Usfs Going Overboard Restricting Salmon River Country

The Middle Fork of the Salmon River, a Washington Post story reported the other day, “may be the premier wilderness whitewater excursion in the country.”

Those of us who share this vintage Idaho experience with visitors from around the world certainly agree. The Middle Fork of the Salmon and the main Salmon River are two of the defining characteristics of what until now has been one of the U.S. Forest Service’s best-managed wilderness areas - the Frank Church River of No Return.

The “Frank” is a 2.4-million acre swath of Idaho mountains and river gorges that has been a centerpiece of rural Idaho’s developing outdoor recreation and tourism industry. It’s never has been in better condition than it is today. Campsites are as clean as the rivers’ sparkling water - in part because the public practices an ethic to protect it. Outfitters’ and guides’ development of fire plans to protect beaches, for example, has become a world standard for minimizing man’s impact in the back country.

Floating within this huge wilderness has remained pretty constant over the past decade, closely regulated by an allocation system that limits the number of launches and people in float parties.

That’s why the people who enjoy the pristine Middle Fork and the legendary “River of No Return” - the main Salmon - can’t understand why the Forest Service has proposed cutting in half the size of float parties on the Middle Fork, by one-third on the main Salmon, and restricting power boat use.

The code of the West is, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The Frank ain’t broke. It’s a priceless resource people have committed to help protect.

Nonetheless, a Forest Service team has proposed unwarranted and extreme measures. The Forest Service’s draft environmental impact statement threatens to turn this fantastic resource into what some of the old timers warned us about: “Wilderness, the Land of No Use.”

Idaho’s congressional delegation, in a Feb. 1 letter to Regional Forester Jack Blackwell, addressed the federal government’s seemingly systematic attack on traditional uses of the back country.

“As these decisions have been implemented, tourism and recreation dollars have been touted as a replacement for the lost revenues to the affected counties when grazing, mining and timber have been heavily restricted or eliminated completely. Yet now, the Forest Service seems to be systematically cutting into the tourism revenue stream by drastically cutting back on recreation usage in this wilderness area.”

The namesake of this largest mountain wilderness in the lower 48 states warned that a purist minority could drive federal agency decisions so extreme that public support for the wilderness would be eroded.

In a 1977 speech, Sen. Church said, “It was not the intent of Congress that wilderness be administered in so stringent a manner as to needlessly restrict their customary public use and enjoyment. Quite the contrary. Congress fully intended that wilderness should be managed to allow its use by a wide spectrum of Americans.”

Now is our day of reckoning for that bureaucratic drift to purity Sen. Church warned us about. Outfitters and guides, kayakers, private rafters, power boaters , back country pilots, hunters and fishermen are taking this matter personally. They are not willing to be locked out of these incomparable public lands because of the Forest Service’s reliance on “social” factors in proposing management decisions that will govern the Frank far into the next century.

Sen. Church wrote in the Central Idaho Wilderness Act of 1980 that “such protection can be provided without conflicting with existing uses.”

Idaho’s outfitters and guides are glad to be a part of an emerging consensus of recreational users of the Frank and conservation groups committed to protect it. The federal government will hear clearly that its draft environmental study on an area as important to all of us as the Frank gravely misjudges the public’s perspective and our priorities.

We ask that everyone who ever ventured into the Frank to enjoy its beauty, to hunt its roadless expanses, to dip a line or to float or power boat its challenging waters, to tell the Forest Service that they’ve gone too far.

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