A ROAD RUNS THROUGH IT The feds seem to be using a tiny town surrounded by wilderness to make a point. But what is the point? © 1998 by Tim Findley

Illustration ©John Bardwell

For a copy of the current issue call 1-800-RANGE-4-U.

It was truly a fine fish, a firm 24 inches of glorious Lahontan cutthroat brought up from somewhere midway down in the cold azure depths of Pyramid Lake.
     All the others on the boat--the Paiute game wardens and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service honchos and Bruce Babbitt's friends--agreed it was a nice catch, worthy almost of some of the trophies taken here years ago before the Paiute depleted their own fishery. They smiled and took pictures and shook the boss's hand after the Interior Secretary ceremoniously returned his prize to its native waters.
     As usual, though, it was Babbitt himself who insisted on having the last, and most flamboyant, words on his achievement.
     "Nevada has a flashy side. So does the Lahontan. It seems to say to the brown desert: 'Look here! See my silver sequins, my pink pinstripes! Try to top that!'" Babbitt gushed in a letter to the Reno Gazette-Journal, recalling the moment and thanking all who made it possible. It had helped convince him, he said, that "the economy is the environment" and that the future of the West lies in providing more such experiences for hordes of Americans "hungry for the outdoors."
     The letter, and variations of it repeated all over the West in 1998 by the Interior Secretary, was part of what Jamie Mills of the Newlands Water Protective Association called Babbitt's summer-long "Sermon On The Trout."
     Bruce Babbitt, so they say in Washington, is back. He sulked awhile and even thought about quitting after the still-unsettled scolding he took from Congress late last year over campaign funding influences. But Babbitt's people say he has put all that behind him and is once again on the trail of feeding the nation's need for an environment unsullied by such "mistakes" as dams and irrigation districts.
     He wrote of hearing "cash registers ring with angling dollars," and of restaurants filled with fishermen, "linked by the magic of water," all of them apart from such outworn uses as "an aging concrete plug called Derby [irrigation diversion] Dam" on the Truckee River.
     Hungry though they may be, however, it will be some time yet before Babbitt's Fish & Wildlife Service will allow the flocking fishermen to actually feed themselves on the officially threatened Lahontan cutthroat. And while Babbitt roved around the Northwest last summer swinging sledge hammers at small dams, Fish & Wildlife (FWS) was doing its own part to make things a little more miserable for other people who actually do earn a living in the outdoors.
     Nowhere was that more apparent than alongside the ankle-deep stream of the Jarbidge River in northeast Nevada. The Jarbidge has its moments, especially in spring after a heavy winter when the runoff fills the narrow aspen canyons near its headwaters and sends it flushing rocks, limbs, logs and all in a headlong rush down to the Bruneau and on through rolling prairies of southern Idaho until it finally links up with the great Snake River on its way to the Pacific. It's that notable descendency that gives Nevada's Jarbidge the respectable title of being part of a federally recognized "navigable" waterway, even if most years it's more like the sort of "river" Mark Twain used to say you needed to jump across three or four times before getting thirsty enough to drink it dry.
     What the Jarbidge really is in its Nevada origin is a portrait-pretty little trout stream worthy of an angler's ode to spiritual tranquility. There's maybe just one thing wrong with its movie-star good looks--a road runs right by it.
     Not a big, well-traveled road with asphalt lanes and guard railed curves. Just a winding lane-and-a-half of rocky dirt highway in its best places, and a little less than that where it cuts off into South Canyon on its way up to the Wilderness Area. It's in that stretch of road used for recreation and fire control where the federal government, with the help of strong environmentalist pressure, has decided to expand its reach by halting repairs to the flood damaged road in the name of the newly-endangered bull trout.
     Otis Tipton, the chubby-cheeked supervisor of road maintenance in this part of Elko County, seems like a nice friendly boy a lot younger than he really is, and he still looks almost personally hurt by it all, like a kid who didn't mean to step on the puppy. Tipton went to a lot of trouble making sure the bulldozer he rented was extra clean. He checked and double checked to make sure there were no leaks of oil or gas or grease before he drove it across the river--and only through the water that one time to get around the Forest Service road block.
     But that did it, the stern people from Fish & Wildlife say. Tipton got the water muddy and probably threatened the bull trout with extinction, they said. And the bottom line is, he didn't even apply for a "rolling stock" permit before he went ahead and did it.
     The folks from Nevada's Division of Environmental Protection questioned Tipton pretty hard about that, making him take them right back to the site and explain himself in front of God, bureaucrats, and very nearly the entire town of Jarbidge, most of whom turned out for the September grilling of Tipton in South Canyon.
