Old Friends Help Spruce Up Neglected Park

Idaho’s Cinderella park has finally come to the ball.

The 5,000-acre Mary Minerva McCroskey Park, the state’s third oldest and third largest, was ignored for 20 years after the death of its donor, Virgil T. McCroskey. This despite the fact that he left the state a trust of more than $55,000 for its care.

But things have changed over the past five years for the park McCroskey named to honor his mother and all pioneer women, thanks to groups such as the Friends of McCroskey.

That group will meet Sunday to review land trades that will shape the park’s future.

Friends of McCroskey now serves as an adviser to the state parks department and the U.S. Forest Service on proposed land exchanges that will consolidate park holdings.

At the most recent spring gathering of the Friends of McCroskey - on a day that alternately brought rain, wind, hail and sunshine - members took notice of steps the parks department has taken to restore the park to the condition that McCroskey left it at the time of his death in 1970.

The department has restored the fireplace, replaced damaged picnic tables, posted signs, cleared viewpoints of tangled growth and assigned a park ranger.

Terry Doupe of Tensed, the group’s president, and Jerry Wagner of Farmington, Wash., recalled working for McCroskey as teenagers when he punched through the road that turns off U.S. Highway 95 about 10 miles south of Tensed.

McCroskey was an unapologetic tree hugger. Wagner told of an incident when the older man procrastinated about removing two pines that stood where the road had to go.

“While he was gone we cut them down, cleaned up the mess and graded over the spot. When he came back he said that he could have sworn there were two trees over there.”

McCroskey could also be fierce. He’s frightened away hunters, because it’s illegal to hunt in state parks.

Wagner remembers coming upon a couple of hunters chopping up a picnic table Virgil had built.

“He managed to intimidate them and before it was over the two handed over $40, all they had in their billfolds, to pay for a new table.”

The Friends of McCroskey have big plans for the future:

A safer entrance off Highway 95.

A historical marker for the park to be placed near the King’s Valley Road. The sign would include a park map.

More directional signs within the park.

Continued road improvement and viewpoints.

A simple, rustic shelter at the fireplace site.

Drinking water. (There is not a safe supply.)

Maybe, someday, an interpretive center will be built. The park is one of the few places containing a gradation of natural species - from bunch grasses and plant life to pine, larch, fir, grand fir, spruce and cedar at higher elevations. For this reason, the western extremity has been recommended as a National Natural Landmark.

That one man would spend half a lifetime acquiring a fortune in timberland, building a road, then giving it all away seems strange.

But, one only needs to kneel in the damp grass beside a rocky brook tumbling downward under cedar branches or listen to the wind roaring through ancient pines to understand. , DataTimes MEMO: Jeri McCroskey, a freelance writer and antique collector, lives with her husband at Carlin Bay. Virgil McCroskey is her husband Robert’s great uncle. Panhandle Pieces is shared among several North Idaho writers.