Photo: Swan View Coalition.

Here’s a bold statement about Keith Hammer, the 2025 recipient of Fund for Wild Nature’s Activist of the Year award: no one knows more about the policies and practices of managing roads on National Forest lands in the U.S. Northern Rockies than Keith. The same could be said about Keith’s knowledge of the harm those roads cause to wildlife. Not anyone who works for the U.S. Forest Service, nor likely any of the activists working in the region’s conservation community. Keith, who is based in Kalispell, Montana, is the road scholar of the Northern Rockies.

As explained by the Swan View Coalition, the organization Keith co-founded, excessive roads on National Forest lands have severe consequences for wildlife, fragmenting critical habitats, disrupting migration corridors, and increasing human encroachment into previously undisturbed areas. An overabundance of roads on our public lands leads to increased human disturbance that forces animals to alter their natural behaviors, as well as greater human access to our public lands for poaching of our wildlife.

As Keith would tell you, roadless lands and wilderness areas are vital for ecosystem integrity and the well-being of wildlands-dependent species. Species such as grizzly bears, elk, and lynx are particularly vulnerable, as they require large, connected landscapes to thrive. Roads also degrade water quality by increasing sedimentation in streams, which harms native fish populations like bull trout. Additionally, roads introduce invasive species, alter predator-prey dynamics, and facilitate destructive activities such as illegal motorized use and logging, which further degrade the ecosystem.

Therefore, as Keith regularly points out, limiting roads and motorized vehicle use is essential to protecting water quality, fish, and wildlife. Ultimately, his message is that we need to minimize road densities, decommission unnecessary roads, and restore natural landscapes, thereby ensuring National Forest lands remain viable habitats for all our public wildlife.

In 1990, by writing the groundbreaking primer “A Road Ripper’s Guide to the National Forests,” Keith helped pioneer the concept of local activist “road scholars” using field inventories and legal tools to prevent or repair the harm roads cause on our National Forests. To this day, Keith and his Swan View Coalition continue to stop bad Forest Service road projects.

Back in 1990, Keith authored “A Road Ripper’s Guide to the National Forests,” a groundbreaking primer on the effects and removal of National Forest roads. In writing this activist manual, Keith helped pioneer the concept of local “road scholars” using field inventories and legal tools to prevent or repair the harm roads cause on our National Forests. Keith’s premise then, as now based on a recent conversation I had with him, is:

“One doesn’t need an MS or PhD to find abandoned roads and photograph them, or to document blown-out culverts, or to inventory and assess whether road closure devices are actually stopping motor vehicles. They just need to be thorough, consistent, and either have their finger on the pulse of how such data helps win lawsuits or create that pulse themselves.”

Keith continues to reap the benefits of this important field inventory work. As recently as February, successful lawsuits filed by Keith’s organization and allies in 2019 and 2022 resulted in the federal government accepting a court decision to limit road building in grizzly bear and bull trout habitat on the Flathead National Forest in northwest Montana.

Birth of a Road Scholar

Although born in central New York, Keith has been a fixture in northwest Montana, specifically the Flathead Valley, since the early 1960s. Growing up in this environment, Keith developed an intimate connection with the outdoors, often accompanying his father on hunting and fishing expeditions. This upbringing instilled in him a strong appreciation for nature and laid the foundation for his future land and wildlife conservation endeavors.

Oddly enough, he started his career working for the Flathead National Forest as a “trail dog” (someone who builds and maintains trails on public lands) and then spent eight years as a logger in the region. These roles provided him with an understanding of forest management practices and the challenges facing public lands, firsthand experiences that would inform his advocacy work for the next forty years.

In the early 1980s, Keith learned of a proposed timber sale in an area of the Flathead National Forest near where he lived. As Keith explained in a 2014 article in the Flathead Beacon, “The neighborhood got ahold of me because they knew I’d worked logging and I’d worked for the Forest Service. I didn’t know anything about the laws and regulations. I just knew what good logging and bad logging looked like.”

Keith got involved in the campaign to stop this timber sale, which led to both the formation of the aforementioned Swan View Coalition and Keith’s now four decades of advocating on behalf of the land and critters of his backyard.

