GROWING PAINS
THAT SIGN IS WRONG,” David Simmonds said as we snowshoed past the warning: “Danger Thin Ice.” Out on the frozen lake, a few hundred feet from shore, a layer of slush had formed between the 3 inches of ice below and the inch or so of fresh snow on top. Whenever Simmonds shifted his snowshoes or dug the basket of his pole into the snow, a puddle—liquid, cold, unnerving—appeared. It was a Friday morning in early January, and we were on Payette Lake in the center of McCall, a resort town in west-central Idaho.
The lake, shaped like an upside-down “v,” is about 10 miles from tip to top to tip. Earlier that week, Simmonds, president of the nonprofit Big Payette Lake Water Quality Council, had skated 7 miles down the ice with his wife and a friend.
The morning fog lifted as we spoke, revealing the snow-dusted trees and hills that neatly cup the lake’s northeast edge. About 80 feet below us was the end of a pipe, one of the town’s two drinking water intakes. McCall relies entirely on Payette Lake for water; a city report from 2018 estimated that its water system serves the equivalent of over 4,500 households—more than McCall’s resident population of about 3,500 people, due to second homes, hotels and vacation rentals. And demand is likely to nearly double in the next 20 years. Logging, shoreline erosion, wildfires, climate change and development are just some of the factors that can harm water quality. Increasing recreational use can also cause problems.
And new housing brings dangers of its own: Disturbing the soil during construction can wash harmful amounts of nutrients into the water, while population rise will put more pressure on the lake.
All this can cause warmer temperatures, nutrient pollution and noxious algae blooms. Over the past few years, there have been algae blooms in late summer; last year was particularly bad, with bright green water that smelled fishy and felt disconcertingly grainy. If the blooms get worse, they could set off a self-perpetuating cycle. “We’re kind of poking the hornet’s nest with a stick here,” Simmonds said. “And if we poke it enough times, we’re going to get ourselves in trouble.”
Trouble seems inevitable: Since COVID-19 hit the United States in early 2020, people have been leaving cities and moving into less populated areas. In McCall, that’s sparked a demand for new building. In 2020, 346 lots were sold in the area, more than twice as many as the year before, according to the Idaho Statesman. And now, a new proposal for a land swap involving tens of thousands of acres of state-owned property around Payette Lake has revealed the potential for yet more development—unless the community can find an alternative.
the five state leaders on the Idaho Land Board held their monthly public meeting to discuss “endowment land,” a special category of state land that must be managed to maximize long-term profits to fund schools and
