Idaho Wilderness Hearings

Statement:

COUNTY SPORTSMEN'S ASSOCIATION Mr. Huebner. Thank you, Senator. I represent the Bonneville County Sportsmen's Association. We had a lot of views here on how people feel about the wilderness, and primarily I've read through a lot of studies and I agree with the Fish and Game thought, that we should protect as much area of the State as possible, including 50 percent of the remaining 6.5 million acres, very soft language in the wilderness bill so we can protect these areas and, at a future time, if we do find out that there was a good economic reason to exploit them, later we could. The problem with getting into these areas once you do is they are so easily damaged because they're so high you'll never get any of the timber to grow back, like up in the Palisades district, if you log off the Ponderosa, and once they figure the Ponderosa goes, there won't be anything left there to grow, so we'll lose that habi tat, too. Then, primarily, you can notice this on the logs on the clear water. When the log saws come in here in the winter — or in the spring, when the waters are running and then you look at the clear water comes in muddy from all the logging, which silts up all the springs and prevents spawning, that's part of the reason we have had such bad salmon runs. Thank you. OK, Thank you. So that's primarily what the problem we're dealing with is. But it would be great to save all of the areas, but the way that we can save these for the best part of Idaho is if we go through them line by line, area by area, and work it out with all the interested groups so that we don't lose any good areas that would be very good for elk habitat, but would also be good for something other, you know, so we don't log off a really good section of old growth where the big mountain caribou are in Idaho. We wouldn't lose the area to logging and lose that whole species where there are a lot of other places, say down and around that have been logged off before, down and around Coeur d’Alene, that would be suitable for logging again. But it's just kind of a — it should be a balanced approach with everybody having their 2 cents worth to speak so that we can get the greatest amount of benefit out of the forest for the sportsmen and for the long-range terms of Idaho. Because if we go in there and tear them up over the short term, we're going to make money, and there's going to be logging, and we're going to sell equipment, but in the long term, it's going to be just another ghost town like Gilmore, and that's not what Idaho needs. We have enough primary industries. What we need is nice manufacturing that produces dollars in and dollars out. We have them year after year versus logging and mining, which some of these areas they're talking about logging are so cold, it will take 40 years for the trees to grow back. That's logging; with the mining, once the minerals are gone, we'll be stuck with the same problems like we have in northern Idaho currently. Thank you.