Dusty North Fork Road still debated

Another bumpy, dusty summer on the North Fork Road has passed, but a long-running feud over paving the road continues to simmer — with a different twist in recent years.

Although there are no paving proposals on the table, paving proponents continue to push the matter, raising concerns about pollution caused by dust that boils off the road and is carried by prevailing winds across the North Fork Flathead River and into Glacier National Park.

Vegetation along the road is often caked with dust. The speed limit is 35 mph, but there are signs that read, “20 mph advised when dust present.” Residents along the sparsely populated road post custom-made signs aimed at discouraging people from driving too fast.

For years, however, dust hasn’t really been raised as a public health issue by Glacier Park officials or paving opponents.

Joe Novak, a relatively new North Fork resident and a paving advocate, has been making it an issue with inquiries to the National Park Service. Novak learned Glacier has only one air-quality monitoring station, and that is located at West Glacier, far from the dust that comes off the North Fork Road.

He says park officials have willfully turned a blind eye to potential air quality impacts caused by the road that runs along the western boundary of the park.

“They simply don’t want to know,” Novak says of the park and conservationists who oppose paving. “They put a political agenda before their long-standing concern for air and water. ... I don’t see any real concern from the greenies about pollution.”

The agenda that Novak and others do see is an effort to keep the North Fork in a condition that would lend itself to wilderness designations for National Forest land at the north end of the Whitefish Range west of Glacier Park.

Longtime North Fork resident Lynn Ogle cites the rough condition of roads on the western boundary of the park. Portions of the Inside North Fork Road, for instance, have been closed due to maintenance issues in recent years. 

Ogle points to the road leading to Kintla Lake in the northwest corner of the park.

“It’s a cow trail,” he says. “They are starting to treat it like wilderness. It keeps creeping on us.”

In a way, he is right, but there’s nothing new about the park’s management goals for the North Fork.

Glacier’s long-term management plan, last updated in 1999, specifically calls for the North Fork to be managed as a rustic, remote wilderness portion of the park.

“The plan calls for maintaining the roads, developed areas, lakes and backcountry trails basically in a no-change status,” says Scott Emmerich, the park’s North Fork district ranger since 1991. 

The idea has been to create a unique area of the park where visitors can seek solitude and independence rather than commercial services, which are banned in the North Fork area of the park.

If visitors “want paved roadways, flush toilets in the campgrounds, guided experiences, hotels and food services, they could find that in other areas of the park,” Emmerich explains.

Partly because of management plan direction, past Glacier superintendents have forcefully opposed paving of the North Fork Road.

But it’s also because the North Fork is part of Glacier’s designations as a World Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve and home to several wildlife species that are protected under the Endangered Species Act. The grizzly bear, for instance, prompted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to get involved in opposing past paving proposals.

“As far as I know, it’s the only major river drainage in the country to have completely escaped post-industrial extinctions,” said Michael Jamison, Crown of the Continent program director for the National Parks Conservation Association. “The North Fork is the last place of its kind still home to all the predator and prey relationships that existed prior to European contact.

“So paving that paradise by running a ribbon of asphalt through the heart of our last best place, on the border of Glacier Park, absolutely goes against the vision of a full century of local wisdom,” Jamison continues. “The bumps and ruts and dust of the North Fork Road are precisely the reason so many locals have chosen to live there.”

One of those residents is John Frederick, who moved to the Polebridge area in 1980 and has since been a staunch opponent of paving proposals that came up in the early 1980s and the late 1990s. 

Frederick, president of the North Fork Preservation Association, explains that with paving comes utilities, then development, both residential and commercial, followed by more people.

That’s what happened after the lowest portion of the road was paved just north of Columbia Falls, he said.

But Frederick acknowledges that the North Fork neighborhood has long been divided over the question of paving.

“It doesn’t seem like there’s ever going to be an end to that,” he said.

Novak is not alone in the North Fork in his views about paving. 

He points to a survey of residents conducted in 2007 in which 55 percent of respondents said they favored paving the road to Camas Creek, 42 percent favored paving other sections of road, 76 percent favored some form of dust abatement, 41 percent were satisfied with winter maintenance of the road and just 23 percent were satisfied with maintenance during spring, summer and fall.

He also cites a dust study commissioned by paving advocates several years ago. The study by a researcher for the University of Montana’s Center for Environmental Health Sciences measured particulate matter off the road and inside nine vehicles using the road.

It found that Environmental Protection Agency ambient air quality standards were exceeded. 

The study concluded that “significant concentrations of [particulate matter] can be liberated from the North Fork Road during traffic events in the late summer months, and that significant exposures can occur to the people living along the road and to those traveling the road.”

The study, which raised the caveat that results should be considered a snapshot in time, also stated that the results “confirm the need for additional resources from both Flathead County and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality to determine the true extent of the North Fork Road dust problem, and then mitigate that problem as necessary.”

