Mike Balen, with the author’s dog Zella, examines the river flow near South Canyon Road. Photo © James Johnston
Residents of Jarbidge, Nevada, claim that they live in the most remote town in the lower forty-eight states. They are probably correct. The nearest major city is Boise, Idaho, a four-hour drive, the last thirty miles on a narrow and windy gravel road up the canyon of the Jarbidge River. The other route into Jarbidge is three hours from Elko, Nevada, the last fifty miles on an even windier, narrower road over an 8,500-foot pass. It is closed for at least six months out of the year.
The latter route—through the heart of the Jarbidge Range in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest—has to be one of the most scenic drives in the United States. In the spring, the Jarbidge Range is blanketed by emerald, chartreuse and silver-tinged sage and grassy meadows thick with bright, yellow balsamroot blooms. Long fingers of lime green aspens flow out of pale-white rock faces.
Being as remote as it is lovely was evidently not enough celebrity for Jarbidge. In 2001, the town became a major battlefield in the Sagebrush Rebellion, a grassroots insurgency against the federal government that got its start during the 1960s wilderness designation and roadless inventory efforts by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. The Jarbidge chapter of the rebellion focused on South Canyon Road, four miles of gravel and dirt that reaches from the town of Jarbidge upriver through Forest Service land to a trailhead into the 113,000-acre Jarbidge Wilderness.
In 1995, a flood washed out most of this section of the road. In June 1998, Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest managers announced they would not repair the road but instead would extend the trail down the canyon. Planners reasoned that the road was likely to fail again in the future, making it an unsuitable choice for repair and maintenance.
The decision didn’t sit well with Elko County residents. In response to pressure from locals who wanted access to the road for hunting, fishing and off-road recreation, county officials sent road crews to reopen the road without consulting the Forest Service or any other regulatory agency. County officials claimed that an obscure law from 1866 pertaining to right-of-way access throughout the West gave the county the right to maintain Forest Service roads.
The county dredged about 300 yards of the river, redirecting the water’s flow away from the road. Their work continued for just a day and a half before the state of Nevada halted work based on the county’s failure to obtain the necessary permits. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued an emergency Endangered Species Act listing for Jarbidge River bull trout, saying the excavation threatened the endangered fish.
The controversy over the road closure became a cause célèbre for anti-government activists throughout the West. Local citizens stewed about the de facto closure for years. Their dissatisfaction culminated on July 4, 2001, when hundreds of protesters from around the country gathered in Jarbidge to repair the road themselves—by hand. Within days, the Shovel Brigade, as the protesters were called, moved thousands of pounds of rock and dirt with wheelbarrows, restoring approximately a quarter mile of the roadbed.
Eventually, the Forest Service compromised with Elko County and agreed to maintain the two miles of road closest to town for use by a Type 6 fire engine, a glorified one-ton pickup.
Almost seven years later I was in Jarbidge to meet with Mike Balen, a Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest engineer based in Elko. Officially, Jarbidge, resting at 6,200 feet in this far northeastern corner of Nevada, is a community of sixteen permanent residents. One dusty dirt road leads through town. There’s a post office, a bar (closed) and another bar and cafe (open). A dilapidated trailer houses a tiny school.
Balen came to the Humboldt-Toiyabe from the Boise National Forest in Idaho. Before working for the Forest Service, he was a mining engineer in Alaska. His baby is the Jarbidge Canyon Restoration Project, the principal outcome of the Shovel Brigade controversy. Funded with a $3 million Congressional appropriation, the project calls for keeping the road open while restoring and enhancing bull trout productivity. The good folks of Jarbidge may have rejected government, but the government still cares about them, thanks in large part to the fact that they are represented by one of the most powerful politicians in the country, Senate Majority Leader Harry—Nevadans call him “Uncle Harry”—Reid. Most of the work, which includes bridge and culvert replacement as well as bank stabilization, is being done downstream of Jarbidge, well away from the controversial site upstream.
The problem with the road is that it sits at the bottom of a very steep and narrow canyon. The Jarbidge, fed by melting snow from a half-dozen 10,000-foot peaks, is an ill-tempered river, prone to sudden flooding when warm rains melt the snow. When the river gets full, it has nowhere to go but over the road.
The type of engineering required to keep the road open is both “an art and a science,” Balen explains. For this project, he eschewed elaborate stream surveys, hydrological modeling and bridge diagrams. The environmental impact statement that the Forest Service prepared for the project contained general descriptions of road realignment and bank stabilization measures. The agency let Balen use his best judgment to select the specific sites to implement these repairs.
Balen approaches the engineering tasks in the Jarbidge Canyon with a rafting guide’s eye for how each bend and turn in the river interacts with rocks, soil and logs. On our field trip in late June, he points to a rock outcropping in the river. “Those rocks there are causing an eddy in front of them when the river’s running high that’s cutting into the road,” he says. “See this erosion? These rocks up there, we placed those there to reduce some of the river’s velocity.”
