Dusty roads: Not just inconvenient

Inter Lake editorial

There aren't any big surprises in the results of a dust study conducted on the North Fork Road last summer - the road puts off an incredible amount of dust, and it's not good for people.

The study exposes the obvious in detail, and in doing so it raises the stakes in a long-running dispute between folks who think at least some of the road should be paved and folks who have been hotly opposed to paving.

Paving opponents cannot ignore the obvious any longer. They cannot say "so what" to the dust problem on the North Fork Road.

Dust literally cakes roadside vegetation during the summer months. The study did not evaluate how much road dust is leaking or floating into the North Fork River, but once again it's obviously a huge amount.

Paving opponents have long been concerned about the potential for rampant development to follow any blacktop. They have cited potential threats of increased development and more traffic to such protected species as grizzly bears and wolves.

Well, the road's bleeding sediments aren't helping bull trout, also a threatened species.

The rampant-development arguments seem flimsier now that the North Fork has neighborhood planning regulations that prevent subdivided lots smaller than 20 acres. And over the last decade, hundreds of acres have been protected by conservation easements in the narrow band of private holdings sandwiched between Glacier National Park, the Flathead National Forest and state school trust lands.

The North Fork will never be developed in any sense that we know it in the Flathead Valley.

That said, we aren't certain that paving is the answer for the North Fork Road. As usual, the Flathead County Road Department has limited funding and more than 700 miles of unpaved roads - many of them raising dust-health issues for far more people.

There may be other, more cost-effective ways to manage the dust problem on the North Fork Road. But the idea of someday paving at least a portion of the road no longer seems to be such an outlandish threat to the rustic nature of the North Fork.