http://www.idahostatesman.com/2012/06/03/2140730/sawtooth-national-recreation-area.html

Becky Nourse had to avoid three antelope on Idaho 75 as she drove south May 19 through the panoramic valley surrounded by the peaks of the Sawtooth Range and White Cloud Mountains.

The weekend before Memorial Day, the road through the Sawtooth National Recreation Area was nearly deserted. A few hawks hunted the log-fenced meadows at the base of a forest of green and red lodgepole pines that rise into the snow-crested granite spires.

As Sawtooth National Forest supervisor, Nourse’s job is to protect the 756,000-acre recreation area set aside by Congress 40 years ago because of its spectacular views, wildlife and fisheries.

But it’s not her only job.

She also manages the rest of the 2.1 million-acre forest, which stretches south nearly to the Nevada border. She has had to deal with budget cuts that have left few rangers roaming the backcountry and nearly forced her to close the visitor center at Redfish Lake this year.

The U.S. Forest Service’s lack of money and focused priorities has prompted some to question the 1972 decision to protect four mountain ranges, more than 1,000 lakes, 40 peaks higher than 10,000 feet and the headwaters of four major Idaho rivers as a recreation area instead of a national park. Parks generally get higher profiles, bigger budgets, and better visitor services and interpretive programs.

But Nourse, who worked as deputy ranger in the SNRA more than a decade ago, thinks Idaho’s congressional delegation made the right choice. Led by Democratic Sen. Frank Church, Idaho leaders created a hybrid recreation area that has withstood the test of time.

“It’s as much about what you don’t see as what you see,” Nourse said.

You don’t see the valleys filled with subdivisions of second homes stretching out from towns filled with huge resort hotels, Walmarts and other chains — like in Jackson, Wyo., near Grand Teton National Park. Stanley has seen only minor development in the past four decades, retaining its small, mountain-town character.

What you do see is the result of the vision of a few state leaders, activists and others who wanted the landscape preserved.

Pat Ford, president of the Boulder-White Clouds Council, which is dedicated to protecting the 500,000-acre roadless area that lines the eastern side, hopes today’s generation renews the vision.

Among his recommendations: Give the area more independence and standing so its quality is recognized and funded. And whatever the future holds, managers will have to account for the changes coming from global warming, he said.

“How can we prepare its lands, users and institutions for the hot, hard weather to come?” Ford said SNRA advocates must ask.

Church, Republican Sen. Len Jordan and Republican Reps. Jim McClure and Orval Hansen championed the law establishing the SNRA to protect fish and wildlife, halt significant new development and retain the area’s pastoral character. Their efforts came after a fight by conservationists to stop an open-pit molybdenum mine at Castle Peak in the White Clouds.

Cecil Andrus made the mine fight the centerpiece of his successful 1970 gubernatorial campaign, broadening support for the area and laying the groundwork for the delegation’s work.

But a combination of Idaho Falls nuclear workers and others who formed the Sawtooth Preservation Council didn’t think the Idaho delegation was ambitious enough.

Boyd Norton, a conservation photographer and former nuclear engineer, remembers a meeting he and others had with Church.

“He said, ‘Look, a national park is not in the cards,’ ” Norton said.

“Looking back, I think Frank may have been wrong about that,” Norton said.

But a national park might have stopped hunting in the mountains. The pressure for the government to buy the more than 25,000 acres of private land within the boundaries — inholdings — would have been strong.

“I did not support a national park because of the inholdings,” said Andrus, who later became President Jimmy Carter’s Interior secretary.

And he agrees with Church’s assessment on whether the area could have been protected as a park:

“They never could have gotten the horses to do that,” Andrus said.

A National Park Service plan presented at the time would have managed the valleys as national recreation areas and the mountains as a national park, said John Freemuth, a Boise State University political science professor and a former park ranger. The national recreation area designation allowed more flexibility.

The agency might have been able to accommodate inholdersand allow hunting, although it rarely does that.

Visitors to a Sawtooth National Park would have seen a different place. As a national park, it inevitably would have attracted more visitors. Today about 1. 2 million people visit the SNRA annually.

Grand Teton National Park, which Freemuth said might be a comparable model, gets 3.8 million visitors who pay $25 per vehicle per week.

Had the Sawtooth been a park, surrounding communities might have seen more visitors and business.

“If it had been done intelligently, both Challis and Salmon might have benefited,” Freemuth said.

Most of all, there would have been more money for better visitor services and staffing. Grand Teton’s 2012 budget is $12.1 million, while the SNRA budget is just $2.8 million.

The Sawtooth National Forest has long had a small budget because it never had the big-money timber that drove national forest budgets for decades and laid the base for today’s forests. The SNRA has suffered with it.

“The Forest Service never figured out what to do with national recreation areas,” Freemuth said.

That’s seen most of all in the lack of interpretive programs in the SNRA. Tight budgets forced the Forest Service to cut its minimal interpretive staff at the Redfish Lake Visitor Center,

and interpretive presentations were down to two a week, said Gary Gadwa, president of the SawtoothInterpretive & Historical Association.

“We thought we were going to have to close the visitor center,” Nourse said.

What happened next is what sets the Sawtooth National Recreation Area apart.Gadwa’s group teamed with volunteers from the SawtoothSociety and private businesses to take over the visitor center.The Forest Service at first balked, said Gadwa, a retired conservation officer in Stanley.

But with Nourse’s backing, the local groups remodeled the center and expanded interpretive programs both at the center and in the forest. They were able to hire a retired SNRA employee as executive director.

This summer, programs are scheduled daily, and the groups hope to reach out to more children, Gadwa said.

Volunteerism is at the heart of the SawtoothSociety, started by Andrus; Hansen; Church’s widow, Bethine; and the late McClure. The group was critical in efforts in the 1990s to get Sen. Mike Crapo to push for additional federal funds to buy easements from landowners to prevent development northwest of Stanley.

The group is still pushing for more money for easements, though more than 90 percent of the private land within the SNRA has had the development rights purchased.

Since it formed in 1997, Sawtooth Society members have raised more than $600,000 for 150 projects.

It is working with the Forest Service to buy — and close —a state of Idaho gravel pit still used in the Sawtooth Valley, said Gary O’Malley, the executive director.

Most of all, it has sponsored the Sawtooth Vision 20/20 process, which has brought together 40 stakeholder groups to work on finding a common path for the SNRA’s future.

The Forest Service’s mission has changed in the past few decades, so perhaps the agency can bring its own shifting priorities for restoration and recreation to the Sawtooths, several observers say.

“ I think there may very well be an opportunity to re-brand the SNRA,” said O’Malley. “This is on our radar screen.”

Nourse isn’t ready to weigh into that discussion, which is full of political land mines.

But as summer approaches, tens of thousands of Idahoans will drive up to camp, hike, boat, fish, hunt and just soak up the scenery of a unique place.

For 40 years, Idahoans have stepped up as volunteers, voters or supporters to keep the Sawtoothsspecial.

“People have a lot of ownership in that,” Nourse said.

Rocky Barker: 377-6484