Refining Riverside State Considers Best Course For Park That Is Open To Many Types Of Use

Something scary is happening at Riverside State Park.

For nearly two years, Washington State Parks Department planners have been floating proposals to designate more natural areas, set more boundaries and write new rules to guide park usage for the next few decades.

The State Parks and Recreation Commission is scheduled to consider those plans Friday in Spokane.

Doubtless someone’s ox could be gored, but mountain bikers, equestrians, hikers, adjacent landowners and naturalists have been scrambling to make sure it isn’t theirs.

Managers of the park just west of Spokane oversee a staggering range of uses and rules on 8,947 acres under their jurisdiction.

Bikes, pets and livestock already are prohibited in the Little Spokane River Natural Area, one of the region’s most diversified wildlife habitats.

The Little Spokane also is one of the few waters in the region with access designed exclusively for paddle craft.

Yet motorcyclists are invited to whip up plumes of dust in the park’s 600-acre off-road vehicle area.

Concessionaires rent horses by the hour for trail riding from stables in the park equestrian area.

Campers can roast marshmallows and relax at several park facilities with a total of 101 picnic sites, 101 campsites, two group camp areas and 14 vault toilets.

The park protects a cultural heritage ranging from Little Spokane River pictographs to the Spokane House, site of a fur trading post established by David Thompson in 1810.

Riverside managers have joint jurisdiction with Spokane County over the 37-mile Spokane River Centennial Trail, which funnels bikers, runners, walkers and skaters into the park’s core.

In all, the park has more miles of trails than any other state park except Mount Spokane. The trails include 36 miles of single track and 47 miles of roads that are closed to motor vehicles.

Between 500,000 and a million visitors come to the park each year, state officials say, although no staffed entrance gates gather accurate numbers.

At this time, Riverside State Park still has ample room for mountain bikers, horse riders, hikers and campers.

But officials foresee user conflicts in a park crushed on several flanks by urbanization.

Since the first parcel was acquired in 1934, Riverside State Park has continued to grow. The most recent addition was 633 acres along Long Lake acquired in 1992, said Daniel Farber, park planner in Olympia.

The new master plan proposal recommends future park boundaries. It offers guidance on parcels that might be liquidated and areas the state should consider for acquisition.

If approved, this plan would revise the permanent park boundary plan devised by a citizen committee in 1979.

“Times change,” Farber said. Strong local resistance developed recently to talk of trading away some areas identified in 1979 as surplus land, he added.

Rules have been enforced in the park since it was founded. But new proposals for restrictions and boundaries are a serious threat to some users.

Officials have been trying to balance recreation and preservation throughout Washington’s state parks by sorting areas within parks into six classifications: recreation, resource recreation, heritage, natural area, natural forest area and natural area preserve.

“Recreation” is the most permissive classification, allowing everything from Jet Skis to off-trail snowmobiling.

“Natural area preserve” is the most restrictive classification, with little public access allowed except by special permit for educational purposes.

“My problem isn’t in having classifications for areas of the parks,” said Ken Carmichael, a horseman and citizen advisor to the park planners for Riverside and Mount Spokane state parks.

“My problem is with the rigid rules the state wants to apply to all 125 state parks. You need flexibility and local input, because the parks in Washington are vastly different.”

Nearly 200 people attended the first contentious meeting 18 months ago, in which park planners came from Olympia to Spokane to present their original master plan recommendations for Riverside.

Stirring the most anger were proposals to designate roughly 2,000 additional acres to natural forest areas.

This classification would preclude the use of mountain bikes and horses in areas where they have traditionally been allowed.

The restrictions, park officials suggested, are needed to slow the spread of noxious weeds in relatively pristine areas, to afford more solitude to hikers and wildlife, and to protect rare plant species.

Bicyclists and equestrians - especially those who live near park - called foul.

Equestrians have had a long history of use in the park, and mountain bikers are the fastest growing park user group.

“They tell us that hikers want an experience where they can find solitude and nothing else but other hikers,” Carmichael said. “I can tell you countless times when seeing horses on the trail was the highlight of a hiking family’s day.”

Horse riders and mountain bikers are the core of the park’s trail maintenance volunteers, he said.

Representatives from these groups have closely followed the evolution of the park plan through several meetings and reams of correspondence.

Last month, park planners presented their revised proposals at a meeting in the Spokane County Health Building.

“Generally they did a good job in respecting existing uses in the park,” said Mike Brixey, a Spokane mountain biker who’s helped organized volunteer trail maintenance in the park.

“They listened,” he said. “And that’s refreshing.”

The park planners eliminated most of the “natural forest area” designations from their proposal and opted for much more acreage in the “resource recreation” classification.

“This gives us more flexibility in many ways, including fire prevention, while still allowing us to manage the uses,” Farber said.

“Resource recreation” allows for multi-use trails.

“Trails are a tremendous tool for protecting the environment,” Carmichael said. “A well-planned trail can lead people, horses and bikes through a nice area with little disturbance. And it works much better than trying to enforce borders drawn on a map.”

Other priorities park planners identified at the meeting included:

Protect and keep new development off the 196,650 feet of freshwater shoreline managed by Riverside State Park.

Expand camping areas, probably at Nine Mile Resort or at the Fisk property acquisition on Long Lake.

Designate the mouth of Deep Creek as a natural area and close a small area there to mountain biking and horse riding.

Consider a paddle craft river access at Seven Mile Bridge that would be designed to discourage use of Jet Skis.

Reroute an existing trail and establish a small “natural area preserve” in the upper Deep Creek drainage to protect rare plants.

“It’s been a long process,” Brixey said after reading the revised park plan. “The proposal the parks staff is presenting to the commissioners is dramatically different from the original. I hope the commission appreciates the work and local effort that went into this.”

“We think we’ve done a good job of working local comments into the plan,” Farber said. “The input we got at the last meeting were mostly refinements from people who have an intimate knowledge of the park.”

Asked what the seven-member commission will do with the proposal on Friday, Farber said, “The parks staff can give our best advice to the commission, but they are an independent body and do as they see fit.

“Generally, though, when we go through this process, they are relatively responsive to the work.”

Map: Riverside State Park plan

MEETING The Washington Parks and Recreation Commission will meet in Spokane on Friday to consider management plans for the Pasco-Cheney rail-trail as well as Riverside State Park. The public session will begin at 9 a.m. at the downtown DoubleTree Inn.