Volunteers plant trees, block illegal ATV access to Hayden Creek

Hayden Creek is where Hayden Lake’s water quality is being fought over in the dirt, not in a meeting room. Volunteers with the Hayden Lake Watershed Association spent the morning planting trees and building hard barriers to keep illegal ATVs and other vehicles off sensitive watershed land, a practical response to repeated damage that has sent sediment into the lake’s largest tributary.

Geoff Harvey put the stakes plainly: “the health of the lake depends on the health of the watershed.” That is not abstract in Hayden Lake, Kootenai County’s third largest lake. Years of unauthorized motorized access have worn new tracks into the north end of the watershed, where sediment runoff has been a growing concern and where the damage has been more visible than on the lake’s healthier south end.

The barriers were built from old or derelict dock material removed from Hayden Lake, turned into log structures meant to force vehicles back onto designated roads. The point was not symbolic cleanup. It was to make a route impassable, slow erosion and reduce the kind of churn that pushes more silt toward Hayden Creek and, eventually, Hayden Lake.

That matters because Hayden Creek is more than a drainage channel. Idaho Fish and Game lists it as 2.7 miles long, and the creek supports documented fish species including westslope cutthroat trout. The Inland Northwest Land Conservancy calls it a stronghold for that native trout, and says Hayden Lake contributes 45 million gallons of water per day to the Spokane Valley-Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer, a drinking-water source for much of the Inland Northwest.

The work also sits inside a longer history of pressure on the lake. About 63% of the Hayden Lake watershed is managed by the U.S. Forest Service, while shoreline development has been expanding since the 1880s. The lake was impounded by a dike in 1910, and water-quality concerns date back to the 1950s, when septic drain fields too close to the shoreline were a major problem. In the mid-1980s, concern over Forest Service harvest planning in Yellowbanks Creek helped spur Save Hayden Lake and an in-depth study by Eastern Washington University limnologist Dr. Ray Saltero.

By 1994, that work had produced the original Hayden Lake Management Plan. In 1998, Hayden Lake was listed under Section 303(d) of the Clean Water Act as a threatened water body with phosphorus impairment, and Idaho Department of Environmental Quality says total phosphorus TMDLs were prepared for Hayden Lake, Hauser Lake and Twin Lakes.

The latest effort reflected a year of coordination among the Hayden Lake Watershed Association, the Hayden Lake Watershed Improvement District, the U.S. Forest Service and the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality. If the barriers hold, they could spare the creek, the lake and the agencies that keep having to respond from another round of avoidable damage.