YAKIMA, Wash. — I’ve been getting some input this morning from people who read today’s “More sweeping changes?” story, and one of the folks I’ve heard from is Jonathan Guzzo of the Washington Trails Association. And he thinks the recreation groups are doing a lot of worrying about, well, probably nothing.

Those recreationists’ fears about the potential sweep of their dedicated rec funds into the general fund during the budget process, Guzzo said, are both premature and about something that is very unlikely. From a lot of folks, I’d just take that as “OK, thanks, have a nice day” input. But as the WTA’s advocacy director, Jonathan spends a great deal more time than I do in the halls and offices of Olympia talking with legislators, so his opinion carries some weight.

He told me the inevitable backlash of such a sweep would make it de facto political poison for the very people who would have to pass the legislation necessary to make it happen.

“I would say if it’s an option, it certainly is one of the least attractive options for the legislature,” Guzzo told me, adding that it was probably “counterproductive” to those recreation entities to be publicly sounding the alarm — i.e., calling reporters — this early in the budget process. “I think it’s extraordinarily unlikely to happen.”

Guzzo said the same thing Rep. Ross Hunter (D-Medina) told me yesterday — that there is no budget yet, so fears about what might be in it can’t and shouldn’t be taken seriously. Guzzo also said if legislators did decide to do in 2012 what they did in 2009, when the NOVA and marine accounts were swept into the general fund to prevent the impending closure of dozens of state parks, would generate “a lot of heat from a lot of people — including Washington Trails Association.”

“We would fight it,” Guzzo said, noting that NOVA funds help maintain trails that are popular not only with motorized users, but with hikers as well.

It may well be true that the funds are very unlikely to be swept; I wouldn’t be at all surprised if these fears are unfounded, just much ado about nothing. But the fact that so many people are up in arms anticipating the worst is, well, kind of news in itself. That speaks of a general feeling of mistrust in the system and in the people responsible for making it work.

Then again, maybe that feeling has been out there long enough that it’s no longer news to anybody. And that’s pretty sad.

– Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA, Wash. — Since the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has gone to strictly online registration for its hunter education classes, some local classes aren’t filling up nearly as fast as they used to. Classes that used to fill up within a day after the old routine — announcing them in the local newspaper with a phone number to call and schedule — are coming and going with room to spare.

Case in point: There’s a hunter ed class beginning Saturday in Selah taught by experienced pro Lance Cussons, and as of 3 p.m. Thursday there were still seven spots remaining. That just never happens, and typically a young prospective hunter hoping to get into one of these mandatory classes has to plan well in advance.

So if you’re looking for a class, here’s where you can sign up. From there, you click on the online registration link; that will take you to the calendar page, and if you want to join the class beginning Saturday, just click on that date and go from there. You’ll also find a Kittitas County class beginning Feb. 16 and another Yakima County class, taught by Dave Pittman, that will get under way on Feb. 20. (There are two other classes starting that same day, so don’t be confused; just click on the date and make your selection.)

Oh, and if you’re a hunter ed instructor wanting to let folks know you’ve got a class coming up, you can always still call your local newspaper to get the word out. We still do that sort of thing.

– Scott Sandsberry

 YAKIMA, Wash. — It seems as if everybody I talk to these days wants to give me a piece of their mind the state’s new requirement that, in order to watch the elk at one of the Oak Creek Wildlife Area’s elk-feeding stations, spectators’ vehicles must display either a Discover Pass or a current WDFW access pass.

(The WDFW pass is issued along with the purchase of a hunting or fishing license; the 2011 passes are good through March, which would almost certainly be later than the last elk feeding. The winter has been so mild and the snow so sparse that the elk haven’t even come down near the Oak Creek headquarters near the 410/12 “Y” and there has been no feeding yet this season.)

It’s not surprising the average Joe on the street doesn’t like the new pay-to-watch deal. Nobody like having to pay for something they used to enjoy for free. But this morning I happened to be talking to former Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission member Bob Tuck, and he waded in on the issue.

And no, he doesn’t like it, either.

