Forty-five minutes from the cement-dreariness of I-5 on a Monday morning, Robe Canyon lights the character and the soul with streams of sunshine and flowing water. The water has the turbidity of glacial melt, the condition a river acquires when it turns milky and heavy with the burden of minerals it is taking to the sea.

Robe Canyon is more than a walk in the park — although it is that, too, the 7-mile canyon is a Snohomish County park — it is a byway for regionalists such as me to hike the trail and consider the need for solutions without borders. The park is being enlarged with three parcels — two already in hand — adding about a hundred acres to the preservation of forests just east of Granite Falls, itself a town that needs preserving. The totality of the project on the South Fork of the Stillaguamish River is part of a larger picture. The project target is 7,000 acres of industrial forest lands beyond the park.

Before the weight of public policy slows us down, a few miles' trek along the jubilant passage of the Lower Stillaguamish, as it forms pools and eddies for both river and mind, is worth recounting. I am in the company of Gene Duvernoy of the Cascade Land Conservancy, whose work along the western slope of the Cascades attempts to turn forestry into a form of preservation. So, too, in this county park, which escaped development and sits along the Cascade Loop for use by abundant weekend hikers. We live so close to wilderness, sometimes we forget what a rocky path it can be.
"Gotta make it over this wash-out," I say to myself. "Can't let this guy see me belly flop down the hill and into the water."

Duvernoy is easily moving ahead of me, leaning into the trail, I am keeping up 10 yards behind. I figure, he does this for a living, and I tap keys. Turns out it's an easy walk, through an old railroad tunnel carved by sweat and explosives into a cedar hillside. I admire the work by the forgotten railroad men. Their legacy is a trail of slick-wet railbed and a failure to keep the wilderness from falling on their track. It's a wonderful place to come to hear the river run.

"A lot of the environmental groups now say they use a business model, but I think we do it as well as anyone," Duvernoy says. The Cascade Land Conservancy, whose work enlarged this park, often does preservation forestry. Usually, the lands it acquires and then hands over to counties or other agencies continues to produce trees for lumber. The land remains in forest production but preserved from development. The Conservancy went regional a few years ago, and now works in King, Pierce, Snohomish and Kititas counties.

Preservation from development rather than preservation from forestry is a middle path the Conservancy tries to hew to, receiving some criticism from other environmental groups for logging with the enemy.

"Our concern is to preserve the land before it succumbs to sprawl," Duvernoy said. "In the future, we then have the opportunity to improve our environmental stewardship of these properties as we economically benefit from the timber flow. That future would be foreclosed if those lands became outer-ring suburbs."

Like Lake Stevens. The pattern that emerges is predictable as October rain. A 7-Eleven, an am/pm, some fast-food outlets, a left-turn lane where one wasn't before, and the growth characteristics acquire a pattern of uniformity. That morning, Duvernoy noted the headlights coming at us through the fog as we turned east heading up to Robe Canyon. The headlights were running south, toward the deeper population pools and for a day at the office, away from the clusters of homes that are dotting the rural hamlets.

North of the King-Snohomish line, the signs of growth are the same as they were at North Bend or Sammamish-Issaquah a decade ago. The headlights are relentless in their search for homes and schools, jobs and that latte in the morning.

Lately, I have been arguing for a pause in the complicity with growth that has changed our region. That may give outfits like Duvernoy and the CLC time to work. A pause in the growth cycle that is just dithered away does no good in preparation for the next economic surge, due in a few years.

If this time is used responsibly in the debate over how we will live in Snohomish or eastern King County or, increasingly, in the edge communities of Bainbridge and all of Kitsap County, it will be a debate worth having.

In Duvernoy's presentation on the Robe Canyon preservation effort, he speaks of the larger "Cascade Foothills Strategy," an idea that arcs from Lake Kapowsin east of Fort Lewis, through the forests of the Cedar and Green rivers in King County, includes lands near the Skykomish River in south Snohomish County and up into the South Fork of the Stillaguamish on the approach to the Mount Baker Wilderness.

The names and locations of those rivers, sibilant and evocative, are part of a pattern that, if successful, would retain forests just now on the edge of the headlights. The tradeoff is that trees would be logged and urban growth would have reached its high tide along a string of rural towns that depend on the Cascade Foothill forest for jobs and recreational vitality.

That forest along the western Cascades is one, single thing. It is still nearly unbroken, although it does not seem so from behind a car windshield. Within the gorge of Robe Canyon, even this sliver of wilderness seems to reach out forever, past the boulders and the shimmering trees into the sky itself.

James Vesely's e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com
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