10,000 shovels to help citizens in Nevada’s bull trout rebellion

Tuesday, Jan. 4, 2000 | 12:49 p.m.

"They have the same problems we do," said Jim Hurst, who fears logging cutbacks on national forests in northwest Montana soon will force layoffs at his 150-worker sawmill near the Canadian border.

"We need to band together," he said Tuesday from Eureka, Mont.

Loggers, ranchers, miners and others from Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana are contributing the shovels to Elko County, Nev., to help rebuild the washed out road that county residents insist belongs to them, not the federal government.

"We're not crackpots. We are not revolutionaries. We are just trying to get a point across and try to preserve part of our way of life up here," Hurst said.

"The Clinton administration, Albert Gore Jr. and folks of that ilk have no conception of what is going on out here in rural America. Resource dependent communities are going to be wiped off the map."

The Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service say reconstruction of the road would jeopardize the survival of the southernmost population of the bull trout in North America.

The road lies within the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest but local residents insist the Forest Service has no jurisdiction because the road was used by miners and loggers long before the national forest was established in the early 1900s.

At a congressional hearing in Elko in November, Reps. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., and Helen Chenoweth, R-Idaho, said the fight over the bull trout and the road along the Jarbidge River is symbolic of broader tensions between federal land managers and Western land owners.

Elko County Commissioner Mike Nannini said the shovels signal growing support for their citizen revolt.

"Those folks in the wood industry have had some real bad times of their own with the Forest Service," Nannini said Tuesday from Wells, Nev.

"Now that people are seeing that Elko County has had the guts to stand up and fight, they want to come in and help us," he said.

A federal judge in Reno issued an injunction blocking reconstruction of the road in November when a state assemblyman organized a work crew that intended to rebuild the road in defiance of Forest Service orders.

The judge later ordered the county and the federal government to arbitration on the matter and the parties are currently trying to settle on a single arbitrator.

Hurst, co-owner of Owens and Lust Lumber Co., told the Elko Daily Free Press his goal is collect 10,000 shovels. He hopes to deliver them by semi-trailer truck by the end of the month.

"Their original plan was to gather about 500 shovels," Nannini said Tuesday. "But once the word got out everybody wanted to help. Now they're getting several thousand.

"We are law-abiding citizens. We have kind of drawn lines in the sand and now we are working through an arbitrator, but that road is our road and we think we can prove that," he said.

Hurst said the Clinton administration's proposal to close old Forest Service roads across tens of millions of acres of national forests is already taking its toll on the elderly in Montana.

"The only ones who have access to national forests now are the privileged few who have free time and a backpack and can saunter around," Hurst said.

'Our old people can't even go up and pick huckleberries where they normally do. They gated off one road because they might disturb a grizzly bear.

"I guarantee you, if you get up in a huckleberry patch and there is a grizzly there, you are not going to disturb him, he is going to disturb you. I don't think a single grizzly bear has ever been killed by a berry pail."