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Yeah, and we had to haul out their whisky bottles.
Four parties in there is an amazing crowd for that lake. Hopefully the washout will relieve some of the pressure.
You can get all the information here.
The failures on the lower part of the road were because of the rivers and streams while the 4 failures on the upper section were slumps due to unstable slopes. There are lots of pictures of destruction and detailed explanations in the EIS.
Seventeen people camped at Crater? That’s absurd. How many parties was that? We went into Crater in the early eighties and some logging outfit choppered their crew in for a season ending bash. They were drinking lots of whisky, whooping it up, and shooting guns across the lake. That was fun 👿
They are going through the public comment period for the White Chuck road repair right now. It looks like they’ll probably only repair it as far as the Rat Trap Pass road and decommission the last 5 miles or so.
Stopping stocking and leaving naturally reproducing populations alone seems logical and that’s exactly the approach the NCNP wanted to take 20 years ago, but it turns out to be exactly backwards from both ecological and angling perspectives. When fish reproduce in high lakes they almost always over-reproduce. They become severely out of balance with the carrying capacity of the lake and they harm animals native to the lake. The NCNP studies concentrated on their effects on zooplankton and amphibians. They found that when a lake is full of over-reproducing fish they didn’t find the populations of long-toed salamanders that should have been in the lakes. They also found that community structures of copepods shifted from larger predatory species to smaller grazing species.
Conversely, in lakes stocked in low densities they found the expected populations of copepods and salamanders.
Where fish over-reproduce you end up with a lake full of small fish that have no way to grow because they have little food. The fishing is lousy.
Having found over-reproducing fish to be doing harm the NCNP is determined to remove them. I support that effort and think it needs to be extended to other wilderness areas.
Because stocking in low densities was determined to do no harm the preferred alternative in the EIS allowed for continued fish stocking. But the Park Service stepped in and is undermining the EIS process in an effort to stop all high lake stocking in the park.
The cost of stocking is extremely low. The fish are stocked as fry so hatchery costs are minimal and most stocking is done by volunteers at no cost to the state.
The author of this article at National Parks Traveler call Chip Jenkins and got a bunch of new quotes. This is required reading for anyone interesting in hearing the Park Service’s side of this issue.
The most troubling and revealing quote from this article is this one concerning what the effect would be if fish stocking authorization occurs after 1 July: “If passage comes after July 1, it could create some tense moments for the Park Service.”
Here’s a nice blog take on the article.
There is a very slanted summary of this article with no link to the original posted in a blog at about.com
Thanks a lot for putting this clean-up together. I’m very interested in helping if I possibly can. Keep us posted when you settle on a final date.
I can’t believe the FS won’t allow you to take a cutting torch up to dismantle that box. If you heated a pot of coffee with it couldn’t you say it was your stove?
Abiel is another one in the watershed. The public isn’t allowed to enter so all those lakes are off limits. Way back in the early eighties or so then bio Bob Pfeifer made a proposal to use Findlay as a golden broodstock lake but he was told no.
Having been in the watershed, my cynical side is convinced they mostly don’t want people there so they can hide how they’ve cut all the trees.
I’m really glad you’re covering this, John. I don’t know the latest on the status of this in the Senate. Hopefully someone with more knowledge will chime in.