     The townspeople, all 65 of them in the summer population, may confidently be said to be completely on the side of Tipton in this dispute, and in some ways just as confused by all the trouble. Since the road work happened July 22, somebody from the Sierra Club has put a message on the club's internet site calling Elko County officials "elected thugs." Somebody else has claimed that Jarbidge is trying to rekindle the whole "Sagebrush Rebellion," and one TV report even suggested that the townsfolk in Jarbidge might have links to the Montana militia.
     John Williams, the Jarbidge Justice of the Peace, blinks at that one and sticks his thumbs in the bib of his blue striped railroad coveralls.
     "Bull trout," he says with no enigma. "Always did think they were good eatin'."
     It was a few fortunately far-sighted individuals like the 74-year-old Williams who probably saved the uniquely treasured town of Jarbidge from going to the ghosts after all the mines finally shut down in the 1930s. From then on, there really wasn't much reason other than pure love of the place to stay in the tiny town with its old log cabins and porch-covered wood sidewalks. You can still find western relics like it elsewhere in places such as Silverton or Kellogg, or Angels Camp or Virginia City. But Jarbidge is about the only natural town of its type left that is still at least 100 miles on a mostly dirt road in either direction from anyplace serious enough to expect daily mail service. Mail still only makes it to the post office in Jarbidge three times a week, less sometimes in the winter. Casual tourists don't know about the place, and probably couldn't find it unless they seriously studied a map and had plenty of patience to keep looking beyond an attention-getting 8,500 foot mountain pass. Fishermen, hunters and some true lovers of the West the way it was know about Jarbidge. Up to now, that has worked out just fine for the family-sized locals lucky enough to live there, cradled in a canyon like a lost, but living, memory.
     "Now, darn it, they're trying to say we're a bunch of hillbillies or rednecks or something," complains Jack Creechley, who, along with his wife, Dot, owns the town's main business and general social center, the Outdoor Inn. Creechley is also currently the president of the Community Association--which makes him the nearest thing to local officialdom. Unless you count JP John Williams.
     "Only, he's a snowbird," Williams teases about his old friend's former habit of spending winters back in Las Vegas or Arizona.
     "And you, John," Creechley counters, "are a worm fisher."
     To which Williams indignantly replies, "Well, I catch 'em, don't I?"
     So it goes most any evening around the bar in the Outdoor Inn ("Booze, Grub, and Rooms" available). Flies or bait. Flat water or deep pools. The jokes among friends and the mutually admiring remarks for all the fun the kids seem to be having on their off-roaders going up and down the dirt paved main (and only) street. An assortment of fishermen or hunters mingle easily with hands in from one of the many large ranches beyond the pass. Ron Luzader clatters up to park alongside the hitching rail in his Model A sedan. Creechley has one too, along with a beauty of a '56 Thunderbird he saves mostly for the Fourth of July parade when they water the road a little to keep the dust down. But unless they're making one of their periodic all-day trips to Elko or Pocatello and back, there's hardly much reason to drive more than a mile or two at a stretch anyway. Nobody, not even the kids, seems to have any good reason for thinking about going somewhere else for more than a visit. Unless, that is, one of the seven kids currently at the schoolhouse finishes eighth grade and needs more than home schooling.
     It's like Williams said when some wide-eyed tourists saw him sitting out on his front lawn one day and stopped to ask him what it was like to live there in all that wilderness. "Wouldn't know," John said. "I live here in town."
     Just after Memorial Day in 1995, the Jarbidge busted loose with one of those rare, rock throwing floods they call "events." It rampaged down the canyon, roaring through several prepared camp and picnic sites and taking out a big chunk of South Canyon road alongside the fork they call Pine Creek. Some two miles down from the trailhead leading into the federal Wilderness Area, the Forest Service dropped two big logs across the road and nailed on a sign declaring it closed.
     Up until then, since at least 1909 when the Elkoro Mining Company was making this the most active gold region in the state, it was understood that there was mutual agreement over it being a county road through federally-administered public land. After the flood, Elko County sought state funds to help repair the road, but was given a low priority in relief money needed elsewhere in the state. Generously, the Forest Service offered to employ federal emergency funds to pay for the repairs to the road along with the campsites. Elko County was happy to accept the offer.
     But as the Forest Service stalled on their promise through the rest of that year, and on past the next, and the next, it began to become apparent that something else was up on the Jarbidge.
     In 1994, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, based in Missoula, Mont., had filed a lawsuit to force listing the bull trout as threatened or endangered all the way from Puget Sound to the extreme of its range and its only known refuge on the rim of Nevada's Great Basin--the Jarbidge. The real object of the environmentalists was to use the bull trout in the same way the spotted owl had been used to successfully halt logging in the Pacific Northwest.
