Links
• FSEEE Home

• General

• January 2009
• October 2008
• September 2008
• August 2008
• July 2008
• June 2008

• Login
• Podcasts
• RSS
• Comments RSS

Happy New Year to everyone.  I have been busy finishing up a master’s
degree in forestry and am ready to start visiting national forests
again… and keep up this blog.  If anyone is still paying attention—I
will be investigating different pine ecosystems in Georgia, Alabama,
South Carolina and North Carolina next week—from January 13-January
20.  I will be sort of home based out of Atlanta, but will do lots of
traveling around and hope to visit the Taladega, Chattahoochee-Oconee,
Nantahala, Cherokee, and Sumter Francis-Marion National Forests.  If
you’re in the area, give me a shout. 

I have a tentative plan
to visit national forests in California in March.  I will try and make
it down to the Southwest sometime after that. 

I have been asking all the wildlife biologists I’ve met how many vertebrate wildlife species are found on national forest lands.  No one knows the answer.  I can’t find the information on the web, either.  You’d think it’d be one of those factoids on the Forest Service home page.  

It’s safe to say that Forest Service manages tens of thousands of different animal species. Millions probably if you counted invertebrates.  Most of these critters manage themselves and don’t make any trouble for anyone.  Some of them are a serious pain in the ass.  

Probably the most endangered animal in North America is the black-footed ferret, which feeds exclusively on prairie dogs in the Great Plains—almost all of which has been converted to agriculture.  At one point there were only 18 black footed ferrets in existence, all of them living in captivity. 

The USFW’s ferret recovery plan calls for the establishment of 10 or more separate, self-sustaining wild populations.  Within a year from now, there was supposed to be 1,500 ferrets living in the wild, with no fewer than 30 breeding adults in each population.  These objectives are nowhere close to being met.  

One of the best sites for black-footed ferret reintroduction is the Thunder Basin Grassland in the northeastern corner of Wyoming, managed by the Medicine Bow-Routt NF.  It is (or was) one of the last spots that had at least 20,000 acres of contiguous habitat occupied by prairie dogs.  But in 2001, sylvatic plague, an introduced disease, wiped out as much as three quarters of the prairie dog population.  Then local county commissioners and ranchers made a big stink over the EIS—basically they wanted more flexibility in the plan to poison prairie dogs. 

(That’s a prairie dog, on the Buffalo Gap NG in South Dakota.)

I am going to talk about this more later, but there is something a little different about the Great Plains.  Killing prairie dogs is a bizarre cultural imperative that I have not gotten a satisfactory explanation for.  

Anyway, the Forest Service is out of money for the black-footed ferret thing and it’s unclear if there’s even enough prairie dogs to for a reintroduction to work.  So, as far as I can tell, the black-footed ferret will have to survive in captivity for a while longer.  

There is something very frustrating about this.  Of course, the plague is to blame, sort of.  But in a more basic sense, society is not making enough room for other critters.  

Lucky for the Forest Service, they don’t manage bison (although the grasslands are excellent habitat).  But Yellowstone National Park manages a herd of almost 4,000 of these majestic beasts.  Or did.  In hard winters like 2007-2008 the bison migrate out of the park, onto adjacent Forest Service lands, where they are summarily executed by the Montana Department of Livestock.  Ranchers, you see, are afraid that bison carry brucellosis, an introduced disease that causes domestic cattle to lose their fetuses.  Last year more than 1,500 bison, more than a quarter of the Yellowstone herd, were slaughtered.

Elk also carry brucellosis but are not banned from cattle country like the bison.  But they’re elk, you see.  Not bison. 

Ah, to be a big game animal and so enjoy the total solicitude of wildlife management agencies.  

100 years ago there were only 500,000 white tailed deer in the United States.  Today there’s 20 million.  There were 40,000 elk, now there’s 1,000,000.  

There used to be 50 million bison in the United States.  Today there are less than 10,000 wild bison.  Or at least there used to be.  After last winter it’s more like 8,500.  

Moose were almost non-existent in the western United States when Lewis and Clark traveled across the continent, but populations their populations are growing rapidly.

I took this photo meaning to say something about environmental impacts.  You notice in the background there that this forest has been thinned.  The black dot in the lower left is a moose (zoomed in below).  Environmentalists challenged the project in part because they feared impacts to the blue river trout stream downhill.  I know of no evidence that this thinning show is having any negative impacts to the trout stream…  I have never heard anyone mention the potential impacts to streams from moose, who never roamed this far south until recently.  Just a thought. 