“It’s an awful thing,” Tuck said. “In an era when we need to do all we can to connect people to wildlife, that was one of the few activities left that was free, where a person of modest means who doesn’t hunt or fish can go see some wildlife.

“To charge them is so detrimental to the future of wildlife and fish in this state, I can’t believe they’re doing that.”

It wasn’t a decision made locally, said Oak Creek Wildlife Area manager Ross Huffman. “It was decided in Olympia, after the (law creating the) Discover Pass, and that’s how they interpreted it.” (They, he said, were basically the WDFW’s lands division manager, Jennifer Quan, and wildlife division manager Nate Pamplin.)

Huffman says he won’t be out there issuing tickets to people who don’t have their Discover Pass or WDFW access permit showing. “If people ask questions about ‘Is it required?’, I’m going to inform them, but as far as enforcing it, I’m not going to. That will be up to the enforcement officers.”

And will they be enforcing it? If they’re there, sure. But, Huffman said, “I can’t see them just sitting in the parking lot and issuing tickets when people pull in. There’s a lot of other higher priority things to do.”

As far as Tuck is concerned, enforcing the requirement of any fee-costing pass — a Discover Pass runs $30 annual pass ($35 including the fees related to purchase) or $10 ($11) for a daily pass — should be on the lowest priority.

Said Tuck, “Everybody should be able to agree on and say, ‘OK, you guys screwed up, and we need to back off on this one.’ “

– Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA, Wash. — Well, it’s only a Christmas gift if you’re one of those birders with a “life list,” a “state list” or a “year list” and will gladly travel hours for a chance at augmenting one or all of those lists with a glimpse at a rare bird.

Because there’s one of up in Okanogan County. Yes, a five-hour drive away. But, trust me, there will be people in this part of the state — and even further — who will make the trip for a chance to see a Ross’s gull (Rhodostethia rosea).

This gull is what birders call a vagrant — an interloper from another area that’s somehow lost its way or decided for whatever reason to go against its own history and, perhaps, a migration pattern developed over numerous generations. It’s an East Siberian arctic species that had only been documented once before in this state — in 1994 near McNary Dam. (And I’m betting a whole slew of local birding enthusiasts were down at McNary checking it out those 17 years ago.

The Ross’s gull in Okanogan County has been spotted on Palmer Lake, and has been verified by someone who ought to know — a state Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist named Jeff Heinlen. Heinlen photographed the bird resting on and flying over the lake on Dec. 15 and 16, and his sighting was confirmed by other wildlife biologists again on Monday.

Biologists believe the bird may remain in the area for a few weeks, based on behavior of other non-arctic sightings of Ross’s gulls. That’s one reason Heinlen, knowing the birding-community buzz this news represents, calls the gull’s presence “like a holiday present for bird watchers.”

For the record, I’m not one of them. But both my parents were, and this is the sort of thing that would have had them on the road on their way to Palmer Lake, which — for the sake of others who will do the same  — is about 15 miles northwest of Tonasket, six miles south of the Canadian border. There’s a BLM day-use site at which to park (Split Rock) at the south end of the lake and a DNR campground on the east shore. (And, yes, there are restrooms at both parking areas.)

There’s a photograph of the bird on the WDFW’s Facebook site.

– Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA, Wash. — Last month’s “Living with Wolves” panel discussion drew a sizeable crowd to YVCC’s Parker Room, where the packed house listened to, among other things, some of Jay Kehne’s personal experiences regarding wolves as well as the reasons why he doesn’t fear their slowly increasing numbers within this state.

What people in that room couldn’t have known at the time was they were hearing from a soon-to-be Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission member.

Kehne, an Okanogan County sheep rancher, hunter and conservationist, was appointed on Wednesday by Gov. Chris Gregoire to one of the two vacant positions on the commission. The other position will be filled by a Mount Vernon boat dealer and sportfishing enthusiast named Larry Carpenter.

The commission is a citizen panel that sets policy for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, its nine members appointed by the governor for six-year terms. Kehne, appointed to an Eastern Washington position on the commission, retired from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service and has in recent years been an outreach coordinator for Bellingham-based Conservation Northwest. An avid hunter, he’s a member of both the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and the Mule Deer Foundation.

