‘Shovel Brigade’ digs in for more

Benjamin Grove

Friday, July 15, 2005 | 9:17 a.m.

WEEKEND EDITION

July 16-17, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The dust may be settling on an old-fashioned Sagebrush Rebellion-style feud in the tiny Northern Nevada town of Jarbidge.

Officials with the U.S. Forest Service have a new plan to resolve a controversy over a washed-out road that came to epitomize land disputes between local residents and the federal government.

But at least a few Elko County residents who are proud members of a rebellion known as the "Shovel Brigade" are still digging in for more battles with the agency.

"It's about access to public lands and keeping roads open," Assemblyman John Carpenter, R-Elko, said. "It's kind of a whole movement. If we hadn't taken a stance here, they might have tried to close more stuff down."

At issue is a scraggy, 1.5-mile ribbon of dirt and rock commonly called South Canyon Road that runs along the river near remote Jarbidge, nestled in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest near the Idaho border.

Flooding in 1995 badly damaged the road, which leads from town through a narrow canyon to the edge of the forest wilderness. Locals, along with the Elko County Commission, appealed to the Forest Service to fix it.

Residents say the road is important, offering access to a trailhead, outhouse and campgrounds.

But the road was never rebuilt.

After the washout, Forest Service officials heeded pleas from several environmental groups that said road construction would hurt the Jarbidge River bull trout, designated in 1998 as a threatened fish. Construction causes sedimentation and erosion, said Chris Wood of the group Trout Unlimited, who worked for the Forest Service in the early days of the road controversy.

Simply put, he said, "Roads kill fish."

But Jarbidge residents have long fired back at such claims. They say green groups and federal bureaucrats should not be making decisions about how to run town business.

"Locally, it has never been about the bull trout," said Dot Creechley, who manages the 17-room Outside Inn with her husband and town board chairman, Jack. "That's always just been something the environmentalists used to stop the road.

"Anyone who has ever been here for a spring flood knows that the bull trout could survive 50 years of construction. Our last flood -- it was chocolate milk through that river: rocks, trees, boulders. And the bull trout hung on somehow."

So it has gone in a fight that has now stretched over a decade, reached into federal court and captured the attention of anti-government activists around the nation.

West vs. East

Experts say the Jarbidge story is emblematic of disputes that are a colorful part of the story of the West, especially in rural areas where the land is populated by spirited, independent people but managed by federal bureaucracies.

In Nevada, roughly 85 percent of the state is controlled by agencies that include the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service.

Feuds between locals and the departments date from the late 1800s and have ebbed and flowed but never disappeared, state archivist Guy Rocha said. The clashes typically spring out of resident frustration with the rules of Washington-based agencies that restrict access to the land where they live, Rocha said.

"They essentially see it as Easterners controlling Westerners," Rocha said.

Federal-local disputes of bygone eras often grew from rancher discontent over federal water or grazing restrictions, but now are just as likely to center on environmental rules.

Perhaps the best known dispute, the Sagebrush Rebellion, was a failed, Western-states movement centered in Nevada in the 1970s aimed at returning federal-land control to states.

"There are still some folks who are clinging to that," said Krisen Brengel of the Wilderness Society, which has been a party to legal wrangling over South Canyon Road.

"It may be a culture war for them, but for us it is about making sure these protections stay in place," Brengel said. "Our stronger nostalgia in this country is that you can't drive your car everywhere you want to go."

10,000 shovels

In Jarbidge, the Shovel Brigade hit its peak on July 4, 2000, when a crowd of several hundred activists drawn from around the West toiled through the day with ropes, picks and muscle to reopen the road. They repaired damage and cleared rocks and boulders -- some placed there by the Forest Service, which had deemed the road too dangerous to drive.

Their work was aided by some of the 10,000 shovels donated by sympathetic activists as a show of support.

Since then, South Canyon Road has been passable, if only by all-terrain vehicles and Jeeps -- "real Jeeps," said Ken Heil, special deputy with the Elko County Sheriff's Department.

