Proposed park sites likely stalled

BOISE – The National Park Service says a 15-year-old list of potential Idaho national park sites submitted recently to the federal agency by the state is unlikely to gain traction because it doesn’t have grass-roots support.

Carl Wilgus, head of Idaho Department of Commerce and Labor’s tourism division, recently gave a copy of a 1992 University of Idaho study to the U.S. Interior Department that names Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, the Sawtooth National Recreation Area and the Craters of the Moon National Monument, among others, as possible national park sites.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne is Idaho’s former governor.

Aside from a small part of Yellowstone National Park, Idaho doesn’t have a national park, and Wilgus said this week that getting one someday could boost tourism dollars.

“It would seem appropriate that someday we have a national park in Idaho,” Wilgus said.

Still, Jeffrey Olson, a National Park Service spokesman, said such lists aren’t generally taken seriously when his agency promotes new parks. A member of Congress must first propose studying a particular site.

“That’s not the way things become national parks,” Olson said.

There have been efforts in Congress to expand Idaho’s wilderness areas, and those could resume this year. U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson and Sen. Mike Crapo, both R-Idaho, have proposed wilderness preserves in the Boulder-White Cloud mountains and the Owyhee canyonlands.

Despite failing to clear Congress in 2006, they may be considered again this year.

“I think we’ll get it done this year,” Simpson said about a plan he backs to create three federally protected wilderness areas in the Sawtooth and Salmon-Challis national forests: the Ernest Hemingway-Boulder Wilderness, the White Clouds Wilderness and the Jerry Peak Wilderness.

One barrier to creating a national park from the Hells Canyon and Sawtooth national recreation areas, in western and central Idaho, respectively, is that activities such as hunting, logging, mining and ranching that are currently allowed in both are incompatible with things normally permitted in national parks.

Long-standing concern among Idaho officials, business people and agriculture that restrictions accompanying national parks would too severely limit land use is a big reason why the state has historically balked at creating a national park.