Laura Lundquist
HAMILTON (Missoula Current) – Bracing himself against Monday morning’s wind and snow squalls, Dominick DellaSala surveyed the Bitterroot mountainside that was burned this summer by the Observation Point Fire.
His gaze swept over the isolated, scorched and dying trees, bare ground, and blackened stumps that are the remnants of the forest cut down in the Bitterroot National Forest’s 2018 West Side Vegetation Project. Having worked for more than four decades as a global biodiversity and climate change scientist, he’s seen similar situations with logging projects around the world. Based on the assessments he’s completed, he pronounced it “a disaster.”
“I’m looking at whether or not what the forest service is doing is true restoration or degradation. I work with a global team of scientists from Australia, Canada and Europe, and we’re finding the same patterns over and over again. What we’re finding is these big fast-moving fires are the principally result of extreme fire weather combined with heavily logged landscapes, giving us these fast-moving fires that are uncontrollable,” DellaSala said. “Thinning can’t get us out of this situation.”
DellaSala was in Missoula to give a talk on logging and climate change at the University of Montana on Tuesday evening. So on Monday, he took advantage of a tour of the West Side Project area south of Hamilton hosted by local forest advocacy groups, including Friends of the Bitterroot, Friends of the Clearwater, Yaak Valley Forest Council and WildEarth Guardians. The groups asked DellaSala to assess the West Side Project and the effects of the recent fire and use them to project what might happen if the proposed Bitterroot Front Project is approved.
The proposed Bitterroot Front Project extends along the eastern side of the Bitterroot Range approximately from Lolo to Darby, and various treatments would affect about 216 square miles, including 43 square miles of commercial logging, over the course of 20 years. That would include the construction of 2 miles of new permanent road and up to 27 miles of temporary road.
The Bitterroot National Forest was expected to issue a decision on the Bitterroot Front Project in July, but it’s been delayed, said Adam Rissien of WildEarth Guardians. So forest watch dogs are hoping that the decision doesn’t go so heavy on logging that it hurts ecological functioning.
“We’re looking at the Bitterroot Front Project as being a threat to old-growth characteristics and the species that depend on them,” Rissien said. “The Forest Service has done tours like this, so we wanted to provide our own perspective.”
The remnants of the Observation Point Fire.
The remnants of the Observation Point Fire.
The burned part of the West Side Project demonstrates what the forest advocates don’t want to see. Pointing to nearby parts of the forest that weren’t treated, Jeff Lonn of Friends of the Bitterroot said the existing forest wasn’t that thick to begin with and the tree and shrub species were diverse. Then, in some of the West Side Project plots, the U.S. Forest Service did an “irregular harvest,” which takes out several trees to create irregular openings. The Forest Service cut out a lot of trees, some of which were smaller but some were old, large Douglas fir that had grown there for centuries. That left isolated Ponderosa pines with large gaps between them and minimal undergrowth.
“The public looks at it, and they like city parks, and it looks pretty good to them. But if you know what was there before, there’s a big difference,” Lonn said. “None of the commercial logging units had any potential for active crown fire.”
After the Observation Point Fire burned through the area in July, the Bitterroot National Forest boasted that firefighters were able to control the fire because of the forest thinning work.
“By spreading, opening up the canopy and reducing the ladder fuels and the density of that canopy, we’re able to create conditions where the fire, which started on the bottom below us, was able to run up the slope but stay on the ground,” Amy Campbell Bitterroot Forest silviculturist told KPAX News in late July.
But the forest advocates say that wasn’t the real explanation for why the wildfire didn’t turn into a blaze like the Roaring Lion Fire of 2016. Although Montana is suffering from drought, the weather conditions were relatively moderate during the Observation Point Fire compared to the Roaring Lion.
“The Forest Service compared (the Observation Point Fire) to Roaring Lion Fire. But they got on (the Observation Point Fire) right away, and it wasn’t very windy. I think those are really big differences,” Lonn said.
View from the Observation Point fire location.
View from the Observation Point fire location.