And, from my conversations with him during the development of the state’s wolf management plan, he seems like a pretty interesting and well-informed fellow. I’m guessing most of the audience at the “Living with Wolves” event would agree.

– Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA, Wash. — The rumors were flying during and after this fall’s elk hunting season in the game management units (GMUs) west of Yakima. With the Muckleshoot tribe having announced its hunters would be hunting deer and elk in nine Yakima-area GMUs, a lot of non-tribal hunters had a justification ready in the event they came up empty.

It must be the Indians’ fault, right? Those tribal guys must have just come in and cleaned out all the elk, right?

Certainly that was the popular rumor.

I talked to one hunter who said the men in his hunting party on Cleman Mountain were told by a game warden that Muckleshoot tribal hunters had taken some ridiculously high number of elk from that GMU — something like 400.

Well, for one thing, it wasn’t a state game warden who said that; I’ve talked to the only two WDFW guys who work that area and it was neither of them, and besides that, the state guys don’t have any harvest numbers yet from the Muckleshoots because those figures haven’t been posted. But four hundred from one GMU? Maybe four. If that many.

I talked to a hunter from Prosser, John Jeskey, who said he hunted in the Wildcat area north of Rimrock Lake and said, “I didn’t see an elk for three and a half days. And I didn’t hear a shot. I didn’t run into anyone that was camping up there that saw an elk.” He told me he also ran into a group of six hunters he’d seen up there last year, when that same group had taken four spikes; this year, they told Jeskey, they got nothing.

Jeskey also told me he’d heard the same kind of rumor that had been circulating in other areas: that a band of Muckleshoot hunters had come in and taken hundreds of elk, just basically taken everything with an antler or without.

Ridiculous. And simply not true.

“The rumor mill is terrible,” said Rich Mann, who heads up the WDFW’s enforcement division in the region that includes Yakima. “I’m not sure what it’s based on one of the time. One animal (killed) turns into five and two tribal harvests turn into 15 and 20. The stories get blown up a lot bigger than at least what the data shows.”

And, of course, there are the stories about how the WDFW are in cahoots with the tribes basically to cheat non-tribal hunters out of a fair shake. WDFW enforcement officer Alan Baird was working those Yakima GMUs during elk season and heard some good ones — in addition to the ones about how the Muckleshoots were killing off elk by the hundreds.

“Guys were saying, ‘Yeah, we were sitting around the campfire and we saw this black helicopter come over and we know it was you guys herding elk out of the area so the hunters can’t get them,’ and that kind of deal. I’m going, really guys? Black helicopters? You obviously haven’t been reading the paper about our budget problems.”

As for why so many hunters weren’t seeing elk and where the elk were, well, that depends on who you talk to. I talked to a guy who guides hunters drawn for special branch-antler bull permits and he said they saw more elk where they were hunting than they usually do. (I won’t say where that is; if a guy’s got a good hunting spot, I’m not about to give it away.) I talked to other hunters who said they saw lots of elk for a day or two and then didn’t see anything after that.

And there were so many drainages that were either closed off and inaccessible because of last year’s high-water runoffs — Milk Creek, some of the Little Rattlesnake, bottom part of Rock Creek — that I’m guessing after the first couple of days of gunfire, the elk figured out pretty quickly where the people weren’t.

As for the idea that Muckleshoot hunters took 400 elk out of Cleman Mountain, or 300 out of the Wildcat, or 200 out of the Little Naches, well, I’ll consider that nonsense until somebody proves otherwise. (And I’m confident it would be easier to prove the existence of the Tooth Fairy. Ya can’t prove what just ain’t true.)

Not convinced? I was hearing the same “where’s the elk?” laments in the fall of 2010, and the Muckleshoots had already begun hunting these GMUs then; it just wasn’t common knowledge last year like it was this fall. If more non-tribal hunters had known about the Muckleshoots’ activity, you can bet those rumors would have been flying then, too.