     By March 1998, Nevada at least had agreed to limit the bull as a catch and release threatened species on the Jarbidge. But the demands to save the fish from habitat degradation caused by logging, dam building, over-fishing, and the introduction of non-native species wasn't getting anywhere quickly with the feds until Otis Tipton at last fired up that spanking clean "Cat" last July.
     It was really only a desperate and emergency move that caused him to do it, Elko County officials testified later. After stalling for three years, the Forest Service let it be known that they had no intention of repairing the road, or the campsites either. Where they had dropped their log road block amounted to at least a three-mile extension of the hikers-only Wilderness Area. "It was either fix it ourselves, or lose the road," said an attorney for the county.
     Beyond just the obvious need of the road for fire, and even flood protection, the high water spring of '95 had overwhelmed campsites and wiped out relief stations. Creechley wasn't the first to notice streamers of toilet paper hanging from some trees as the Forest Service clenched, summer after summer. Like it or not, the wilderness was getting closer to the little town.
     That Tipton neglected to acquire the necessary "rolling stock" permit for the work from state environmental officials was only something overlooked in the emergency to get it done before another winter. But just one day after he started his work, the FWS demanded the state issue a cease and desist order against Elko County and consider thousands of dollars in penalties for what they said was serious sedimentation of the river caused by Tipton's rented bulldozer. To his amazement, they even accused Tipton of changing the natural stream channel by attempting to repair the washout.
     It was so serious, they were moved to declare an emergency and immediately list the bull trout as endangered in the Jarbidge. It's a fine of $1,000 to be caught bothering one, and possible criminal penalties of jail time and up to $100,000 for continuing to mess with the bull.
     As it happened, Jack Creechley, along with John Williams and some other folks from town, had gone up to watch Tipton work that day and had even moved some trout--none of them bulls--out of the old flood-made pools and back into the main stream. It was about as radical an act as they've ever done, unless you count hauling that huge oak back bar all the way up from the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas to the Outdoor Inn a decade or so ago.
     Jack Klippenstein, a retired heavy equipment operator from Reno who has been fishing along the Jarbidge since 1971, testified that he missed all the morning action with the bulldozer by taking the 10 minute drive into town. When he got back to his campsite below the work later that afternoon, he said, the water was clear as ever and he caught his five-fish limit for supper--none of them bull trout. "It didn't hurt or help the river," Klippenstein said in a puzzled way at all the trouble. "It helped the road, but it didn't hurt the river or the fish."
     Tipton wasn't able to get much done anyway before he was ordered to stop, but what he did in a couple of hundred yards served to halt further erosion along the washout. It is true, however, that no one has actually seen a bull trout there since.
     Not, maybe, that there really aren't any bull trout there. Williams, who sometimes exaggerates, especially about fishing, insists he's caught one now and then on worms over the last half-century. But fly-fishing Creechley never has in nearly 30 years, and neither has anybody else he knows--except maybe John Williams.
     The bull is actually a char that eats other little trout. Its predatory nature, in fact, once helped establish a bounty on catching them. But the furious opponents of the road work, led most lately by Trout Unlimited and Friends of the Swan, insist the pink-spotted bull is likely to be the biggest and best fish caught in streams like the Jarbidge. And, of course, the one most imperiled by any attempts to do so, intentional or not.
     That's just one of the reasons Creechley can find to worry about a next season already hampered by lower limits and the continued lack of access to at least four campsites along the closed road. What worries him and others in Jarbidge most, however, is the way the Sierra Club and Trout Unlimited and others are trying to depict anybody who wants the road reopened as some kind of environmental criminal.
     Trout Unlimited State Chairman and Elko resident Matt Holford accused county officials of having a "public lands agenda" and the Jarbidge locals of "hiding behind" a phony cause of fire control. "Opening the road is more of a political statement," Holford charged.
     Even Holford saw the endangered listing as going beyond the less-restrictive "threatened" status his group wanted for the bull, but he blamed the backers of the road repair. "They asked for it, and now we have to live with it," he taunted.
     John Bernt, a geologist who has lived in Jarbidge off and on for 20 years, scowls about it and broods over when and how it's all likely to work out. "The federal government and the environmentalists just ruin it for everybody," he said. "It's bound to end up in a bad way."