Paving opponents viewed the 2008 study with suspicion because it was commissioned by pro-paving residents.

But to Novak, the study should at least be an indication that dust pollution should be taken more seriously by the park. 

Yellowstone National Park has four air quality monitoring stations. One, located at the Tower Ranger Station, monitors acid rain and mercury deposition, another at Yellowstone Lake measures ozone levels and other meteorological data and the other two at West Yellowstone and Old Faithful measure particulate matter, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides produced by snowmobiles.

“It’s not cheap,” said Ann Rodman, branch chief for physical resources at Yellowstone. “The big part is knowing how to analyze the data to know you are doing it correctly.”

To do that, she said, Yellowstone relies on multiple agencies outside the park.

Novak contends that Yellowstone was responsive to improving air quality monitoring efforts only “after environmental groups brought up concerns about pollution from snowmobiles.”

Emmerich notes, however, that dusty roads aren’t exactly rare in and around national parks.

The National Park Service, he says, “has literally thousands of miles of dirt roads throughout its close to 400 units. Most of those roads have dust that impacts the local resource to a certain degree.”

Glacier officials, however, have recently expressed interest in pursuing air quality monitoring in the North Fork.

“To help provide more concrete empirical evidence to prove or disprove the observational science, the park hopes to install an air quality measurement station along the western boundary,” Emmerich says. “Funds need to be procured to purchase the equipment and download data on a regular basis.”

In addition, funding for the equipment must compete with other park priorities at a time when Glacier and other parks are faced with less funding and relying more on help from nonprofit partners such as the National Parks Conservation Association.

Novak points out that the association runs radio spots with former “Seinfeld” star Julia Louis-Dreyfuss asking for help combating haze in national parks. He said he believes Glacier should benefit from that type of appeal, specifically with air-quality monitoring.

Haze that hinders viewsheds is an issue for some national parks, but Jamison says those parks are being impacted by pollutants from sources other than dusty roads.

Emmerich adds: “Road dust particulates are larger and heavier than particulates brought about by the burning of fossil fuels and do not carry nearly as far. The proposed air quality monitoring station should help provide science-based evidence that can be used to answer questions related to this issue.”

Glacier’s pursuit of west-boundary air monitoring comes at a time when the condition of the North Fork Road is considered by many to be better than it ever has been because of dust abatement efforts carried out by Flathead County over the last four years between Camas and Polebridge.

Jamison says he drives the road on a regular basis and he can say “absolutely that it’s in better shape than ever in terms of dust abatement.”

Emmerich observes that the poor condition of the road in the past “made visitors question whether they wished to travel to the North Fork — especially those driving sedans. The current condition of the road is much more user-friendly. We are seeing many more sedans traveling through the Polebridge entrance than we have in the past.”

But from Polebridge to the Canadian border, the road is as bad as it has ever been, says Novak, who lives north of Polebridge.

“Dirt roads are dusty,” Jamison counters. “But it seems to me that anyone who moves to the end of a dirt road and then complains about the dust maybe didn’t think things through so well.”

Despite past pushes for paving, it now appears Flathead County is moving away from that direction.

For the last two years, the county has been narrowing a 10-mile stretch of road south of Camas from a width of 36 to 40 feet down to 26 to 28 feet, said Dave Prunty, the county road superintendent.

The wider road prism “was all set up for paving” and capable of handling traffic at higher speeds, Prunty said. But the road is being narrowed to improve drainage, better retain road materials and reduce the cost of maintenance.

“It takes a heck of a lot less passes with the blade for winter and summer maintenance,” Prunty said.

For about four years, the county has shared costs with the Flathead National Forest’s Resource Advisory Committee to pay for dust abatement using crushed gravel, bentonite clay and magnesium chloride on about eight miles of road north of Camas, the busiest stretch of the North Fork Road, according to Prunty.

“That makes things work extremely well for keeping the dust down,” he said. 

The county’s share this summer was about $22,000, matched by the Resource Advisory Committee.

It was only a few years ago that the county was out of favor with the Montana Department of Environmental Quality because of dust from county roads. But efforts similar to the dust abatement on the North Fork Road that have been carried out countywide have changed that situation.

Prunty said that about two years ago, the state agency notified Flathead County that it has a “model program for dust control that other counties in the state should follow.”

A lack of funding has long been raised as a reason paving cannot be pursued on the North Fork Road. Funding was secured in the late 1990s, but that money was diverted to improvements on the Big Mountain Road largely because of the fight over paving the North Fork Road.

Novak said there have been missed opportunities for the county to obtain funding for paving, such as the federal stimulus program. He contends the county would save money with paving because that would establish the road as a secondary state highway, making it the maintenance responsibility of the Montana Department of Transportation.

A more likely reason for the county to shy away from paving, he said, is the specter of expensive litigation that could arise to prevent it from happening. 

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by email at jmann@dailyinterlake.com.