10at6,
The upper Clark Fork running red occurred in the 1960's, and is a matter of record. A little digging can find information on it from various sources. By the 1970's much of the river had recovered, though mostly below where Rock Creek enters, 22 miles above Missoula, due to the large amount of clean water entering there.
But even in the late 1970's the number of fish in the river was much smaller than below Rock Creek, with the exception of below the settling ponds near Anaconda. Brown trout could cope with the water there, but rainbows and cutthroat were basically gone, and along the banks were easily-seen layers of copper waste. That areas been cleaned up considerably since then, but it took years to mitigate most of the after-effects. I'm familiar with all this partly through working with FWP on various projects along the upper Clark Fork during those years.
Starting in the mid-1970's I also hunted the area near Saltese for elk and deer for several years, and yes, it was very good. But by then the Forest Service had started gating off many side-roads during the fall, eliminating motorized access outside of the main canyon roads. Prior to then just about all the logging roads remained open, leaving few places for game to get away from hunters. One of my favorite hunting areas was around a 7-mile-long closed side-road, which helped a lot in getting game out, even on horses.
Idaho's elk harvest dropped from over 16,000 a year in 1960 to 4000-some in 1975, which happened to be the period of heaviest logging and greatest access due to thousands of miles of new FS roads. That is also a matter of record.
As noted in my other post, I am not anti-logging, mostly because since my years of hunting around Saltese I've had great success hunting around seasonally CLOSED logging roads that helped me find, and pack out, game around clearcuts. In fact I wish more logging would be done right around where I live now, because the new, smaller-size clearcuts that were great hunting when I moved here 27 years ago are grown up in thick, 20-foot-tall trees. Some of them burned a couple years ago, which will help, but more small clear-cuts would help just as much, if not more.
