Elers Koch: Forty Years a Forester
Elers Koch grew up on the Montana frontier in the late 1800s. After earning a master's degree in forestry from Yale University in 1903, he joined the newly established Bureau of Forestry, which was to become the U.S. Forest Service, to which he dedicated himself until his retirement in 1944. As a forester, he founded the Savenac Nursery, at that time the largest nursery in the Forest Service, and published numerous articles in professional journals. In addition to being a major innovator in forest management and fire-control technology, Koch was an exemplary family man, a skilled mountaineer (the first to ascend Granite Peak, Montana's highest point), an outspoken wilderness advocate, and a successful novelist (The High Trail, 1953). His own adventure narratives, his scholarship regarding the Lewis and Clark expedition routes, and his knowledge of northern Rocky Mountain place-name origins served as valuable resources for contemporary novelists and historians.  Writers Bernard DeVoto and Norman Maclean can be numbered among Koch's friends and admirers. DeVoto in particular was grateful to him for defining the route and campsites of Lewis and Clark during their traverse of Montana and northern Idaho. Elers Koch died in 1954.