Hells Canyon Jet Boats Winning Concession Operators’ Trips, Not Destinations, Will Be Limited

A local outfitting business has won a concession in its appeal of the U.S. Forest Service management plan for the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area.

“We feel it’s a step in the right direction, but there’s still a ways to go,” Alan “Butch” Odegaard, who owns River Quest Excursions with his wife, Debra, said Monday.

Richard Ferraro, deputy regional forester in Portland, agreed with the Odegaards that the plan improperly restricted their destinations for jet boat tours in Hells Canyon.

Ferraro ruled that the plan’s analysis of the need for limiting outfitters’ destinations was inadequate. But he upheld the plan’s limit on the numbers of trips commercial outfitters may take into the canyon each summer.

“We’re still limited on our days but we’ll be able to offer our trips like we have in the past,” Odegaard said.

Jet boat outfitters who run the Snake River are still waiting for the Forest Service to rule on a number of other issues raised in appeals.

Woody Fine, the Forest Service’s assistant area ranger in Clarkston, Wash., said Ferraro’s decision represents a major change in the plan but keeps its focus intact.

“I think it provides the outfitters with a substantial amount of economic flexibility, but it still moves us from an unmanaged to a managed river,” Fine said.

The numbers of trips taken in the canyon by both commercial and private jet boaters will be limited for the first time this summer.

Both groups of powerboaters sought unsuccessfully to have regional Forest Service officials overturn the plan’s no-motors periods during the summer control season. The plan calls for six or seven three-day periods each summer when jet boats will be banned from 21 miles of the Snake River from Kirkwood Historical Ranch upstream to Wild Sheep Rapid.

Now-retired Wallowa-Whitman National Forest Supervisor Robert Richmond put a hold on the no-motors windows for this summer, saying the agency needed to study how they would affect private land access.

But Ferraro did not answer the commercial jetboaters’ call to drop the no-motors periods. Regional officials in January rejected a similar request from private jet boaters.

The issue probably will generate a lawsuit, Odegaard said.

“We still have a long way to go,” he said. “We’ll probably end up in court on it because we’ll never accept that.”

Still, he was happy Ferraro dropped the destination limits.

High water this year has eased the first season of limited numbers of jet boat permits available for the wild portion of the Snake in the canyon. Both float boaters and jet boaters have left unclaimed permits to run the wildest stretch of the river.