HomeMy Public PortalAboutLandslidesIdaho Statesman March 17, 1997 page 1 of 4
The Flood
Next time
Katherine Jones/ The Idaho Statesman
Shattered dream: When spring runoff begins, the slope above Trail's End restaurant in Lower Banks is expected to slide again.
Mary Lou Holton, who owns the restaurant, has been ordered to leave, as the community has been declared unsafe.
Clear-cuts, roads, fire suppression:
Human touch results in no-man's land
By Rocky Barker
The Idaho Statesman
Lower Banks was no
more than a wide spot
in the road and the
restaurant was in dis-
repair.
But Mary Lou
Holton saw something in the
desolate Payette River Canyon,
enough to pin her future on it.
She bought the run -down prop-
erty and turned it into the
Trail's End restaurant, store,
gift shop and
Part motel.
"The view was
phenomenal," she
said.
She didn't know
then that the odds
were stacking up
OF 5 against her. Two
PARTS years earlier, a
Pennsylvania cou-
ple started the
Cottonwood forest fire when
sparks flew from the wheel rim
of a car they were pulling be-
hind their motor home.
The fire burned through the
dense forest covering the steep
slope across Idaho 55 from
Trail's End. When Idaho suc-
cessfully sued the couple, the
state used the settlement to
help pay its firefighting costs.
The owner of the steep parcel,
Jim Powell, didn't get any
money to replant or stabilize the
slope, and he couldn't afford it
himself.
Five years later, the trees'
roots had rotted away. On Jan.
1, with nothing to hold the slope
in place, mud and rock came
sliding down on Holton's
dreams.
"This is absolutely my worst
nightmare," she said.
The same thing is happening
across the Pacific Northwest,
where two seasons of winter
rainstorms have triggered mas-
sive movements of the earth.
Landslides happen naturally,
when steep slopes become satu-
rated and collapse. But logging,
road building and fire control
compound the problem and
make it more destructive.
Some slides are deadly. Along
Hubbard Creek in the Cas-
cade Range of Oregon, mud
and rock crashed into the
"WE HAVE A
TENDENCY TO
ABSTRACT
OURSELVES FROM
NATURE AND THINK
IT ALL HAPPENED
IN THE PAST."
David Alexander,
Payette National
Forest supervisor
in McCall
Idaho Statesman March 17, 1997 page 2 of 4
The Idaho Statesman
Mud and rock flowed down the slopes above Lower Banks in January, into the Trail's End restaurant, hotel
and store. Later, Boise County officials declared the area unsafe and told residents to move.
home of Rick and Susan Moon
on Nov. 18, 1996, killing the
couple and two friends. The
slide originated on private
timberland that loggers had
cleared of trees in 1987.
Another woman was killed
in November when her car
was carried off an Oregon
highway by a slide that start-
ed in a clear -cut area.
Their deaths serve as a re-
winder: The process that cre-
ated the scenery that attracts
us is continuous and some-
times frightening.
The plants, animals, soils and
streams in a forest — the ecosys-
tem — grow accustomed to a cer-
tain cycle of fires. In the Boise Na-
tional Forest, dominated by pon-
derosa pines, small fires naturally
burned through every 10 to 30
years, leaving the big trees be-
hnd to hold the soil.
�. When the Forest Service start -
ed putting out these smaller fires
at the turn of the century, the for-
est grew denser and more prone
to larger catastrophic fires.
When those fires came in the
early 1990s to the Boise forest,
hundreds of thousands of acres
were denuded of all vegetation.
Five years later, the roots rotted
and slopes came down as they did
in Lower Banks.
But in the spruce - dominated
Payette National Forest, fires in
1994 burned within the normal
cycle. This winter's storms still
triggered landslides in areas such
as the South Fork of the Salmon
River but they proved beneficial
to the ecosystem.
Sheets of water ran off of the
fire -burned areas, picking up
large dead trees and depositing
them in the river. New pools and
ripples will develop around them,
providing important fish habitat.
"You want floods," said David
Burns, fisheries biologist with the
Payette National Forest. "They
rejuvenate the stream channel."
Foresters today balance two
methods of thinning dense stands
of trees: encourage logging and
the roads that go with it, or let fire
do the thinning and risk losing
control. Either choice may bring
more landslides.
For Burns, whose primary in-
terest is fish, the choice is easy.
"Fire is by far less riskv to fish
habitat than anything else we do
on the landscape," Burns said.
"Given a choice between logging
and fire, I'll take fire every time."
But in another area of the
Payette forest, fire may have con-
tributed to flooding in January
that damaged or destroyed more
than 40 homes along the Little
"IF THEY STOPPED
CLEAR - CUTTING TODAY,
THEY WOULDN'T GET A
REDUCTION IN WATER
FLOW FOR YEARS."
Cecil Bilbio,
Cambridge rancher
Idaho Statesman March 17, 1997 page 3 of 4
Salmon River. That makes the
choice more difficult.
"In other watersheds," Burns
acknowledged, "society can't
allow us to do that."
Clear -cuts
Like forest fires, clear -cut log-
ging removes most of the forest
canopy and increases the amount
of water that flows off an slope. It
also can leave little root structure
to hold the soil.
A U.S. Forest Service study of
clear- cutting in the Western Cas-
cade Range of Oregon concluded
that non -road related landslides
occur nearly three times more
often in clear -cuts than in forest-
ed areas.
Based on similar studies, and
prompted by public outcry at the
five landslide deaths in 1996, the
Oregon Board of Forestry urged
landowners to limit logging and
road - building in landslide -prone
areas. But the board stopped
short of banning either.