The Muckleshoots are very strict in their reporting requirements of their hunters, and they report their tribal harvest to the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission. Those numbers won’t be available to the public for a few months or I’d include them here. But just take a glance at the actual figures from last year:

Non-tribal hunters — we’ll call that “the state” — took 115 bull elk (most of them spikes) out of the Little Naches GMU last year; the Muckleshoots took 15. With cows, the state took 108 and the tribe took two. In the Taneum, the state took 56 bulls and 63 cows; the tribe took seven and zero. The Muckleshoots took six elk in the Bethel GMU; the state took 100.

Throughout the Region 3 GMUs, non-tribal hunters took 870 bulls and 722 cows — nearly 1,600 total. The Muckleshoots took 34.

Still believe the rumors?

— Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA — It’s amazing how easily a writer can overlook the obvious until something is already in print — and then, how obvious and boneheaded the oversight looks in the instant the print version is seen.

That was the case with today’s column about Tracy Hames leaving his position overseeing wetlands and waterfowl for the Yakama Nation.

I didn’t manage to mention why he was leaving or where he was going. So, naturally, my first email this morning — it just came in a moment ago, as I’m typing this, in fact — was from Andy Walgamott of Northwest Sportsman magazine. Andy wanted to know if he’d missed something in my column. Did Tracy retire? Move? God forbid, did he die?

No, Tracy Hames is fine. Not that you’d know it from today’s column (my apologies), but he has simply left the Valley to take a job as the executive director of the Wisconsin Wetlands Association, a great deal closer to his old stomping grounds of Minnesota.

So I’ll join Tracy’s many friends and those in the numerous conservation organizations whose efforts Tracy tirelessly augmented in offering my congratulations on his new position.

And, of course, for not having died.

– Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA, Wash. — Many Yakima-area followers of multi-event sports will remember Kelsey Backen, the former East Valley High cross country standout who went on to become one of the Northwest’s premier triathletes.

Just to jog the memory a bit, in 2003 Kelsey pulled off a two-fer that’s pretty impressive in the triathlon world: He won both of Central Washington’s premier triathlons back-to-back, the Valley of the Sun Triathlon in Yakima — a race which is sadly now defunct — and the Whisky Dick in Kittitas County.

(The only other person to pull off that double whammy, I believe, was an elite Montana triathlete named Matt Seeley, who actually did it at least twice — 1995 and 1996. Seeley might have done it in 1994 as well, but records for Whisky Dick winners before 1995 are tough to find.)

Kelsey also won the Valley of the Sun two years later in 2006.

Now a firefighter in the Boise, Idaho, area, Kelsey sent me a little note that he’ll be competing in a event to raise money for cancer research. Check it out:

I will be participating in the Scott Firefighter Stairclimb, a race up 69 flights of stairs in full fire gear and SBCA, on March 11th, 2012. While this will be an incredibly tough climb, the real challenge is to help fight blood cancers. All proceeds from the competition benefit The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). Please support me by going to http://www.firefighterstairclimb.org/ and click donate. Type my name in and then donate. It’s that easy! Thank you for supporting me in the fight against blood cancers!

There you have it. Just passing it along.

– Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA, Wash. — For those of you who like to see what’s going on in the great outdoors elsewhere, here are a few interesting items that caught my eye:

From The Missoulian in Montana: Patrol reminds hunters to be responsible in grizzly bear country

A snippet:

The men were bugling elk along a timber-covered ravine in the southern end of the Gravelly Mountains on a perfect fall day this year.

A bull elk across the ravine answered. For a time, the hunters and their quarry were talking back and forth before the elk abruptly turned and moved away.

At almost the same time, the men heard the sound of something big crashing through the brush just above them. They turned and saw a sow grizzly and her two large cubs running right at them.

One man shouted “bear” and the sow lined up with him. The hunter had nothing but his bow for protection.

From the Spokesman-Review’s outstanding outdoors writer, Rich Landers: Ruff Neighborhood

Ruffed grouse have been taking a shine to graying men in North Idaho.

Newspaper stories have featured two men who’ve developed close relationships with the normally shy forest grouse.

The wild adult birds have joined the men for walks, perched on their arms and waited in the woods seemingly with the enthusiasm of puppies for the men to return the next day.

Both of the retired men were so smitten with their new “girlfriends,” they gave them names.

