YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC
By Scott Sandsberry
"Reprinted with permission from the Yakima Herald-Republic"

STEHEKIN — A huge photograph of Horseshoe Basin, a breathtaking amphitheater of North
Cascade peaks, hung for years in the dining hall of Stehekin Valley Ranch.

Visitors marveled at the picture whenever they stayed
at the ranch, a timber-beamed lodge with rustic cabins seven miles
up-valley from the northwest tip of Lake Chelan. Then, invariably, they
would ask for directions to see for themselves the area once described
in a 1960 Sierra Club documentary as "a crown jewel of America's scenic
grandeur."

They don't ask that now. The photograph has been taken down.

Lodge owner Cliff Courtney got tired of having to tell visitors that, unless they were willing to don backpacks for a
30-mile round trip, they could no longer get to Horseshoe Basin. Or, for that matter, to myriad other backcountry destinations that Stehekin — itself accessible only by plane, foot or, usually, a 51-mile boat ride from Chelan — had long been the portal.

In the language of the native Indians, Stehekin meant "the way through." But in October 2003, a 500-year flood
washed out the Stehekin Valley Road, which a century earlier had gone nearly to Horseshoe Basin, dead-ending
— to quote that 1960 film — "in paradise." Now it ends at a rather incongruous stop sign just
13 miles up the valley at a place called Car Wash Falls, barely more than halfway to its original terminus.

Last fall, the National Park Service opted to abandon the road
upriver from that point, less than two miles into the park-run Lake
Chelan National Recreation Area and the Stephen Mather Wilderness.

Since then, the tiny, historic community of Stehekin — at least the half of the 80-some population not employed by the park service — has been in an uproar. Without the road
to the upper valley, those residents say, the tourism on which they
depend will continue a decline that has already begun. And firefighting
crews will lose access to fight the catastrophic wildfire they fear is
coming.

And, without the road and without some way to corral the meandering path of the Stehekin River, they say, the death of Stehekin itself — or, at least, the way of life it has enjoyed since long before
the park service came along — may only be a matter of time.

Maintaining "the way through," say the locals, requires only common sense.

Parallel to the section of the valley that flooded in
2003, the critical 21/2 miles from just below Carwash Falls upriver to
the trail junction called Bridge Creek, runs the road's original route — safely upslope from the river. In the 1930s, though, that stretch of the road, called "the old wagon road" or just the "detour road" by locals, became part of the Pacific Crest Trail and Civilian Conservation Corps crews replaced it with the flood-prone road along the river.

The solution is obvious, say Stehekin locals: For those 21/2 miles, simply reroute the main corridor to the "old wagon road" and run the PCT along the river, where a trail would be far easier to maintain and rebuild than a road.

The park service's response: Nope, can't do that. The Stehekin Valley Road
is bounded on both sides by the Mather Wilderness, a 100-foot
right-of-way that, according to the 1988 Washington Park Wilderness Act
and the 1964 Wilderness Act, cannot be moved.

The locals' answer to that: Change the law.

"This is not a roads versus non-roadless area matter. This is about a common-sense fix," says Ron Scutt, who runs a bike-rental business and is president of the non-profit Stehekin Heritage. "There (would be) no net loss of Wilderness, the Crest Trail users get to follow a more beautiful route and the road is reopened. It's just common sense."

It would also take an act of Congress, like one
working its way through right now: the Wild Sky Wilderness Act, which
would create a 167-square-mile wilderness near Stevens Pass. That act
has made it through the House, and state Sen. Linda Evans Parlette,
R-Wenatchee, sees it as a natural vehicle on which to attach a rider
allowing the minor adjustment to the Stehekin Valley corridor.

"If it involves no net gain or net loss of
wilderness, it's just a practicality of doing what some of these other
parks have done," Parlette says, who is hoping Democratic Congressman
Norm Dicks will champion just such a rider. Some other national parks,
Parlette points out, have similar Wilderness issues that, by comparison
to Stehekin and the North Cascades National Park/Lake Chelan National Recreation Area, are much less constrictive.

Alaska's Denali National Park has a lengthy road corridor that, as in Stehekin's case, predated the park and designated Wilderness through which it runs. But Denali managers can shift the road when necessary, affecting up to 5,000 Wilderness acres, without requiring Congressional approval.

But the Washington Park Wilderness Act — which established the Mather Wilderness on both sides of the Stehekin Valley Road — included no wording for such adjustments.