     Elko County Commissioner Tony Lesperance, who has long been known not to mind much being called a rebel when it comes to dealings with the federal government, said, "They can list the damn moon if they want to, we're going ahead with opening up the road because the county has its police powers."
     That was about the same opinion come to by the Nevada Environmental Commission, whose chairman and state engineer, Mike Turnipseed, said he was "fed up" with all the wasted time. "This is Nevada," he said. "We're Nevadans and this is our resource."
     After hearing all the evidence, and interviewing Tipton again both at the site and in Elko, Turnipseed's commission came to the conclusion that Tipton should have gotten a "rolling stock" permit, but that he meant no harm by forgetting it, and that he actually did more good than harm to the river by returning it to its natural channel. They directed the county to apply for a state permit immediately and maybe pay a token fine before getting on with the rest of the work.
     The state environmental commissioners are aware, however, that their decision will simply, as Turnipseed put it, "get us off the hook." The real battle is yet to come, because now the Forest Service claims it, not Elko County, owns the road, and they're backed up by Trout Unlimited and others who have written letters proclaiming the road can't be fixed without violating the law that protects the endangered bull.
     That's the sort of reality come to Jarbidge that leaves Bernt and others shaking their heads with unaccustomed scowls.
     Bruce Babbitt, wandering around the West with a sledge hammer last summer, at one point offered to personally mediate the dispute. By then, officials in Elko County and people in Jarbidge in particular knew a lot better than to bite on that bait. Babbitt was busy anyway, making a keynote address on Aug. 12 to Trout Unlimited's national convention. He drew laughter there with a wink and a sneering remark about not wanting to "characterize Elko" despite all the good work he said was being done there by his BLM bureaucrats.
     That Reno crowd gave Babbitt its warmest applause when the secretary heaped praise on the personal pal who helped him catch his Lahontan cutthroat in May. It was Trout Unlimited's own Matt Holford. The same guy determined to stop the road repairs in South Canyon.
     Late in August, in a stuffy little room at the opposite end of the Great Basin, FWS officials conceded to a crowded gathering of Lahontan Valley farmers what has seemed obvious to them for years--that the cui-ui sucker fish in Pyramid Lake is not nearly so endangered as the feds originally thought when they made it the first finny creature on the list in 1966.
     In fact, the Fish & Wildlife representatives admitted, their initial "modeling" of the cui-ui's problems and the way to solve them were all wrong. The fish lives longer than they thought--a spawning female was found to be 51 years old. The initial count of them was not accurate--somebody forgot that sucker fish travel along the bottom while they were counting fish nearer the surface. And it turns out that thousands of the fish were being killed by the methods of chutes and ladders imposed by the government to save them.
     Did that mean the cui-ui, chief cause all the trouble for some 30 years between Pyramid Lake Paiutes and the farmers, was no longer "endangered"? Far to the contrary. Numbers of the fish, past or present, have little to do with it, FWS people said. The cui-ui was not listed as endangered because of any scientific evidence, they admitted. It was "nominated" for its cultural importance to the Paiute. And no matter what new "modeling" might show, the sucker will remain on the endangered species list for at least another five years until it can be determined for certain that it is likely to survive into the 22nd century. The farmers sitting in the sweaty little room in their own county office complex listened with dulled eyes. A couple of them even thanked the federal bureaucrats for being so forthcoming with new information. In the meantime, the federally funded program to buy out irrigation rights from "willing sellers" in their region continues under legal pressure to provide more water from the Truckee to Pyramid Lake's "endangered" cui-ui, and, incidentally, to the upstream Reno metropolis. Last year, after another disastrous mishap in the federal recovery program inadvertently killed a number of the fish, U.S. authorities put out a notice among the Pyramid Lake Paiute offering a "take" of cui-ui for consumption by legitimate tribal members. The response was disappointing.
     Like the cui-ui, the bull trout was "nominated" in the Jarbidge as an emergency measure to save its existence, whether or not local folks might agree that it really needed saving or was even there at all.
     Bruce Babbitt, in his inspired letter to the Reno Gazette-Journal last summer, expressed the feelings of many in such disputes.
     "I reeled in a bit of the New West," he expounded. "What I saw, in the technicolor swirl of that Lahontan cutthroat, was a deepening iridescence, the strengthening pulse of a Great Basin ecosystem on the mend."
     Such purple prose from the secretary back from his own near extinction. Not so easily spoken, however, in Jarbidge, where county authorities concede it is unlikely that the South Pass road can be fixed again this year before the snow flies.

