Stehekin road options criticized

STEHEKIN, Wash. – The National Park Service has proposed turning a washed-out road in north-central Washington’s upper Stehekin Valley into a trail for hikers and horseback riders, but the idea is meeting opposition from residents of the rural community.

Stehekin sits at the end of Lake Chelan, accessible by boat, floatplane or on foot. The community is surrounded by wilderness area, the North Cascades National Park and U.S. Forest Service land.

The 23-mile Stehekin Valley Road leads away from the lake into the national park, but parts of it have been impassable for months. The Park Service made the lower 12 miles accessible to vehicles, but the upper 11 miles remain closed.

Eight miles of road were damaged when the Stehekin River flooded in October 2003, and the last three miles have been closed since a 1995 flood.

In March, the Park Service released four options for the road, including doing nothing, closing the road to vehicles, rebuilding most of the road, or rerouting the road and asking Congress to change the boundaries of the Stephen Mather Wilderness Area.

Park Service officials believe that closing the road to vehicles is the most environmentally sound option, but they will consider comments before making a final decision, agency spokesman Tim Manns said.

“We do want public input, and if someone has a good idea, that’s the purpose of the public comment period,” he said.

Comments on the proposal will be accepted until May 27.

Already, some residents are finding fault with the preferred alternative. Members of the community group Stehekin Heritage say none of the four alternatives is viable. In addition, the preferred option would discourage visitors and residents from enjoying a large area of the North Cascades National Park.

Instead, the group is asking the Park Service to include a new alternative that would rebuild a road inside a strip of non-wilderness area, slightly outside the flood plain.

Contractors believe the rebuild would cost between $600,000 and $1.5 million, instead of the $6.6 million estimated cost for rebuilding the current road.

Heritage spokeswoman Roberta Pitts said in an e-mail that about half of Stehekin’s 85 permanent residents align themselves with her group’s goals.

She said her group worries that the road can no longer be used to take hikers and sightseers into the backcountry.

“Many of the most scenic hiking areas of the valley are now cut off to the day hikers. Fishermen are also a group that enjoyed using Bridge Creek for a day-use fishing trip,” she wrote.

Cliff Courtney, president of Stehekin Heritage and operator of a shuttle service part way up the Stehekin Valley Road, wrote that residents already fought this battle with the Park Service before it adopted its new management plan in 1988, when it agreed that the entire road would be maintained.

“Without the road the crown jewels of the area like Horseshoe Basin and Cascade Pass become inaccessible to all but the ardent backpacker and the mobility impaired have little chance to see the actual park at all,” Courtney wrote.

Manns said the Park Service operated a shuttle bus on the upper road each summer for about 20 years. It ended the service after the 2003 flood, he said, and the future of the service depends on what happens to the road.

The vans carried about 2,500 passengers a year one-way on the upper road, he said.

Only a narrow strip of land – 50 feet on either side of the centerline of the previous road – is outside the wilderness area. Manns said he is not sure if it would be possible to move the road outside the flood plain, yet stay outside wilderness area.