Tuesday's postcard, and an open plea for Trestle Creek

September 12, 2023

Lake Pend Oreille shoreline near the mouth of Trestle Creek

“I said don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot”—Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi, 1970

It was only a matter of hours after I posted a dispatch, Saturday, that I heard from Stan Miller, whom you may have met in June in a Daily Rhubarb piece about the hardy volunteers working to monitor and protect water quality at Priest Lake. In Saturday’s post I’d made brief mention of a landmark campground and beach at the mouth of Trestle Creek on the north shore of Lake Pend Oreille. Stan is a board member of the Selkirk Conservation Alliance whose area of interest both Priest Lake and Lake Pend Oreille. What he was calling my attention to is a controversial plan to put in a large private marina coupled with a large residential development at the mouth of Trestle Creek.

I had missed this, even though the project—previously stalled under threat of a lawsuit from environmental groups, but now back again—attracted 200 people to a raucous meeting last week in Sandpoint as the project’s private proponent, The Idaho Club, pushed its plans to move ahead with the project. There’s a well written article about the meeting, Luxury homes, marina draw concerns, questions, in the Bonner County Bee this morning. The Trestle Creek drainage just to the north of the lake gathers water from the south slopes of Mount Pend Oreille and Trestle Ridge. The creek is an important watershed for endangered bull trout, providing vital habitat for more than a third of the bull trout population for the lake.

There are so many of these battles—between private developers and conservationists—that it’s difficult to keep track of them. But I couldn’t help but wince at missing this one when I saw Stan’s note. I’ve hiked up to lakes in the watershed and the area near the mouth of the creek is one of my favorite places to take in the expanse of the lake and the surrounding mountains. There is a scene in my 2022 book, Beautiful Wounds, that takes place at the Trestle Creek picnic area in 2009. I included it for the same reason I mentioned it in Saturday’s piece, because you can get a good view of Green Monarch Ridge—the mountain wall that absorbed a head-on collision from the massive Purcell Trench glacier some 17,000 years ago that set the stage for the Ice Age floods that I wrote about in the book.

But there was more to it than the spectacular geology. There’s also a priceless memory. “My son, Devin, was ten at the time,” I wrote, “and before long he grabbed a branch of driftwood shaped like a trident and had us laughing and shaking our heads as he hissed, and roared, confronting imaginary foes along the shoreline.”

I left out the fuller context of that scene. Our family was really hurting that day, and we’d left Spokane emotionally bruised and fearful of losing each other. The trip to Lake Pend Oreille and Trestle Creek was supposed to be nature therapy for the four of us, and it was— thanks in large part to the beauty of this place and Devin’s priceless reaction to it. It brought smiles to our faces and saved the weekend.

It’s hard to make experiences like this tangible, to express their value to our lives, to compare them to a yacht slip, a private deck on a luxury home, and the cash that flows from these developments. Money’s important. But it’s not most important.

During last Wednesday’s four-hour meeting a consultant for the developer testified as follows, according to Lauren Reichenbach’s reporting for The Bee: “The owner has the vested right,” he said. “This is private property. This is America.”

Cha-ching.

This is not close to being a new story. These clashes between development and conservation are rife in our region. Having read and commented on more Environmental Impact Statements than I care to remember (and by the way “impact” should really only be used to describe a collision, not a deliberative accounting to weigh costs and benefits) it is demoralizing to see how spiritually dehydrated the process is. We do have ways of measuring and explaining tangible loss and destruction and sometimes that’s enough to kill projects that threaten the environment. But we don’t really have a way to give weight to the aesthetic values of nature, including how unwelcome noise and visual blight can alter or ruin our experience of the natural world. The money wins more than it should. As the man said at Sandpoint last Wednesday, “This is America.”

Devin at the Trestle Creek picnic area on Lake Pend Oreille in May of 2009.

That said, if you’re familiar with Trestle Creek, or not, and would like to register your views on the proposed marina and luxury home development at the mouth of Trestle Creek, the Idaho Department of Lands is accepting public comments via email (GVictorson@idl.idaho.gov) until Friday. Here’s a link to the Selkirk Conservation Alliances comments on the controversial proposal.

—tjc