A few activists celebrated the five-year anniversary of the Shovel Brigade earlier this month. The controversy has yet to be quelled.

Forest Service officials have never formally declared the road open. They encouraged people not to use it, but in most cases did not actively block access, said Robert Vaught, Humboldt-Toiyabe Forest supervisor.

To settle the matter once and for all, the Forest Service in April announced a plan in which it would declare most of the road open to all-terrain vehicles.

But the agency also aims to develop the last four-tenths of a mile of it into a hiking and horse path -- closed to vehicles.

The plan was the result of much deliberation, Vaught said.

"There has been an untold amount of dollars spent and agony generated around this," Vaught said. "This is a reasoned decision, and most people agree it's a reasoned decision."

An Interior Department spending bill pending in Congress would launch the Forest Service plan into action.

It includes $250,000 to groom the hiking trail, extract bridge remnants from the river and remove an outhouse that has drawn its share of controversy, according to the Forest Service.

(Residents in 2003 offered to empty the outhouse for free, but the Forest Service spent $15,000 to airlift more than 5,000 pounds of sewage by helicopter, deeming the job too risky to human health and the environment for volunteers to handle.)

County officials, who have long fought the Forest Service to keep the road open, are content with the plan to close only the last four-tenths of a mile, county manager Rob Stokes said. The five-member Elko County Commission voted unanimously not to appeal the plan.

"We're hoping this will bring some finality to the issue up there," Stokes said.

Still fighting

But Shovel Brigaders are continuing their fight to keep the whole road open.

Grant Gerber, an Elko lawyer who represents the Shovel Brigade for free, said closing any part of the road to vehicles was unacceptable.

Gerber said the Forest Service had launched a de facto plan to close the road by making the end of it a hiking trail. He pledged to appeal the plan and keep the battle alive on principle.

"If we don't keep these kinds of roads open, people will continue to get squeezed into tighter and tighter areas, to the point where traveling in America is no fun anymore," Gerber said.

Most of Jarbidge's 15 winter and roughly 50 summer residents would prefer that the Forest Service keep the entire road open to anyone, although they haven't been as militant as the Shovel Brigade leaders, the Creechleys said.

The old mining town, which has its own post office and gas station but no school, hosts a number of tourists each year, mostly hunters, hikers and a few fishermen and campers. Parts of the canyon are known for wildflowers.

"You'd be surprised how many people find Jarbidge," Dot Creechley said.

There was a road there before the flood, and there is no good reason not to rebuild it, Jack Creechley said. There have never been that many bull trout in the river anyway, he said.

"This is all a ploy by the environmentalists, the green groups," he said. "They just don't want anyone in there. People need to get up there and see the beautiful canyon."

Carpenter, who has long supported the Shovel Brigade, said he, too, cannot understand why the Forest Service wants to close off the end of the road.

But Vaught sharply disputes the contention that the Forest Service is closing the road. The final piece has been closed for 10 years, and the Forest Service is reopening it, albeit as a trail, Vaught said.

He said constructing a road on that last stretch in a steep and narrow passage would be an engineering feat and not worth the high cost and danger to the environment.

"It's a matter of practicality," he said.

Final chapter?

As the Forest Service pursues its plan, a final chapter may be decided in federal court, where the matter of who controls the road is pending. As part of a settlement in 2001, the Forest Service agreed not to challenge Elko County's right-of-way claim to the road. (The agency still decides any road proposals that would affect the forest.)

But two environmental groups, the Wilderness Society and The Great Old Broads for Wilderness, filed an appeal, arguing the Forest Service had no right cede any claim to the county. A federal judge in 2003 agreed the Forest Service did not follow proper procedure.

Now the county is trying to convince a federal judge to rule on the broader issue of whether the county has a right-of-way claim to the road, which Elko officials say was there before the Forest Service took control of Humboldt-Toiyabe.

The environmental groups remain parties to the legal proceeding, urging the judge to keep the road firmly in the hands of the federal agency.

"Hopefully," Brengel said, "one day this will end, and we can all move on."

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