You can see dramatic differences between forest vegetation where deer and elk have been excluded, for instance on some research plots I visited on the Lolo National Forest (thought I’d taken some pictures but I can’t seem to find them).  

“In some areas I see more impacts from wildlife than from cattle,” an employee on the Fishlake National Forest in Utah, told me.  “None of these states, they’re all hamstrung.  They don’t have the courage, you see (to reduce deer and elk herds), because the funds from the wildlife management are a big thing for them.”  

If bison and black-footed ferrets were big game animals, they’d be coming out our ears.  

Most national forests in the Rockies these days have a “Green Team”—part of the fed’s “Greening the government” initiative.  Each forest’s green team is working to limit that unit’s environmental footprint by reducing energy consumption, increasing materials recycling, etc., etc.  

One of the most active and successful Forest Service green team that I’ve run into is on the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest headquartered in Laramie, Wyoming.  They dramatically reduced energy consumption with innovations like a video conferencing system that allows live meetings between far-flung ranger districts without long drives and an E85 compatible fleet.  They’ve recently installed a wind turbine on the Yampa Ranger Station compound that produces at least as much clean electricity as the buildings consume.

Ironically, the Medicine Bow-Routt also manages the Thunder Basin National Grassland, which is a huge producer of coal, one of the leading contributors to global warming.  The Thunder Basin NG has five coal mines, including the Black Thuder coal mine, which produces more coal than the other 23 coal producing states in the country. 

Ironically, the Medicine Bow-Routt have very high potential for development of clean wind-generated power.  “That’s going to be a huge issue,” the Executive Director of the Laramie-based Biodiversity Conservation Alliance told me of wind development.  “It’s a matter of doing it right, where to put ‘em and where not to.”  Among other things, he’s worried about several species of bats that reside on the Medicine Bow and Routt forests and are vulnerable to the giant wind turbine blades as they hunt for insects at night.  

Two of the most common sights driving the windy, wide-open highways of eastern Wyoming are wind farms and 100-car trains loaded with coal from the Thunder Basin.

I took a lot of photos of wind farms—a lot of tourists do.  But when I stopped to take a photo of the Jim Bridger coal fired power plant Zella and I were immediately cornered by security guards.  It was pretty easy to convince them we weren’t a threat to national security.  

“Do you ever have anyone trying to break in?” I asked.

“Oh, all the time,” one of the guards told me.  “All guys from FERC.  The FERC guys are always trying to bust through our security.” 

“Ever had a dog try and break in?” I asked as she snapped a photo of Zella (now the first dog with an FBI file). 

(The fuzz calling in my plates.)

P.S.  If you haven’t noticed, this blog has been subject to an extraordinary amount of spam lately.  I’ve been forced to change the commenting options so that only messages from readers that have already had a message approved can be posted.  So, the first time you post a message, I will have to approve it (and I approve everything, unless it’s completely idiotic).  After that first approval, anything you post will be online immediately.  

Coming soon:  Bison, black ferrets and the Black Hills NF.  

“Our iPod-listening, American Idol-watching, Xbox-playing generation increasingly shows a propensity toward sedentary life.”  
    —Gail Kimbell, Chief, USDA Forest Service

(Forest Service employees Jane Weber and Dave Cunningham spend a good part of their time hanging out with kids.  That’s all kid’s drawings behind them, if you can’t tell.)

I have mentioned before the Four Threats to national forests identified by retired FS Chief Dale Bosworth:  1) Fire and fuels; 2) invasive species; 3) loss of open space; and, 4) unmanaged recreation.  These are big, serious-sounding issues and with the exception of invasive species (coming soon), I’ve touched on all of this stuff.  

I kind of scoffed when, several months ago, the new chief, Gail Kimbell, put her spin on Bosworth’s threats (see http://www.fs.fed.us/emphasis/).  The new threats, according to Kimbell, are 1) climate change (a huge, important issue); 2) water (another huge issue); and, 3) reconnecting kids with nature (huh?).  

The Forest Service’s budget is collapsing, but Kimbell has scraped together a half million dollars for the “Kids in the Woods” program, dedicated to “hands on outdoor experiences for youngsters.”  I thought that’s what the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts were for.  

I was in a big hurry when I set up a meeting with the Lewis and Clark National Forest in central Montana, and when they asked if there was anything in particular I wanted to learn about I think I said something along the lines of “whatever you want.”  They picked the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls for a meeting.  

The Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center is like something out of the Park Service, a 27,000 square foot tribute to the Lewis and Clark expedition.  They’ve got a 158-seat theater and get approximately 60,000 visitors a year, including 4,500 school kids from Montana and the Dakotas.  

