Can protection of wolverines help Stevens Pass?

Earlier this month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it is initiating a status review of the wolverine to determine whether the species warrants protection under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The current range of the wolverine includes Washington State, as highlighted in a recent Scat! post, "Do wolverines need a passport?"

Another recent study shows that wolverines are dependent on areas where the snow persists well into the spring. High Country News recently explained the study's important findings, 

Female wolverines den in snow, and rely on snow caves to protect and insulate their kits until the babies are ready to emerge in late April or early May. The paper’s authors found that all of the world’s known den sites occur in areas with persistent spring snow and that 95% of telemetry locations during the summer also occur within this range.

Here in Washington, these findings and the possible listing of wolverines as endangered under the ESA should have an impact on a development project currently underway in the North Cascades.

Stevens Pass Resort, which leases US Forest Service public lands along Highway 2, has proposed an expansion of the resort in its Master Plan for Development. The Master Plan for Development is a blueprint for the ski resort to grow over the next 10 to 15 years. This extensive plan includes a new mountain bike facility to bring almost 20,000 new people in the spring and summer, as well as expansion of the ski runs into the roadless Grace Lakes basin.

Just like the housing real estate market–wildlife habitat is all about location, location, location, and the resort is located between key intact wildlife habitats to the north and south. Indeed, a collared wolverine has been detected in the Highway 2 vicinity, and the ski resort is located at the elevation preferred by this rare, shy carnivore, as evidenced in the study.

Because of the importance of remaining habitat suitable to provide connections, expansions into these public lands deserve thorough environmental analysis and public input. Still, despite the important wildlife concerns with all long-term actions taken at Stevens Pass, in May 2008 the Forest Service approved in concept the resort's full master plan of development without a comprehensive environmental analysis. Last week came the latest news when the agency announced its approval of a Phase 1 of this expansion. 

This is a reversal of how the Forest Service approached expansion plans proposed by The Summit at Snoqualmie. In that planning process, Conservation Northwest engaged early on and ultimately supported the final decision and plan.

The wolverine if listed as endangered would require an adequate analysis of the effects of any actions within the wolverines' recovery zones, which we would assume to include the Highway 2 corridor. This would help make sure that projects like the Stevens Pass expansion proposal are analyzed more appropriately to consider and mitigate all anticipated cumulative impacts*.

At Steven's Pass, the entire master plan, not just a single phase, should be scrutinized under a full environmental analysis and open to public comment before we move forward with extensive development in vital wildlife habitat.

As more users of trails and ski runs call for environmentally friendly options, making our recreation resorts as wildlife-friendly as possible and allowing the public to comment on their development on public lands is a simple, win-win situation.

[See the full impacts of the Master Plan (PDF, 431 Mb)]

*Editor's note: I asked Dave Werntz, our science and conservation director, to help me better understand what "anticipated cumulative impacts" means in layperson's terms. His analogy: Imagine a developer has a plan for 400 houses on a big piece of land. If they can't get immediate approval for the impacts caused by that kind of massive development, they may instead roll out the plan in phases, say three houses on a few acres as Phase 1. That first phase admittedly has much less impact on the land, but without evaluating the entire 400-house master plan, land managers (and the public, since we are talking about national lands) can't make accurate analysis and decisions. It is simply good science to view the entire picture first.