BY KAREN BOSSICK
Chances are you’ve never celebrated a ribbon cutting for a snow storage facility.
You have that opportunity now.
The Wood River Land Trust and City of Hailey’s Mayor and staff will hold a ribbon cutting ceremony at Hailey’s new snow storage site one mile west of Hailey at 4:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 9. The site sits along Croy Canyon Road near the new Simons/Bauer Preserve.
The site means more than providing a place to dump snow. It’s the latest step in a 20-year effort to restore the Big Wood River at Lions Park.
Moving the snow storage away from Lions Park will reduce the amount of contamination that runoff from dirty piles of snow bring to the Big Wood River
And the area that had been used to store snow in the giant dirt parking lot between Lions Park and Croy Canyon Road will enable that area to be restored to help reconnect the river to its floodplain.
The Wood River Land Trust closed on the 118-acre Simons/Bauer Preserve--a working wetland between Lions Park and the Mountain Humane campus—earlier this year. And the City of Hailey closed on a parcel of land sandwiched between that preserve and Croy Canyon Road.
The two acquisitions fulfilled part of the Hailey Greenway Master Plan and are enabling the two entities to carry out projects to restore the Big Wood River at Lions Park.
Crews and big machinery have been working the snow storage parcel for the past few weeks, getting it ready for winter.
“We’re working right now to prepare the drainage, and install a containment berm so as the snow melts, it drains through the soils and we minimize runoff into the wetlands,” said Brian Yeager, Public Works director for the City of Hailey. “We’ll be testing the new site this winter to make sure it works as well as we think it will.”
This new arrangement will be a win for the community, says Scott Boettger, Executive Director of the Wood River Land Trust.
“It will reduce the amount of contamination that the runoff brings into the Big Wood River,” he said. “And it will provide the opportunity to move forward with the restoration plans conceptualized in the Hailey Greenway Master Plan, which calls for the reconnection of the river to its floodplain to help mitigate spring floods.”