Once upon a time big-game hunting meant going into wild places, where you not only sought game but also explored new country and tested your own resourcefulness. You forsook the comforts of home to renew your ties to the land. Hunting meant camping. You ate only what you could carry or catch or kill. You shared the experience with a partner or a guide, or you went alone. Hunting appealed to adventurous young men enamored of rifles.

These days, many people who call themselves hunters do not fit the traditional mold. In some ways, that's good. Women have joined our ranks--a blessing for those of us who've tired of tales of male prowess around the campfire, and welcomed by anyone concerned with hunting's political fortunes. Big-game hunters need not schedule month-long pack trips beyond railhead to hunt in Canada, or book long weeks in steerage on a steamer bound for Mombassa.

Given the patience and forbearance to endure TSA lines at airports, they're just hours from meeting their outfitter--who whisks them off in an air-conditioned four-door pickup. Camp is often a lodge, food as fresh and varied as any at a four-star restaurant. Hunters eat at tables, not from charred cans or tin plates on their laps. Rather than exploring, they travel well-trafficked routes to blinds and hillsides from which they'll see animals already scouted, commonly video-taped, often field-scored and sometimes fed for the occasion.

In remote mountain country, hunters must still warm a saddle to reach camp, or, if they're able, walk. Accommodations may still include white canvas. These camps appeal to me.

Now, lest you misunderstand, I appreciate soft living as much as the next guy. A warm tent and a hot shower--even one from a bladder bag under canvas--keep me in good humor. So too does food that didn't begin life freeze-dried or canned. But hunting in wilderness, where the country is big enough to challenge me physically and to hold surprises, has special allure. I'll relinquish some comforts to go there, because in my experience wilderness memories last the longest. You don't have to kill something to find satisfaction in a hunting trip to wild places. The journey is enough.

You might argue that no place is truly wild anymore, that every horizon has been breached. You'd be right. But some places are wild enough to test your body and your resolve. Distances there can wear you down; terrain there can be tough enough to stop you; weather there can turn your hunt into an exercise in survival. Even if you come prepared for wild country--mentally, physically, and equipped with the most efficient modern gear--you must often concede the outcome of a hunt there to factors beyond your control.

Big-game hunts with guaranteed results qualify as sport in the same way television wrestling does. Wilderness denies you the inevitability of a kill, and promises nothing.

You don't need lots of area to experience a wilderness hunt. Any trip that pulls you beyond a place of comfort and security qualifies. Still, archetypal wilderness, vast and roadless, delivers what you might call a classic adventure. The Wilderness Act of 1964 defines wilderness as "an area where man himself is a visitor who does not remain . . . an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence . . . protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions." Wilderness designation was subsequently reserved for parcels of "at least 5,000 acres" or a size that allowed for practical management.

Some designated Wilderness is much bigger--the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness in central Idaho, for example. In 1931 the U.S. Forest Service declared 1,090,000 acres as the Idaho Primitive Area. Subsequent roadless designations included the nearby Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, which in 1963 was split into three parts. The Salmon River Breaks Primitive Area and Magruder Corridor, like the parent Selway-Bitterroot, remained roadless.

A year later, Idaho Senator Frank Church helped sponsor legislation resulting in the Wilderness Act. It protected nine million untrammeled acres as part of the National Wilderness Preservation System. In 1968 Church introduced the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, an additional shield for remote arteries like the Middle Fork of the Salmon River. The Senator followed up in 1980 with the Central Idaho Wilderness Act, which spawned the River of No Return Wilderness--an area comprising the Idaho Primitive Area, the Salmon River Breaks Primitive Area and a piece of the Magruder Corridor. The Act added 125 miles of the Salmon to the Wild and Scenic Rivers System. In 1984, Congress renamed Senator Church's crown jewel The Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness. He died just weeks later.

At 2,366,757 acres, this tract is the biggest designated Wilderness Area in the continental U.S. If you want additional trail miles, trek on into the Gospel Hump Wilderness, bordering the Frank Church on the west. Those two parcels, with surrounding undesignated roadless forest, total 3.3 million acres. Only a single dirt track cleaves them from the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness to the north. The Frank Church includes sections of several mountain ranges: the Salmon River Mountains, the Clearwater Mountains and the Bighorn Crags.

Threaded by the riotous Middle and Main Forks of the Salmon River, it offers some of the best whitewater rafting in the country. The precipitous gorges provide habitat for bighorn sheep. On the rims you'll find mule deer and elk that rarely see hunters. Mountain goats and moose also call the Frank Church home, as do record-class mountain lions and a growing population of wolves. Whitetail deer have pushed farther into the bottoms of this wilderness.

Managed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, the River of No Return has several remote airstrips whose use was grandfathered into the original legislation to provide access to areas that would otherwise be practically unreachable. Jet boats have likewise been allowed, for upstream travel on currents so swift as to preclude hand-powered boats.

Pack trains servicing deer and elk camps pound the 2,616 miles of established trails from 66 trailheads. Still, a million and a half acres remain free of all paths, save those traveled by big game. From canyon floor to pine, fir, and spruce forests and 14 clear-water lakes, to high meadows and rugged spires reaching to 10,000 feet, the Frank Church boasts a variety of plants and animals. It teems with life; but by the time you reach its heart, you're consumed by its space.

"There's enough room here for any hunter," says Travis Bullock, who with wife Brenda runs Mile High Outfitters. Headquartered in Challis, Mile High operates in two areas, one deep in the Frank Church and accessible only by air charter. "Our other camp is on what we call the Front Range. It's easier to access, and a good bet for late hunts."

I spent a week with Travis and Brenda and sons Charlie and Clay. The remote airstrip lay so deep in a canyon that the Cessna dipped below the rims miles before touchdown. Then we packed up the mules and headed upstream on a trail that was bald from the strike of steel shoes. By mid-afternoon we'd left the river to wind up a steep nose. It took us over a ridge to a lovely wooded hollow, suspended below peaks marching to pale purple horizons in every direction.

"We'll hunt from here for a couple of days," said Travis. "Then we can try a spike camp. One is just 10 miles upriver." Distance in the Frank Church might as well be measured in fortnights. You'll find plenty of game if you travel; but you'll travel far enough only if you've scheduled plenty of time. "A lot of hunters come expecting to shoot game a few yards from camp," Travis grinned. "It has happened, but we commonly travel many miles to find the big bucks and bulls sportsmen have in mind on a wilderness trip."

In the next week, I saw many elk and mule deer. I passed up an easy shot at a raghorn bull early on, and never saw a bigger set of antlers. Warm weather had sent the old bulls into cover. However, I managed to kill a fat four-point mule deer one evening, after spotting him in open timber from horseback and sneaking to within 75 yards. One shot from my Winchester 94 in .356 put him down for keeps.

The kill was almost anticlimactic. Watching dawn warm the ridges, and dusk color the distant peaks, I relished the scope of this place. Testing the iron in my legs on slopes arching from canyon's dark belly to snowy rock obscured by cloud, I met my match. Roaring white torrents below and silence broken only by wind in the crags mesmerized me. Sleeping under white canvas, splitting lodgepole with a sharp ax and snugging old saddle leather against the ribs of a mountain pony can be done just about anywhere. But, like hunting, they're most memorable in wilderness.