Lack of national park rooted in Idaho’s past

BOISE – Though brushed by Yellowstone National Park’s western border, Idaho is the only state without a national park of its own.

As other parks across the United States face the pressures of development, it actually was the lure of development, mostly for agriculture at the turn of the 19th century, that kept Idaho park-free.

“The creation of such a national park would not add one speck to the beauty of nature’s work,” said Thomas Stanford, a Carey, Idaho, sheepman and state lawmaker in the 1920s, according to a National Park Service history.

This prevailing attitude stymied proposals such as creation of Shoshone Falls National Park on the Snake River near Twin Falls. Today, the 212-foot cascade dubbed the “Niagara of the West” has an industrial flair, with its graying concrete dam that diverts water into irrigation canals and produces enough electricity to light 10,000 homes.

In what the Park Service describes as a “consolation prize,” President Calvin Coolidge created Craters of the Moon National Monument in 1924, a nod to changing notions that the 54,000-acre expanse of lumpy black lava, icy caves and cinder cones spilling into the eastern Idaho desert wasn’t merely an impediment to settlers looking for an easy way to cross.

In addition to Craters of the Moon, Southern Idaho has Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument, home of the prehistoric “Hagerman Horse,” and the City of Rocks National Reserve, where Oregon Trail pioneers afflicted with “California gold fever” carved their names in granite.

The state also has five federally designated wilderness areas, including the 2.4-million-acre Frank Church-River of No Return area. Earlier this year, the U.S. Forest Service rejected a plan by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to land helicopters there to track wolves.

A move is afoot, by U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, to create another wilderness in the Boulder-White Cloud Mountains in central Idaho. Some conservation groups back the effort, in part to help regulate off-road vehicles they say can damage the landscape.

“Areas are losing their eligibility for wilderness as they are eaten up by powerful motorcycles and ATVs,” said Justin Hayes, an Idaho Conservation League spokesman in Boise.

Craters of the Moon superintendent Doug Neighbor says the national monument doesn’t face the development pressures that might threaten more accessible parks.

Situated at the southern foot of the Lost River Mountains, it is more than an hour from Idaho Falls, the nearest population base, and often is just a pit stop for tourists traveling state Highway 20 between Sun Valley and Yellowstone.

The monument, which gets roughly $1.1 million from the federal government annually and recently raised its per-car entrance rate to $8 from $5 at the behest of Park Service managers in Washington, had 260,000 visitors last year. Gate receipts were $120,000. The monument was expanded in 2000 by adding an adjoining 650,000-acre preserve.

Now, the biggest concerns of Neighbor, who arrived this year after managing the National Park of American Samoa in the Pacific Ocean, include riding herd on exotic weeds that blow in from Bureau of Land Management grazing land.