This editorial appears in the Yakima Herald-Republic on May 31, 2009.

It's a time to celebrate and a time to mourn.

The celebration took place Wednesday in Richland, where dignitaries, including Sen. Maria Cantwell and U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, applauded the passage of the Ice Age Floods Bill that will create a geologic trail from Montana to the Pacific Coast, with a portion of it snaking through the Tri-Cities.

The mourning follows the recent move by state lawmakers to take away substantial funds from trail maintenance and development in order to keep open Washington's network of parks.

While state park officials were voicing fears that its trail system, most of it through national forests, will suffer severe damage due to the cutbacks, federal lawmakers were clearly excited about the new geologic trail for which Congress carved out $12 million to get established and about $600,000 a year for maintenance and operation.

Cantwell first introduced the Ice Age Floods Bill in 2002. It quickly gained bipartisan support.

The legislation commemorates a geologic event that took place roughly 12,000 years ago when multiple floods during the end of the last ice age ripped through the landscape of Eastern and Central Washington.

One of the largest of these floods took place when a 1,000-foot-high ice dam on the Clark Fork River in Montana broke apart, unleashing 600 cubic miles of water that roared through our region and scoured the countryside.

The 400-foot-high cataract called Dry Falls, 20 miles southwest of Grand Coulee Dam, is a lasting testament to those massive floodwaters. So, too, is the Hanford Reach in the Tri-Cities.

The National Park Service will spend the next two years preparing a plan for the trail system, which will cover about 500 miles from Western Montana to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland. The trail will include interpretive centers, scenic overlooks and displays. It will also incorporate some high-tech wizardry -- webcasting, iPods and global positioning satellites to help enliven the experience for people driving along the trail.

This undertaking, no doubt, will bear fruit in terms of increased tourism to the region.

But what are we to make of the cutbacks in state funding for Washington's vast trail system? With one hand the feds giveth, with the other the state taketh away.

What's aggravating is that the money being siphoned off to help prop up the state parks system is specifically earmarked for trails. It's from off-road vehicle license fees and funds generated by the ORV portion of the state's gas tax.

Just two years ago, ORV enthusiasts asked the state to increase the tab fees so more money could be plowed into the maintenance program.

But with the state facing an unprecedented revenue shortfall of nearly $9 billion, that trail money became too attractive for lawmakers to ignore.

So here we are today, celebrating the creation of a new federal trail and bemoaning the loss of nearly $10 million to help maintain and develop others, many of which are in the Naches and Cle Elum ranger districts. Something is wrong with this picture.

We hope state lawmakers see the value in maintaining these trails and find a way, when the economy turns around, to return the funds to their rightful place in the budget. Then we can enjoy not only a geologic trail but a mountain path as well.

* Members of the Yakima Herald-Republic editorial board are Michael Shepard, Bob Crider, Spencer Hatton and Karen Troianello.