LAKE OZETTE — Olympic National Park’s plan to burn three acres of brush and saplings at a historic homestead between Cape Alava and Lake Ozette has drawn fiery criticism from wilderness advocates.
The proposal calls for a controlled burn of a clearing at Rooses Prairie, site of the last house and barn that survive from about 50 homesteads that ringed the lake at the end of the 19th century.
Park spokeswoman Barb Maynes said Thursday that no fire would be set until a list of climatological conditions are met to assure the burn would be safe.
The conditions include temperature and humidity, relative dryness of the brush, wind, and dew point.
Sudden very wet conditions also could preclude the burn for this year, she said.
Opponents, however, say the burn would contravene the 1964 Wilderness Act that covers 95 percent of the park.
The controversy reunites parties to a 2004 lawsuit that stopped the park’s plans to replace two backcountry trail shelters that had collapsed under the snowfall of the 1998-99 winter.
This time, Wilderness Watch, Olympic Park Associates, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility — PEER — jointly objected to the plan to manage what the park calls a “cultural resource.”
“It provides a window into the past, a window into the time that people were homesteading the rain forests of the Olympic Peninsula,” Maynes said.
“Those areas now are being encroached on by salal and other shrubs and vegetation that’s moving in.”
Countered Tim McNulty of Sequim, a trustee of Olympic Park Associates: “We would believe that those windows would make better museum exhibits.”
Culture versus wilderness
When the parties last tangled, the wilderness groups won when U.S. District Court Judge Franklin Burgess in Tacoma ruled against the park.
It had planned to use heavy-lift Chinook helicopters to fly prefabricated cabins into the Home Sweet Home and Low Divide areas in the park’s southeastern corner.
The Low Divide area is located where the north fork of the Quinault River begins. The Home Sweet Home area is located at the headwaters of the Duckabush River.
Park officials considered the collapsed shelters to be historically significant, and they cited their eligibility for the National Register of Historic Places.
The replacement cabins were built by park staff in 2001 and 2002 using non-native materials.
Their planning and construction cost more than $100,000, according to the park.
The cost of using a helicopter to place them shelters was set at $50,000.
Maynes said meadows and pastures were part of the Roose homestead and that they may have predated settlers’ arrival in the area.
“Native Americans may have cleared them to create a mosaic of plant life to attract animals like deer,” she said.
“Fire was used by Native Americans pretty much all over the continent, I believe, to enhance game habitat and to promote the growth of certain vegetation.
“The deep forests don’t necessarily provide the right kind of conditions for salmon berries and other food plants.”
However, Sue Gunn, director of the Washington chapter of PEER, said wilderness meant no evidence of intrusion by any humans, be they Native Americans or settlers.
“It’s pretty much doin’ nothin’ to the land,” she told the Peninsula Daily News.
“Wilderness is not supposed to have the impact of man on it. Wilderness is really trying to preserve the land before man made his imprint on it.”
Maynes disagreed, saying that the Wilderness Act “does not negate or supersede other Acts of Congress, including the Antiquities Act, the Historic Sites Act and the act that established the National Park Service.”
Furthermore, the proposal to burn the three acres at Rooses Prairie and, eventually, another 14 acres there and at nearby Ahlstroms Prairie was included in the park’s Fire Management Plan.
“That plan went out for public review twice and was completed early in 2005,” Maynes said, and the wilderness advocates made no objection.
However, McNulty of the Olympic Park Associates said the plan “received very scant discussion,” and the organizations requested continued discussion of it.
“There has been no fuller discussion,” he said. “The comments weren’t adequately addressed in the final plan.”
McNulty said the groups have not planned how they will respond if the park moves to burn the three acres at Rooses Prairie.