Saturday, Sep. 13, 2008

Lake Roosevelt visitors leave behind big mess

By Rich Landers, The Spokesman-Review

Most of Lake Roosevelt's 1.4 million annual visitors have come and gone for the season, and what many of them left behind will make you wince.

The brush and woods behind popular undeveloped camping beaches along the 154-mile-long reservoir are littered with toilet paper and human waste.

The mess is just one of several issues prompting the National Park Service to begin taking public comment this month for a shoreline management plan that will be developed over the next 1 1/2 years.

"The first time I came out to these beaches, I wasn't prepared for how disgusting this is," said Debbie Bird, Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area superintendent.

"Even though campers are required to have portable toilets, many of them don't bother. What you see here is all from this season, because we came out and cleaned these beaches this spring to get a handle on the problem," she said on a recent boat tour to view a portion of the Columbia River reservoir's 500-some miles of shoreline.

The national recreation area provides 70 vault toilets, 20 flush toilets and four floating toilets along shores plus nine pit toilets at boat-in campgrounds, said Ray Dashiell, Park Service facility manager in Coulee Dam.

"But it would be cost prohibitive to try to maintain toilets at all the undeveloped beaches we can't reach by road," he said.

The Colville and Spokane tribes manage nearly half of the reservoir's shoreline along their reservations, and they require campers to buy tribal permits.

The shoreline management plan will seek to keep camping outside of developed campgrounds free, while confronting issues that threaten to spoil the experience, she said.

Those issues include:

-- Development on lands bordering the recreation area, and demands for private access to the lake.

-- Public access points that are overcrowded in peak season.

-- Increasing infestations of aquatic vegetation.

-- Increasing size and noise of vessels.

The natural character of Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area's shoreline is protected by a ribbon of federal land, excluding the Indian reservations, that prevents private development directly on the shoreline.

As private lands bordering the recreation area are developed, people are expecting some sort of private access to the lake, Dashiell said.

"At least five Realtors were advertising lots with beach access even though it's not legal to cross the federal land," he said. "We've been contacting those developers. We have up to 300 known encroachments into the park. One is a quarter-mile-long road bulldozed from a home to the beach. Not all are that egregious, but we contact them and put them on notice to stop, then we decide whether to go ahead and seek restitution."