What is the Black Ram Guitar? It’s kind of an amazing history, one that began roughly in the early 1700s—Columbus had landed but a decade earlier--with an Engelmann spruce seedling germinating in a vertical column of light far in the high elevation wetlands in the most northwestern corner of northwest Montana’s Yaak Valley, right up on the Canadian border.

Some things happened, over the next 300-plus years, and it grew enormous, slow and patient with super tight grains, supported by the equally large cohorts—cedar, white pine, and more spruce. In 2017 however the first Trump administration decreed an accelerated liquidation of forests on public lands and this region of the Yaak—the “Black Ram” region—was targeted. Groups such as The Montana Project and Forest Refuge Alliance, Green Curtain Roadshow, Center for Biological Diversity, Whitefish Review, Alliance for Wild Rockies, Wild Earth Guardians, Sierra Club, Maine Climate Action Network, and others mobilized to defend this ancient inland rainforest. The Forest Service built a road to the edge of the old forest and began spray paint the trees and marking skid routes for an enormous clearcut. In that process, the old spruce snapped—she was at the edge of the clearcut road, and had lost the support of her cohorts.

We went in with a wheelbarrow, cut out a section of this incredible wood—about the size of a whale vertebrae—strapped it into the front seat of an old Subaru, and drive it to master luthier Kevin Kopp, who made the prototype Black Ram Guitar. A year or so later, Jeff Bridges heard the instrument, said he dug the story and wanted to get involved. He commissioned six more guitars to be made from the same wood, as part of his “Allin This Together” sustainability campaign, and gifted one to us, which we now use to advocate for the protection of the guitar’s old-growth forest by designating it as the first Climate refuge in the nation.

We hold concerts each year—Climate Aid/Black Ram Guitar Festivals—and the music community has bene incredibly generous. Maggie Rogetrs, James McMurtry, Pear Jam’s Jeff Ament, Rise Against’s Tim McIllrath, Rob Quist, Jack Gladstone, Martha Scanlan, Dar Williams, Stellarondo, and so many others have played her, teaching her songs of celebration and resistance. Only 4 years old, she has much to learn, as do we, about her forest. And by protecting her forest as the first in a series of protected old and mature forests at northern latitudes (which store so much more carbon than do other forests), we can create a global Curtain of Green, from one idea, one seed, one tree, one guitar.

Read about it here: https://www.mtoutlaw.com/songs-from-a-climate-refuge/

Photo: Brian Schott