The Interpretive Center is all about kids.  You can touch everything and I have to say, the Lewis and Clark expedition really does come alive here.  The Lewis and Clark National Forest has a grant application in to the Kids in the Woods program to fund a winter ecology field course for local fifth graders.  The kids will get a class on weather prediction and then a snowshoe trip into the forest to check weather stations.  Among other things they’ll learn how snowpack and weather patterns affect the next summer’s fire season.  

(Kids streaming into the LC Interpretive Center.)

“So, just to sort of test this a little bit,” I said at my meeting with the LC.  “I mean, the Forest Service isn’t a fitness club or a daycare center.  Why kids?”  

Interpretive Center Director Jane Weber had a very fast answer:  “Because otherwise we’re not going to have resource managers down the road or people who care about the land.”

That stopped me.  One of my favorite and most frequent rants is kids these days.  

“It’s comforting to think that at least a small percentage of the generation that will be paying for my social security is not permanently brain damaged by constant exposure to horrific electronic mutilations.”  That’s what I wrote on 7/05.  Come to think of it, if you really care about national forests, you better care a lot if the generations behind you are getting out in the woods.  I guess the Chief (and the Lewis and Clark National Forest) is a step ahead of me.  

(My apologies for being so long in writing.  I’ve had internet problems, truck problems and I’ve been bunking with fire crews for most of the last week in a relatively remote area with no internet access anyway.  Mostly we played cards.  Lots of lightning but no fires.  Look for me to be more punctual from here on out.)

I suggested in a previous post that every national forest has it’s own culture.  This can quickly become a big overgeneralization because most national forests have about a million things going on at any given time.  Just for the hell of it, though, I’ll dub forests like the Caribou-Targhee, Bridger-Teton, Gallatin and Flathead “bear forests.”  Because they have grizzly bears living on them.  (There’s more forests than these four that have grizzly bears on them—these are just the big bear forests I’ve visited so far… someone please write and give me a correct count.)

The conference room in the Flathead has a neat cast of a grizzly bear track.  The Flathead is part of the Northern Continental Divide Greater Ecosystem.  I have seen bigger griz tracks.  On a fifty-mile long wilderness beach on the Chugach National Forest, where I was investigating a lame-brained proposal to drill for oil on the Copper River Delta.  But that’s another story.  Here’s a picture of some Chugach NF brown bear tracks, though:

There are ecosystems—communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms linked by their interactions, and then there are greater ecosystems, those ecosystems that are large enough to accommodate populations of the largest native wildlife like grizzly bears and wolves.  

There are just a half dozen or so such ecosystems left in the Lower 48.  The ones with grizzly are the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, made up of the national forests and parks centered around Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, the Greater Selkirk Ecosystem in western Montana, north-central Idaho and northeastern Washington, the Greater Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem centered around Glacier National Park in northwestern Montana, and the Greater Cabinet-Yaak Ecosystem in western Montana and northern Idaho.

The Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide ecosystems have between 600-700 grizzlies living in them.  

The Caribou-Targhee, like most of the bear forests, used to do a lot of clearcutting in the 1970s and ‘80s.  To put it in terms of forest structure and succession, between 1945 and 1990 they regenerated approximately 150,000 acres of older age classes of forests to saplings.

(To put this in perspective, the 1988 Yellowstone fire converted 700,000 acres from older lodgepole to sapling in about three months.)

The Caribou-Targhee’s revised forest plan, put in place in 1997, shifted the forest’s emphasis from timber production to restoration, partially in response to demands to secure habitat for wildlife like grizzly bear.  The timber quota on the 3 million-acre forest went from 88 million board feet to 8 million board feet.  

“In my tenure there have been changes, monumental changes,” the forest’s wildlife biologist (who has been studying grizzly bears on the forest for more than 20 years) told me.  The CTNF has closed 400 miles of road.  23 of 24 sheep allotments have been retired with the help from conservation groups who provided compensation to ranchers (sheep are like M&Ms to bears, and buying out sheep allotments helps ease bear-livestock conflicts, which often result in the bear getting shot).  

Despite these changes, the CTNF’s timber management program still faces a lot of appeals and litigation.  “The groups that are challenging our projects seem to want to fight the battles of the ‘80s…  and that’s a huge frustration.  We get the same old, you know, you’re just logging to feed the mills, and we’re like, no we’re not, there’s no mills…  We really need to find a way to communicate with people, because I don’t think we’re that far apart,” a planner on the Caribou-Targhee told me.  

The Forest Service has a multiple use mandate—to provide for favorable water flows, timber and other commodities, recreation, and wildlife habitat.