From another of my favorite writers around the region, the Vancouver Columbian’s Allen Thomas, who looks at The difference between elk hunters and deer hunters, including some salient thoughts from your favorite outdoor columnist and mine, Rob Phillips.

Deer hunting for them is “recreational.” They are out enjoying the woods, a bit ambivalent if they kill a buck or not, and have light-hearted good humor. There’s always the four-day late season in mid-November if they really want a deer.

Elk hunting for them is a serious, serious matter. It’s an intense time. The season is short and they hunt hard. Some elk camps are nicer than the first house I rented.

 Check ‘em out.

– Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA, Wash. –The boat ramp at Zillah that was washed out by debris in 2010′s early-spring high flows in the Yakima River is usable once again.

Crews under contract with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife completed work last week on a primitive dirt launch that will enable anglers and waterfowl hunters to put in at the ramp, which is just off Interstate 82 at Exit 52.

WDFW officials had been hoping to get the launch open in time for the fall waterfowl season, which got under way earlier this month.

The previous launch, a more substantial concrete-and-planks ramp, was destroyed by large logs dragged downriver by high flows in 2010. It had been rebuilt in 2009 after having been wiped out by a similar high-water event the year before.

– Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA, Wash. — The men of the Mullinax family, who are spread from Yakima and Ellensburg to Spokane, have been hunting elk on Cleman Mountain every year about this time for a half-century. And this year is as cold and dismal as it’s ever been. That’s cold as in Brrrrr and cold as in getting further and further away from whatever it is you’re trying to find.

Which, in this case, is elk.

I talked to TJ Mullinax on his cell phone at about noon today (Wednesday) and he said his group could “hear all the way to Bethel and Mud Flats and down into the Wenas” and had heard one gunshot all morning. “If you want to talk about a very, very dead and cold opening of cow elk modern rifle,” he said, “it’s as quiet as it can get.”

TJ said the numbers of hunters and hunt camps were way down, but that they weren’t missing anything. There’s seven people in the Mullinax hunting party and between the seven, who are all active hunters — we’re not talking about road hunters here — they’d seen four elk, total, since Saturday, three of them cows and just the one spike that nobody had a good shot at.

“Rather than hunting,” he texted me a while later, “it seems it’s turning into a family camping trip with firearms.”

He followed that with ;-) which, as texters know, is your basic smiley-face. My guess is TJ doesn’t feel much like smiling.

On the other hand, he’s not seeing any elk but he saw this. So it’s not all bad.

– Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA, Wash. — Not everybody was happy about the Department of Natural Resources’ project to remove many thousands of tons of dead or diseased trees from the Klickitat Meadows, even before a 53-foot chip van overturned on Sept. 20 next to the Tampico store, dumping its 30-ton load.

It’s certainly not the removal of the thousands of tons of potential wildfire fuel from the area that has bothered many of the Ahtanum residents. It’s the speed of those enormous chip vans and the screeching sound of their “jake” brakes — compression-release engine brakes — at times when those residents are trying to sleep.

“Last night they came through at 10:36 and then at 4:30 this morning they came by. That’s getting a bit ridiculous,” Tampico resident Anna Swanson told me on Monday. “I’d love to have the home phone numbers of all the head honchos so I could call them up when we get woken up. You know: ‘Hi, just wanted to wake you up to let you know one of your trucks just woke us up.’

“You can hear those things a mile and a half off, and when they’re coming down their jake brakes are just screaming.”

For Vince Froehlich, another resident in the Tampico area, the noise takes a back seat to the speed of the truck traffic in terms of its negative impact.

“The whole heart of the issue is the roads and the narrowness; they’re just not designed for that type of traffic,” Froehlich said. “It’s a residential area. I realize there’s a lot of recreation that goes on out there, but when you’re adding 53-foot chip vans on a tractor-trailer, that’s 65, 70 feet of semi-truck coming down that road at high speeds.

“They need to widen these roads and they need to lower the speed limit, and mark these corners better. It’s just been a matter of time, not if it’s going to happen, but when.”

The it was the type of accident that happened on Sept. 20 when the fully-loaded chip van overturned adjacent to the Tampico store.  The driver, traveling east on the North Fork Ahtanum Road with a full load, was cited for excessive speed around the bend. The posted speed limit on the stretch of road west of the store is 50 mph, with slower speeds called for on the corner.

