The view from southwest Idaho’s Celebration Park is stunning. Located in a steep canyon in southern Idaho along the Snake River, the park treats visitors to dramatic vistas of sheer basalt canyon walls. The deceptively calm, glass-like waters of the Snake River provide a verdant contrast to the desert cliffs, along with a variety of native flora and fauna.

The park, Idaho’s only archeological park. also memorializes several significant historical facets of the state’s past.  Visitors can read about the area’s history as a Paleolithic, Archaic and historic Native American winter-hunting camp while hiking among peculiar basalt boulders. The boulders themselves tell an interesting story – tossed into the area about 15,000 years ago by the rushing waters of an enormous Pleistocene-lake flood.

Native Americans carved petroglyphs into the boulders, some dating as far back as 12,000 years.  Thousands of the artistic renderings remain for visitors to see. Hikers have access to several scenic hiking trails from the park; one traverses the historic Guffey Bridge, which transported ore via railroad in 1897. Since Idaho established the park in 1989, it has become a popular recreation locale for hiking, fishing, and boating, with about 80,000 visitors each year.

On August 16, 2008, Bureau of Land Management firefighters from its Boise District assisted in constructing trails, benches and signs throughout the park. The trail and signs are part of an ongoing, collaborative fire-mitigation project among Idaho’s Canyon County Parks and Waterways, Southwest Idaho Resource Conservation and Development Council and BLM.  The signs explain the fire ecology of several plants native to southwest Idaho’s Snake River Plain and Owyhee Mountains. They also provide information about invasive plant species and their subsequent effects on wildland-fire behavior.

The three partners are also exploring the integration of wildland-fire-ecology education into the park’s educational curriculum. A frequent destination for school fieldtrips, the park receives visits from more than 15,000 students a year.

“Idaho is such a wildland fire-prone state; it makes sense for the BLM to partner with local agencies in wildland-fire education,” said Bob Narus, Boise BLM fire-mitigation specialist. “By presenting information to adults and children alike, we’re educating a large population about an integral aspect of Idaho’s environment.”  

Celebration Park officials are planning to break ground on a new park museum in the near future. Because of the area’s wildland-fire history, the museum will be a Firewise building. Firewise, a multiagency effort encouraging fire-prevention at a local level, employs the practices of defensible space and fire-resistant landscaping. In order to emphasize the importance of Firewise practices, the partners are currently creating signs they designed to showcase the building’s Firewise attributes to the park’s many visitors. They will then place the signs in various locations around the museum.

On Nov. 8, 2008, the partners highlighted the park and the sign project during the National Firewise Conference in Tampa, Fla. The conference provided a forum for those working and living in the wildland/urban interface to share information with residents, community leaders, planners, builders, landscape architects, and others.  On behalf of the partners. Bob Narus, fire mitigation and education specialist, Boise District BLM, and Tom Bicak, director, Canyon County Parks and Waterways, presented information about the project

For more information about what Idaho’s Celebration Park has to offer, visit www.canyonco.or/parks.aspx

For more information about the Firewise program, visit www.firewise.org