Heli-ski permit lands in lawsuit
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MOOSE PASS: Some say environmental impact statement is incomplete.
By JOEL GAY
Anchorage Daily News
Published: February 2nd, 2005
Last Modified: February 2nd, 2005 at 02:04 PM
A group of Moose Pass residents and state and national conservation organizations sued the U.S. Forest Service on Tuesday to stop the expansion of helicopter-assisted skiing and snowboarding in the mountainous Chugach National Forest south of Girdwood.
They contend the agency didn't fully analyze the economic, social and environmental impacts before it granted Chugach Powder Guides a five-year permit last fall. It would allow the Girdwood-based business to carry nearly twice as many clients every winter into an area 60 percent larger than in previous seasons.
The plaintiffs accept heli-skiing as a legitimate use in a national forest, said plaintiff Rick Smeriglio of Moose Pass. "Our beef is with the process," he said. "We want (the agency) to go back and do it right."
But the lawsuit came as no surprise to Chugach co-owner and business manager Chris Owens. Alaska's fledgling heli-ski industry has faced opposition virtually everywhere it lights, largely from local residents who don't want to hear the whop-whop-whop of rotor blades on a still winter day, or who fear that well-heeled skiers will shred their favorite secluded slope.
"This is where things tend to go if the public process doesn't go your way," Owens said.
Chugach Powder Guides has operated in the mountains around Girdwood since 1997 with a series of one-year permits from the Forest Service. The most recent, approved in 2003, allows it to carry 1,200 clients during the 10-week season and use about 160,000 acres of national forest land.
But to compete in the multibillion-dollar international heli-ski industry, Chugach wanted additional slopes in the backcountry farther south, plus highway-accessible landing zones.
"Alaska has a great reputation for heli-skiing," Owens said. It's becoming known as the "pinnacle of big mountain skiing. Alaska is what you aspire to achieve sometime in a ski career," he said.
"It also has a great reputation for having people sit on the ground," waiting for the weather to improve.
His company has worked around that by taking clients uphill in wide-track snow cats or having them ski at Alyeska Resort. But skiers and snowboarders who pay as much as $5,550 a week for an Alaska ski vacation really want helicopter access, he said, and the new five-year permit offers that.
It expands the company's ski terrain from 159,000 acres to more than 260,000 acres and opens miles of new runs, including many that have never been skied before, Owens said.
"The whole reason we want into this terrain is we need viable alternatives," he said. "We don't want to own the world. We want to have enough safe ski areas that when we have bad weather in one of these areas we have someplace else to go."
Several of the newly approved areas are considered tentative, and Chugach has only a one-year permit to use them. The Forest Service says it will monitor the impact this winter and determine later whether to extend the permit.
In addition, two areas are closed to helicopters for a portion of each week, which the Forest Service says will help ensure that other users can plan a quiet backcountry trip. The company must post all its flight plans on a daily hot line, which backcountry users can call to determine whether a certain valley will have helicopter traffic that day.
To mitigate the concerns of residents along the Seward Highway and other forest users, the permit requires Chugach to follow specific flight routes and fly at least 1,500 feet above ground level. Helicopters cannot circle or harass wildlife and must honor no-fly zones around mountain goat and Dall sheep concentrations.
It took nearly five years to complete the environmental impact statement for the new permit, which Owens called full and complete.
The lawsuit takes issue with that. The five Moose Pass residents, along with the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society and the Alaska Quiet Rights Coalition, say the Forest Service's study doesn't fulfill the requirements in federal law. They want the agency to perform a new environmental impact statement, and in the meantime limit Chugach Powder Guides to its old territory.
Teresa Berwick, staff attorney for Trustees for Alaska, which is representing the plaintiffs, called the agency's study superficial.
"They don't know the actual number of sheep, goats or brown bears in the area, yet they come to the conclusion that heli-skiing won't have any impact," she said. The agency considered sound levels from the company's helicopters but not how it affects residents in the Moose Pass area.
"We just think the Forest Service didn't do its job," she said.
Forest Service spokeswoman Rebecca Talbott said Tuesday that the agency hadn't seen the lawsuit and couldn't respond to the charges. But she noted that agency officials reviewed the environmental impact statement closely before approving it and upheld it after it was appealed.
The district foresters in Girdwood and Seward "wouldn't have signed if they didn't think it was comprehensive and met the test" set out in national environmental law, Talbott said.
Residents of Moose Pass are shaking their heads over the permit, said several of the plaintiffs. In spite of the mitigation efforts included in the permit, "I think the tone in the community is that our concerns and comments were either ignored or dismissed outright by the Forest Service," said Mike Cooney, an avid backcountry skier, hunter and fisherman.
After the permit was issued last September and the Forest Service dismissed their appeals, he said, "we're left with no choice but to sue them. They've pushed us to this point. We wouldn't be here if they considered more carefully the concerns of the community."
If the Forest Service does another environmental impact statement that goes into greater detail, yet reaches the same conclusions, Cooney said, "I could live with that." Heli-skiing is a legitimate use in national forests and should never be banned outright, he said.
"But I want to make sure that if they expand to this level, the Forest Service has done the job that (federal law) requires them to do," he said. "I'm interested in seeing the forest managed well, and in the public interest, and there are interests in the forest beyond heli-skiing that need to be considered with this type of permit."
Owens said his company's ski and snowboard season starts Saturday. This weekend's clients include a film crew whose previous work has helped create the buzz on heli-skiing in Alaska.
Daily News reporter Joel Gay can be reached at
jgay@adn.com or at 257-4310.
