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COVER STORY | IN
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May 11, 2006
![The Weekly Wrap](../IMAGES/weeklywraphednew.jpg)
![The Weekly Wrap](../IMAGES/weeklywraphednew.jpg)
PALCO PERMITS: After months of contention
and a start-and-stop hearing process, which culminated in three
days of hearings this spring, the North Coast Regional Water
Quality Control Board has granted Pacific Lumber Company watershed-wide
waste discharge permits to log this year in the Freshwater and
Elk River watersheds. Voting 5-0, the Board said PL could log
382 acres in Freshwater (more than twice the 144 acres water
quality staff had recommended) and 378 acres in Elk River (just
a tad more than the staff-recommended 318 acres).
As part of the permits, the company will be required
to monitor sediment entering the waterways. Some residents in
the watersheds had complained since the early 1990s that sediment-induced
flooding had increased ever since Palco ramped up logging in
the watersheds starting in 1986. Palco has presented different
theories on the flooding, and has proposed engineering fixes
to correct for legacy logging practices, and clearing out channel-choking
brambles, as a quicker, better means to clearing up the waterways
than simply curtailing logging. The permits arrive at somewhat
of a compromise.
"The permits are highly significant, in that
they will have the effect of restricting Palco's rate of harvest
as a means for measuring compliance with sediment limits,"
said Mark Lovelace of the Humboldt Watershed Council in a news
release Tuesday. "Though they do not go as far as we would
like in terms of recovery, they are still a huge step forward
in regulating water quality."
Palco, meanwhile, sounded equally copacetic, at
least according to a Times-Standard report Tuesday, which
quoted spokesman Chuck Center as saying, "I think we came
to some closure and what we want to do is work with the landowners
and the watershed council and make this work."
— Heidi Walters
DELLAS CONVICTED: Former Manila Community
Services District President Tim Dellas was convicted last week
of manufacturing marijuana and possession of marijuana with intent
to distribute. His conviction on Thursday prompted him to resign
as president of MCSD on Friday.
Dellas had been under investigation by the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation,
as well as the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office. He was arrested
in 2003 after officials executed a search warrant at his Briceland
residence. The search revealed over 5,000 plants, cloning facilities
and 20 pounds of trimmed buds packaged for distribution. Officials
also found papers in Dellas' truck documenting hundreds of thousands
of dollars worth of marijuana transactions, including one with
estimated sales receipts totaling more than $1.6 million. The
trial, which took place in federal court in San Francisco, lasted
six days and it took the jury only five hours of deliberation
to convict.
Tim's sister, local artist Joy Dellas, has sparred
with her brother for years in Manila's political arena. She said
Tuesday that the ordeal has been very trying for her family.
"It's been hell for my family, especially my parents. I
feel really bad that they have to go though this," she said.
She said she does not approve of her brother's actions, and she
wishes he had made better choices.
"I wish he would have used his position in
politics to help lobby for changes in the law," she said.
"I'm for legalizing all drug use, but now he can't even
be in politics anymore."
Tim Dellas will be sentenced on Sept. 11 in San
Francisco. He could face anywhere from 10 years to life in prison,
and as much as a $4 million fine.
— Luke T. Johnson
BERKOWITZ VS. BIG OIL: Cliff Berkowitz was
in good spirits after the first leg of his gasoline-boycott-turned-biking-odyssey.
In response to the $3.50 milestone gas prices reached on the
North Coast last week, the KHUM morning DJ vowed to spend this
week with his Ford Ranger parked in his driveway. Instead, he
will bike from his Eureka home to the station's Ferndale studios,
a 40-mile round trip.
"It was a tough ride, but not as bad as I
thought," he said about his Monday morning journey, which
began at 4:30 a.m. to get him to work by 6 o'clock. "I didn't
expect the fog drizzle, so I got a bit wet on the way. But it
was pretty good."
Berkowitz said that while day-long gasoline boycotts
are well-intentioned, avoiding gas stations one day when you'll
just fill up the next does nothing to affect gas companies' bottom
lines. He hopes spending an entire week gas-free will have a
more noticeable effect on the oil market, and inspire people
to kick nasty gas habits in the process.
"If a bunch of people do this, we can make
an impact. Plus it's good for the environment and we'd all get
in better shape," he said.
The gas-striking cyclist has received an "enormous"
amount of support in his endeavor. In addition to the countless
listeners who have called into the station with their support,
several motorists honked their encouragement as they sped by
Berkowitz on Highway 101, which he said surprised him. No one
has been more supportive than Adventure's Edge in Arcata— they
not only provided him with lights and reflectors to keep him
visible during dark morning hours, but loaned him a new "styled-out"
bike as well, "just because."
The nation's official "Bike to Work Week"
doesn't start until next week (May 15-19), but Berkowitz hopes
getting the wheels turning a little early will promote more participation.
"If I can do this and survive, other people
may say, 'Hey, I can do this too.'"
— Luke T. Johnson
TOP
Springtime
in the Trinities
story and photo by HEIDI WALTERS
Half-way up the 299 grade toward Lord Ellis Summit,
I almost busted into tears. I know, it's embarrassing, and certain
social death to admit it: I was unhappy.
There wasn't any one thing I could pin it on. Maybe
it was the birthday just around the corner — a generally happy
event, except when one's old friends and family are all hundreds
of miles away. Maybe it was the return, after a streak of sunny
days, of the not-quite-fog/not-quite-sun haze that most days
I still find exotic and refreshing, but in weak moments I tire
of. Or maybe it was the fact that I couldn't pin my malaise on
anything calamitous or terrible, which in turn made me feel guilty
and stupid. But, mostly, I think I just wanted winter to be over.