In some areas Balen cut into the side of the canyon to move the road further away from the river. He flattened and softened the steep drop off from the road’s edge and planted willows to stabilize the stream bank. He replaced a half-dozen bridges and dozens of culverts.
But the real art in Balen’s approach is repairing broken community relations. He consults with locals about every detail of the project. He also helps with community construction projects—off the clock. He has used a heavy truck to bring rock to a local park construction project on a return trip from a fueling run and has installed sod by hand on a day off. Balen knows every person in town, and he has so many people to talk to, it takes us a half hour to get through town on our way upriver. Later, when I ask the waitress at the cafe what she thinks of the road repair work, she stares blankly at me. “You know,” I say, “the stuff the Forest Service is doi…”
“Ohhhh! You mean, Mike’s stuff?” She gets a big smile on her face. “Oh, we really, really like Mike.” She seems indifferent to the particulars of the roadwork. “Sometimes there’s a lot of delays, but you know, Mike is so good about talking to people about what’s going on. You can just plan around it.”
Not everyone is as thrilled. Katie Fite, an environmental activist who challenged the 2001 decision to leave the two miles of road upriver from Jarbidge open, takes exception to the environmental impact statement that Balen relies on to complete the road repairs.
“What happened,” she says “is they got a big slug of money from Senator Reid, and the projects just grew and grew, and they’re not doing the upfront environmental analysis. The full scale of impacts were really never analyzed, is my impression of what is going on there...That sort of thing allows the individual in charge of the project to play God instead of looking at alternatives.”
If Balen is playing God, he’s a picky deity. When we get upriver, we stop to inspect a brand new culvert. Balen is glaring at it. “What do you think?” I ask him.
He looks up, shaking his head. “I don’t like it,” he says flatly. “Look, this rock armoring should have extended all the way around, or this part here,” he points, “excavated some more. Otherwise it’s going to erode here,” he jabs at the slope, “into here. No good.” He’ll bring an excavator up tomorrow or the next day to fix it, he says.
The section of road built by the Shovel Brigade is a mile upriver, dead-ending at a river ford. The route from this point up is the stretch of road maintained for fire engines, although only monster four-wheel drive rigs and ATVs can negotiate the river fords. As we walked up the river, Balen was stopped by a grizzled old-timer on a four-wheeler and four of his friends. He was put out. A ford upriver, the guy said, “was starting to get soft under me.” He thought the Forest Service was planning on letting the crossings erode. “It just seems like it’s gonna get closed down bit by little bit.”
“Nope, that’s not what’s going on,” Balen said. “We didn’t put in that bridge just downstream there to let it get washed away.” He knew that the locals felt lied to before, and he was going to stay on top of the problem. The old-timer and his friends seemed satisfied and thanked Balen as they drove on. Ten minutes later, Balen’s river guide eyes are frowning at a river ford. A small island of cottonwoods just upstream, he said, was breaking up the river’s velocity just enough to hold the riverbank together and keep the ford passable—for now.
The fix? “Probably place some structures, some boulders…there,” he points.
“This is it,” he says a little later, referring to a road that really doesn’t go anywhere. “Just this little stretch of road. That’s the controversy.”
I can’t help but think that in the arms race that is river and road, the offense will eventually wear down whatever defenses Balen erects. Come the next big flood—this year, next year or fifty years from now—the road will be gone and the controversy will return.
As with most natural resource conflicts in the West, the one over South Canyon Road is purely symbolic. At the bar in Jarbidge, I ask a few patrons about the road. Everyone has the same theory: The federal government and environmentalists want the road to go back to nature so they can expand the Jarbidge Wilderness. The town is surrounded on all sides by national forest. Folks want to be able to get around in it, just like anyone who lives in Chicago or L.A. is able to come and go where they please. The little stretch of road is a line in the sand at which point the citizens of Jarbidge won’t be hemmed in any further.
The controversy, quieted by the Forest Service’s agreement with Elko County to maintain part of the road and by the public relations work of Forest Service personnel such as Balen, may heat up again soon. On May 20, a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of two environmental plaintiffs, finding that the Forest Service lacked the authority to make the 2001 road maintenance decision with the county without public comment or review under the National Environmental Policy Act. The Forest Service and Elko County must revisit the compromise agreement.
Balen is optimistic that legalisms won’t undermine the compromise, that he can keep the road open barring another major natural disaster, and that relations between the Forest Service and locals will continue to improve. The art of engineering he practices in the Jarbidge Canyon inspires a lot of confidence.
Join FSEEE’s James Johnston and Zella, his two-and-a-half-year-old Rhodesian Ridgeback, as they seek to visit every national forest coast-to-coast. James is meeting with agency personnel, citizens and local conservation groups to learn about Forest Service success stories and challenges. Forest Canapé is James’ day-to-day chronicle of his journey.