Naches Ranger District opts for expensive, but popular, Bumping Road option

When it came to deciding how to deal with the 2006 washouts of two roads leading to popular jumpoff points into the William O. Douglas Wilderness, the bean-counters, analysts and biologists said this: Rebuild one and turn the other into a trail.

But the brain trust at the Forest Service’s Naches Ranger District have decided to listen to someone else: the trail users who so fervently want both roads reopened.

District leaders fully intend to find a way to reopen not only the 1808 road leading south to the Deep Creek Campground, but also the 1800 (Bumping) road as far as the Swamp Lake trailhead, a popular access route to the Pacific Crest Trail and numerous high-country lakes.

It’s a difficult undertaking, considering the $1 million-or-more anticipated cost of building an 1800 bridge spanning Deep Creek, and one more likely to take “a few years than to be done overnight,” said Naches district ranger Randy Shepard.

But the creek’s population of endangered bull trout — the very presence of which necessitates such a bridge — ironically could become the way the district can make it happen.

“It will still be a challenge to find the funding,” Shepard said on Monday. “But we’ve been given some leads on different funding sources — maybe a combination of sources — that would actually get the process implemented.

“The key to the whole thing is, by doing the improvements to fish passage, that would open it up to funding that goes beyond just roads themselves. (The project) would benefit endangered species; there are grant programs that are directed to those kinds of projects, and we’ll explore those as well as road-related things.”

The proposed action in district’s own environmental analysis (EA) was to reopen the 1808 road — the less-expensive reconstruction of the two — but turn 1800 into a foot-and-hoof trail only from the point where Deep Creek washed through it in November 2006, a decision detailed in last Thursday’s Herald-Republic.

But Shepard and district biologist Gary Torretta, who oversaw the district’s EA process, both said the vast majority of public input was in favor of reopening motorized access on both roads.

And Shepard’s plan now is to go not with the EA’s alternative three — the proposed action — but with alternative four, which calls for reopening both roads.

“We thought alternative three was more feasible, and that may indeed be the first phase,” Shepard said. “But with the user-group interest and the amount of access it offers to areas that are, for lack of a better term, near and deer to people’s hearts, we thought it was important to pursue the funding and take it just as far as we can go.”

Elizabeth Lunney, president of the Washington Trails Association, said that with such a “popular, with-used area, it’s certainly nice to see (Forest Service officials) responding to constituent interest.”

Lunney said the district faces two hurdles with alternative four — the “huge, big price tag on that second (1800) bridge,” and “whether or not alternative four would actually be better for aquatic habitat. If the answer to the funding is, yes, we can do it, and the answer to the habitat question is yes, we can do it, and they’re willing to put in that kind of energy into making it happen, that’s terrific.”

As for the bull-trout habitat, Torretta said, a bridge on the 1800 road would be an improvement not only to the area’s status now — in which hikers and horseback riders run the risk of trampling the bull trout redds (essentially fish-egg nests) while fording the creek — but even to the way things were before the flood.

The previous culvert had long made for difficult passage by juvenile fish because of a dropoff that, depending on the creek’s water levels, was as much as 1 1/2 feet — relatively easy for larger fish to move upstream, but difficult for smaller ones.

Alternative four is an improvement, Torretta said, because instead of a pair of 12-foot-wide culverts that all the water has to go through, a bridge would create “a stream channel at least 60 to 70 feet wide that the creek can go through.

“It’s just better for the stream function overall because  it allows those natural channel-forming processes to occur. In a way, you’re removing a dam off the creek. Either alternative three or four will improve the natural stream function.”

That should come as exciting news to day-hikers, campers, backpackers, horse enthusiasts and motorized user groups. (Although the latter can’t use designated Wilderness trails, the Deep Creek campground is a popular destination for all groups, and there are unimproved roads in the Copper City area outside of the Wilderness.)

Those very user groups may be critical to making it happen — and not only in terms of volunteer trail-work hours.

“A key ingredient will be the success of the user groups in helping us locate the funding,” Shepard said. “There may be some (grants) they could qualify for that we couldn’t even apply for as a government agency.
“The more sources we have, the more likely we will be able to implement this in a timely manner.”