The Northwest has its newest wilderness, 275,000 acres surrounding 11,815-foot Castle Peak in south-central Idaho, where the mining industry once plotted to gouge out a giant molybdenum mine.

The Boulder-White Clouds Wilderness was made possible by a dogged 15-year effort by Idaho’s Republican Rep. Mike Simpson, and by the prospect that President Obama would soon create a national monument in the region.

“In the end, somewhat surprisingly, the monument compelled Congress to act,” Rick Johnson, executive director of the Idaho Conservation League, wrote in his blog.

The Obama administration has left its mark on Idaho, one of America’s most conservative states. The 2009 Endangered American Wilderness Act created a half-million-acre wilderness in the remote, high desert canyon lands of the Owyhee River in the southwest corner of the Gem State.

“With the greatest of understatement, this is an amazing story — decades long,” Johnson wrote.

Castle Peak is a familiar, distant, majestic sight to hikers in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area.  Several Idaho politicians have ventured to lakes at its base on their honeymoons.  Former Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus, an early Obama backer, has made creation of a national monument into a personal cause over the last two years.

Castle Peak helped elect Andrus in 1970, leading to four terms as an improbable Democratic governor in a “blue state” plus a stint as U.S. Secretary of the Interior.

Incumbent Republican Gov. Don Samuelson was gung-ho to put a molybdenum mine at the base Castle Peak.  A picture of Castle Peak, handy for showing where the mine would have gone, sits in the Idaho Conservation League office in Boise.

Andrus won, ushering in an era of preservation for Idaho.  The Hells Canyon and Sawtooth National Recreation Areas were established, along with the Gospel Hump and Frank Church River-of-No-Return Wilderness Areas.  With help from Robert Redford, Andrus created a Birds of Prey sanctuary on the Snake River south of Boise.  Hundreds of raptors nest above the river each spring, with soaring golden eagles and diving prairie falcons.

The state has reverted to conservative roots, with anti-abortion bills in the Legislature and starved social programs for the living.  But one conservative, Simpson, fought long and hard for Boulder-White Clouds.

“Wilderness is not a Democratic ideal; it is not a Republican ideal. Wilderness is an American ideal,” Simpson told a Frank Church Institute conference earlier this year.