I’ve been writing these little pieces for Idaho Falls Magazine for a few years now and every time it comes around to writing for the spring issue, I always catch myself humming that line from the old song, “When it’s Springtime in the Rockies...”
Now I really love eastern Idaho, but it always annoys me that both I and the tourism board place us in the Rockies. I’m no geologist, but it always seems a stretch when we say that we’re located in the Rockies. I’ve seen numerous travel brochures that say, “Nestled in the foothills of the Rockies,” that seem to be making a pretty generous geographic approximation. To me, the term “nestled” conjures up images of Mae West and a ruby pendant, and while we live in a gem of a place, I hardly feel that we are in the bosom of the mountains staring up at the lofty heights, although on most days you can see the peaks of the Tetons from many places in town.
If you were able to scrape all the modern human contrivances away, what you would find is that the greater Idaho Falls area is built on top of where basalt lava flows from the west intertwined with unconsolidated sedimentary materials washed down from the mountains in the east. Looking at the various gravel deposits, it is clear to see that much of Idaho Falls is built on the runout of a rocky flood plain, not idyllic alpine meadows, as those currently being terraformed at Snake River Landing would have us believe.
Flooding by small streams like Willow Creek all the way up to raging torrents like the Snake River is what springtime here used to look like here. As the mountain snows melted, all hell used to break loose. While flooding is considered a bad thing to most of mankind, in the natural world, flooding is a critical component in making the whole system work. Flooding on the South Fork of the Snake River created one of the greatest and last remaining cottonwood galleries on the planet. Construction of Palisades Dam was a boon to agriculture, recreation, and helped reduce flooding for humans, but was a tremendous blow to the health of the cottonwoods. The cottonwoods need the flooding and subsequent drying out to draw the seedling roots down through the gravel. No flooding means no new cottonwoods!
If you look closely at the cottonwoods of the South Fork, you will notice that there are very few young trees, mostly grand old trees rapidly approaching death. When these trees die, not only will they be gone, but so will the benefits they provide to many species of fish and wildlife, some of critical importance to humans because of their place on the Endangered Species List. Just last year the Yellow-billed Cuckoo (yes, this is a real bird!) was listed as a Threatened Species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and stretches of the Snake River were designated as critical habitat! This means not just that the bird is protected, but how its habitat is used.
The cottonwoods also provide crucial thermal protection to fish like our native Yellowstone Cutthroat, another species always being looked at for potential ESA listing. We may laugh at a bird like the Yellow-billed Cuckoo being listed, but having the Yellowstone Cutthroat listed would be a major game-changer, for we humans that use the cutthroat’s habitat to water our crops.
So in the end, it is really up to us whether to continue and delude ourselves into thinking that what we have today is really what springtime in the Rockies is supposed to be like or try to come up with a new strategy for how we manage the snow that falls like manna from Heaven. High and dry is not always as safe as it seems; just ask the cottonwoods.