Mud Closes Panhandle Forest Roads Slide Causes Washout Of U.S. Highway 12

Back-country roads across North Idaho are treacherous as heavy rains and high creeks undermine roadbeds and mudslides close byways.

Idaho Panhandle and Clearwater national forest officials are asking people - including Christmas-tree cutters - to stay off the roads until the problems subside. The Forest Service fears people will trigger landslides with their vehicles, getting stuck in the muck or getting trapped between slides, said Kerry Arneson, spokeswoman for the Panhandle.

Farther south, a torrent of mud and debris on Friday blew down Noseeum Creek, 50 miles east of Kooskia, and took out a 100-foot section of U.S. Highway 12. The highway is closed indefinitely, meaning travelers will have to detour more than 100 miles to Coeur d’Alene and take Interstate 90 to reach points east.

The slide from Noseeum Creek hit the Lochsa River, diverting water over U.S. 12. A 1,000-foot section of the road is either buried or missing and will have to be rebuilt on higher ground, said Bill Dermody of the Idaho Department of Transportation.

That will take a month, under the best circumstances. An estimate of the cost of repairs was not available.

The Clearwater County Commissioners have declared a state of emergency because the Clearwater River came over its banks and damaged the main road through Orofino on Thursday.

Dworshak Reservoir rose five feet in 14 hours. The North Fork of the Clearwater River is at its highest recorded level.

Other rivers, including the Coeur d’Alene, St. Joe, Selway and Lochsa are running high but are not breaking records.

There are at least a half-dozen slides on Forest Service roads in the Panhandle. They included the Rattle Creek Road north of Clark Fork, and a handful of other county and Forest Service roads - including the western access to the Taft Tunnel, northeast of Avery.

Some of the problems started in early November, Arneson said.

The Clearwater Forest is in worse shape. A giant slide on Quartz Creek, 20 miles east of Dworshak Reservoir, is 600 feet wide and 60 feet tall.

More than 500,000 tons of rocks, mud, dirt and debris jam the canyon. And the pile is growing.

Environmentalists and former Forest Service employees are blaming logging and road building for dozens of slides, mudflows and debris dams. “Forest Service personnel I talked to said all of the problems in Papoose, Badger and Squaw creeks were due to rain, roads and timber cuts,” said Bill Haskins of the Ecology Center, a forest watch group in Missoula.

Industry and the Forest Service say that’s not the case and point to the problems on U.S. 12 as proof.

“Noseeum Creek is absolutely untouched,” said Deanna Riebe of the Clearwater National Forest. “We haven’t done anything up there,” not even helicopter logging.

The unusually warm weather and heavy rain - often called a “Pineapple Express” coupled with unseasonable snow melt is causing the damage, other Forest Service officials say.

Ken Kohli of the Intermountain Forest Industry Association insisted that “most of the slides are in unlogged drainages.”

That doesn’t match what Haskins found in trips to the eastern portion of the Clearwater Forest Thursday and Friday. “From Powell on down to the Colgate Licks along Highway 12, every drainage with logging and road-building is running brown,” Haskins said.

“I stood in places where creeks from logged and roaded areas joined with creeks from undeveloped areas,” Haskins said. “When the creek came from a logged area it was muddy and when it came from a roadless area, it was clear.”

As he hiked up into the woods Friday, every problem area he found was associated with logging roads and tree harvest - most of it done within the last 10 years, Haskins said. Because snow will probably cover the area soon, most of the problems won’t be fixed and “they are going to run into serious problems in the spring.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Map of area