Tree-Spiking Threat May Be Setup By Forest Service, Activist Says

An environmentalist has suggested the Forest Service is behind a letter warning that trees have been spiked in the Cove-Mallard timber sale area of the Nez Perce National Forest.

“We are viewing it perhaps as a setup,” Jake Kreilick of the Cove-Mallard Coalition office in Missoula said Tuesday.

Kreilick said his group did not know who was responsible for the letter, “but one possibility would be the Forest Service itself” in an effort to discredit protesters.

“The Forest Service is deliberately trying to create a situation where activists are viewed as violent and going in the opposite direction of the approach we’ve used throughout,” he said.

A letter signed by “Elves for Habitat” was received Monday by the Nez Perce National Forest supervisor’s office, the Red River Ranger Station and the Idaho County Sheriff’s Department. It warned that ceramic spikes had been placed in trees in the Jack, Noble and Rhett timber sale units of the Cove-Mallard.

At least one of the letters was sent from Portland, said Ihor Mereszczak of the supervisor’s office.

Mereszczak said in a prepared statement Monday that the letter was part of an alarming pattern of change in tactics used by activists who want to stop road-building and timber harvest in the Cove-Mallard area.

“Acts of civil disobedience have now escalated into threatened violence,” he said.

But Kreilick said spiking trees, which poses lethal threats to loggers and mill workers, is contrary to the Cove-Mallard Coalition’s mission.

“We’re certainly not involved with the tree spiking, if it did in fact occur,” Kreilick said. “It doesn’t make any sense for us to do that when we have people who are risking their lives in front of fairly belligerent and frustrated workers.”

Still, the founder of a group called the Environmental Rangers said violence might be inevitable unless the Forest Service deals fairly with activists trying to peacefully protest logging in the Cove-Mallard.

Ric Valois, 42, of Vaughn, Mont., was arrested earlier this month for chaining himself to a gate at the Jack Creek timber sale. But Valois said his group might go a different direction if non-violence fails.

“We are very much more radical and we will do whatever it takes ,” Valois said.