President Bush signed a bill Thursday designating 106,000 acres in the state of Washington as the Wild Sky Wilderness, the first federally created wilderness area in the state since 1984.
The bill passed in the U.S. Senate April 10 and in the U.S. House of Representatives April 29 with the help of Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Rick Larsen, making Bush’s approval the final step in establishing the wilderness.
Wild Sky is located just north of State Route 2, between Index and Skykomish, Wash., and is now under the highest possible level of federal protection.
Tom Uniack of the Washington Wilderness Coalition has been working to pass the Wild Sky bill since February 2003. Uniack said he feels the passage of the bill was important because it will ensure that Wild Sky will be enjoyable for many generations.
“Change is inevitable,” Uniack said. “This will keep this place the same. Unless you do something to protect an area, things will change.”
Western student Jon Dufay, events coordinator at the Outdoor Center, said he has kayaked on the Skykomish River through the Wild Sky area many times since moving to Washington six years ago.
Dufay said future plans for the Outdoor Center could include going to the Wild Sky area on excursions. Located about 55 miles northeast of Seattle and less than 100 miles southeast of Bellingham, the wilderness provides numerous opportunities for recreational activities, including kayaking, rock climbing, hiking, backpacking and camping.
Mike Town, a Western alumnus of Huxley College of the Environment and founder of the Friends of the Wild Sky group, said that aside from the recreational benefits that come from protection of the wilderness, the passage of the bill will also ensure a continued high water quality of the Skykomish River and area streams. The wilderness area has approximately 25 miles of salmon and steelhead spawning streams in the area.
Town said hundreds of people have been involved with the Wild Sky Wilderness bill, from citizens who live in the area to Murray and Larsen, who represent the area. Murray, who has been working toward getting the bill passed since 2002, and Larsen met with people who had concerns about the establishment of the wilderness, Town said.
John Miles, a professor at Huxley College, said the primary opposition to the formation of the wilderness has come from the logging and mining industries. However, Miles said timber has not been harvested in the area in the last decade because of endangered species that live there.
“The endangered species, such as the northern spotted owl, and large predators, such as bears, will benefit because these animals need a large, undisturbed natural area to live in,” Miles said.
Miles, whose research and teaching focuses on wilderness in national parks throughout the history of the U.S., has been an activist for wilderness preservation for more than 20 years. Miles said he has used Wild Sky as an example in his teaching of the process of how a wilderness is created.
Part of what makes the passage of the Wild Sky bill so important, Uniack said, is 30 percent of the area is below 3,000 feet in elevation. Ninety-four percent of Washington’s other wilderness areas are above this elevation, he said. The topography of Wild Sky is not just rock and ice, as is much of the other wilderness areas, it is old growth forests. This makes it accessible to people year-round.
“The reason people live, work and play in the Pacific Northwest is because of things like Wild Sky,” Uniack said.
Only registered users can post comments.
Please login or register.
Be first to comment on this article
