Home 
Environment & Access Eco Blurbs May-June 2004
Environment & Access Eco Blurbs May-June 2004
| Eco Blurbs May-June 2004 |
 |
 |
| Saturday, 01 May 2004 05:59 |
|
New Regs to Cut Brown’s Park Access If there ever was a middle of nowhere, Brown’s Park on the Utah-Colorado border is it. The Green River here crawls through a vintage Western landscape before plunging into Lodore Canyon of Dinosaur National Monument. Once a refuge for Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, Brown’s Park is now a haven for migrating birds, protected as a National Wildlife Refuge. Canoeists, rafters, anglers and birders journey here for the lack of humans, family-friendly flows and stellar camping. But a new refuge proposal could put clamps on the floating part. The refuge currently doesn’t have a river management plan, and officials are mulling whether or not river use should be a component of the refuge’s goals of wildlife protection. The proposal includes prohibiting overnight parking at sites along the river, removing select campsites and closing certain river stretches. Plus, Dinosaur will begin enforcing its decades-old river management plan that prohibits floating from Brown’s Park into the monument. The monument is concerned that pressure from Brown’s Park floaters could degrade the quality for Lodore Canyon users. "Do I think that existing facilities can accommodate new use? No, I don’t," says Dinosaur superintendent Chas Cartwright. "Our main concern right now is to keep that high quality of experience we provide right now." The proposal has caught the attention of the Colorado Plateau River Guides, a group representing commercial river use in the West. "The combined actions now in place and proposed by the Brown’s Park Refuge will effectively eliminate river use for all people, with the possible exception of those with a Lodore river permit," says CPRG’s Herm Hoops, who has asked Interior Secretary Gale Norton to rescind the proposal. If the proposal goes through, it appears the only people floating through Brown’s Park will be outlaws. —mh No Love for New Salmon Plan While a new management plan for Idaho’s Middle Fork and Main Salmon rivers aims at preserving wilderness and the experience of floating through a primitive area, it appears to do little to halt the most destructive, polarizing forces: an outdated, and some say unfair, system of allocating commercial outfitter permits, the number of people on commercial and private trips and the excessive use of jet boats on the Main Salmon. It’s no secret that paddling’s increased popularity has negative effects on wilderness ecosystems as well as the feeling of solitude, which is part of the appeal of such trips. The U.S. Forest Service, the administrating agency, notes this as a main reason for preparing the new plan, yet it doesn’t add any provisions for limiting commercial outfitter use, which constitutes more than half of all floaters, and it doesn’t implement restrictions for jet-boat use on the Main Salmon. The plan does add a new twist on Middle Fork floats: The addition of variable trip lengths allows smaller private groups to stay on the river for more days. Still, the plan doesn’t seem to have satisfied anyone. Western Whitewater Association (a jet-boat group), Idaho Outfitter and Guides Association and a coalition of environmental groups, led by Wilderness Watch, have all appealed the plan. Kent Fuellenbach, public affairs officer for the Salmon-Challis National Forest, says he and other Idaho wilderness managers meet with groups that file appeals to solve the problems without going through the time-consuming appeals process. "We’ve made these management decisions," he says, "but we cannot implement them until this process is over." George Nickas, executive director for Wilderness Watch and a former river guide, is concerned that the recreation industry is starting to have too much influence over land management, much like the timber and mining barons of the past. "Wilderness was established to be an antidote to our commercialized world," he says. "As long as wilderness has to serve the recreation industry, we’ll have no wilderness left." Info: www.fs.fed.us/r4/sc/. —Daniel Berger Forest Service Shuns Chattooga Kayakers The headwaters of the Chattooga River, a 20-mile Class IV-V creekers’ dream, continues to be off limits to paddlers because, according to the U.S. Forest Service, kayakers would negatively impact the experiences of other users, namely anglers. In a January decision, the Forest Service continued a ban on paddlers in the Chattooga’s headwaters, the entire river being designated a Wild and Scenic River for the last 30 years. While the ban stayed off the radar for most paddlers for many years due to the lack of demand in the hair-boat category, American Whitewater (AW), which began fighting the ban eight years ago, now says the potentially precedent-setting case just locks out kayakers in favor of other user groups. "The Forest Service has begun a bad public policy of zoning paddlers away from anglers, based on the absurd assumption that the two uses are incompatible," says AW’s Kevin Colbourn. "This policy could ultimately result in both anglers and paddlers losing access to rivers they cherish, but for now the decision simply discriminates against paddlers." Colbourn says the Forest Service instituted the ban 26 years ago ostensibly for safety and to provide a high-quality angling experience. But, he adds, the agency still has weak to no data supporting the ban. "They’re basically just saying the addition of kayakers will ruin the solitude experience of other backcountry users," Colbourn says. "But this is not an angling-versus-boating issue, but rather about a very small group of anglers who feel they have the right to have this river all to themselves." Colbourn notes that AW will appeal the case, saying the group has more than enough critical analysis "to take this as far as it can go." —mh Originally Published, Paddler May-June 2004 |
Share This Page!
