The story has a few mistakes - more then 10 people live here in the winter!

Then on July 22 a half an inch of rain in a short time blew out nearly every tributary to East Fork of the South Fork and closed the road off and on until Nov 1st.

Here is the official press release from the Payette National Forest:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Yellowpine Mudslide Update

On Tuesday around noon, the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning for Eastern Valley County. An isolated thunder storm tracked across the South Fork Salmon River Basin in the area of last summer Cascade Complex and East Zone Fire Complex. Mud and debris flows occurred in approximately 2 dozen small tributaries to the East Fork South Fork Salmon River (EFSFSR). About 10 drainages cross the EFSFSR Road, which provides access to the community of Yellow Pine from McCall. About 6 culverts where plugged and the road is impassable. First reports came in yesterday from loggers working in the Parks Creek area west of Yellow Pine. Park Creek severely scoured from the very head of the drainage to the confluence with the EFSFSR. A large open bottom culvert was completed plugged with an alluvial fan spreading over 1000 feet up and down the road. Mud and debris at Parks Creek is reported at about 7 feet deep. The Forest Service and Valley County Roads are working together to clear debris and provide access to Yellow Pine along the EFSFSR Road. Access is currently limited to road equipment and crews. The Forest can expect further damage in fire areas if isolated summer storm develop and produce rainfall amounts that exceed one inch per hour. No reports of damage to the community of Yellow Pine, homes, ranches, or other property have been reported.

Valley County will take the lead on clearing debris off road, opening access, and restoring flows through the culverts.
NOAA-Fisheries has been contacted for emergency consultation.
Debris jams in the EFSFSR need to be assessed for potential risk to road and downstream bridges. Action will be taken where needed by County and FS.
This type of event was foreseen and funding has already been acquired and programmed.

The drinking water supply for the community of Yellow Pine was cut off for one day following this week mud flows. Boulder Creek is Yellow Pine’s surface municipal water supply. Yesterday recon indicates surface and rill erosion. High water and mud flow lines were indicated across the steep boulder field in the mid section of the drainage. The flows eventually dissipated into the boulder field. This boulder field protects the community from large debris. However, the surface water treatment plant did receive a large amount of very fine sand and organics which required the community to shut the system down and clean screens and refurbish sand filters.

(sorry for the double post.)

The Clean Water Act mandated that CWA enforcement be done by state agencies. The states created more bureaucracies that push more paper. There is no field corps of clean water detectives policing our waterways!

Besides, what can anyone do about it now, other than watch the soil wash away? You can’t mulch 1,200 square miles. Mulching is the plan for the 3,000 acre Angora Burn to prevent eroded soil from entering Lake Tahoe. Good luck with that! But there’s nothing significant that can be done for the Idaho Batholith now.

Mike: Impacted municipal water districts and ag irrigation or local conservation districts might be a good start if they were paying attention to pre-fire/drought erosion as closely as TMDL. If not, EPA CWA watchdogs will most likely give ‘em a nudge.

Your erosion prediction should be fun to check out. Will anyone be monitoring or measuring in an official capacity on this? The first Fall rains should be a good indicator, and Spring snow-melt should give an answer.

He accused me of ignorance and flaming rhetoric, and called SOSF “far out” and of no consequence. So I feel like a counterpunch was fair.

Moreover, this post was about erosion and habitat destruction, not rural homes burning down. Seth wanted to change the subject, a common tactic of the enviro radical crowd.

The subject of this post is the Idaho Batholith. If anybody wants to discuss that topic, the floor is open.

Maybe you didn’t make Seth up, but you should give him a break. Anyone who makes nonsensical claims such as : “but fires can do alot [sic] of that [logging] work for a lot less $$” should be treated with sympathy, not derision.

(Fires, Seth, don’t do any logging “work” at all, much less do it cheaper. Logging, if designed correctly, produces an income. Fire does not. Given that perspective, based on facts and historical documentation, the rest of your assertions become suspect or silly.

How many homes destroyed by logging last year? How many acres of old-growth killed by logging vs. killed by wildfire? Same with spotted owl habitat and spotted owls themselves? And so on.)

Give the guy a break, Mike. He needs patience and instruction, not ridicule, and that is why he is reaching out and sending you these cries for help.

There are over 650 posts on this website. NEVER, not once, have I recommended that we log it all. That is a foul canard, a baseless accusation, and pure crap.

I have consistently recommended restoration forestry. Take a look, chump.

And as to your dismissal of my influence, you are sadly mistaken about that, too. SOS Forests is the premier forestry website in the Blogosphere. Movers and shakers read this site. And what’s more, they AGREE with 99 percent of what appears here.

What they DON’T agree with is simple-minded hysterical rhetoric about “logging it all” as the ONLY solution to our forest destruction crisis. Nobody thinks that, Seth.

You are trying to make a straw man. You want everybody to think that some vast capitalist conspiracy wants to clearcut the National Forests. That’s a lie, Seth, and you should know it.

What we are trying to do here is SAVE our forests from destruction. Where did the fires “save” forests, or make them “healthy,” or “do the work” of forest restoration? Send us a map and some pictures, Seth. Then we can check your assertion out, and see if your remark has a scintilla of truth to it.

You can’t, because it doesn’t.

And by the way, Dear SOSF Readers, I did not make Seth up. He is, as I predicted, an enviro nut attempting to justify the worst disaster in Idaho NF history.

So I was right about that, too.

And the solution to log it all? How many years would that take?

Seems like restoring some semblance of natural fires does make sense.

If people choose to live in the woods, they need to take some responsibility. Obviously the feds shouldn’t let people and homes burn up, but fewer than a dozen structures were burned throughout Idaho this year and 2 million acres were burned.

How long would that’ve taken if we wanted to punch roads in and logged it?

Don’t get me wrong some logging and thinning makes sense in the right places, but fires can do alot of that work for a lot less $$.

Finally, the notion that these fires cooked everything in their path is patently false. The fires burned with mixed intensity, some hot, some cool.

You’re rhetoric burns like a wind-driven red-hot fire thou, fortunately anyone who reads your stuff realizes you’re far enough out there not to make a real impact.