From World War II through the 1980s, most observers would agree that the National Forests gave priority to resource extraction.  During the nadir of the environmental movement in the 1960s and ‘70s, Congress tried to give the multiple use mandate teeth with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the National Forest Management Act (NMFA).  The latter required forest planning and standards and guidelines to protect wildlife.  The former law required an interdisciplinary approach to land planning that put range of disciplines from biology to archaeology—not just forestry—in charge of timber sale planning (and mining, grazing, etc.).  

“With the outfit, the only reason, the only reason we have fish bios, archaelogists, etc. is because of that NEPA law,” a Northern Region biologist told me.  “And they still don’t really let us suit up.”

“The silviculturists here are still really old school,” he said.  “If a soil scientist or an ecologist doesn’t talk about it, it doesn’t get talked about.”

That’s one perspective from one forest.  Other biologists I’ve talked to on other Northern Region forests feel like they’re in the driver’s seat when it comes to timber and other projects.  “Oh yeah, they listen,” another Northern Region biologist told me.  “I don’t feel like the odd man out, I don’t feel like we’re just mitigating impacts from roads and timber, I think the projects we’re doing, you know, they’re because of, not in spite of what wildlife says.”

This is the last rambling installment about fuel reduction thinning in northern Idaho and western Montana.  The story’s ultimately about the law.  NFMA requires the Forest Service “to maintain viable populations of existing native and desired non-native vertebrate species” (36 CFR §219.19).  NEPA requires the FS to fully disclose impacts to these species.  The information used in the NEPA process “must be of high quality.  Accurate scientific analysis, expert agency comments, and public scrutiny are essential to implementing NEPA” (40 CFR §1500.1).  The 9th Circuit, in the string of Northern Region lawsuits described in the 09/09/08 post, found that the Forest Service hadn’t adequately disclosed impacts to flammulated owl, black-headed woodpeckers, goshawk and other critters.  

I’ve talked to more than a half dozen Northern Region biologists.  Beyond the question of whether the Forest Service had actually adequately disclosed impacts (a somewhat objective question), I was interested to know whether any biologists thought that there was any real impacts to the species at issue in litigation over fuel reduction thinnings in the Northern Region.  

The unequivocal answer I heard from all the biologists I talked to was no.  

One Northern Region biologist has conducted extensive studies of goshawks on his forest and found “no statistical difference between occupancy rates and reproduction and harvest—or no harvest.”  Pine marten, great gray owls, boreal owls and flammulated owls, “are well distributed and we expect providing a variety of successional stages will maintain those populations.  I don’t see any problem with the management we’re doing there.”  

 “They didn’t get a lot of support from the biologist community,” the biologist who complained about old school silviculturists quoted above said of environmental litigants.  “You’re talkin’ about a circumpolar critter,” he said of goshawk viability.  “I mean, come on!”  

“The greatest stride to turning this boat around has always been environmental litigation,” he continued.  Now that the recent en banc decision has made it easier for the Forest Service to move timber sales, he said, “They’re gonna do something stupid, run too far back the other way with it.”  

—————————————-
From: “James Johnston” <james@fseee.org>
To: “Mike Petersen” <mpetersen@landscouncil.org>
Sent: Friday, July 25, 2008 9:12 AM
Subject: Mission Brush

Hi Mike,

Any chance you or someone else would have some time to show me around the Mission Brush Project on Aug. 23-24 or 26-27?

Thanks,

James
—————————————-
From: “Mike Petersen” <mpetersen@landscouncil.org>
To: “James Johnston” <james@fseee.org>
Sent: Friday, July 25, 2008 12:38 PM
Subject: Re: Mission Brush

I will check, I am out during that period of time.

Thanks

Mike
—————————————-
From: “James Johnston” <james@fseee.org>
To: “Mike Petersen” <mpetersen@landscouncil.org>
Sent: Friday, July 25, 2008 1:00 PM
Subject: Re: Mission Brush

Well, I don’t want to hang out with an ugly old man anyway.  Don’t you have any bright young idealistic youth working for you?  

Thanks much.

James
—————————————-
To: “James Johnston” <james@fseee.org>
From: “Mike Petersen” <mpetersen@landscouncil.org>
Subject: Re: Mission Brush
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 2008 2:09 PM

I would have to lock them up if you came around….

Mike
—————————————-
Mike Peterson is the Executive Director of the Lands Council, a conservation outfit that works on national forests in Eastern Washington, Northern Idaho and Western Montana.  Along with the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and the Wild West Institute (formerly the Ecology Center), they are the most frequent litigants against Forest Service silviculture projects in the Northern Region.  

