The road enables the savvy backcountry traveler a chance to drive between the two enormous wilderness areas that hug the border between Montana and Idaho.
Years ago, the Forest Service put together a brochure that offers some history and otherwise colorful prose about this unique driveway.
Back then, the Forest Service hadn't yet gotten to really know a Hamilton housewife named Doris Milner.
"We had a family tradition of camping every summer along the Selway River," remembers Milner's son, Eric. "It was a family vacation. ... It started back in the '50s and we'd put up out big canvas tent and would stay a week or 10 days."
When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed The Wilderness Act into law in 1964, he created two new large wilderness areas on either side of the roadway built by the Civilian Conservation Corps.
The new law excluded just over 100,000 acres down the middle. That's where to logging was going to take place.
When Doris saw a road being punched up into the countryside along the Little Clearwater River, this housewife and mother of four boys stepped into the fray.
"It was our favorite camping spot," Eric said.
Over the course of years, Milner would spend thousands of volunteer hours cajoling politicians and organizing the faithful to save the Magruder Corridor and other important western wild lands.
Doris Milner died peacefully on Dec. 28, but the legacy she left behind is found in quiet wilderness protected forever and the many lives she touched during her tireless advocacy to preserve it.
Montana Wilderness Association's longtime conservation director John Gatchell was a young man hoping to make a difference when he first met Milner in mid-1970s. By then, she was already part of the "old guard" of folks working hard to establish Montana's wilderness system.
She became a mentor and a friend.
"Doris always served as volunteer," Gatchell said. "She was never paid a dime for her efforts. She was a housewife and mother ... and when I'd go to Hamilton, she'd always serve a meal that included something from her garden."
And she'd offer some advice laced with humor.
"Doris was very pragmatic and very dedicated to Montana wilderness," Gatchell said. "And she'd always impress upon you the importance of integrity in all your dealings. ... It was important to her to always be forthright and honest."
Milner served as president of the Montana Wilderness Association for 1973 through 1975. She apparently saw promise in Gatchell. In 1985, Milner pushed the association to hire him.
"She was like the foundation of Montana wilderness," he said. "It began for her with her family and her values. ... I can still hear her voice. I can hear her telling me just after my son was born that the wilderness was for them. To always just let them enjoy it.
"I'll never forget her," he said.
Teddy Roe had just taken a job as legislative director for Sen. Lee Metcalf when he first crossed paths with Milner back in the early 1970s. She was one of a number of wilderness advocates asking the senator for help.
"I was pretty darn green," Roe remembered. "Back then, addressing wilderness issues was like building an airplane in the air. ... Doris was always there for me. She was always knowledgeable."
Milner understood the art of diplomacy. And she'd never back down when she knew she was right.
"She was a smart lady," Roe said. "I owe her so much. I owe her my education on wilderness in Montana. I owe her a level head. She understood that politics was the art of the possible. And she understood that you simply couldn't place too heavy a load on any one politician."
Eric Milner grew up in a home where his mother found a way to both nurture her family and community while reaching out to accomplish her civic responsibility by being an active participant in the democratic process.
"It wasn't until later in my life that I really began to fully appreciate all that she'd been able to accomplish," Milner said. "I'm tremendously proud of her. I think we all are."
His mother, Milner said had the determination and abilities to accomplish great things.
"But her most distinguishing characteristic was simply that she enjoyed life," he said. "She enjoyed people very much and it showed with the lifelong friends she made. Humor was a big part of that."
Her inclination toward environmental activism began well before she took on the fight of protecting the Magruder Corridor. Eric remembers as a young boy listening to his mother voice the need to take care of this planet we call home.
But that didn't mean she put people second.
"She always cared about the people whose families were dependent on timber and would be hurt," he said. "We live in such a polarized society now and that's something my mother wouldn't have liked. She wasn't a polarizing person and she didn't believe in trying to polarize people.
"She always accepted the fact that there were different points of view," Milner said. "She respected that and tried to find as many ways to accommodate as many different points of view as possible."
That ability of Milner's to accept people as they were was a trait that Doug Scott always admired.
Back in the late 1960s, when Scott first crossed paths with Milner, he was the Sierra Club's regional representative. The two were to become "great pals."
"She was indomitable," Scott said. "When she set her mind, she'd never let anything stop her. She'd get beat down and then pick herself back up and go back to work."
Milner never held a grudge. She became a voice of reason within environmental politics.
"I never heard her say a mean thing about anybody," Scott said. "She never considered anybody to be her enemy."
She took the responsibility of her citizenship seriously.
Years later, when National Public Radio asked Scott for a suggestion of a citizen conservationist for an interview, he didn't hesitate to offer Milner's name.
Scott will always remember the look on Milner's face when NPR's Elizabeth Arnold asked: "Why?"
Why would a woman with an already full life decide to roll up her sleeves to save the Magruder Corridor from logging roads and clearcuts?
There was a look of surprise - "It was as though she couldn't believe that anyone wouldn't have gotten involved," Scott remembered.
Milner's reply was classic.
"All I knew was I was mad," she told Arnold. "That's all I knew - and I was going to do something about it."
Milner left behind a "tremendous legacy," Scott said.
And Scott finds it in a single sentence buried deep in the Forest Service's brochure about the Magruder Corridor. It's in the section headlined "Paved Road" just after the explanation of why there's asphalt so far out here into the wilderness and how people might notice trees that were marked for cutting decades ago.
It reads: "Timber harvest is not allowed in designated wilderness areas."
Scott is hundreds of miles away driving his car through Seattle's traffic. Still, there in his voice, you can hear admiration.
"I've always thought that was a wonderful acknowledgment that they had different plans for that place," he said. "I've always thought that simple little sentence was a wonderful monument to Doris.
"I think she would like that," he said.
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