Council Hopes New Trail Leads To Logging Ban Group Pushes To Stop Cutting On Cda Watershed

Last week, the Inland Empire Public Lands Council called for an end to commercial logging on federal lands.

This week, representatives from the group stomped up to the Little North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River to call for a moratorium on logging in that watershed. And they say they are backed with petitions with more than 1,200 signatures from Spokane residents.

Why should anyone care that a totally no-logging group is calling for a moratorium anywhere? “Ending commercial logging takes an act of Congress,” said Barry Rosenberg of the lands council.

“A moratorium in the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene only takes a decision of the forest supervisor.”

And the damage to the watershed is so severe that something needs to be done immediately, he said. About 900 acres of clear-cut logging and 25 miles of new and reconstructed road are planned.

Allen Isaacson, former supervisory hydrologist for the Idaho Panhandle National Forests, joined the Lands Council in calling for the moratorium. “What we are seeing here is erosion caused by excessive clearcutting and road building,” Isaacson said. The accumulation of rocks and sediment “has so choked this major river that it barely flows above ground at its mouth.”

The Forest Service is unimpressed.

“This is really an old story, one we’ve tried to tell ourselves,” said Dave O’Brien of the Idaho Panhandle National Forest. To blame the area’s problems strictly on logging and road building is off base, he said.

There has been a century of human activity in the watershed, including logging, mining and recreation, not to mention fires and damage caused by things like last November’s ice storm.

Most of the roads come from an era when older logging technology was being used to remove thousands of white pine being killed by blister rust. Those days are decades gone.

“We know roads cause problems and we are working hard to get rid of roads that don’t belong,” he said.

During the last three years, the Panhandle Forests has built only 15 miles of new road while obliterating 374 miles. That work will continue, but people want some roads and won’t allow total elimination of the byways, he said.

Meanwhile, logging allows the agency to reintroduce disease-resistant white pine, which also is fire resistant, he said.

That’s the kind of restoration the land needs, O’Brien said.

, DataTimes