The Ripple Effect of a Road Ripper

I first met Keith in the late 1980s when I was just starting to get my bearings as a wildlife conservation activist. He was recommended as someone who could guide me as I learned the ropes of federal land and wildlife policies related to large carnivore conservation. As fate would have it, a few years later I saw an opportunity to “scale up” Keith’s road scholar inventory work across the Northern Rockies. Respecting his deep knowledge, experience, and presence in the region, I asked Keith if the organization I had co-founded in Bozeman, Montana could use the name Road Scholar Project for this expanded effort. Keith said yes and off I went to coordinate similar inventories on 5,000 miles of national forest roads from northwest Wyoming to eastern Washington.

But his influence extends well beyond the work I did with his tutelage and blessing. As Keith recently told me:

I’ve always tried to clearly explain my methodologies in my road closure reports, so others can duplicate or adapt my methods to their area. My 2023 Road Hunt report, for example, has a very clear section on methodology that uses state of the art smart phone apps and GPS capabilities.

Old school activism meets new school technologies.

Furthering his ripple effect, at the request of other public lands activists, Keith has given numerous workshops and advice on how to conduct these road closure surveys. Most recently, he mentored activists addressing similar issues on the Kootenai and Bitterroot National Forests in western Montana. Data from the road closure surveys these road scholars conducted on the Kootenai National Forest has been successfully used in legal challenges to that Forest’s management plans.

Proving the adage “there is strength in numbers,” those legal efforts helped build the case law Swan View Coalition used to win its above-mentioned lawsuit regarding the Flathead National Forest’s revised forest plan. For Keith, this is a great example of how local, grassroots activists can synergistically expand the field survey and legal knowledge that – collectively and over time – gets presented in various cases to the U.S. District Court in Missoula. Keith need not look any further than his mirror to know where all this got started.

Back at Swan View Coalition’s headquarters, such information (and tenacity) has led Keith’s team to file approximately two dozen lawsuits challenging the Flathead National Forest’s management plans and practices during the organization’s forty-year history. By Keith’s calculations, Swan View Coalition has won close to three-quarters of those legal challenges.

Better yet, Keith told me his group has filed a similar number of “60-Day Notice of Intent to File Suit,” a requirement in the Endangered Species Act (ESA) that states individuals must give the federal government 60 days’ notice before filing a lawsuit alleging violations of the ESA. Based on Swan View Coalition’s well-researched and well-reasoned 60-day notices, the group didn’t need to file a lawsuit because in each case the government either cancelled or substantially altered the project based on the notice alone.

Logging road landslide into Sullivan Creek, which provides critical habitat for bull trout, a threatened species. Photo: Keith Hammer.

Leaving a Legacy Worthy of the 2025 Grassroots Activist of the Year Award

To me and many others that know him and his work, Keith is an old growth tree – by his preference a Western hemlock – with his roots planted deep into the ground that is his home. He has become this elder by doing this work, with the same organization he co-founded, working on the same conservation issues, to protect the same expanse of public land, since the 1980’s. He is a defender of his homeland; someone who takes care of the land because he cares greatly about the land (which, notably, is the land of all Americans).

When I asked Keith about his legacy, in true humble grassroots activist style he simply stated, “I’d hope my legacy is that a citizen who is committed to a cause can have substantial influence by being steadfast, consistent, and accurate with their advocacy and any data they collect for use in administrative and legal challenges.”

Then, Keith offered this final perspective:

Inherent in this is to also remember the importance of getting out into the field often, not just to collect data, but to maintain one’s sanity and connection to the land they are fighting for. I’d like to think that my advocacy and example have made people question the wisdom of being involved in extreme sports and wreckreation, rather than a slower-paced contemplative recreation of their relationship to the Earth.

The Fund for Wild Nature selected Keith as the Fund’s 2025 Grassroots Activist of the Year. The Fund was created by grassroots activists to get more resources to other bold grassroots activists working to protect wildlife and wild places. We recognize how even a small amount of money for these advocates can lead to big results. The Fund for Wild Nature depends entirely on annual contributions from the public, which it then redistributes to support worthy grassroots groups throughout North America. In addition to providing grants, the Fund sponsors the Grassroots Activist of the Year Award as another way to promote bold activism.

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