Forest Service Postcard Trims Truth About Fire Pro-Logging Mailing Doesn’t Tell Whole Story About 1930s Disaster
Cabin owners recently received a picture postcard from the Forest Service claiming to show how a 1930s fire laid waste to the woods around Kalispell Bay.
“The Forest Service wants to reduce wildfire risk,” reads the caption on the back.
It is a mail campaign to generate support for a logging program on the west side of Priest Lake that the Forest Service says will reduce fire danger.
What the caption doesn’t say is how much the hand of man contributed to the bleak landscape. “I thought it was a little sneaky, to say the least,” said Bill Egolf, a 20-year resident of the Priest Lake area and a member of the Selkirk-Priest Basin Association.
“They can use the picture but they should have said it was taken after a fire, after we salvage-logged what we could and then after we reburned the rest.”
The Priest Lake Ranger District is proposing to log as much as 3.2 million board feet of wood from 7,200 acres, a project it calls Lakeface-Lamb. It is showing off three demonstration plots to convince people that it can log the area to make it more fire resistant.
The premise is that removing trees will lessen the chance that fire moves into the tops of the trees, which often leads to a more intense, widespread fire. Part of the plan also is to pull out the trees around powerlines, bike trails and roads on this slice of the west lakeshore.
The bad taste from the postcard, questions raised by a fire ecologist and skeptcism from local residents may make the logging project a tough sell. Some wonder if removing major parts of a maturing cedar-hemlock forest would turn a shady, mossy woods into a drier, more flammable forest.
“It’s a relatively damp forest,” said Roberta Ulrich, who has come to the same cabin since 1942. “The last fire was in the 1930s.
“The fire danger isn’t so high up there that you can’t get your cabin insured,” Ulrich said.
The Forest Service is sincere in thinking it can reduce fire danger with management, she said. Yet she also believes the agency is using the fire pitch because it is under tremendous pressure to sell timber.
“I don’t envy those guys,” she said. “The people who really believe in cutting are in control of Congress.”
Leon Neuenschwander, a fire ecologist at University of Idaho who has toured the project, applauds the proposal to cut the trees away from the power lines, campgrounds, parking lots and road rights-of-way.
The rest of the program may cause more problems than it solves, Neuenschwander said.
“The stuff right around Priest Lake is on its way to healing itself from past fires and logging,” he said. “It won’t burn very fast.”
If the proposed areas are logged, however, they will be filled with highly flammable brush and young trees in 15 to 20 years. If the Forest Service doesn’t have the money to mow down that growth, “they create a situation worse than what they had to start with,” Neuenschwander said.
History shows the Forest Service rarely has the money to do such follow-up work.
Joe Hinson of the Intermountain Forest Industry Association supports the project, saying the Forest Service is reacting out of a concern for lake shore development more than anything else.
“Really what they are talking about is protecting commercial values,” Hinson said. If these tree stands were five miles away from the nearest building, he said, nobody would bother with fire prevention thinning.
District Ranger Kent Dunstan defends using the postcard to promote the project and says support is building. “If the fire came through here last year and a bunch of homes burned, then people are clamoring for this,” he said.
“Another part of this issue is the cost of fighting fire in the urban interface is high,” Dunstan said, referring to the cabins and resorts. “If I owned (Hill’s Resort) I’d be begging for that.”
Scott Hill, a member of the family that runs the resort, says they are worried about fire but “we can’t reach a consensus.”
Hill questions whether logging will just increase the fire danger. Last summer some kids used a logging road to make their way into the woods and start a fire by the resort’s water tank.
In addition, the majority of people Hill has talked to “say I moved to Priest Lake to be next to a forest - don’t cut it down.”
But Ranger Dunstan said fire is going to become a more important issue in the future and that Congress will indeed fund logging designed to reduce fire danger.
There is evidence, however, that fire isn’t a growing issue. A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report says that the nation has gone from dealing with fire on 34 million acres a year in decades past to about 4 million acres a year now, Neuenschwander said. That shows the Forest Service is pretty good at putting out fires.
Considering the Forest Service is selling this fire project because cabins and commercial development are mingled with the woods, Neuenschwander said he wonders if zoning might better reduce fire danger.
That would include requiring buried power lines, clearing rights-of-way and fire-resistant roofs, he said.
Hinson, of the industry association, says zoning isn’t enough. “Nature can still go awry on you and you can pay a pretty high price,” he said.
Gallery owner Jim Martin, a former commercial logger and a 23-year area resident, hasn’t seen the Forest Service plan. Some logging would help the area, but he’s leery, he said.
Martin removes trees for cabin owners, who lease their land from the federal government. Because of the enormous hurdles, he said, “I’ve been frustrated and the cabin owners have been frustrated wanting to remove trees.
“Now the Forest Service all of a sudden has this ambitious project to do what the cabin owners have struggled to do on a tiny, tiny basis.”
Perhaps the most significant worry for area residents is whether Lakeface-Lamb will a precedent for more logging to prevent fires. “As long as they have the tool, they will expand it,” Egolf said. “And use it.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo Map of area