By Michael Howell
The Stevensville Ranger District has temporarily closed Willow Creek Roads #364 and #969 east of Corvallis following several slides that have covered the road with mud, rocks and debris. The slides occurred on Tuesday, June 13, following heavy rainfall over the Sapphire Mountains. Numerous weather stations on the forest including Sawmill Creek, Deer Mountain and Tipi Point all received more than two inches of rainfall from this week’s storms. The Gird Point station east of Hamilton of Skalkaho Road received a record 3.7 inches of precipitation in a 48-hour period.
The slide reported at the time was near the junction with Butterfly Road below the Willow Creek trailhead. Barricades were placed across the road to prevent entry into the area.
By the next day, Bitterroot National Forest road crews began clearing debris from the road and engineers began reviewing the area to determine the extent of the damage and necessary work needed to repair the roads.
Forest Service Public Affairs Officer Tod McKay said on Monday that the crews found the slide had actually originated on an upper road that had collapsed sending water and debris down onto the lower roads.
“We are going to have to rebuild a portion of the road bed,” said McKay. “We are bringing in rip-rap and rocks to stabilize the upper road.” He said he expected the work to be completed by the end of the week.
The road is one of the primary roads designated for timber hauling in the proposed Gold Butterfly project. McKay said that the rain event and road repair will mean rescheduling the public field trip that had been planned for July 10. He said the field trip will be rescheduled soon. No date was set as of Monday but he expected it to be later in the week or in the next week. Whatever date is set for the field trip, the deadline for commenting will be extended to two weeks past that date to provide time for those who took the field trip to provide comments.
“That would put the deadline for comments somewhere in mid-July,” said McKay.
McKay said that forest hydrologists had referred to the storm as a 100 year storm event and he would not be surprised to find out that other places on the forest were also affected. He cautioned motorists driving on the forest roads to be on the lookout for problems and is asking the public to report any road damage, downed trees, plugged culverts of flooding conditions that they see.
Members of Friends of the Bitterroot were able to take photos of the flooding on the day that it occurred. Those photos verify what the Forest Service personnel discovered in terms of the upper road being the source of the slides.
FOB member Larry Campbell called the event “a natural audit of their best management practices.” He said the major problem is not how to avoid extreme rain events, which nobody can, but how to build roads that can handle them. He said it is not just the road bed that washed out that needs to be reconstructed but the ones that have not washed out yet. He said the back log on road maintenance on the national forest was huge.
“I don’t want to over-state the case, but this is Mother Nature’s audit and they flunked.”
Ravalli County Sheriff Steve Holton said that the Skalkaho Highway was also temporarily closed due to flooding at the Skalkaho Falls. He said that the Sheriff’s Department did not get a lot of emergency calls related to the heavy rains. He attributed the lack of calls in large part to the work of County Director of Emergency Management Eric Hoover.
He said that Hoover was preparing for the event before it happened and when it did happen, working mostly with the valley’s Fire Districts, he was able take the calls and provide the most appropriate response, usually a lot of sand bags.
Hoover did not return phone calls on Monday.