Central Ferry to be closed for another summer

Central Ferry Park will be out of commission for another year this Memorial Day weekend and for the whole season.

The river park will be closed this summer, as it has the past two summers, while officials with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers continue to mull options for the site.

“Unless our budget changes, nothing’s going to happen down there,” said Gina Baltrusch, press agent for the corps’ Walla Walla office.

Central Ferry closed down after the firm that operated it cancelled its lease with the corps. The park was built as one of the corps’ recreation mandates when the federal government built the Snake River dams.

Helen Appel of Dusty said it was long a popular spot for residents of western Whitman County.

“We’d go by in the summer and that parking lot was full,” she remembered. “You had that big grassy area where the kids could play and a great spot to launch boats.”

The Appels, and many other families in the area, used the spot for family functions but also hosted 4H picnics and potlucks under the park’s now-decaying picnic shelters.

Now, the grass is knee-high and grows through cracks in the pavement.

“It really is a shame no one wants to take care of that spot and take care of our river anymore,” she said.

Central Ferry was run by the state parks department from the 1970s until budget cuts prompted the state to cancel its operating lease with the corps in 2003. Private firms ran the park until it was shut down in 2010.

Former Port of Whitman County Commissioner Don Cox in December 2010 suggested a three-way partnership between the port, state and corps to run Central Ferry through a concessionaire as an effort to re-open it. Nothing came of that proposal, though.

Baltrusch said the corps has no immediate plans for the park. She did say they had considered calling for volunteers to tend to the park.

Options are limited by funding, she said. Because the corps never received spending authority to take care of the park, it will not be allotted any operating funds without a change in the overall agency’s budget.

There are other options at the river.

Willow’s Landing is just across the Snake, upriver from the Central Ferry bridge.

“But you have that problem of a gravel road when you get down there,” said Appel, who noted her family does have a spot (“there’s that place with a tree”) it likes to camp and play at near Willow’s Landing.

Baltrusch noted the swim area at Lyon’s Ferry, at the mouth of the Palouse River, will be open this summer. Operations there were limited to day use when the private operator pulled its deal there.

Riparia also provides primitive camping and recreation access just below Little Goose Dam.