Geology and survival on the Snake River Plain
Excerpt
TWIN FALLS, IDAHO-Curving in a long, shallow arc across the arid bottom of the state of Idaho is the Snake River. For a stream running through a piece of the Great American Desert, the Snake is a remarkably deep, churning, voluminous river. In the process of draining parts of seven states, it has cut a deep trench through the basaltic baserock that underlines the Snake River Plain. The Snake's tributaries also have cut deeply through the soil of the plain and down into the basalt. I point this out because in this part of the West geology is everything. Even—or perhaps especially—in agriculture.
One of the tributaries is Rock Creek, 40 miles long, running northward off the coniferous slopes of a piece of the Sawtooth National Forest. Draining nearly 200,000 acres, parts of the watershed have been farmed for a hundred years-remarkably early considering this was still the frontier less than a century ago. But only a few generations after settlement, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, the pastures were converted to cropland, and Rock Creek became one of the most polluted streams in the country.
Of geology and trout
There's a useful geological marker here pertaning to the cause of this pollution. It …
Footnotes
Charles E. Little, 3929 Washington Street, Kensington, Maryland 20895, writes regularly for the JSWC and other magazines on the environment and natural resources.
- Copyright 1989 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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