Program Updates, Fall Equinox 2011

Usually our Get With The Program section summarizes all our staff’s hard work over the past quarter — and it’s a long list! To change things up a bit we’re going to highlight just one (of many!) staff’s key accomplishments.

While this is a tough choice (we’re all gettin’ ‘er done), Adam Rissien’s field tour in the Lewis and Clark National Forest in Montana is at the top of the list. (Although a close second is also about Adam R. and his tumble off a spooked horse on a monitoring tour in the East Pioneer Roadless Area in Montana — let’s just say, this is a “before” pic, and, while Adam is OK, he had a hard time sitting, breathing, and even typing for a few weeks.)

But back to the Lewis and Clark. First, you may not realize the kind of behind the scenes organizing a field tour like this takes. We wanted to highlight a Legacy Roads and Trails (LRT) road reclamation project, one that had active restoration ongoing: a heavy equipment operator on site, working with his backhoe to rip a road surface or recountour a slope. We wanted to show this to some of our Congressional supporters (Montana Senators Tester and  Baucus), but also spread the word through the media. After consulting closely with Adam Switalski, our Science Program Director who coordinates our LRT monitoring, they chose the Lewis and Clark because of the great restoration job being done on the forest.

Adam R. put a lot of the pieces together, which, if you charted it out, would look a little like this:

Getting all these folks to be at the site, at the same time, on the same date, is easier said than done but Adam did it, although his phone ear was a bit sore.

The result? The Great Falls Tribune, two local television stations (ABC and CBS affiliates), three Forest Service staff— a hydrologist, a fisheries technician and a public affairs officer—one heavy equipment operator (Ken Peiffer), one of Senator Tester’s staff, and two Wildlands CPR staff (joining Adam was Bethanie Walder, our ED) all met in the upper Sheep Creek watershed near Kings Hills outside of Great Falls, MT. (See locator map on attached pdf.) It was a veritable restoration party. The television crew filmed Peiffer working his magic on
the old, failing road that had been dumping sediment into nearby creeks. “These (fish) species can’t deal with that,” the FS hydrologist said.

Both Bethanie and Adam were interviewed, as well as Peiffer, both for the print story and television, and Senator Tester’s staff was able to see first hand the kind of restoration and job creation happening in Montana thanks to Legacy Roads and Trails.

Heavy equipment jobs are one of the important economic benefits of Legacy Roads and trails. Besides the family-wage income Peiffer receives for his hard work, there is also a great sense of satisfaction.

“I go back on my roads all the time, it’s neat. The creeks are running right
again, you can’t even tell the road was there,” Peiffer says.

This kind of exposure in the media can make the difference in broadening public awareness and support of LRT, not just in Montana but across the Pacific Northwest and the country. As funding for innovative programs like this is challenged through the budget-cutting mania in DC, LRT support on the ground and on the Hill is critical. See the two videos from the tv stories here, and here.

Congrats Adam!