Dear Friends,
In This Issue:
Event Announcements
Overnight Hike to Weitas Creek Roadless Area
A Forest Service Critique by Scott Phillips
Event Announcements
The Friends of the Clearwater (FOC) House Party this Saturday, July 12, has been postponed. Due to several attendance cancellations by the principal participants in this fundraising event, including one of the hosts, who will be gone on a trip, and two of the three musicians, we regret the temporary delay of this lively gathering. However, FOC board and staff members eagerly anticipate a similar celebration in the future and will notify you when a new opportunity to converge with Wild Clearwater Country supporters emerges.
Nimiipuum Weet'es: A Film about the Nez Perce Homeland will be shown again this Sunday, July 13, at 2 p.m., at the museum of the Nez Perce National Historic Park on Highway 95 in Spalding, Idaho. This documentary by Nicolas Barbier, a geographer from France, explores current land, sovereignty, and environmental issues affecting the Nez Perce Tribe and neighboring communities within the original 13 million acres of the Nez Perce homeland. All of the wide variety of sixty individuals who speak as interviewees in this film -- half of them Native American -- are involved in natural resource-related activities and express different worldviews and perspectives on political, treaty rights, and resource management topics. The regional context of the film is broadened by two central characters who have worked on numerous Indian reservations across the country: John Trudell, a Sioux political activist and artist, and Winona LaDuke, an Ojibwe rural economist and writer. Admission to this screening is free of charge. Please see the June 2008 calendar of events at the Friends of the Clearwater website, www.friendsoftheclearwater.org, for more information about this film.
Backpacking Partners are being sought for summer trips in the region by Friends of the Clearwater member Mark Winstein. He is available from July 11 through July 24, but would also like to hike with others throughout the rest of the season. If you are interested in accompanying Mark on wildland excursions, contact him at mark@winstein.net or at 208-596-6500. Similarly, if you would like to alert other FOC e-mail subscribers to your availability as a hiking or backpacking partner, please contact Helen at foc@friendsoftheclearwater.org.
Overnight Hike to Weitas Creek Roadless Area
Come and enjoy a full moon weekend and the howls of wolves in the Wild Clearwater Country! Friends of the Clearwater and the Palouse Group of the Sierra Club are hosting an overnight camping and hiking trip into the upper Weitas Creek basin. Depending on snow conditions in the area, possible alternate routes may include the Gravey Creek and the Cayuse Creek watersheds. These and adjacent drainages together constitute the 255,000-acre Weitas Creek Roadless Area – the largest, unprotected wildland not adjoining designated wilderness in the Clearwater and Nez Perce National Forests. Please bring sturdy camping gear and hiking footwear, raingear, food, and water and meet at 7:00 a.m. on Saturday, July 19, at the Rosauers sign in Moscow. We will return by 5 p.m. on Sunday, July 20.
The Weitas Creek Roadless Area, consisting of the major Cayuse, Fourth of July, and Weitas Creek watersheds, is ecologically significant as the core of wildlands between the Lochsa and North Fork Clearwater rivers. The forests and brush fields surrounding these three large streams contain vast lower elevation habitat for myriad creatures. The Weitas Creek drainage hosts important winter range for elk, especially within the broad, middle Weitas valley, while unique aquatic life thrives in the Hemlock Creek area, which retired University of Idaho professor Fred Rabe has proposed as a Research Natural Area. Most of the roadless area eastward to the Kelly Creek/Great Burn Roadless Area burned in the huge fires of 1910 and 1934, but high-elevation giant cedars endured near Weitas Butte. Cayuse Creek basin encompasses some of the largest tracts of unburned, old-growth forest, while natural regeneration in the Weitas Creek watershed includes interspersed patches of ancient larch. Cook Mountain may be the most fire-prone area in the entire Northern Rockies region, with its frequent fire return intervals and early successional vegetation.
A Forest Service Critique by Scott Phillips
NOTE: This guest commentary, written as a rebuttal to Forest Service (USFS) Chief Abigail Kimbell, was circulated on-line by the Denver Post on July 2, 2008 (http://www.denverpost.com/headlines/ci_9767457). Mr. Phillips requested further distribution to citizens concerned about a heedless Forest Service, through the Friends of the Clearwater electronic newsletter. Scott buttressed his described examples of USFS mischief and malfeasance in his article with solid facts and direct quotes from his sources. You can contact Scott Phillips, a retired USFS Recreation Specialist and public lands advocate residing in Hailey, Idaho, at scottyphi@hotmail.com.
Chief Abigail Kimbell of the U.S. Forest Service wrote a guest commentary in the June 13 Denver Post to which I respectfully take vigorous exception. She extolled the virtues of the "Kids in the Woods" program co-sponsored by the USFS and the American Recreation Coalition (ARC). This program is a whitewash of today's out-of-touch-with-reality Forest Service. Under the heavy hand of the anti-environmental Bush administration, Mark Rey (Kimbell's boss), and Kimbell, much damage is being perpetrated upon environmental quality and the sensibilities of the American public. Some examples of this follow.
* A 1,400-acre phosphate mine expansion into an inventoried roadless area has been approved in eastern Idaho on the Caribou National Forest. Phosphate mining produces selenium – a horrible water pollutant and fish killer that is also highly toxic to humans (Idaho Statesman, June 11). The corporate benefactor, of course, is the multibillion-dollar J.R. Simplot Company. So much for Kimbell's assertion of the importance of clean water!
* The forest supervisor of the Lolo National Forest in Montana recently approved aerial weed spraying with ten deadly chemicals including Natrazine, a proven cause of cancer in humans (retired USFS employee Dick Artley, Grangeville, Idaho).
* In western Montana, Plum Creek Timber Company owns over one million acres of private land in a checkerboard pattern and plans to sell much of it for land development. Historically, the primitive roads built on intermingled national forest parcels were for the express purpose of timber hauling only. Mark Rey wants to throw out the rules with no public involvement and grant unrestricted, legal, road access to Plum Creek. Affected Montana counties are understandably angry and distressed over the impending burden on emergency services and road maintenance. Rey refuses to respond to their letters (High Country News, June 9).
* In 2005 on the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, the USFS wastefully spent $48 million in taxpayer money to develop timber sales and logging roads, but received only $600,000 in timber receipts. Two hundred jobs are linked to Tongass logging, whereas 4000 jobs are linked to southeast Alaska's fishing industry, which is dependent on clean water and forests, not clear cuts (Forest Magazine, Spring 2008).
* The Forest Service has been aggressively exploiting "forest access fees" in backcountry and general forest venues such as trailheads. (Please see www.WesternSlopeNoFee.org for more information.) A fee repeal bill (S2438) has been introduced in the Senate. A House subcommittee held an oversight hearing on USFS and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) fee abuse on June 18.
The cozy "partnership" between the USFS and the ARC is extraordinarily bad news for the American public. The ARC is a hard-core lobbying group for motorized wreckreation. Their mantra is that all Americans have an inalienable right to keep filling their luxury motor homes with cheap gas. They previously lobbied Congress to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. One wonders if Chief Kimbell and Mark Rey have been studying the coming societal train wreck that is Peak Oil.
Rey and Kimbell are adept at diversions and masking their rip-and-run agenda with platitudes and propaganda like "Kids in the Woods." It's all utter nonsense. They have caved in to the ARC, big timber, big oil, big mining, and corporate America. Where is their accountability to the American public? Where is their land and water stewardship? Congress needs to bring real reform to a co-opted Forest Service that oversees YOUR precious national forest heritage, so please get involved.
For the wild,
Helen Yost