Idaho has far fewer clear -cuts
in steep terrain than Oregon and
Washington and most are small-
er. One area where clear- cutting
is extensive is the western side of
the Payette National Forest, in
the upper drainages of the Weiser
River.
There, landslides aren't the
issue, but flooding is. The Weiser
River has no flood - control reser-
voirs and is prone to flooding.
Farmers and ranchers in Cam-
bridge, Midvale and Weiser have
complained that clear- cutting ac-
celerates the runoff from winter
snow, leaving them with too little
water in late summer to finish ir-
rigating their crops.
U.S. Geological Service data
supports their claim. Since the
1940s, the runoff has steadily
started and peaked earlier.
This early peak causes flooding
as well, said Cecil Bilbio, a Cam-
bridge rancher who formed
Friends of Cuddy Mountain to op-
pose clear- cutting.
"If they stopped clear- cutting
today, they wouldn't get a reduc-
tion in water flow for years," Bil-
bio said.
But the study area may be too
narrow to draw sound conclu-
sions. Forest Service scientists
say they can't begin to measure
an increase in water flow until 15
percent of a small tributary's en-
tire watershed is clear -cut.
"You've got to look at the bigger
picture," said Greg Lesch, Payette
National Forest hydrologist.
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Katherine Jones / The Idaho Statesman
A new gorge: Old Idaho Highway 17 is a good example of how a road
built through steep terrain can redirect water and cause erosion.
Other activities
Clear- cutting isn't the only
problem with the Weiser River,
Lesch noted. Much of the low-
lands is planted in crops and even
more is open range where live-
stock have trampled.
Overgrazing starts a cycle of
erosion along streams, resulting
in "downcutting," or deepening of
the channel, Bureau of Land
Management studies show. When
streams are downcut, they don't
spill out into their historic flood
plain, so flow is contained in a
narrower area and water velocity
increases. That causes greater
damage downstream.
When temperatures rise later
this month or in April, the moun-
tain above Holton's business is ex-
pected to begin moving again.
Since Boise County declared
the community of Lower Banks
unsafe and uninhabitable, Holton
has no choice but to move on.
She's waiting for disaster aid from
federal, state or local officials.
"Our main goal is to get out of
here and start our business else-
where," Holton said. "When we
came, that slope seemed a long
way away. It doesn't seem so far
away now."
What humans do to intertere
with the natural flow of water is
behind much of the damage
Idaho Statesman March 17, 1997 page 4 of 4
caused by January's storms. Cold
temperatures quickly stopped the
flow of water and mud, but time
won't stand still.
"We have a tendency to ab-
stract ourselves from nature and
think it all happened in the past,"
said David Alexander, Payette
National Forest supervisor in Mc-
Call.
Unstable underpinnings
The Idaho Batholith, which
underlies the central part of the
state, is made up of broken
granitic rock that erodes into
gravel, sand and silt. Soil scien-
tists have known since the 1950s
that roads and logging in steep
areas of the batholith cause mas-
sive soil movement which blows
out roads and clogs rivers.
The best road systems are built
on top ridges, not scraped along
rivers or cut into steep slopes. But
Idaho's steep geography limits
where roads can go. Even vital re-
gional links have been forced into
the wrong places — roads such as
U.S. 95 through the Little Salmon
River Canyon, Old Highway 17
through Garden Valley and Idaho
55 on the Payette River.
Foresters and engineers are
learning where they can and can't
go. Still, thousands of miles of old
forest roads remain, bleeding
mud into rivers and triggering
slides. Roads in the Boise and
Payette forests alone stretch for
more than 8,000 miles — the dis-
tance from Boise to London.
Many of the roads no longer
have value for timber harvesting,
said Dave Van De Graaff, timber-
land manager for Boise Cascade
in Emmett.
"If you build roads you need to
build them right or put them to
bed, one or the other," he said.
Debate on roads
Congress has told the Forest
Service to sell timber and use part
of the money to close roads.
The Idaho Statesman
A ticking time bomb: Burned trees from the 1989 Lowman fire pro-
trude from a heavy snowpack. The fire left thousands of acres barren
and vulnerable to rapid runoff and landslides.
"To us, doing nothing is insane,"
said Frank Carroll, Boise Nation-
al Forest public information offi-
cer. "Using those trees to generate
dollars for restoration makes
sense."
That approach encourages a
cycle of more roads and more tim-
ber cutting.
Another approach would halt
logging and allow forests to recov-
er in areas where roads have
caused the most damage. These
include the Clearwater National
Forest in Idaho's Panhandle.
"We were on the way to recov-
ery but we didn't obliterate
enough roads in time, and the wa-
tersheds came unglued," said Al
Espinosa, a former Forest Service
biologist from Moscow.
The same conditions exist in
the Boise and Payette national
forests. Few roads have been
closed there, either — except by
nature.
Even when nature closes roads,
the Forest Service sometimes re-
builds. A 1995 flood so powerful it
cut a new channel for the Middle
Fork of the Boise River also blew
out miles of forest roads. The For-
est Service rebuilt, and some of
the roads have washed out again.
The agency proposes rebuilding.
"That's like setting the time
bomb to go off all over again," said
Ron Mitchell of the Idaho Sport-
ing Congress, which has sued the
Forest Service and lost over the
road - building issue.
Boise - Cascade lost few roads
from the January storms on pri-
vate land the company logs. Van
De Graaff credits a well -built road
system as well as an aggressive
thinning and harvesting program
that reduces the risk of cata-
strophic fires.
"The first thing you've got to do
is control the wildfires," Van De
Graaff said.