Trees Being Thinned, Burned To Save Central Oregon Forest Technique Called The Wave Of The Future For Logging In The Inland Northwest

One ranger district is expected to generate 20 million board feet of timber annually through a technique of tree thinning that is aimed at making a healthier forest.

Phil Cruz said the kind of logging being practiced in his Crescent Ranger District 50 miles southwest of Bend, Ore., is the wave of the future for Inland Northwest forests.

The idea is to thin out small trees and brush to promote the health of larger native species such as ponderosa pine and some types of fir.

Hundreds of thousands of acres of East Side forests are in terrible condition as a result of past logging practices, fire suppression and recent prolonged drought.

Logging took away the drought-resistant ponderosa pines. Fire suppression allowed the region to generate tightly packed trees and heavy brush which compete for water and nutrients.

Under these conditions, the forest is vulnerable to drought, insects and disease.

“People have seen Santiam Pass and they’ve seen the Blue Mountains. Those forests have died,” Cruz said. “We’re trying to prevent any more of those catastrophic die-offs.”

On Odell Butte, just west of Crescent in the eastern foothills of the Cascade Range, logging contractors are cutting many small but commercial-sized firs and pines, mostly 8- to 12-inch-diameter trees capable of feeding small-log mills.

The contractors are leaving many small trees and most of the big ones standing.

When the commercial logging is completed, Forest Service crews will return to burn and thin the brush and remove many of the crowded, stunted trees.

Cruz said the aim is to return the forest to a semblance of its historical composition.

“We’re trying to stabilize the stand and retain the old growth,” he said.

Cruz said that if this type of logging had been practiced years ago, much of the devastation in insect-killed and drought-damaged forests now seen from the Cascades to the Blue Mountains might have been prevented.

David Summer, who leads the Deschutes National Forest’s natural resource team, said he agrees that the Crescent district’s logging program establishes a useful pattern for the future.

He said dying forests are spreading north and south. But except for lodgepole pine stands in its lowlands, the Crescent district, the southernmost in the Deschutes National Forest, had yet to be seriously affected.