Common-sense solution benefits all in Stehekin
By members of the Yakima Herald-Republic editorial board are Michael Shepard, Sarah Jenkins and Bill Lee.
Reprinted with permission from the Yakima Herald-Republic

Wild, beautiful backcountry is a diminishing treasure
in this populous country, making the laws that protect our designated
wilderness areas nearly as valuable as those remarkable areas
themselves.

But laws are written by human beings, and human
beings are fallible. We forget things. We fail to plan for
contingencies. So, when they crop up and a law we've created prevents
us from doing the right thing, we need to fix the law.

That's precisely what our lawmakers should do with
the Washington Parks Wilderness Act of 1988. As written, that federal
act now effectively closes the upper Stehekin
Valley, a portal into a breathtaking part of the North Cascades. It
also could mean the slow economic death of the tiny community of Stehekin, at the northwest tip of Lake Chelan.

And that would be a tragedy.

Tourists seeking incredible outdoor beauty discovered Stehekin
more than a half-century ago, and the residents have been a welcoming
committee of open arms and hearts for visitors from around the world
ever since. The community predated both the creation of the North
Cascades National Park in 1968, with whose employees it now shares the
valley, and the 1988 Parks Wilderness Act that created the Stephen
Mather Wilderness on both sides of the Stehekin Valley Road.

Authors of that 1988 law, though, failed to include wording that would allow the road's
100-foot wilderness-exclusion corridor to be adjusted in one direction or the other — with no net loss of wilderness — in the event of a natural catastrophe. By contrast, Alaska's Denali National Park and
Reserve, which has a similar historical roadway surrounded by designated wilderness, can move that road whenever Mother Nature makes it necessary.

So three years after the 500-year flood of 2003 wiped out the Stehekin Valley Road 13 miles up the valley, the National Park Service closed it to motorized travel for the remaining 10 miles to its terminus.

It's worth noting that "motorized travel" is a bit of an overstatement when applied to Stehekin.
Since visitors arrive in the village aboard a boat from Chelan, they are on foot — and the only "motorized" vehicle that regularly uses the road is a small shuttle bus to carry them up and back.

So while completely closing the road might please some environmental groups — the ones for whom even minimal human ingress into the backcountry seems to be an awful thing — it's just not right.

Not only does this make awe-inspiring backcountry destinations like Horseshoe Basin, Goode Mountain and Cottonwood Camp accessible only to long-haul backpackers, it leaves the upper Stehekin Valley much harder to defend against catastrophic wildfire. If a shuttle bus can't make it up the road, neither can firefighters and their equipment.

This conundrum is not the fault of the park service. It couldn't move the road
to an already-existing corridor safely above the flood zone — a move
the service estimated would cost $1.3 million — because the 1988 law
failed to allow for just such a common-sense fix.

It was Forest Service administrators, not previous generations of Stehekins, who chose to reroute the main road lower to the river in the first place. It was federal legislators who,
in 1988, locked that poorly-chosen corridor into its unfortunate
location, immovable within the Stephen Mather Wilderness. And it's up
to federal legislators to rectify this situation.

Because, yes, it is a simple, common-sense fix, that could be attached as a rider to the Wild Sky Wilderness bill working its way through Congress.

For under $1.5 million — less than a tenth, in fact,
of the price tag for the Valley Mall Boulevard extension in Union Gap —
the Stehekin Road could be rerouted at its critical 2<00BD>-mile stretch to the higher road,
which is now part of the Pacific Crest Trail. The trail would be
rerouted down alongside the river, where it would be much easier to
maintain than a motor-vehicle-ready road.

Pacific Coast Trail hikers would gain as well, since
they'd now be hiking for that stretch along a beautiful, designated
National Wild and Scenic River instead of on whounts to an old mining road through deep forest.

The people of Stehekin deserve it. But more than that, we all do. Stehekin
is the kind of place people who know about it either have already
visited or want to. People come from all over the country and beyond to
pass through that friendly portal to the beauty beyond.

Fixing the road is part of that.

It's just common sense.

* Members of the Yakima Herald-Republic editorial board are Michael Shepard, Sarah Jenkins and Bill Lee.