My attitude had been dimming for days, so on Friday
I decided to ditch work and drive inland toward the Trinity Alps.
After that bad moment just before Lord Ellis, the gloom finally
lifted, broke into lazy pieces and drifted off. The sun was out,
the sky was blue — it was a wonderful moment. Higher
and higher into the mountains I drove, noting every exploding-pink
tree — red bud? — and delicate first flower on the side of
the road, watching the trees shift from redwoods to firs to a
jumbled mix of everything in every shade of green. And I remembered
something I'd been told right after I moved here last summer:
You want sunshine and heat, all you have to do is drive up and
inland a dozen miles or so and there you have it. It's sort of
a reversal of what I'd grown up with: Down in the desert, when
it gets too hot, you drive up into the mountains to cool off.
I camped that night off Highway 3, along the first
finger of Trinity Lake reservoir, at a hilly, deceptively unoccupied
— oh, this'll be quiet — campground, out of whose red
soil grew pines, firs, oaks, honey-scented shrubs abuzz with
bees, and blooming manzanita with pale-pink flowers hanging like
clusters of tiny hot-air balloons from red limbs. I could hear
the creek falling out of the high country, spilling into the
lake. The night was too warm for a down bag, but the mosquitoes
were still sleeping. A bald eagle flapped low overhead along
the edge of the lake at dusk. But as the night grew darker, it
got noisier: Logging trucks whined and huffed up the grade on
one side of the campground, sailed briefly, quietly over the
bridge, then shudder-chugged in a gathering roar down the other
side. One after the other. Just before morning light hit the
snowy peaks in the near distance, a new sound erupted: A helicopter,
purring like a giant contented lion, hovered and dropped and
rose just this side of the wilderness boundary. The bald eagle,
startled from the trees near the chopper, flapped again over
the lake's edge, away from the commotion.
I packed up and headed down Highway 3 to 299 again.
At Weaverville I stopped at a bakery. There, the ubiquitous round
table of old men grumbled about the no-good world, as they do
in every coffee and tea shop around the globe. "No one in
this world is ever willing to take the blame," one of them
said. The others shook their heads in agreement. "There's
always someone down the line to pin it on." I shook my head,
too, over at my own table, thinking about how gray skies, or
trucks or helicopters, make good scapegoats for inner discontent.
I read the May 5 edition of The Trinity Journal. The Trinity
River was going to rise and rise and rise, to maybe 8,500 cubic
feet per second by late May, as snowmelt brought Trinity Lake
to the brink. A Poker Bar woodworker had carved a beautiful,
celestial-themed mahogany chair fit for a palace. And a cougar
had killed a deer on a Weaverville man's deck at 3:45 one morning
— he'd watched it happen through the sliding glass door and,
as the lion chomped down on the deer's neck, the man reportedly
told his wife, "This is not something you want to see."
The lion hung around the next few days, then finally dragged
the carcass out of the neighborhood.
After coffee, I drove down to Junction City. A
May Faire was going on in the woods just off the road to the
dump, and people were selling homemade fudge, arm-wrestling on
special padded pedestals and selling assorted fancifuls. Then,
spring-hungry lions be damned, I drove a bit farther, turned
onto Canyon Creek Road — an oddly familiar name, but I couldn't
remember why — and drove 20 minutes to a trailhead into the
Trinity Alps Wilderness. There, a couple was loading up backpacks,
dithering whether or not to bring snowshoes. Some guys came out
of the mountains and reported that the snow started about five
miles up the trail, at the falls, but was rapidly melting. The
couple threw in the snowshoes. I hiked past ponderosas, oaks,
maples, firs, incense cedar and spindly, graceful dogwoods with
giant four-petaled white flowers, until I got to the first creek
crossing, where water frothed in great wheels over boulders and
broke in waves across the skinny log that was the bridge. I quit
taking chances while hiking alone long ago, so I turned around
and went up a different trail until another creek crossing stopped
me. I wandered downstream to a pretty spot where white granite
boulders have tumbled into piles on top of slaty brown bedrock.
I picked up a small chunk of the granite. It glittered with pyrite.
And then it dawned on me why the name of this canyon
was familiar to me. Somebody was hoping to start up a multi-pit
placer mine here to cull gold from the banks of the river. Scott
Greacen of the Environmental Protection Information Center had
told me about it last year. The prospective miner was a Texas
businesswoman who dabbled in oil and race horses, he'd said.
There was supposed to have been an environmental impact statement
released on it months ago. But the whole issue had fallen into
a no-news slumber. I shrugged it off, and wandered farther downstream
to a meadow. There, I fell into a peaceful, eyes-open slumber
myself, lulled by the heat and all-encompassing noise of the
creek, gazing at the red trunk of a giant madrone tree. A rustling
in the leaves at my feet startled me out of the stupor, and I
looked down in time to see a skinny, sleek fallen red branch
of the madrone flicker to life and slither away. No, it was a
snake.
When I got back to the coast — so cool and lovely
and nice — I phoned up the business partner of Gloria Marshall
(the Texan), Cullen Thomas of Junction City. I said I was a reporter,
calling about the mine. What about it, he said. Well, what about
the EIS? I asked. "It's taking an unusually long
time," he said. But, yes, the project was still on, although
it's been dormant. He defended it, said they were already working
another mine next to the proposed mine site with no trouble,
and everything would be reclaimed. "It's not a very large
scale mine. Trinity's a big county, so 22 acres is just a drop
in the ocean." He grew wary, said, "The best thing
you can do is let it die, don't write about it. If you stir up
a mud puddle, you're going to get mud on you."
Well, but that's just what happens in the spring,
isn't it? Things get stirred up, muddy, come awake.
TOP
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