I have been trying to get Mike or one of his staff to show me around the Mission Brush project in Northern Idaho on the Idaho Panhandle National Forests for a while.  He hasn’t been able to make it happen.  I don’t blame him.  He is a busy guy with more pressing tasks than acting as a tour guide for an erratic guy from Oregon and his dog.  And he would be irresponsible to leave me alone with his younger staff.  They’d stumble into work three days later reeking of sawdust and bar oil and chewing tobacco…  

So I toured Mission Brush (see my last post) with the Bonner’s Ferry District Ranger and planner/forester type.

I have asked a lot of Forest Service employees in Idaho and Montana about the recent 9th Circuit Court of Appeals en banc decision that reversed a previous court injunction against the Mission Brush timber sale and eased requirements on the Forest Service to analyze impacts to wildlife.  

“The Forest Service is elated, absolutely elated,” a wildlife biologist told me a week ago.

“Oh, we’re elated,” beamed a planner two days later.  

The District Ranger I toured Mission Brush with chose her words more carefully:

“It reset the clock for us because we believe, how do I put this politically correctly, I really agreed with the decision.  It’s puts us back in the role of managers.”

I take this to mean that she is elated.  

The tour of the Mission Brush project itself was anti-climactic.  It involves a variety of different types of treatments, from thinning in a drier Ponderosa pine site to remove encroaching Douglas fir to heavy thinning to favor seral species like larch in higher elevation, wetter sites.  I found myself really wishing that one of the environmental litigants could have been along for the trip.  I found nothing particularly objectionable about the project…  It’s hard to get a sense of something until you’ve heard both sides of the argument.  

I have some photos of the Mission Brush units, but they were taken in very harsh lighting conditions—bright sun under a dense canopy.  The photos show what I’ve come to expect from Forest Service thinning shows in northern Idaho:  A bunch of smaller Doug fir and true firs marked for cutting and larger ponderosa pine, larch and white pine remaining.  

This photo may be of more interest:

This was our last stop of the day, as clouds rolled in and soft light spilled out over the rust-tan tones of the hillside (summer’s just about over).  This is the Dawson Ridge project, infamous as the site of the “Dawson Ridge Study,” which the 9th Circuit originally found to be inadequate to demonstrate that the Mission Brush project wouldn’t harm flammulated owls.  

“This is one of our best dry sites on the district,” the planner told me.  “My target is the dry sites because that’s the most need.”  This site had been logged at least twice to remove Douglas fir.  It’s also been burned several times to kill young saplings.  The result is an open, park like Ponderosa pine stand.  

Within a couple years, harvest of the Mission Brush project will be complete, and at least some of those units will look something sort of like this.  

Next post:  Wildlife biologists weigh in on the impacts to wildlife from these thinning operations.  

The Forest Service spends more time in court than one of those pill-popping Hollywood types.  Forest Service court cases are not racy affairs, but they can be interesting and even a little weird from time to time.  If you’ll bear with me through some boring legal background (you have to be a bit of an idiot savant to keep track of this stuff) you’ll read about federal judges arguing amongst themselves about species viability, the proper role of the courts, and blowing up dams.  

The bottom line for the Forest Service is that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals—which hears all appeals of Forest Service projects in WA, OR, CA, MT, ID, NV, and AZ—is picky about how the Forest Service discloses impacts to wildlife from logging.  

Until recently.  The court, you see, has changed its mind.  

It all started six years ago when the Ecology Center—a Montana conservation group—sued over a salvage logging project on the Lolo NF.  They lost in district court and appealed to the 9th Circuit.  The 9th agreed with conservation plaintiffs that the sale was illegal because the Forest Service didn’t explain why logging burned forest habitat wouldn’t adversely affect the viability of black-backed woodpeckers, a critter that forages in burned forests.

That case was called Ecology Center v. Austin (all the defendants named in these suits are Forest Supervisors).  This ruling became the basis for “The Ecology Center Rule,” a legal test that bascially says that the Forest Service may not rely on a scientific methodology that “is predicated on an unverified hypothesis.”  Instead, the FS must rely on science that has been “verified with observation” and “on the ground analysis.”  In short, the FS doesn’t just get to baldly assert that a critter isn’t going to be harmed by logging.  They have to provide a robust analysis as to why the critter isn’t going to be harmed.

Not long after the Ecology Center ruling, the Lands Council—an Idaho nonprofit—sued the Idaho Panhandle National Forests over the Mission Brush Fuel Reduction Project.  They lost that case, called Lands Council v. McNair, but appealed to the 9th, where they won.  “As in Ecology Center,” the 9th wrote, “the Forest Service is relying on the ‘unverified hypothesis’ that treating old-growth forest is beneficial to dependent species.”  

