More people will be able to see the view from atop Rattlesnake
Mountain and the plants and animals it harbors on its slopes, the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service announced Thursday.
The agency is in the
early stages of planning tours of the mountain on the Hanford Reach
National Monument and has hired an employee to organize the effort, said
Robyn Thorson, regional director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service.
The agency wants to find ways that the public can visit
the mountain, the highest point in the Mid-Columbia, in a way that’s
ecologically and culturally responsible, she said Thursday as Fish and
Wildlife observed the monument’s 10th anniversary.
Government and environmental leaders, some of whom have worked for
as long as three decades to preserve the last free-flowing inland
stretch of the Columbia River and nearby land, gathered at the White
Bluffs Overlook for the celebration.
“Just because you cannot get
to the top of Rattlesnake Mountain doesn’t mean there are not other
places to enjoy on the monument,” said Larry Klimek, manager of the
Hanford Reach National Monument.
That drew no argument Thursday as
about 75 guests and Fish and Wildlife employees marked the monument’s
anniversary under sunny skies where swallows were flying overhead.
From
the White Bluffs overlook on the western side of the Columbia River,
visitors looked down on the meandering blue ribbon of the river, taking
in one of the best views at the monument. Mount Rainier and Mount Adams
rose out of the haze in the distance, and closer in, Saddle Mountain and
the Rattlesnake Mountain ridge ring the Hanford nuclear reservation. At
the vista’s center is Gable Mountain, a sacred site to the region’s
tribes.
A good eye could pick out most of the nine defunct
plutonium production reactors that line the river and just past Gable
Mountain is the massive vitrification plant being built to treat
radioactive wastes left from plutonium production.
The monument
was “preserved by unusual circumstances,” Thorson said, quoting outgoing
President Bill Clinton when he declared the 196,000 acres surrounding
the plutonium production portion of Hanford a national monument in 2000.
The land was left undeveloped and largely unused as a security and
safety perimeter around Hanford during World War II and Cold War
plutonium production.
Now it is home to an unusually high
diversity of plants and animals, Thorson said. It has two plants and 40
insects found nowhere else, she said.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.,
credited with being a key champion of the monument, remembered coming to
the sage- and brush-covered land as a child when her grandparents lived
nearby.
“I’ve had a chance to work on a lot of important issues
for our state, but protecting the Reach really has had a special,
personal meaning for me,” she said.
“I still remember how much I
loved this area when I was young and how much I was in awe of the wide
open landscape and the way everyone cared for the land as if it was
their own backyard.”
Protecting the Reach “is about capturing our
future,” she said. Salmon spawning habitat must be protected and
families must be ensured they will be able to use the river for
recreation for years into the future, she said.
“We are just a
small part of time,” said Rex Buck, leader of the Wanapum band, who sang
the invocation.
Perhaps far in the future someone through vision
and prayer will hear the words spoken Thursday at the White Bluffs
overlook and the wishes that it long be preserved, he said.
Rick
Leaumont of the Lower Columbia Basin Audubon Society brought his
9-year-old grandson with hopes the boy’s grandson would one day be able
to lazily float in a boat on a similar sunny day beneath the White
Bluffs. But those who support the monument must continue to work on
three fronts, he said.
Historically, the monument burned once
every 50 years or so, he said. But over the last decade the monument has
been devastated by large fires twice.
“The environment can’t take
repeated burning,” he said. Aircraft and fire equipment are needed to
keep fires to a minimum.
The monument must grow to include more
shrub steppe land at Hanford as environmental cleanup there is
completed, he said.
Third, management decisions must be based on
good science rather than politics.
“We can love this place to
death,” he said.
Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., has worked for more
fire protection equipment for the monument and also has pushed for
public access to Rattlesnake Mountain.
“While it has yet to be
achieved, in my view it is possible to reach a workable balance between
protecting environmental and cultural resources and enabling the
American people to access and utilize land that they, as taxpayers,
own,” Hastings said in a statement read at the anniversary celebration.
A
volunteer coordinator will start work at the monument this summer to
prepare plans for tours of Rattlesnake Mountain, also considered a
sacred site by local tribes. There is a one-lane road to the mountain
top, but it is deteriorating and steep enough to burn out brakes.
The
tours may be patterned after the popular tours to Hanford’s historic B
Reactor, which also is in an area normally closed to the public. The
Department of Energy and the tribes will be involved to tell their
stories, Klimek said.
Care will be taken to preserve the unique
but very fragile ecosystem, Thorson said.
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