Bill’s passage means outfitter camps can stay

SALMON, Idaho – Congress has ended a decade of controversy over three outfitter camps along the main Salmon River in central Idaho’s Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.

Jammed into the foot-thick, $388 billion omnibus budget bill passed last weekend was a provision overturning a four-year-old federal court order that the permanent camps be removed.

Republican Sen. Larry Craig led the effort to save the outfitters from having to dismantle the camps, contending that the 1980 law creating the largest wilderness area in the state intended that they be protected.

“It is clear to me that Senator Church, the main proponent of the legislation, intended for these lodges to remain,” Craig said at one point during the long legislative history of the measure. “I am mystified as to why anyone would want to eliminate this historical use and Senator Church’s intended protections.”

Wilderness Watch, which was among the groups challenging the continued existence of the camps since 1994, said their preservation violates not only the spirit but the letter of the law.

“The American people made a covenant with future generations to protect the few remaining remnants of the original wild America,” Director George Nickas said in a statement. “This Congress broke that promise.

“That they could do so with such impunity is a sad testament to the shortsighted greed and lack of integrity that are the hallmarks of the current leadership in Washington,” he said.

The legislation overturns a 2000 order from U.S. District Judge Sidney Thomas requiring the Forest Service to remove the structures in Smith Gulch, Arctic Creek and Stub Creek by the end of next year.

The most elaborate of the camps is at Smith Gulch. It has four cabins, a 24-guest lodge and a storage building covering 3,500 square feet.

The Stub Creek camp covers 1,500 square feet while Arctic Creek has 1,000 square feet of buildings.

The camps have operated since the 1930s under special use permits issued by the Forest Service, and land managers determined that they were grandfathered in when the compromise wilderness legislation was approved a half-century later.

Grant Simonds, director of the Idaho Outfitters and Guides Association, has repeatedly said that was the understanding as concessions were made to extend the wilderness designation to 2.3 million acres.

Thomas concluded that since the camps were not specifically cited as protected in the legislation, they were specifically barred. He said grandfather rights belonged only to legal uses, and that the permits the camps had been operating under prohibited permanent structures.