The species at issue this time was flammulated owls.  The Forest Service based its conclusion that Mission Brush wouldn’t harm owls on a single study that found one owl in a nearby completed thinning sale.  This study, the court ruled, was “insufficient to meet the requirements of Ecology Center.”  

Here’s where it gets unusual.  

The 9th heard the Lands Council appeal, as it usually does, as a panel of three judges, where a majority carries the day.  This panel ruled 3-0 for the environmental plaintiffs.  Usually one judge will write an opinion for the consensus majority.  In this case, Judge Milan Smith (the brother of Republican Senator Gordon Smith of Oregon) agreed with Judge Ferguson’s majority opinion but took the time to write a “special concurrence” describing how Judge Ferguson was an idiot.  

In his special concurrence, Judge Smith blasted the 9th Circuit for overbroad legal rulings that he said had contributed to the “decimation” of the logging industry.  He wrote:

“[Judge Ferguson] cites as authority… a 2003 tome by Messrs. Derrick Jensen and George Draffan entitled Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests, which attributes the decline of logging in the Northwest almost entirely to corporate consolidation and cost-cutting within the timber industry…  Jensen is often labeled an ‘anarcho-primitivist,’ who is quoted as saying in his book A Language Older Than Words that ‘[e]very morning when I awake I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam. I tell myself I should keep writing, though I’m not sure that’s right.’…  I respectfully suggest that the views of persons who, for example, fantasize about blowing up dams (a form of ecoterrorism and criminal act that potentially threatens the lives and property of thousands of people) deserve a healthy skepticism…”

“I would (if the occasion arises),” he concluded, “reverse the majority’s holding in Ecology Center, which would likely change the result in this case.”

Judge Ferguson wasn’t going to take that lying down.  In yet another concurrence (a rebuttal to a concurrence to his own opinion, if you want to get technical) he argued that Smith was the one who was an idiot.

“I take issue with the part of his special concurrence that, with no evidence whatsoever, assigns to the courts of our circuit culpability for the status of the timber industry and impugns the last several decades of our circuit’s environmental law jurisprudence,” he wrote.   “Judge Smith takes the plain fact that district courts in our circuit have enjoined logging projects in the past, adds the claim that the timber industry is declining, and asserts a causal relation between the two. In doing so, Judge Smith commits a textbook logical fallacy: post hoc, ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this).”

“Judge Smith’s ad hominem attack against Jensen and Draffan,” he adds, “does not address the merits upon which the authors base their contentions. Regardless of how one feels about these two individuals, their argument quoted herein is a quantitative analysis, citing other studies. It has nothing to do with blowing up dams.”

To make a long story short, it appears that Judge Smith’s legal view (if not his views on legitimate scholarship) have prevailed.  The 9th Circuit made a highly unusual decision to review Lands Council v. McNair en banc, meaning that an expanded 9th Circuit panel of 11 judges reconsidered the decision of the three-judge Lands Council panel.  

In this en banc decision, the 9th Circuit threw out it’s previous holding in Lands Council v. McNair and the Ecology Center rule.  

This quote sums up the 9th’s updated view of the law with respect to species viability:

“In essence, Lands Council asks this court to act as a panel of scientists that instructs the Forest Service how to validate its hypotheses regarding wildlife viability, chooses among scientific studies in determining whether the Forest Service has complied with the underlying Forest Plan, and orders the agency to explain every possible scientific uncertainty… [T]his is not a proper role for a federal appellate court.”

Next post:  I tour the Mission Brush Project with Forest Service staff and get their reaction to the en banc ruling.  

And in a post to follow, what do Forest Service wildlife biologists have to say about fuel reduction thinnings and wildlife viability?

I have noted in previous posts that Forest Service silviculture has changed dramatically in the last decade or two (see 8/25/08 post).  Clearcutting is no longer the norm.  Instead, since it’s an article of faith among Westerners these days that a century of fire suppression has led to overgrown forests at risk of uncharacteristically severe wildfire, a typical Forest Service logging show these days is designed to reduce fuel.

The Forest Service says these projects improve forest health and protect homes and property from fire (see 7/10/08 and 8/01/08 posts).  A number of environmental groups argue these projects are an old school timber grab dressed up as restoration.

Much of this controversy has played out in federal courts in northern Idaho and western Montana.  My next post will be a detailed account of this legal wrangling.  For now, since a picture is supposedly worth a thousand words, I’ll share some photos of a wildland urban interface fuel reduction thinning project just outside the town of Libby on the Kootenai National Forest in the far northwest corner of Montana.  There’s probably no such thing as a typical thinning show, but this project—the North Kootenai River Project—is probably as close to typical as it gets. 

