River’S Future Clearing Up Cleanup Efforts Have Cda River’S South Fork On Pace To Overcome Murky Past

Second of three parts

It’s been called Lead Creek and much worse. But the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River may deserve a new name.

Resurrection River.

True, there still aren’t many fish in it. Zinc dissolved in the water keeps them away. But the visible mining wastes are gone, and so is the sewage. The water often is as clear and glinting as crystal. While most of its shoreline is anything but natural, efforts are under way to return vegetation to some of it.

Communities that had turned their backs on the South Fork decades ago are taking another look.

“It’s actually a great benefit,” says Kellogg city planner Walter Hadley, who is working to develop a riverside greenbelt through his town. Park benches, trees and a paved trail now top the levees.

Wallace Mayor Ron Garitone is equally gung-ho to beautify the barren riverbank that greets visitors to the Shoshone County seat. He is seeking grants for his Project 2000 and envisions grass, trees and historical displays.

People long had been warned to stay away from the South Fork. Inviting folks to stroll and bike along its banks is a remarkable turn of events, given its 100-year status as one of the most contaminated rivers in the country.

“People are even catching fish in the South Fork, up by Big Creek,” says longtime Silver Valley resident John Yergler. “I wouldn’t eat ‘em, but some people are catching them.”

Before settlement by white people, the South Fork was a fish-filled mountain torrent that poured into a lowland Shangri-La. After arriving in 1884, pioneer W.R. Wallace reported catching 247 trout in one day on Placer Creek.

The city that bears Wallace’s name was first known as Cedar Swamp. Cedars still scrape the sky above the South Fork’s headwaters. There, beyond the uppermost mine, migrating cutthroat from Lake Coeur d’Alene find an insect-laden haven in which to spawn.

Scientists hike through a tangle of ferns and devil’s club to reach the stream that still is what the South Fork was.

Downstream, the only hint of the historical swamps are ancient stumps that punctuate a treeless plain near Smelterville.

Heavy metal history

It’s impossible to envision the South Fork’s future without understanding its past.

By the 1880s, mines were dumping waste rock directly into the streams that feed the South Fork. Sometimes miners built dams to hold back the rock, but gravity and spring runoff always won out. The earthen dams burst, carrying zinc, lead, arsenic and more coursing toward Lake Coeur d’Alene.

Along the way, the heavy metals killed fish, wildlife, livestock, pets and vegetation. Mining camps such as Wallace and Kellogg sprang up, and human waste was added to the brown, foamy current. The South Fork stunk. Its color was described as “dirty dough.”

Meanwhile, much of the shoreline was replaced by dikes to protect towns from flooding. Construction of Interstate 90 in the 1960s shoved the river around until it wasn’t much more than water in a ditch.

It was 1968 before all the mines were using settling ponds to limit contamination. In 1972, residents of Wallace, Mullan, Osburn, Kellogg and Pinehurst passed a sewer bond. Their joint sewer system was operating two years later, keeping raw sewage out of the river.

With the 1980s came closure of many mines and the Bunker Hill smelting complex.

As the turn of the century approaches, the federal cleanup of the massive Bunker Hill Superfund Site surrounding Kellogg is nearly done, but a lot of work remains.

The final steps of the Superfund project include trucking reddish mine tailings away from the river downstream of Kellogg. After that, Mother Nature will take over. She’ll send sediment-laden floodwater onto the plain. Bushes and trees should take root.

Cycle of nature

“You have to have vegetation to have bugs, and you have to have bugs to have fish,” says Marti Calabretta. She coordinates cleanup work being done upstream for the state and mining companies, through the Silver Valley Natural Resource Trustees.

As much as possible, Calabretta wants wetlands restored in the river corridor. So does Jack Matranga, the consultant who’s overseen much of the trustees’ restoration work. He even suggests tearing down some of Kellogg’s flood-protection dike and rebuilding it to make the river prettier and more natural.

“In Kellogg they’re inviting people to walk along the river, but basically they’re just inviting them to look at a ditch,” Matranga says.

The trustees’ prime objectives are getting zinc out of the river and fish back into it. That’s not good enough for some valley residents. They want a shoreline free of contamination.

“What good does it do to have fish coming up the South Fork when children don’t have a good place to go fishing?” Sandi Lockhart of Osburn asked at an Environmental Protection Agency meeting this summer.

In the short term, says Calabretta, restoration may mean people are fenced out of their favorite river hangouts while grasses and trees grow back.

A place to play

One place that’s always been clean is the South Fork upstream of Mullan. That’s above the mines. The Idaho Department of Fish and Game plants rainbow trout there. Scientists use its water quality as a benchmark, the goal for downstream cleanup efforts.

“I practically lived in it,” Wallace’s Mayor Garitone says of that last wild stretch of the South Fork. “The big thing growing up in Mullan for us kids was for one of our dads to drive a bunch of us up to the fish hatchery. We’d wade from there to Mullan.”

These days, whitewater-crazy boaters come to Wallace to surf waves that rage through the river channel. They have fun despite the presence of dangerous rebar and other debris left from freeway construction.

There’s talk of a kayaking park between Wallace and Kellogg, created with strategically placed boulders.

“I always thought that would be a fantastic idea,” says Spokane kayaker Marlene Williams, who talks of dropping over ledges and into pools downstream of the Wallace visitors center.

A whitewater park could complement the winter recreation offered at Silver Mountain ski resort, says Forest Service fish biologist Ed Lider.

The South Fork isn’t deep enough for powerboats, and most of it is too noisy with freeway sounds to be pleasant for canoeists.

But Hadley, the Kellogg planner, envisions canoes launching in his town and floating toward the quiet, isolated stretch of river between Pinehurst and Enaville. Rock-lined dikes pose a big obstacle.

Wallace and Kellogg officials are excited about the chance to be part of a 72-mile hiking and biking trail. The state is negotiating to use the bed of Union Pacific’s abandoned railroad right of way for a “linear park” extending from Plummer to Mullan.

All the talk and planning shows that even a degraded river can call out to people. Calabretta, who has lived 25 years in Osburn, says locals have long tossed their rafts in the gravelly South Fork and floated a couple of miles.

“When I think of the future, 20 years from now, I think my grandkids will be on the beach, swimming. And, hopefully, fishing.”

Map: South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River