Federal judge overturns Forest Service plan to poison Buffalo Creek in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness

Court rules in favor of Wilderness Watch, strikes down Forest Service poisoning plan in Buffalo Creek watershed near Yellowstone

Buffalo Plateau on the border of Yellowstone National Park and the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness. The east side of the plateau drains into Buffalo Creek. Photo by Howie Wolke.

In a landmark ruling for wilderness protection, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy granted summary judgment in favor of Wilderness Watch and vacated the Forest Service’s approval of a plan to poison more than 45 miles of Buffalo Creek in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness at the behest of Montana Fish Wildlife and Parks (FWP).

Molloy found the project violated the Wilderness Act on several grounds and, “[u]nlike other resource management statutes, the Wilderness Act is not merely a procedural checklist or a delegation of discretion to a managing agency to weigh competing uses; the Wilderness Act mandates the preservation of wilderness character.”

Styled as an effort to expand Yellowstone cutthroat trout populations, the project would have involved a decade’s worth of helicopter landings plus the use of other motorized equipment to poison and kill fish, amphibians, and insects in numerous lakes, ponds, and wetlands and nearly fifty miles of high-mountain wilderness streams. After the watershed was poisoned with the toxic chemical rotenone, FWP planned to stock the naturally fishless streams and lakes with cutthroat trout.

Molloy rejected the Forests Service’s claims that the project would restore natural conditions in the Wilderness, pointing out that because the watershed was naturally fishless, “the wilderness neither depended on Yellowstone cutthroat trout for ecological balance nor contributed them to the watershed as a whole. As a result, conserving them serves no wilderness purpose.”

“This is one of the most important rulings for protecting the integrity of the Wilderness Act in the law’s 60-year history,” said Wilderness Watch executive director, George Nickas. “The idea that managers can substitute their desired conditions for what Nature provides in these wild places threatens to destroy the profound values that set Wilderness areas apart. Judge Molloy’s thoroughly reasoned Order spells out precisely why the agency’s misguided aims are fundamentally at odds with the law. Every manager who oversees Wilderness needs to read and understand it.”

Judge Molloy’s ruling clarifies how the Act must be applied: “the Wilderness Act mandates the managing agency ‘preserve wilderness character’ even if it acts to further other enumerated purposes.” Echoing other decisions in the Ninth Circuit, the court noted, “when there is a conflict between maintaining the primitive character of the area and between any other use, the general policy of maintaining the primitive character must be supreme.”

“This ruling reaffirms that Wilderness wasn’t designated by Congress to serve as a staging area for agency manipulation,” said Wilderness Watch staff attorney Dan Brister. “The court recognized what the Act requires—wilderness areas must remain self-willed.”

“With rapidly mounting pressures on our most protected landscapes, Judge Molloy’s opinion marks an essential line in the sand for Wilderness,” said Dana Johnson, attorney and Policy Director for Wilderness Watch. “In Wilderness, restraint is a core statutory imperative.”

A copy of Judge Molloy’s Order is available here: https://wildernesswatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Molloy_Buffalo_Creek_Amended_Order_10_24_2025.pdf

Wilderness Watch, headquartered in Missoula, Montana, is the leading national organization whose sole focus is the preservation and proper stewardship of lands and rivers included in the National Wilderness Preservation System.