 
A typical thinning operation in the Northern Region makes extensive use of ground based logging equipment.  This feller-buncher grabs hold of trees, saws them and leaves them for a forwarder to pick up and move to a landing. 

Even a well designed and ecologically sound thinning operation can look pretty ugly.  This is a landing where logs and slash get piled. 

The general idea with these WUI thins is to reduce crown bulk density (the amount of fine material in the crown of trees) and surface fuels.  This is one example I found where logging opened more than enough space.  This area doesn’t have much trees left on it. 

This is much more typical of what the area looks like after harvest.  The smaller, less fire resistant tree species (in this stand, grand fir and some Douglas fir) have been removed, leaving the larger, more fire resistant trees (in this stand, ponderosa pine, western larch and some Douglas fir) anywhere from 10-40 feet apart from one another.  I was a little confused by the paint markings.  Where I’m from, cut trees are marked blue and leave trees are marked orange.  On the Kootenai leave trees are marked blue.  Weird!

So, about a hundred feet beyond and to the left of the background in the photo above is this scene—new home construction in the wildland urban interface. 

Overall, I though this operation was really well done.  And I think this sort of silviculture on national forests is a good idea.  It is perpetuating more resilient forests that are going to better support historical ecological processes (see 7/10/08 post).  If the Forest Service maintains these treatments—burns logging slash and periodically burns regrowth every 5-15 years or so—these treatments will also give firefighters a much better chance of defending structures, except in extreme fire weather where fire usually gets its way. 

The only thing that really troubles me about all this is I get the feeling that I (and every other taxpayer) am subsidizing this guy’s dream house.  The Forest Service should be a good neighbor—shouldn’t let unnatural forest conditions develop next to people’s homes that help fuel big blazes.  But this guy is knowlingly building his home next to a fire-prine forest, presumably because he wants to live next to a forest.  This guy doesn’t pay a dime for the fire protection in the city I live in, 900 miles to the southwest.  Why should I pay for his?  I don’t mind paying for the upkeep of the national forests.  I’d gladly pay more in taxes for restoration of old growth, streams, endangered species habitat and more…  I don’t have fully developed thoughts about this stuff yet, but I just got an uneasy feeling that I don’t want to pay for this guys house not to burn down, same as I doubt he wants to pay for my house not to burn down. 

I haven’t been doing a very good job keeping up with the blog this last week.  I have had many long days of driving.  Some weeks I feel like I’m actually touring national forests and other weeks it feels more like I’m just touring Forest Service offices and state highway systems.  And the occasional honky-tonk joint…

I do get to be in the field with the Gallatin NF tomorrow.  And I’ll finish up some thoughts about silviculture in northern Idaho and western Montana no later than tomorrow (Friday).  Then I’m going to talk about grizzly bears.  In the meantime I’ll leave you with some photos of Zella’s week.

This labor day weekend I am holed up at a friend’s cabin in northern Idaho watching TV.  Political season is in full swing and it’s the first full day of college football.  Happy day!

On Friday me and a couple of my east coast liberal friends did a short hike up Lakeview Mountain near Priest Lake on the Idaho Panhandle National Forests, where we bumped into AJ, an Forest Service silviculturist laying out units of Lakeview-Reeder, a thinning sale in the early stages of NEPA planning.  

“There’s gonna be a better view soon,” he beamed.  

My friend Ayelet, who lives in D.C., has been working for environmental nonprofits for most of the past 15 years.  “A view of what?” she said.  “I want a view of trees!”  AJ’s face fell.  

I laughed and hunkered down for what I was sure would be an entertaining interaction between an Idaho forester and a DC environmentalist…  The red state/blue state dynamic is much on my mind these days.

(AJ did a great job explaining the prescriptions he has planned for the Lakeview Reeder project.  I think he even convinced the hard core environmentalists among us.  He’s another FS employee who’s more than earning his pay.)

The U.S. system of checks and balances vests an undue amount of power in the hands of westerners.  Western states with relatively tiny populations get as much representation in the U.S. Senate as populous eastern states.  These western Senators have historically been beholden to timber, mining and grazing interests.  Western Senators typically get elected when they’re relatively young, they rarely if ever faced serious election year challenges, and they generally serve a very, very long time in the U.S. Senate.  Their seniority means they have their pick of committee assignments, which positions them to pass or block legislation that affects public lands.  All these facts explain why for the better part of the post war period the Forest Service has been focused on resource extraction.  

