COEUR d’ALENE — The recent blockage of the old Eagle Creek Road that once served hundreds of placer miners during the Eagle City Gold Rush has at least one group of prospectors a little upset.

Forest Service Road 152, as it is called now, has been the subject of controversy several times since it was built in 1884 to access gold in Eagle Creek. The Forest Service finally closed the road to motorized traffic in 1996 following an extensive flood that washed out portions of the road running alongside the east fork of Eagle Creek.

Since then, recreational miners and prospectors have been able to get special permission to access their mining claims on the creek, but now they say the Forest Service has blocked access to the road in such a way that it is nearly impossible to access even by foot.

“Every year in the spring we do a mine tour up there,” said Bob Lowe, founder of the 20-year-old Northwest Gold Prospectors Association. “This year you can’t even walk in to access the claims — not even an elk or deer could get in there.”

Lowe said the Forest Service has piled up mounds of debris, large logs and Jersey barriers at the entrance of the road to prevent vehicular access. Lowe said before that was done, miners could still drive the road in a small truck to get to their mining claims as long as they received permission from the Forest Service.

Shoshana Cooper, a spokeswoman for the Panhandle National Forest, said that road and a number of others were opened last summer to fight wildfires.

“The law says if we open a road for fire suppression, we have to close it when we are finished,” Cooper said, adding the Forest Service used coarse woody debris and the Jersey barriers to deter motorized use in the area.

Cooper said the road was previously blocked with just the Jersey barriers, but off-road vehicles and four-wheel drives were driven around those to access the road.

She said there is another road that can be used to access the claims on Eagle Creek, Forest Service Road 2349.

Lowe said while that is true, it requires much more driving to get there — and access to the lower portion of the creek is limited in that direction.

“That just makes it a lot harder for some of our older members to access those,” he said, adding some of the members are in their 60s and 70s.

“The thing that gets us is they did this without notifying anyone about it,” Lowe said. “Some of our members wonder if they did that in accordance to their own laws.”

Lowe said the NWGPA has contacted Congressman Raul Labrador’s office and that resulted in a letter from the Forest Service justifying the way the road was closed.

“We have been aware for years that the road has been used by some miners without authorization, both by way of the lower access point and the upper access point toward the Jack Waite Forks,” wrote Kevin Knesek, minerals, geology and abandoned mine lands program manager for the Forest Service, in the letter to Labrador’s office.

“In fact, there was even evidence in the spring of last year that people were attempting to reconstruct the road in some areas,” Knesek said. “This reconstruction was not authorized, as there was no approved Plan of Operations and associated NEPA to authorize it.”

Knesek said the Forest Service also blocked off access to an unauthorized trail that leads to Bedrock Gulch for the same reasons.

Knesek said it became apparent last fall that some members of the recreational mining community felt the Forest Service re-claimed the fire line as an attempt to keep miners from accessing their claims.

“This was not the case.” he said. “The road was already designated as closed, and was unusable without driving in the creek. It remains so today.”

Lowe said his association members follow a code of conduct, which includes obeying “the laws of the land” where they are mining, but he has seen people driving in the creek to access claims. He said a Jeep club has been known to drive that section of creek as well.

In fact, Lowe said he believes by blocking Eagle Creek Road more people will be tempted to drive up the creek for the first quarter-mile to access the road.

Lowe is not sure what the remedy is at this point, but he wants to make sure the public is aware of what is going on.

“I don't think they are going to go up there to clean it all up,” he said, but he does want the public to know that the Forest Service is capable of closing access to the woods without any notice to the people they are impacting.

“If they know who the problem miners, ATVers and four-wheelers are, why are they not writing citations to those who break the law?” Lowe said. “Instead, they destroy an access used by the rest of us. This only pushes the lawbreakers into the creek to do what they have been doing already in the area above Oregon Gulch.”

Knesek told Labrador’s office there is a process to reconstruct or reopen the road “if there is a mining-related need to reconstruct the lower portion of Forest Road 152.”

However the decision to do that would be based on the level of mining activity in the area rather than on the physical capability of the miners to access the land.