Forest Plan revisions causing a stir

YAKIMA, Wash. — Hunters, snowmobilers and four-wheel enthusiasts around the state are somewhere between confused, apprehensive and outright livid about the proposed Forest Plan that will govern the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest for the foreseeable future.

Hikers and horsemen who want more designated Wilderness and roadless backcountry will like it. Motorized users will see it as simply more areas into which they will be barred from going. Forest Service staffers say the potential for those closures are not nearly as drastic as users fear.

And the public-comment-period clock is already ticking — even before detailed maps are available to the public.

As of Monday afternoon — 11 days into the July-August comment period — the much-awaited interactive map on the National Forest’s website detailing how the proposed plan would impact users of specific roads and trail systems was still not available to online users. And the map available on the compact-disc available at local National Forest ranger stations isn’t detailed enough to delineate specific areas.

“This is pretty much typical. They’ve only had seven years to do it,” said Dick Coppock of Omak, the land-use co-chairman of the Washington State Snowmobile Association, himself a retired Forest Service employee. “And from what I’m reading in the Forest Plan, it’s following the politics of the day: lock-up, the whole nine yards.”

Numerous areas, including a roughly 20-square-mile area of the Teanaway popular with snowmobilers, are recommended in the plan for potential Wilderness designation.

That Teanaway area, northeast of Cle Elum, is north and east of the North Fork Teanaway Road and north of Forest Road 9703. Were it to become designated Wilderness, “That would definitely take out a large chunk of quality snowmobiling territory that, from my perspective, has had little or no impact on the natural area,” said Mike Sutton of Cle Elum, an avid snowmobiler and co-owner of a horse-packing outfitters operation.

Large swaths of land throughout the Okanogan-Wenatchee are also proposed for “backcountry” designation, which would mean motorized uses would be outlawed on those areas. Some of them appear on the project’s maps to include existing roads or trails, but the maps available even now, nearly two weeks into the comment period, aren’t detailed enough to tell.

“Here’s a map on an 8-by-11 and it comes from the Yakama Nation border to the south and the Canadian border to the north, and we’re looking at little red dots (lands proposed for Wilderness designation), but it’s not defined,” said Ron Rutherford, who represents both four-wheel-drive and motorcycle user groups.

“So (the plan) is out on the 29th (of June), and here it is the 11th, and we cannot get a full picture of what they’re proposing. No, this does not make me happy. The end of August is the end of the comment period. The days are clicking by.”

Dave Hurwitz, the chairman of the Snowmobile Alliance of Western States, a pro-access snowmobile association with about 1,000 members in Washington and thousands more around the United States, said he’s “still waiting for decent, detailed maps.”

“I’ve told (Forest Service officials) several times now, your ‘detailed maps’ are just blotches,” Hurwitz said. “It should clearly designate trails and ridgelines, everything so you know where the different use lines are. The comment period should not even be started until the maps are available.”

In all, roughly 125,800 acres within the Okanogan-Wenatchee are being recommended as potential Wilderness, which would constitute an 8 percent increase over the current 1,470,000 Wilderness acres. Recommendations for the Colville National Forest could, if approved by Congress, see its designated Wilderness area more than quadruple, from 29,000 acres to 129,500.

The document isn’t specific about the acreage being designated as “backcountry,” but snowmobile groups are up in arms about the possibility of losing the numerous snowmobile-popular areas with that designation.

Margaret Hartzell, the National Forest’s project manager for the plan revision, said snowmobiler use in those “backcountry” areas would remain unchanged.

The proposals, Hartzell said, “deal with summer recreation. I think people are taking the (Forest Plan) title and extrapolating that into winter. For backcountry and backcountry motorized, the existing winter use that’s authorized, we aren’t proposing making changes to it. The proposed action as written doesn’t make any changes to the existing winter authorized motorized use.”

Hartzell points to a this line in the proposed plan as the critical point: “The proposed action does not include site-specific changes to where winter motorized uses are allowed.”

Neither Coppock nor Hurwitz, though, is convinced that line means what Hartzell says it does.

“I think she’s putting words that aren’t in the document,” Hurwitz said. “It leaves it open to determination by the Forest Service, their interpretation. It’s not clear at all, what it really means.”

“It still doesn’t work for me,” Coppock said. “You’re closing an area and making it backcountry non-motorized. What does that tell you? She’s saying the ‘existing authorized motorized use’ areas, the groomed areas, would be OK, but is she including those play areas? There’s miles of them.”

Coppock pointed out that a huge snowmobile “play area” north of Conconully in the Okanogan Valley, including such premier snowmobile destinations as 20-Mile Meadows, 30-Mile Meadows and Parachute Meadows, would all be designated as “backcountry” under the new plan — and thus non-motorized.

“That ‘backcountry’ designation is going to affect snowmobiles, regardless of what spin they’re putting on it,” Coppock said. “That’s a big thing for the town of Conconully. (The loss of snowmobile-related tourism) is a death knell for that town.”

Wade Kabrich, the safety/education director of the All Wheelers Off Road Club in Yakima County, said adding Wilderness and additional roadless backcountry areas in this part of the state “is not feasible for the Valley in general.”

Kabrich pointed to a number of popular areas — Manastash Ridge, the Blue Slide area, Divide Ridge and Bethel Ridge — where motorized users might be left out in the cold.

“Everybody’s an outdoorsman in one way or another here — hunting, off-road use, people just driving around looking at things,” Kabrich said. “To take these roads out that have been there as long as my father and grandfather have been around is not good for the Valley. It would basically lock up a lot of areas to the general person.

“Hiking is a niche and a lot of people do it, but it’s certainly not the only source of recreation to people out there. There’s a lot of other people who use the road systems — maybe people who do like to hike but don’t want to have to hike 30 miles to a place that, now, they can hike five miles to get to. If you just leave it the way it is, I think that would be best for everybody.”