NCCC: July 2014

Monday, July 28, 2014

Laurel Mundy was Artist in Residence at North Cascades NP this summer

Illustrator Laurel Mundy completed a brief residence in the park in July. Here are some of the scientific and natural illustrations inspired by her time in the North Cascades.

All images are ©Laurel Mundy (Laurel Mundy Illustration) — at Cascade Pass.

Laurel also welcomes you to view her Facebook illustration page (www.facebook.com/LaurelMundyIllustration) to get a look at some of her other works.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Sustainable Roads results will be reported at upcoming public meetings

We all have a favorite long mountain road we remember driving way up into the subalpine country, with a short hike at the end leading to open meadows and views. Some might remember that before that logging road was built there was a long hike through deep forest involved, lost when that road was built to 'get out the cut.'

"Logging-road mileage has more than doubled in Northwest national forests since 1960, far outstripping the pace of street and highway construction in the region" -http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19951212&slug=2157228

It hasn't been a big surprise that a lot of those roads have been cut off by washouts, blowouts, avalanches, slumps... you name it... since they webuilt. Now the Forest Service is no longer aggressively building roads and cutting, but all those old roads remain. The road budget is way down, but many hikers still want to do that long drive to a short hike, and instead they run into Road Closed signs.

The Mount Baker Snoqualmie National Forest (MBSNF) started a program to try to determine where to spend their scarce road repair funds, calling it the Sustainable Roads Project, and took public input as one part of that. NCCC has been tracking this process closely. There will be some hard choices to make. If scarce dollars aren't properly allocated, few if any may get the precious "access" they seek.

Now MBNSF is preparing to report the results of their survey of public input. The data collection that will be reported on was designed to assess the public use levels and knowledge of the 2,500 miles of Forest Service roads on the MBNSF, as a first step.

MBSNF is holding four meetings to present these results to the public who contributed the data input. These meetings are planned as follows:

July 17, 6:00 − 8:30 pm

Park Place Middle School Commons

1408 W. MainStreet

Monroe, WA 98272

July 24, 6:00 − 8:30 pm

Issaquah Main Library

10 West Sunset Way

Issaquah, WA 98027

July 29, 2:00 − 4:30 pm

The Mountaineers [Seattle]

7700 Sand Point Way NE

Seattle, WA 98115

July 31, 6:00 − 8:30 pm

Darrington Community Center

570 Sauk Avenue

Darrington, WA 98241

This public input is only one aspect of MBS's development of a Sustainable Roads Strategy, due out in 2015, which is to provide guidance for “right-sizing” and maintaining the roads on the forest.

If you would like more information you may attend one of these public meetings, please RSVP: mbs_pao@yahoo.com, please note that’s mbs_pao with an underscore. Also you may go to http://mbssustainableroads.com/