Lawsuit targets aging shelters in Olympic National Park

BREMERTON, Wash. – For many hikers, the hand-hewn log cabin near Sol Duc Falls is a pleasant place to take a break and ponder Olympic National Park’s early days.

But others see the 77-year-old cabin, known as the Canyon Creek Shelter, as a wilderness trespasser – an unwelcome reminder of how deeply humans have penetrated the world’s pristine places.

The shelter and four other aging park structures are at the heart of a lawsuit that pits wilderness preservationists against historic preservationists. Montana-based Wilderness Watch is suing the park over its plans to rehabilitate or reconstruct the buildings. The group says that doing so would violate the 1964 Wilderness Act, which aims to protect the “primeval character” of wild landscapes.

“Nature’s working its will on these structures,” Wilderness Watch Executive Director George Nickas said Friday. “Their usefulness and presence on the landscape is expiring, and that’s the way it should be.”

Entering the fray this week are three historic preservation groups – the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Washington Trust for Historic Preservation and the Friends of Olympic National Park. The U.S. District Court ruled that the groups may join the litigation in support of the park.

The court granted the groups “permissive intervention” as third parties whose interests in the preservation of historic structures would be harmed if the lawsuit is successful. Should Wilderness Watch win in court, the groups would have legal standing to appeal the decision.

Rod Farlee, vice president of Friends of Olympic National Park, said the structures are unobtrusive and complement the park’s natural beauty. They’re also popular with hikers, he said.

“I love them as a hiking destination, and so do a majority of park visitors,” he said, citing a 2012 park-led survey. About 75 percent of the hikers polled said the structures enhance their wilderness experience.

The Canyon Creek Shelter was constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1939. It’s the last of three CCC-built structures still standing in the park.

Button Cabin has stood in the Elwha River Valley since the late 1920s. The 200-square-foot log structure, which still serves as an emergency shelter, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007.

The other three structures the groups hope to preserve are three-sided shelters near the Elwha, Dosewallips and Hoh rivers. They were built in the 1950s and early ‘60s.

The park once had as many as 100 wilderness-area structures. Now only 18 are standing, and many just barely, Farlee said.

Wilderness Watch has been successful in two other recent lawsuits in Washington. In 2005, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that Olympic’s plan to replace two collapsed shelters would violate the Wilderness Act. In 2012, the court again sided with Wilderness Watch over what it called the illegal reconstruction of a 1930s-era fire lookout on Green Mountain in Snohomish County.

Congress eventually intervened, blocking the court’s order to remove the lookout, although it is still considered a violation of the Wilderness Act.

In both cases, the federal agencies opted not to appeal the court’s decisions. It’s for this reason that the preservation groups intervened, obtaining the legal standing to appeal if the park service doesn’t.

For Wilderness Watch, replacing these structures or the park’s common practice of flying in repair tools and materials is a clear violation of rules aimed at protecting natural areas from the “imprint of man’s work.”

“They fly in the face of the Wilderness Act,” Nickas said. “There’s nothing natural about these structures.”