No big surprise here as the Forest Service didn’t even need to go through the public hearing process (not that that even matters when it comes to the WPG). This little travesty was brought to you by the Bush administration’s decision that renewing permits every few years was too demanding on private profiteers like the WPG, so they allowed them to streamline the process by making it once every ten years. Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest Supervisor, Brian Ferebee eagerly sent out a memo saying that he had renewed the permit. Way to go Brian – may your neighbors take up chainsaw art as a family hobby.
Archive for the 'Forest Service' Category
In one of the greater ironies of the Wasatch Heli Wars, the Forest Service prohibits jeeps, dirt bikes and ATV’s from tearing up the Wasatch Mountains, but for some reason allows helicopters. Fortunately a Heli-Free Wasatch supporter was able to fix the trailhead sign:
The link below takes you to a PDF document which was compiled by the Wasatch-Cache National Forest as a result of the Jan 2005 Wasatch Powderbird Guides bombing campaign which senselessly devastated large tracts of trees in the central Wasatch Mountains. With known avalanche instability, the Powderbird Guides went on a bombing joyride which triggered massive avalanches in the backcountry, tearing out trees and weakening the snowpack in the process.
After a formal Freedom of Information Act request (and then the expected follow-up note weeks later to ask if/when the the Forest Service was actually going to send it) I’ve finally received the January and February 2008 daily Wasatch Powderbird Guides report.
I’ve always thought it seemed like there were a lot of helicopters flying around at the head of Little Cottonwood Canyon, but never imagined the WPG were making as many flights as they do. With only twelve days of operation in January, they managed to pump out a staggering 511 flights, for an average of 42.6 flights per day. Bear in mind a “flight” is there and back, which means when they were flying, it was a virtual war-zone of flying choppers.
Shocking, eh? But then there was February.
In an ear-shattering, peace disrupting effort, the Wasatch Powderbirds cranked out 720 flights in just 14 days during February! That’s an average of over 51 flights per day. No wonder it seems like the helicopters are in your face all the time – they are.
During Jan/Feb spree, they managed to drop 41 bombs of which there is no record of the damage they caused to flora and fauna.
In the combined 26 days of operation, they saw 328 “ski or snowshoe users” which comes out to 12.6 per day, or only one backcountry user for every 3-4 flights they took. They must not be looking very hard.
The hard-to-read pdf document can be found here.
It’s a sad yet familiar sight… you are out backcountry skiing in the beautiful Wasatch Mountains and just as you come up to the top of a peak, there is a little pile of WPG flagging attached to a snapped off tree limb.
This is called “litter.”
And because it makes the Wasatch LitterPig Guides feel important and like a REAL heliskiing company, there is a lot of it!
Real heliskiing companies use 36″ (or longer) staffs that they plant in the snow with durable flagging, then they remove it at the end of the day or the season. The Wasatch Powderbird Guides just rip a branch off a nearby tree, tie a piece of tat to it and leave it to rot. This is done mainly to impress their clients. Not only that, but they often place the flagging so low that it is buried by the next snow storm, so they have to plant even more litter.
WPG is sanctioned by the Wasatch Cache Forest Service to place all of this litter and rip branches off of trees as they see fit. They have no provision for cleaning it up and claim the flagging is biodegradable, which it probably is… in 25 years. In the meantime, it just clutters up peaks and then gets mulched into the talus in the summer.
This makes backcountry skiers mad:
Remember, PUT LITTER IN ITS PLACE, which in this case is the Wasatch Powderbird Guides parking lot.