Investigative reporter Tim Findley lives in Fallon, Nev. 

CUTTING HIPOCRISY BOTH WAYS

© 1998 by Tim Findley.

Illustration ©1998 by John Bardwell

For a copy of the current issue call 1-800-RANGE-4-U.

John Balliette, the natural resources manager in neighboring Eureka County, Nev., gladly accepts his reputation as a troublemaker among former friends and collegues in what he calls the "Forest Circus."
     Balliette took the whole summer fracas over bull and other fish so seriously that he has proposed a political solution worthy of any get tough politician anywhere. Crack down on the wrong-doers, Balliette suggests. Zero tolerance, starting with people who openly flaunt the letter of the law in the Endangered Species Act. Arrest Bruce Babbitt for harassing that cutthroat trout without a permit.
     The way Balliette reads the Endangered Species Act (Section 9), sport fishing, even limited to catch and release, amounts to a violation of the act limiting such takings to scientific purposes or other special reasons requiring a specific permit. Just showing off for your friends shouldn't count.
     Oh, ridiculous, you say. But Balliette says it's no more ridiculous than the special permit required of bug hunters last year who wanted to count a mysteriously threatened insect, and certainly no more ridiculous than the law which imposes potential $100,000 fines for merely chasing the over-populated wild horses in the state.
     Hypocrisy, in Balliette's view, ought to cut both ways. If Bruce Babbitt wants to get all sequined glittery over claiming that an irrigation dam is in the way of spawning Lahontan cutthroat (and there's no evidence it is) then any fishing at all in the Truckee River ought to be halted for fear of harassing the threatened species. And while we're at it, Balliette says, the little horned lark that feeds alongside highway shoulders in the fall is also protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act but frequently ends up as a radiator ornament. It might be time to stop driving in Nevada during the time when the little bird would be in harm's way.
     Such is the suffering state of common sense when it gets lost altogether in an ugly battle to repair an obscure road.

Investigative reporter Tim Findley lives in Fallon, Nev.