The Battle to Preserving Hells Canyon

An awful lot of the flora and fauna in Hells Canyon will stick you, painfully sting, or bite. The centerpiece is an unleashed river with swirling rapids that can sweep you away. The deepest canyon in North America, the Snake River is flanked by mountains up to 9,000-feet.

I rafted the river in high runoff one spring, taking home the memory of being sucked into quarter-mile-long Wild Sheep Rapid. Months later, I stood atop the wonderfully named Dry Diggins Lookout at 7,500-feet in Idaho’s Seven Devils Wilderness and looked down more than a vertical mile to the river.

It was 50 years ago, with bipartisan support, that Congress created the 652,488-acre Hells Canyon National Recreation Area, protecting an undammed river and mountains in both Oregon and Idaho.

Raft trips introduced me to the human history of Hells Canyon and its old overgrown ranches and orchards and Indian petroglyphs. The most moving spot is where in 1877 the Nez Perce under Chief Joseph, fleeing the U.S. Cavalry, crossed the Snake River at high runoff.

Chief Joseph took at least 750 men, women, and children across the Snake River, and then its principal tributary the Salmon River. They surprised the cavalry in high bluffs above the Salmon River, killing 34 of the pursuing soldiers. The White Bird battle site remains wild and eerie to this day, with hillocks that shelter deer and raptors. Chief Joseph’s Nez Perce would travel more than 600 miles, finally to be surrounded and surrender in Montana less than 40 miles from Canada and asylum.

I write to celebrate a place where activists won. During much of the 1960s, the fate of Hells Canyon was subject to furious competition for who would get to wipe out a wild river. Both public and private power proposed high dams, lawyered up, and courted the Federal Power Commission. The Washington Public Power Supply System — whose nuclear meltdown later threatened to melt down the Northwest’s economy — wanted to build a 575-food high Nez Perce Dam below the confluence of Snake and Salmon Rivers. Private utilities proposed an even taller High Mountain Sheep Dam on the. Snake, to be followed by a dam on the Salmon.

At hearings full of battling barristers, the environmental community was represented by Brock Evans, the Sierra Club’s young Northwest staffer, and Seattle lawyer Tom Brucker. They needed an equalizer, provided by the entrance of a great conservationist, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

Douglas intensely disliked government agencies that had been captured by interests and industries they were supposed to oversee. In a seminal opinion, writing for a majority of the Supremes, he redefined the mission of the FPC. The opinion in the case of Udall vs. Federal Power Commission forced a widening of the scope of power-project decisions. Douglas quoted an observation of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that “a river is more than an amenity; it is a treasure.”

“The text [from Congress] is whether the project will be in the national interest,” Douglas wrote, “and that determination can be made only after an exploration of all issues [including] the public interest in preserving reaches of Wild River and wilderness areas, the preservation of anadromous fish for commercial and recreational purposes, and the protection of wildlife.”

Utilities and a powerful federal agency had already worked their will on the river system, three private power dams further upstream on the Snake River blocked migration of adult salmon to spawning grounds. Four Army Corps of Engineers dams reservoirized the lower Snake, turning a four-day migration into a 30-day journey for young fish headed for the Pacific Ocean.

The dams decimated runs on the largely free flowing Salmon River. Signs reading “Spawn your brains out” greeted the few salmon who made it up to just below Redfish Lake in the Sawtooths. Idaho Gov. Cecil Andrus put it best: “Idaho has habitat, needs fish.”

Douglas’ 1967 opinion came just as the environmental movement in America was cresting. Hells Canyon became a model for the conservation strategy Brock Evans defined in the title of a book: Endless Pressure, Relentlessly Applied.

A confluence of Northwest governors — Idaho’s Andrus, Washington’s Dan Evans, and Oregon’s Gov. Tom McCall — came out for protecting the heart of the canyon. Oregon’s Republican Sen. Bob Packwood became an advocate for preservation.

Utilities fought on, at times enclosing disinformation with customer electric bills. The most obnoxious, no surprise, was the Spokane-based Washington Water Power Co. In the end, however, legislation creating the National Recreation Area and a Hells Canyon Wilderness was signed into law in 1975 by President Gerald Ford.

“A victory for selfishness” headlined a Wenatchee World editorial denouncing the creation of the Hells Canyon preservation. The Northwest was admittedly deprived of a promising power source, but the river drew rafters and became a magnet for jet boats.

A campaign to make Hells Canyon a national park grew up in the 1990s. Cecil Andrus set me straight, as he and Sen. James McClure, Idaho’s top GOP politician, feared the wild, rugged canyon could not accommodate the visitor stream that would come with park designation.

My favorite place is the confluence of the Snake and Salmon rivers. Bighorn sheep are often seen on the rivers’ banks, golden eagles soar in the wind currents, and blue waters merge with muddy waters. High overhead are the bore holes left by engineers designing the never-built Nez Perce Dam.

Happy golden anniversary, Hells Canyon National Recreation Area! Roll on, Snake River, roll on!