Idaho Wilderness Hearings

Statement:

Ms. Eckwright. Thank you. I want to talk about the Kelly Creek area of the proposed wilderness. And I would like to say, first of all, that I was there just a week ago today. And some of the things that I saw, were, first of all, the roads that we traveled on. And the roads—one of the main roads we were on was a CCC road that we estimate was built maybe 50 years ago. And probably one of the first things we noticed was that it is unstable even now in many spots. That is to say, that we saw a slump—a major slump area that is still emptying itself into Kelly Creek. And we noticed, also, that it's been surveyed for widening which indicated to us that it was going to be causing more slumps and more damage to the Kelly Creek watershed. The soil of the area was fragile, fine soils of the Idaho Batholith. Especially the area that was unstable, we noticed, was the fine micaceous soil which was almost like sand. And it was obvious to us that it was not going to hold up during the sort of use or any further roadbuilding. And we felt that any further roadbuilding in that area would directly contribute to the degradation of Kelly Creek and to its tributaries. 673 We also saw and fished in the Cayuse and Kelly Creeks. And we noticed that the water quality was excellent at this time. It was beautiful. You could see all the way to the bottom every place. It was totally unsilted. And one of the other things that you might be interested in knowing about was that there were people from all over the State fishing there. We saw license plates from everywhere. So it's not something that's just used locally. But it's something that's used by many people in the State. And in comparing it to some other areas that have been logged right near Kelly Creek we noticed that the Orogrande Creek, which has apparently been logged recently—it was a smaller creek. And it was dirtier. It was full of silt and mud. There were—whoever had logged it had logged all the way down to the creek. And the cull logs were still lying in the creek. And it was obvious that this would cause problems in the future. The fish—fish—there wouldn't be a variance of fish that would cause the water temperature to change and that sort of thing. So if that was an example of logging practices in the area, I can guarantee you that you would ruin Kelly Creek and Cayuse Creek and Toboggan Creek. You would ruin all the fish in those areas if this is the type of logging that's been proposed. And, also, we noticed that there was no erosion control whatsoever in the area that had been logged, again, on the Orogrande Creek. The timber itself—we went all the way up Toboggan Ridge Road. And we noticed that the timber was something like 4 to 6 inches in diameter. Mostly lodgepole pine. And as we went up higher in the elevation, the trees were smaller. And there were, of course, fewer of them. Also, we saw many more meadows as we went higher up. So the timber itself—the timber resources are not that great.