Bark Beetle Plan Sparks New Debate Forest Service Wants To Log Old Growth Trees, Roadless Area To Prevent Fires, Salvage Trees
The Forest Service’s beetle battle is moving into controversial new territory.
The agency wants to log old-growth forests and a roadless area hit by the Douglas fir bark beetle to reduce the danger of wildfire and to salvage bug-killed timber.
Last year, the Idaho Panhandle National Forests embarked on a massive logging project on beetle forests across 25,000 acres in North Idaho and Eastern Washington.
Now the agency wants to log and burn another 1,400 acres, this time scattered across the Coeur d’Alene River Ranger District.
Nearby landowners want the latest round of work because they’re worried about wildfires sparked in the dead and dying timber.
Rob Rider and his family live at the head of Rutherford Creek, just below a section of National Forest that includes the 4,400-acre Skitwish Ridge roadless area.
The family runs a guided trail-riding business on Wolf Lodge Bay. They take customers up into the forest on a special-use permit. They run livestock on the public land.
They also worry that wildfires that spark in the bug-killed timber above their place will burn down onto their land.
“There’s an awful lot of timber up there that’s dead and dying,” Rob Rider said. “We just got through cleaning up from the ice storm and the beetle damage on our own property. We’d like them to do the same.”
But critics say logging oldgrowth and a roadless area goes too far.
The Forest Service is using the excuse of forest health to justify the logging, but the project will make the forests sicker, said Barry Rosenberg of The Lands Council, which is based in Spokane.
Rosenberg points to a Pacific Northwest Research Station study showing the importance of dead and dying trees to forest health. Spruce budworm, for example, kill trees that later become homes to birds - that eat the budworm.
The Coeur d’Alene River Ranger District’s proposal lacks scientific credibility, he said.
“It’s all speculation. They’re taking an extremely complicated forest and applying kindergarten-level actions.”
Last year, the Forest Service started logging across North Idaho and into Eastern Washington to address what the agency called the worst beetle epidemic in 40 years.
Trees toppled by the 1996 ice storm triggered a beetle feeding frenzy in 1998, agency officials say.
Officials say last year’s beetle-spurred logging was controversial enough without old-growth and roadless lands in the mix. Now the beetle outbreak is declining, agency bug researchers say.
But the Forest Service wants to return to the beetle zone, logging recently surveyed pockets of dead and dying trees from Hayden Lake to the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River above Wallace.
Trees will go to waste unless they’re salvaged now, said Bob Rehnborg of the Coeur d’Alene River Ranger District.
“The wood’s breaking down. The clock’s running,” Rehnborg said. “We’ve only got so much time.”
The agency’s proposal - one of four under consideration and open for public comment until May 15 - also calls for forest openings and replanting to allow for the return of fire-resistant tree species such as ponderosa pine, white pine and larch.
Agency plans call for logging more than 6 million board feet of timber and setting two intentional fires across 1,400 acres scattered across the district.
That includes nearly 160 acres in old-growth stands and 52 acres within Skitwish Ridge, also scheduled for a 225-acre fire.
Skitwish Ridge, above Wolf Lodge, has been helicopter logged in the past. The Forest Service is not proposing any new roads there.
And some of the old-growth forests don’t match the usual stereotypes.
Old-growth logging is scheduled in forests near Thompson Creek, Blue Creek, Fernan Creek, Canfield Mountain and Hayden Lake.
The proposed old-growth logging violates the Forest Service’s own rules, so the district will have to amend its forest plan to comply.
But some of the so-called old growth is actually a few 100-year-old trees and not the deep dark forests most people think of, said the Audubon Society’s Susan Weller.
Weller said some of the logging is needed. At Canfield, for instance, the Forest Service should clean up “the mess” of dense trees and flammable debris on the ground.
But four sales in the Thompson Creek area are in true old growth and better off left alone, Weller said.
“I don’t think we can pronounce the whole thing a bad idea,” she said. “We have to evaluate the sites individually.”
The beetle sales also could inflict further damage on the ailing North Fork drainage, one of the most heavily logged and roaded forests in the country, critics say.
Forest roads and logging are reasons that some 30,000 tons of sediment come out of the North Fork annually.
The Forest Service’s own analysis shows four of 16 proposed timber sales are money losers.
But the agency expects to combine those with money-making sales for an overall gain of roughly $250,000 on the 6 million board feet of trees.
Rehnborg acknowledged that the sales won’t be as easy to sell as traditional ones. Steep and hard to reach, half the sales will require costly helicopter logging. Between 20 and 30 percent of the wood arriving at mills is expected to be too rotten to turn into lumber.
But the Forest Service also gains fire suppression from the added costs, he said.
Critics disagree.
The district loses money on traditional timber sales, said Robert Wolf, a retired Forest Service employee who scrutinizes agency finances. Tricky sales like these surely will be losers, Wolf said.
“The reality is that the operation will run in the red,” he said. “These sales, with their light cuts per acre and helicopter logging, will be bigger losers than normal.”
No decisions on the beetle logging are set in stone. An environmental impact statement still is in draft form, Rehnborg said.
“We’re in the process of trying to figure out what the right thing is,” he said.
See related story under headline “Public can offer suggestions for project” Zaz Hollander can be reached at (208) 765-7129 or by e-mail at zazh@spokesman.com.