Here is the latest on access around the Goldbar area in Washington State.
As many of you know, the land on which most of the bouldering in Gold Bar sits used to be owned by a Washington timber company named Manke Lumber Company. Manke logged the “Clearcut” area (now more like the “Jungle”) in 2000 or 2001, and allowed climbing on its property below Zeke’s Wall due to the fact that the hillside needs some 40-50 years before it can be harvested again.
Because the Washington State Department of Natural Resources owned the land under the first mile or so of the road up the hill, however, vehicle access to the Manke parcel became collateral damage when DNR closed access to the entire Reiter Foothills area in 2010. It is through Manke’s grace that WCC members were briefly granted vehicular access to the area in 2011 as “permittees” of Manke’s that were thus afforded the benefits of Manke’s easement over the DNR land; this access was revoked in May 2012 when Manke succumbed to pressure from DNR to end what was perceived as favoritism toward our user group over others, including ORV users. Under Manke’s ownership, pedestrian access to Gold Bar was stable, but not secure. The company could have posted the area and revoked climbing access at any point, logged other areas of the parcel, or even sold it to a developer, with no need to justify its decisions.
This all changed in early 2015 when DNR acquired the Manke parcel as part of a larger land swap deal with Manke. DNR wasn’t especially interested in the Gold Bar parcel itself, but is reported to have been interested in completing its holdings in the valley (the Manke parcel was something of an island among state and federal land in the Wallace Falls-Reiter Foothills area), as well as gaining a potential access point for a large stand of timber between May Creek and Wallace Falls.
DNR’s acqisition of the Manke parcel is both a mild blessing and a mild curse for climbers. After a boulderer reported on Facebook that they had been harassed by a DNR employee and told the area was off limits to climbing in the fall of 2014, representatives of the WCC, Access Fund, and Seattle Mountaineers met with DNR Cascade District Manager Al McGuire to discuss the district’s approach to climbing. DNR plans mostly to use the Manke parcel as an access point for a stable crossing of May Creek, and the timber beyond. It plans to build a road that departs from the current logging road at the westernmost switchback, at the beginning of the trail to the Magic Boulders and to retire the upper portions of the existing road. As a precursor to abandoning the upper portions of the road, it plans to open up a modest amount of timber in the vicinity of the boulders to logging (more about this later).
The main impacts that will come to Gold Bar under DNR’s new plan involve the road. The planned abandonment of the upper sections of the road is a huge setback for the already-remote possibility that full vehicle access would be restored. DNR has a strict legal duty to manage the state trust lands in its possession so as to maximize their financial return, and is very unlikely to provide the several thousand dollars per mile per year (as quoted by Mr. McGuire) that it costs to maintain a gravel logging road on the wet west side of the Cascades. There is a slight possibility of establishing an open road to the May Creek switchback after logging operations to the west are concluded, but the road to such a trailhead would likely still have to be mostly privately funded, and under DNR’s regulations, it would have to be truly “public” – DNR cannot give preferential treatment to a specific user group.
For the full article, please visit Kelly Sheridan’s blog.