Lonn added that the Observation Point Fire tended to slow when it reached unlogged areas, because more trees and vegetation help retain forest moisture. Whereas the thinned areas on eastern and southeastern slopes that are exposed to the sun were more dried out, so there, the fire burned hotter. Now, on those slopes, some of the soil is sterile, and the Ponderosa pines that were left by the logging crews are dying.
Michele Dieterich of Friends of the Bitterroot said the Forest Service’s own research predicted that the fire would burn hotter in thinned areas. She rattled off a number of research papers published by the Forest Service or coauthored by Forest Service researchers between 1940 and now that all reach the same conclusion.
“Every single one of them says if you reduce the canopy cover, you increase the severity of the fire,” Dieterich said. “The Bitterroot Front Project is supposed to be all about fire but if they’re going to reduce the canopy, it means (hotter fires).”
One of the main things the forest advocates want to limit or stop is the logging of old-growth areas. Some old-growth areas are in the inventoried roadless area that buffers the Bitterroot-Selway Wilderness from the rest of the national forest. But the Bitterroot Front proposal would allow commercial logging in roadless areas within a quarter mile of any road so that would include chunks of the roadless area.
After announcing the intent to develop a national definition of old-growth forests and a rule to protect them, the Forest Service announced in January that it was abandoning the effort and would leave identification and protection up to each national forest.
Then in June, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced she would rescind the Forest Service roadless rule, which would open up almost 6.4 million acres of inventoried roadless areas in Montana, including the area along the Bitterroot Front, to more development. As the comment period closed in September, an analysis of a subset of the comments showed 99% opposed rescinding the roadless rule.
Rollins has yet to issue a ruling, but eliminating the roadless rule would probably affect the Bitterroot Front. DellaSala said it would allow the Forest Service to build more roads, which ironically leads to more wildfire, because studies have shown that humans start almost 90% of wildfires. Both the Roaring Lion and the Observation Point fires were started by people.
Standing near some towering old-growth pines in the roadless area up Camas Creek, Rissien said he didn’t know if the Forest Service would log the area but it would be open to logging. The Forest Service is allowed to remove only trees of “predominantly small diameter,” but that’s not defined so the agency can potentially log a lot of trees. And, if the roadless rule is rescinded, “they can take out any of the bigger trees that they want,” Rissien said.
“When looking around this area and thinking about future old-growth and current old-growth conditions, we’re really talking about habitat for fisher and lynx and wolverine and a variety of bird species. So we don’t want to manage these areas to the minimum qualifications as the Forest Service is proposing to do. We want to increase the species diversity and we want to see ecological processes operate unhindered,” Rissien said. “We want to see fire, disease and insects do the things they’ve historically done, which is to create high-integrity forests. You’re not going to do that with a chainsaw.”
The Forest Service justifies many of its logging and burning projects by saying they will reduce the risk of wildfire to nearby communities and improve forest conditions by eliminating diseased and dying trees. Often, there’s also a statement that the project will improve the local economy by providing jobs.
When it comes to reducing wildfire risk, the forest advocates argue that the West Side Project did little to stop the Observation Point Fire when weather conditions were moderate. And when fire conditions are severe, with high winds, hot temperatures and dry vegetation, nothing stops a wildfire. They say the money being used to log limited areas of forest would be better spent on helping communities harden their homes and create defensible space. The new economy should involve making communities resilient, Dieterich said.
With only one lumber mill still operating in Montana, the economic argument isn’t very strong since there are few places to send the logs. In addition, if numerous national forests increase their logging output as the Trump administration has ordered, they would flood the market, making timber sales even less profitable.
The Forest Service doesn’t have to log public lands, DellaSala said, because national forests provide only about 4% of the nation’s timber supply. Instead, most of the timber supply comes out of southeastern plantations of fast-growing trees like loblolly pine.
“If you take that 4% number, the mature and old-growth is an even smaller percentage. So just stay out of those forests. It’s not going to affect things on a national scale that much. You’re getting most of your wood supply from private lands,” DellaSala said. “We need to look at managing the national forest system for more than just two-by-fours.”
Rissien tried to invite Bitterroot National Forest ranger Steve Brown on the tour but the government shutdown prevented that.
Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.