BHNF hoping to protect streams with Wild and Scenic designation

The 1968 Wild and Scenic Rivers Act protects waterways that are primitive, unpolluted, and accessible only by trail or are largely primitive with natural shorelines but accessible in parts by roads. 

In 2022 when Joe Biden was president, the Black Hills National Forest proposed Wild and Scenic designations for Little Elk Creek, Little Spearditch Creek, Spearditch Creek, Sand Creek, and Beaver Creek even though the assessment found 21 streams or stream segments totaling 144.7 miles in the South Dakota and Wyoming Black Hills were eligible for inclusion in the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System. Designation takes an act of Congress or a direct order from the Interior Secretary.

Some of Box Elder Creek and the Bogus Jim Creek tributary are strongholds for the lake chub and the only location within South Dakota and the Black Hills where it has been identified in the past 50 years. Finescale dace was the only fish found in Black Hills streams by the Custer Expedition in 1874 but the white sucker and threatened lake chub are also native. Dace and chub are preyed upon very heavily by non-native brown and rainbow trout. 

Earth haters in Meade County want no part of it.

The Little Elk Creek section under consideration is in both Meade and Lawrence County, and is located between Dalton Lake and the forest boundary near Piedmont. A parking lot at Little Elk Creek Trail is already frequently full, and commissioners expressed concern about what additional tourism would mean for the area, and for surrounding private property owners. The Meade County Commission’s opposition will be noted in the environmental impact statement, that is part of the Forest Service decision-making process for land designations. [Meade Co. opposes Little Elk Creek wild and scenic river designation]

Learn more from the US Fish and Wildlife Service.