Candlelight Dinner From Hell
Having a garage full of camping gear has helped many Inland Northwest families take the chill out of the ice storm and power outage.
Prepared campers always have a supply of candles and a drawer full of long underwear.
Savvy hunters always have extra flashlight batteries.
Our family transformed the living room into “the family bed” by spreading Therm-a-Rest mats on the floor and snuggling into sleeping bags.
The propane grill did dinner by lantern light on the deck. The white-gas stove - used by an open window - provided hot oatmeal and coffee.
With the refrigerator out of commission, we stuffed the cooler with ice to preserve the milk, eggs and what’s left of the pheasant and quail I bagged last weekend.
But if you’re like our family, you might be too well-prepared.
The freezer is fully stocked with this season’s wild game, including antelope, fish, ducks and pheasants, plus a good harvest of huckleberries.
One more day with no electricity and we’re looking at a major big-game feed and a long night of making huckleberry leather.
Seizing opportunity: Anyone want to bet that local ultra-right-wing propagandist Ed Davis writes a letter to the editor claiming the devastating effects of the ice storm could have been prevented by salvage logging?
Mount Spokane hotline: Cross-country skiers can get updates on trail conditions at Mount Spokane State Park by calling 238-4025.
The park was snug in blanket of fresh powder snow on Wednesday morning. Temperature was 10 degrees. Grooming is scheduled daily except for Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Monitoring Roosevelt: Anglers have already put two-and-two together to deduce that the massive flush of floodwaters through the Columbia River system this spring had something to do with crippling the fisheries in Lake Roosevelt.
Adult trout and kokanee apparently were swept over Grand Coulee Dam. The rapid flow of water through the reservoir retarded growth of plankton, which is essential feed for kokanee and the baitfish that sustain walleyes.
Fishing has been in a funk all year.
No one can say when the fishery will recover.
But at least the Washington Fish and Wildlife Department is assigning a biologist to investigate what has happened.
Researcher Scott Smith said he has to scientifically verify the decline before he can begin pinpointing causes and seeking solutions.
“We know that kokanee cannot tolerate higher flows and will wash out of the system with a major reservoir drawdown and high spring flows,” he said. “But trout are adapted to handle high flows. Trout shouldn’t have been affected so much.
“Increased flows would have impacted plankton,” he said. “But the closing of a British Columbia fertilizer plant in 1994 could be having an impact, too.”
Roosevelt normally has a rich diversity of plankton that helped these fish grow very fast, Smith said. “At least two surveys by the Tribes showed the largest of the plankton were virtually absent this year.”
Closing a fertilizer plant may have been necessary to stop the dumping of toxic waste into the river, he said. But the side effect is that nutrients that were creating fish food have been cut off.
The federal government and Colville Tribe has been doing research on the reservoir, Smith said.
“I hope we can pull together some sort of multi-agency effort to bring together all the work that’s been done,” he said.
Smith has no rosy-tinted ambitions in his assignment, noting the Columbia River has many constituencies, including power production, irrigation, recreation and industry as well as fishing.
“Balancing the uses is sometimes contentious,” he said in one of the great understatements of the fishing season.
Condo habitat: Colorado voters have been pretty quick to trounce on hunters and trappers as scourges to wildlife.
Biologists can’t compete with the political fray, but they are at least contributing to the discussion of real threats to wildlife.
Colorado regions between 6,500 feet and 8,500 feet are prime bear habitat, dense with the oak brush and berries. “Unfortunately,” said Todd Malmsbury, spokesman for the Colorado Division of Wildlife, “that’s also prime condo habitat.”
He tells a story about a woman, newly arrived from Arizona, who called his office in a panic one day. “There’s a bear in my back yard!” she said.
The warden who answered the phone replied: “That’s funny. I just got a call from a bear who said, ‘There’s a house in my front yard.”’
You can contact Rich Landers by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5508.
, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Rich Landers The Spokesman-Review