Ancient Forests of Bumping Lake Deserve Wilderness Protection

By Brock Evans, FWOC Washington DC Representative

Outdoors West, December 28, 2011 (Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs)

In the Central Cascades east of Mt. Rainier, in the Wenatchee National Forest, there is a gem of a place called Bumping Lake. On two sides of the lake are large stands of truly magnificent ancient forests that are adjacent to the William O. Douglas Wilderness.

Over the past twenty years, I have been to these forests three times and each time I am awed by their size and extent: an untouched 2,000–3,000 acre gathering of giants, 8–10 feet in diameter, harboring, east side, ponderosa and sugar pine, and west side, Douglas fir and western hemlock. I have hiked most of the trails and climbed many peaks in the Cascades, but I have never seen anything quite like these Bumping ancient forests. To be able to wander on level terrain through ancient forests at the end of a lovely lake, that is a rare Cascades experience!

Last August I returned with a con- vivial party of Washington State Sierra Club and Audubon members. The best and deepest part of these famous forests is reached about three miles in via a lakeside trail. When we arrived there, a great silence, borne of awe, came over us. There are literally hundreds of places to camp and stroll beside these great massed columns of giants, alongside beautiful Bumping River where it flows into the Lake.

We were there to devise a plan and a strategy to protect this special place. For there are powerful and wealthy special interests that seek to destroy it soon. We who love it will have to fight to save it. Bumping forests are an integral, biological part of the adjacent William O. Douglas Wilderness, even if not officially inside its boundary. The spotted owls and endangered bull trout and all the other ancient forest species inhabiting this special niche, don’t understand all this human palaver about “political” boundaries; they just go on about their normal lives.

“Politics”? Haven’t we in the Federation, the Sierra Club, and so many other groups, fought for the past fifty years to have these one-of-a-kind forests included in Wilderness, where they naturally belong? Yes we have; but each time, starting in the 1970s, it is water politics that has kept them out. The Bumping region is a part of the Yakima River watershed, in a drier part of the state. The Yakima River Basin already contains many taxpayer-funded dams and reservoirs, and canals, including “Lakes” Kachess, Kecheelus and Cle Elum, built long ago, to subsidize ranching and irrigation farming.

Now vested interests want more “insurance dams,” to be built for “storage” in case of future long droughts. The federal Bureau of Reclamation has convened a “Yakima Basin Working Group,” which is recommending two new dams: at Bumping, drowning out the ancient forests; and at Wymer, a downstream site which would destroy habitat of the endangered sage grouse.

Now we have all learned to expect such “proposals” from the Bureau, which in my experience has never seen a free-flowing river that didn’t need “improvement.” The same for “water users,” assuming that they can get taxpayers to pay for the new projects.

But the new shocking wrinkle this time is that the Bureau has included two “environmental” organizations in its “Study” process. And even more shocking and sad, these two have stated they would support these new dams if the dam-promoters would agree to purchase about 40,000 acres of logged-over “checkerboard lands,” in the Teanaway River valley, about a hundred miles away as “mitigation.”

To which my colleagues and I say: No! No Way! If the Teanaway acres are important for open space reasons, though that is difficult to imagine, they can be purchased with other funds, not in some kind of “deal” with outside anti-conservation interests.

The great forests of the Bumping cannot be “mitigated.” There is now no other place in our Cascades where there can be found such a unique classic ancient forest habitat, alongside a lake at level ground.

In 1978 FWOC adopted resolutions, which oppose the destruction of the Bumping forests and urged adding them to the William O. Douglas Wilderness. This October I had the privilege of representing the Federation and the Endangered Species Coalition in Washington DC, visiting Members of Congress and agency officials to deliver the following message:

1.There are better and cheaper ways to provide more water in this region than building dams. Water conservation and efficient use of existing water, as is already being done in other dry areas, could save 200,000–400,000 acre-feet of water without a single new dam.

2.Conserving water is not only the way of the future; it would also save taxpayers a lot of money and greatly improve salmon habitat.

3.There are numerous other ways to find funding for saving the checkerboard lands of the Teanaway from potential future subdivisions.

4.But there is no other way to replace, or to “mitigate” for a loss of the unique ancient forests of the Bumping.

We must win the fight to save the Bumping ancient forests and get them included in the “official” Wilderness this time around, making them safe forever.