Says Parlette, "I honestly believe that was an oversight."

Bill Paleck, who retired this year as North Cascades
National Park superintendent, disagrees. "I think the congressional
intent, which is the road would be placed
within that 100-foot wide non-wilderness corridor, was clear," Paleck
says. "If they had other intentions, they certainly didn't make it
clear in the language of the act."

Roy Zipp, the park's environmental protection specialist, agrees that the "old wagon road" was probably where the non-Wilderness corridor should have been in the first place. "Folks knew where to put roads in the good old days," he says.

But the park service can't simply move the road back. It doesn't enact laws."This is really an issue for the
legislative branch now," Zipp says.

"I feel for the folks in Stehekin. They're in a difficult spot. In a lot of ways, there's a good argument to say that Stehekin should be held to a different standard, because it's such a unique place."

How unique?

Few Stehekin cars carry
current license tabs; many don't even have plates to put them on,
because the Department of Motor Vehicles decided long ago that Stehekin's remoteness made it a special case. When people pay $125 to have a car barged over from Chelan, it's usually there to stay.

Almost every private door in Stehekin
remains unlocked. Ignition keys sit in unattended cars and motorcycles.
Yet there is virtually no crime. The locals watch out for each other:
In the most recent "crime wave," about five years ago, an outsider
broke into a few homes, was caught by locals and handed over to Chelan
County Sheriff's deputies.

The nearest medical doctors are in Chelan, but there are enough emergency-medically-trained people in
Stehekin that folks don't fret about it.

"If somebody's in trouble up here, you'll get more
help than you can dream of — and it's good help," says Cragg Courtney,
a member of the sprawling Courtney family tree whose branches make up
the bulk of the non-park service residents. "That's how it is here.
You've got a group of people in this community who will support you."

And who don't want to be supported by anybody else.
When community-wide satellite phone service was proposed recently, most
locals were against it — primarily because, though low-cost to them,
its immense expense would be federally subsidized by the Universal
Service Fund, something that to many manifestly self-reliant Stehekins smacked of socialism.

"It's a handout, basically. It's just not right,"
says Cragg Courtney, one of the handful of locals who pay for their own
satellite phones or satellite Internet, at vastly more expensive rates
than they'd pay anywhere else. "We pay for that ourselves, and nobody
else is paying it for us. That's the main thing."

But the road problem is something the locals can't take care of themselves. They can't move the road
because of the Wilderness Act. They can't simply armor the banks of the
river and regulate its recent flood-driven course — one that has
already eroded away nearly an acre of Stehekin
Valley Ranch property and will likely take much more — because of
federal guidelines in the Clean Water, the Endangered Species and
National Wild and Scenic Rivers acts.

"If we could make our own decisions," says Don Pitts,
the town's retired postmaster, "it would already have been done. And if
you think erosion is bad now, wait until a good fire comes in and
clears all that out."

The upper valley, from which the prevailing winds
blow, has the same bark-beetle and spruce budworm blight that has
browned much of the thick-forested eastern Cascade slopes, making it
susceptible to just such a lightning-strike wildfire. And the road
closure erases the ability to truck firefighting crews closer to those
slopes, where they might be able to keep a smaller wildfire from
becoming the monster that wipes out the town.

"It's definitely generally acknowledged to be a huge
threat," says Bob Nielsen, Chelan County Fire District 10 commissioner.
"It's important for Stehekin to get that road back."

And, perhaps, not only for Stehekin, since its lodges' guestbooks show hundreds of entries not just from far-off states, but far-off countries.

"Throughout the world," says Don Duncan of Renton, a veteran climber who has used the Stehekin Valley to reach numerous peaks, "there may be no place else quite like Stehekin."

Indeed, it's a warm, welcoming place where everybody
waves at you, a place without locked doors or crime, where visitors
ride around on 1960s-era fat-tired bicycles while ogling deer and the
occasional black bear, and where, for decades, they could head off, as
the old Sierra Club documentary said, into "paradise."

But not any more.

"A lot of the areas that are the most magnificent,
people just can't get to any more," says Randall Dinwiddie, owner of
the Silver Bay Inn in Stehekin. "It's like going to Disneyland and only being able to do the cup-and-saucer tour."

"We need a federal delegation to get behind us — to understand the valley needs the road economically, but the visitor needs the road recreationally. It's an access issue," Cliff Courtney says. "This has
to be more than just a little frontcountry experience, a rock wall and an interpretive sign.

"Stehekin deserves better than that."