Rivers Preservation Celebrated

By Joe Knight, The Leader-Telegram, Eau Claire, Wis.

Jun. 15–TREGO — Park Service naturalist Joan Jacobowski was on the phone explaining to a hesitant canoeist that bears along the Namekagon River are not quite as troublesome as the bears in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, but the Park Service still encourages campers to hang their food from a tree overnight.

The 98-mile Namekagon and about 150 miles of the St. Croix River comprise the Upper St. Croix Scenic Riverway. The rivers have more than 150 camping sites, most accessible only by water.

Earlier in the morning Jacobowski met with a group of counselors from a summer camp who soon would be taking young campers on the river.

Across from the visitor center, the Namekagon flowed with no signs of canoeists or tubers. But a group of canoeists had just completed the 98-mile trip down the river to the St. Croix, taking advantage of the higher late-spring flows to paddle the headwaters of the Namekagon, north of Cable, which required navigating around several beaver dams.

“The Namekagon is my favorite place to be,” said Jacobowski, who has lived in the Hayward area for 30 years.

Thanks to the protection provided by the National Wild and Scenic River Act, the river has maintained its wild character during the past 40 years while much of the shoreline in northern Wisconsin has undergone a housing boom.

The act, passed in 1968, protected eight of the most scenic rivers in the country. The late Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson was instrumental in having the St. Croix and Namekagon included among the protected rivers, said Kate Hanson, chief of Natural Resources for the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway.

“We have him and Walter Mondale (former vice president and Minnesota senator) to thank for having it included,” she said.

At the time there was series discussion of building another dam or two on the Upper St. Croix, she said.

“The ‘Wild and Scenic’ legislation was passed during a time in history when a lot of the other major environmental legislation was passed, like the Clean Water Act, in the late ’60s through the early ’70s,” Hanson said. “The goal of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act is to protect the free-flowing character of the rivers and to protect them in the state they were in when they were designated,” she said.

Protecting the shorelines is a good first step, but people are more aware now than they were 40 years ago that water quality is largely determined by what goes on in a river’s basin.

“Water quality is directly related to land use, not just along the river, but in the entire watershed,” she said.

The watershed draining the riverway is about 7,700 square miles. About 54 percent of the basin is on the Wisconsin side, with 46 percent on the Minnesota side. The population living in the watershed grew from about 150,000 in 1950 to 400,000 by 2000. It is projected to grow to an estimated half million by 2020.

At the same time, a 20 percent reduction in phosphorus loading is needed by the year 2020 to prevent further degradation to the watershed, the Park Service estimates.

Managing the riverway requires a cooperative approach, Hanson said.

“A lot of the rivers that were designated wild and scenic flow through all public land. The St. Croix is different … the river passes through two different states, 11 counties, 33 townships and seven municipalities, some Indian trust lands and lands managed by other agencies,” she said. “That’s something unique about the St. Croix. We can’t do it by ourselves,” she said.

Pete Muto, a retired UW-River Falls chemistry professor who has been active in St. Croix River issues for 30 years with the Sierra Club, said the Wild and Scenic designation has helped protect the St. Croix, but it continues to require vigilance from those who care about the river.

“If you are taking an airplane ride and fly over the junction where the St. Croix River flows into the Mississippi, you can see the difference in the water. The water from the St. Croix is much cleaner and clearer. We’re sure the federal law has had an influence through those 40 years,” Muto said.

In 1972, the Lower St. Croix, from St. Croix Falls south to Prescott, where the St. Croix joins the Mississippi River, was added as a scenic river, with joint jurisdiction from management. The St. Croix Valley Chapter of the Sierra Club is concerned that the town of Troy in St. Croix County has an ordinance that doesn’t protect the scenic values of the bluffs. The group is considering suing the Wisconsin DNR to make the agency enforce its own rule — NR 118 — to protect the river’s bluffs.

Knight can be reached at 830-5835 or joe.knight@ecpc.com.

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Copyright (c) 2008, The Leader-Telegram, Eau Claire, Wis.

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