“That’s a 35 mph corner at best in a car,” Froehlich said, noting that the truck had to have been traveling much faster than that. “Another 75 yards and he’d have been through the middle of somebody’s house.”

Residents bothered by the chip-van traffic in the Klickitat Meadows project (which was featured in a Sept. 14 story in the Herald-Republic), though, may be receiving a reprieve of sorts. Since the Sept. 20 accident — and since residents like Swanson began calling DNR officials with complaints — the truck speeds seem to have gone down. So has the screeching of those jake brakes.

“I don’t know what it was said, but it was straightened out real quick,” Swanson said on Thursday, three days after she reached DNR Alpine District manager Ken McNamee. “You could hear (the trucks) coming out, and it was normal” — not, she noted, at the same high speed and the same loud brakes. “I saw one coming out, and you couldn’t hear him two miles away like before; he was coming out slowly.

“I have not heard a jake since.”

The DNR’s McNamee said he has talked with his logging contractor about the truck-speed issues, but added that the on-site chipping project in the Klickitat Meadows is still on a tight schedule. The logging crews still have a lot of downed and diseased trees to chip and remove before the winter snows begin to fall in the Cascade foothills.

“We’re probably right up against that right now, to be honest with you,” McNamee said. “It all depends on Mother Nature. We’re working between 5,000 and 6,000 feet right now, and starting to get a little precipitation.”

Trying to get all that potential forest-fire fuel out of there before winter without negatively impacting the people of the Tampico area, he said, “is a balancing act.”

– Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA, Wash. — I love Jim Sprick Park. That riverside eden in the Nile Valley is one of my favorite places for a picnic.

I love hitting the trails, and while I’m primarily an on-foot guy in hiking boots, I share that love of trails with a lot of folks who prefer to visit the high-country forests on horseback, on bikes (mountain or motorized) or in four-wheelers.

And I really admire trail enthusiasts who take pride and ownership in those trails in such events as this weekend’s “Pick Up a Mountain.”

For the third year in a row, the good people of the Pacific Northwest Four Wheel Drive Association is hosting a volunteer clean-up event, centered at the aforementioned Jim Sprick Park.They’ve

What’s really great about this project is that you don’t have to pick up some place you’ll never go; you just show up at Jim Sprick on Saturday morning, get signed up, grab a garbage bag and then go to any area you like — your favorite camping area, trail or forest road, anywhere that has been defiled by litter-tossing losers. (I’d like to use a stronger term to describe those idiots, but this is a family newspaper — er, blog.)

Bring your filled garbage bag back to Jim Sprick Park, and the PNW4WD folks will haul it off to the dump with the rest of the litter that gets gathered up.

And the next time you go to the place you cleaned up, you’ll feel just a little bit more ownership of it.  And just think about how much better it will look.

– Scott Sandsberry

YAKIMA, Wash. — Anglers in this part of the state have another opportunity — two and a half weeks of prime steelhead fishing on the Columbia River not far from home — to celebrate.

The emergency regulation opening the lower Hanford Reach to hatchery steelhead retention, recommended Monday by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Yakima-based Region 3 office, came through late Tuesday afternoon. The permanent rule listed in the state’s fishing-regulations pamphlet wouldn’t have opened the lower reach until Oct. 1.

The e-reg allows anglers to keep any hatchery steelhead caught between the Highway 395 bridge and the wooden powerline towers at the old Hanford township. That’s right: any hatchery steelhead, because the e-reg also removes the requirement for both adipose and ventral fin clips. Basically, if this is a hatchery steelhead, meaning its adipose fin clip has been removed and there’s a healed scar in its place, you’re keeping it — as long as it’s at least 20 inches.

And provided it meets that minimum-size criteria, you’re keeping it, not releasing it in hopes of catching a bigger one on your way to your two-fish daily limit. It’s a mandatory-retention fishery. Wild steelhead, those with the adipose fin still intact, must immediately be released unharmed, without ever being removed from the water.

– Scott Sandsberry