2015: The Year Outdoors
Record low snowpacks were recorded throughout the Northwest, from 7 percent of normal in the Olympic Mountains to just a little less grim around the region. Oregon’s average snowpack was 11 percent of normal by May. Washington’s average was 27 percent and it wasn’t much better in many areas of Idaho and Montana.
Things started getting weird in January when an outbreak of avian influenza at an Okanogan County private game farm forced federal and state agriculture officials to kill up to 5,000 ducks, geese, chickens, pheasants and turkeys.
Later, more than 2,000 migrating snow geese died in pit stops at Mud Lake in southeastern Idaho, apparently from avian cholera.
Things were simply going wrong.
The first grizzly bear out of its winter den in Yellowstone National Park was reported on Feb. 9. Ski areas were closing weeks early. Coffeepot Lake in Lincoln County never had enough water in 2015 for the boat launch to be opened. Three black bears had to be removed from North Spokane residential areas this year.
Spring runoff, what there was of it, occurred a couple of months ahead of normal and left streams recording record low flows from March through summer.
Whitewater rafting operations opened April 1 instead of May 1 to go with the flow before it was quickly gone.
By the first week of June, as surveys showed 2015 was stacking up to be the area’s lowest water season since records have been kept, Avista reduced Spokane River flows in a vain attempt to fill Lake Coeur d’Alene and keep it at normal summer level.
Even the Cascade Mountains were so bare that Bellingham organizers of the annual 94-mile Ski to Sea event on May 24 were forced to drop the two skiing events that normally start the race.
The dearth of runoff spawned the best early-spring fly fishing Montana river guides could recall. But by July Montana was enacting restrictions on fishing hours to reduce stress on trout trying to survive high water temperatures. Washington followed suit as sockeye salmon began dying in the Columbia.
Dread for the inevitable drought-spurred wildfire season soon was fulfilled. By late June, lightning-caused fires were forcing land closures that grew and multiplied by the week.
Portions of the Glacier Peak, Pasayten, Wenaha-Tucannon and other wilderness areas soon were closed to hikers and equestrians.
Nearly all private timber companies throughout the region, including Potlatch, Weyerhaeuser and Inland Empire Paper, closed their forests to public access by mid-July.
In August, huge areas of Eastern Washington and Idaho were closed to public access going into the hunting seasons, including a swath of Panhandle Forests north of Interstate 90.
Even the Little Spokane River Natural Area was closed to hikers and paddlers because of a fire.
By the time the pall of smoke cleared, Washington had racked up its worst fire season on record. More than 1,500 wildfires burned 1,005,423 acres in the state. Battling those blazes cost Washington $164 million.
But the drought-induced losses weren’t measured in blackness alone.
In late summer and early fall, white-tailed deer were dying by the thousands from the Colville area south to the Grangeville, Idaho, region from a deadly hemorrhagic disease called bluetongue. The virus is spread by gnats that flourish in dry conditions and take a high toll when whitetails are concentrated at limited water sources.
A weather-related ocean phenomena dubbed “the blob” – a large expanse of warmer water off the coast – contributed to a toxic algae bloom unprecedented in range. It affected marine life, including clams, fish and sea lions, from Central California toward Alaska.
But despite all of the negatives, outdoors enthusiasts couldn’t be totally deterred. Many national parks recorded record visitation in 2015, including Glacier Park, where a fire closed the Going to the Sun Highway for weeks.
Spring brought on one of the best morel mushroom harvests in memory, especially in the vast areas charred by wildfires in 2014.
Spring also produced a booming crop of wild turkeys from the region’s wilds to city driveways. Frustration with wild turkeys on Spokane’s South Hill spawned contentious effort to curb the growth of flocks by finding nests and destroying eggs. The effort facilitated by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife failed. Citizen volunteers couldn’t find the nests.
By December, with wild turkeys just about everywhere, the region was up to its armpits in something else – snow!
The tide seems to have change. Gov. Inslee rescinded Washington’s drought proclamation. Cascade passes have been closed regularly for avalanche control. Mt. Spokane ski area reported more snow on Dec. 16 than it had at its peak in the previous season.
What a difference a year can make.
Other issues that generated outdoors news and interest in 2015 include:
The movement seeking ways to transfer federal land to states began running into opposition from economists who showed how expensive it would be. Nevertheless, Utah approved $12 million this year to continue the effort this year and Idaho was willing to spend more.
However, Montana Gov. Steve Bullock stepped up and vetoed a bill that would have funded a study of federal lands for potential transfer. A similar bill died quickly in the Washington Legislature.
Repairs to a cracked spillway were completed at Wanapum Dam allowing water levels on the Columbia River reservoir to be raised to normal levels and boat ramps reopened for the first time since the problem was discovered in February 2014.
Construction began on the first wildlife overpass on Interstate 90 in the Cascades to go along with four underpasses already constructed. Up to 20 passages are planned to mitigate the deadly barriers the freeway has presented for decades.
Clark Fork Delta restoration gaining ground, so to speak, as a $6 million project checks dam-related erosion at 5,600-acres of Idaho’s most important wetlands.
More than 50,000 tons of rock have gone into rebuilding shorelines on the delta, which was losing about 15 acres a year to erosion. Thousands of willows have been planted, too.
In five years, a restored peninsula “will be a big, green finger pointing into Lake Pend Oreille,” said Katherine Cousins, an Idaho Department of Fish and Game biologist. “You won’t even know that we did all this work here.”
Wolves continued to be in the news and regularly racking up polarized mobs of reader comments on The Spokesman-Review’s website.
Eleven wolves were killed in the southern Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia during a winter effort to reduce predation on endangered woodland caribou that range in Canada as well as in Idaho and Washington. Another 73 wolves were killed farther north to boost caribou in the province’s South Peace region. Only 14 caribou were still alive in the southern Selkirks when the wolf control began.
Several bills related to wolves were debated in the Washington Legislature, including one to delist wolves from endangered species protections. None was approved.
Gray wolves continued to spread from their stronghold in northeastern Washington to other portions of the state from Whitman County, where sheep were attacked, to just west of Snoqualmie Pass, where a wolf was killed in a vehicle collision on I-90.
A Whitman County farmer who used a vehicle to chase down and shoot a wolf that posed no immediate threat to humans or property. He was fined $100 in September by the county prosecutor, less than most hunters would be fined for illegally shooting a deer. He also forfeited the rifle valued at $1,200.
Northern pike suppression started in Lake Roosevelt where numbers of the non-native predators mushroomed in the Kettle Falls area.
The Coeur d’Alene Tribe offered a $5 reward to anglers who turned in dead pike from the south end of the lake where tribal biologists are looking for ways to curb pike predation on cutthroat trout.
A massive irrigation project began coming on line in Central Washington to bring farmers more Columbia River water and curb the reliance on unsustainable deep-well irrigation. Roughly 500 deep wells have drawn down the aquifer in the Odessa Sub Area by more than 200 feet in some areas.
Grizzly bear recovery brought the species closer to delisting from threatened status in the Rockies. Conflicts with hunters and livestock were among the reasons a record 59 grizzly bears died in the Yellowstone ecosystem in 2015.
Proposals for reintroducing grizzlies to the North Cascades polarized the public at public meetings held by federal agencies.
Salmon passage upstream from Grand Coulee Dam gained traction as a legitimate proposal by Columbia River region Indian tribes. An initial study is planned on what it would take to return spring chinook and sockeye runs to the 100-plus river miles between the Grand Coulee and the U.S.-Canada border.