Top Official Confirms Agencies Questioned Salvage Timber Sale

A top fisheries official has confirmed conservationists’ claims that three federal agencies raised questions about Forest Service plans to salvage timber in critical salmon habitat on Idaho’s South Fork of the Salmon River.

The Thunderbolt salvage sale in Idaho’s Boise and Payette national forests is to be auctioned next week.

Several conservation groups cited those federal agency concerns when they filed suit last month to block the salvage logging sale. They claim it will damage water quality, endangered salmon and other fish in a drainage prone to landslides that dump sediment into the river’s spawning gravel.

“Issues of common sense and fact went right out the window on this one,” said Will Stelle, regional director of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Logging in the drainage in the 1960s led to a major landslide in 1965 that devastated the South Fork, destroying most of the salmon habitat and resulting in the region being put off limits to logging.

The region is spending millions of dollars to improve salmon passage on the Snake and Columbia rivers, Stelle said, “while at the same time we are degrading the habitat these animals need … for small volume timber sales that don’t mean that much.”

The fisheries service, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service offered to expedite approval of two larger timber sales if the forest service agreed not to log Thunderbolt. Forestry officials agreed at first, Stelle said, then changed their minds.

The Idaho Sporting Congress filed suit Oct. 25 to block the 3,237- acre Thunderbolt and two other salvage sales in the South Fork drainage.