Salmon Spawning Beds At Risk From Salvage Logging, Critics Say

Fish advocates are outraged by the U.S. Forest Service’s decision to allow salvage logging on the site of Idaho’s 1994 Thunderbolt fire, an important spawning area for the endangered Snake River chinook salmon.

The Payette and Boise national forests have announced their decision to allow logging of 3,237 acres of the 27,000-acre Thunderbolt fire northeast of Cascade, which burned on the slopes leading to the South Fork of the Salmon River.

Boise forest spokesman Frank Carroll confirmed the “Alternative D” chosen offered up the largest amount of timber. But he added the sale will take up a small portion of the burned area, yet provide money to stabilize slopes in many other areas to protect fish habitat, he said.

“You have to have the money to keep the hillsides out of the river,” he said.

The blaze burned on steep slopes with rocky, granitic soil. Conservationists warn the logging followed by precipitation could cause a huge blowout, burying spawning beds.

“Is there any stream that is too sensitive for logging? Are we so desperate for logs that we have to go into one of the most important chinook recovery streams in Idaho? Then we’re a little too desperate,” said David Bayles, Pacific Rivers Council senior program director.

Bayles said federal, state and tribal fisheries experts agreed years ago logging should, for the most part, be recluded there because the watershed was damaged by earlier cutting.

“Going back in there now will set back the South Fork for decades,” he said.

“These guys are proposing the kind of salvage logging the Forest Service wouldn’t have entertained five years ago,” said Jim Weber, policy assistant for the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission. “From our standpoint, it is technically and morally indefensible.”

“This project is about improving the condition of the fisheries,” Boise National Forest Supervisor Dave Rittenhouse said.