New Timber Harvest Plan More Forest Friendly Forest Service Will Build Fewer Roads, Include More Watershed Restoration As Part Of Effort To End Beetle Outbreak

It’s a logger’s dream and - foresters hope - a beetle’s worst nightmare.

Details of a battle plan will become public Monday, when the Idaho Panhandle and Colville national forests announce their plan for combating what they’re calling the worst Douglas fir beetle outbreak in 40 years.

The Forest Service refuses to provide specific details before it rolls out the final environmental analysis, but at least two major changes appear likely from the proposal unveiled in January.

First, the Forest Service is indicating there will be fewer miles of road construction and reconstruction than the 183 miles in the draft plan. Second, there likely will be more watershed restoration work as part of the logging package.

In the Newport Ranger District, for example, removing culverts, improving road drainage and road obliteration will be part of the timber sale contracts. That guarantees the work will be done no matter whether the timber sales make money. In most cases, that work will be done before logging begins.

After analyzing the Newport District, down to the feeder streams, the Forest Service is considering taking out as much as nine miles of road, removing or replacing some 50 culverts, and putting gates on other roads to seasonally limit access to big game winter range. It’s a case of using timber harvest to pay to help heal the landscape, Forest Service officials say.

“We wouldn’t be doing this without the beetle-related logging,” said Dan Dallas, Newport district ranger. And, after analyzing the affects of logging vs. the benefits of the watershed work, the long-term bottom line is that less sediment will go in the streams, he said.

“We’re not going to change things so we unravel the streams.”

The work in the Newport, as across the rest of the Douglas fir beetle project area, will include efforts to reduce the fire danger and replanting some stands with more fire-and insect-resistant trees.

Overall, few forest followers expect the agency to change the magnitude of the timber sales it plans across 25,000 acres of North Idaho and Eastern Washington. That includes 5,000 acres of clearcuts, some larger than the 40-acre limit the agency traditionally follows.

Enough timber to build a city of 15,000 homes will roll out of the woods.

In addition, logging in the Coeur d’Alene and Hayden Lake area is expected to stay on the emergency fast track - and could start within a month. The Forest Service received permission from its Washington, D.C., office to turn the loggers loose within a month on those 4,000 acres.

That’s because that area, were the city mingles with the forest, is considered at the highest risk for catastrophic wildlife damage. The potential is heightened by the dying Douglas fir.

It is not yet clear how much the cool, wet spring has thwarted the spread of the Douglas fir bark beetle. At a minimum, scientists say these weather conditions make it easier for trees to fight off an infestation.

The Forest Service agrees, to a point.

“The cold, wet weather is bad news for the bugs and good news for the trees,” said Allen Gibbs, spokesman for the Panhandle Forests. “It’s too soon to know whether the weather has sufficiently retarded the beetles.”

It will be September before foresters will know.

Meanwhile, the hot, dry weather that is forecast is perfect for the bugs to spread far and wide, Gibbs said.

One unanswered question is what sort of legal challenges the Forest Service will face. The timber industry has said it believes the Forest Service has the responsibility to go after thousands of more acres, to keep the beetles from spreading to neighboring private and industrial land.

The environmental community already is unhappy about the fact that the agency is keeping every detail of it’s final plan under wraps until its Monday press conference.

“They are supposedly including a restoration alternative we suggested and we won’t have a chance to review it until they’ve made their decision,” said Jeff Juel of the Lands Council. “They want to get out there and make their public statements and not allow anybody time to make a response.”