That started to change in the 1990s, and I think the pace of that political change will continue to accelerate.  We may, in fact, be witnessing a tectonic political shift when it comes to western lands.  The good old boys are riding into the sunset.  

The first to go was Oregon Sen. Bob Packwood, the 10th most senior member of the Senate and chair of the powerful Finance Committee.  Bob resigned in 1995 under threat of expulsion from the Senate for sexual harassment of Senate staffers.  He was replaced by Democrat Ron Wyden.  Then, Oregon’s Mark Hatfield—the 7th most senior Senator and chairman of the Appropriations Committee—retired in 1997, replaced by Republican Gordon Smith.  Timber industry frontman Slade Gorton of Washington was beat by Democrat tech-mogul Maria Cantwell in 2000.  Conrad Burns (R-MT), hounded by controversy and scandal, got beat by Democrat Jon Tester by 3,000 votes in 2006.  

Then there’s Idaho Senator Larry Craig, who’s retiring from the Senate after getting busted last summer in an airport bathroom sex sting operation.  Craig will be replaced by a conservative Republican, but the Idaho delegation will lose its seniority.  And its power.  

(I have noticed that Christianity has become a sort of morning-after pill for wastrel celebrities and scandal-plagued politicians.  “For this situation,” former Quarterback Michael Vick—who shares an attorney with Craig—told the media, “I’ve found Jesus Christ.”  I am sure Craig’s attorney advised his client to get born again.  But the Senator seems to have relied instead on Alberto Gonzales’s PR people, who told him to go the half-witted semi-denial route, which never works.)

It’s senior Senators that matter, and there are now just three senior pro-industry Republican Senators from western states remaining.  Ted Stevens (84 years old and currently under felony indictments for shady financial dealings with lobbyists) is the fourth most senior United States Senator, and chairs the Appropriations Committee when the Republicans are in power.  Pete Domenici of New Mexico (#5 in seniority, and a senior member of the Appropriations Committee) and Orrin Hatch of Utah (#9 in seniority and a senior member of the Finance Committee) are both in their seventies.

Once these gentlemen and John McCain (age 71) retire, the list of senior Senators from western states becomes very blue.  Seven of the eight most senior Senators from western states (not including the two Democratic Senators from Hawaii, I’m here just talking about AK, OR, WA, AZ, NM, NV, CO, WY, UT, and MT) will be Democrats.  And the one Republican (Smith) is in a tight race this cycle.  Seven out of the ten least senior Senators from western states will be Republicans.  

The Senate seniority balance of power is shifting decisively from red states like Alaska and Idaho to blue and purple states like Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada and Montana.  The Senators that will control western public land management legislation for the foreseeable future are folks like Max Baucus (66 years old, #10 in Senate seniority, D-MT), Jeff Bingaman (64, #17, D-NM), Harry Reid (68, #25, D-NV), Diane Feinstein, (#33, 74, D-CA), Barbara Boxer (67, #35, D-CA), Patty Murray (57, #37, D-WA) and Ron Wyden (58, #43, D-OR).  

In other news, my Ducks thrashed the Washington Huskies for the fifth straight year.   Happy day!

(Great photo of UO Running Back high stepping through UW’s high school-like defense here:  www.registerguard.com/rg/Sports/story.csp?cid=128775&sid=7&fid=1)

This is a too-long but over-due post about fire.

These photos are of a prescribed fire on the Deschutes National Forest.  They are courtesy of my good friend Brett Cole, one of the best outdoor photographers in the business.  He’s done a ton of photography on national forests around the country, some of which you can view here:  http://www.wildnorthwest.org/.

I had a good meeting the day before yesterday with almost 20 employees on the Salmon-Challis National Forest in Salmon, ID.  A number of folks joined by conference call—the Forest Supervisor has limited all but essential travel so anyone who wasn’t around the Supervisors Office had to phone in.  

The Supervisor told me he could only stick around the meeting for a few minutes—he had an appeal to read “I told myself I was going to be locked in my office until I got through this,” he said.  He was kind enough to stick around for almost thirty minutes.  A district ranger who was in the building that day was also closeted with an appeal but stopped by for five minutes to talk about a cobalt mine.  Then back to the appeal coal mine…

Appeals and litigation come up a lot in my conversations with FS employees.  There’s often a lot of evidence of appeals and litigation in offices I visit—boxes of court records stacked up in planners and NEPA coordinators’ offices. 

But I was talking about fire.  If every national forest has its own personality, then the Salmon-Challis is definitely a fire forest.  It’s a cultural thing:  Every wall is covered with posters, photos, maps, etc. that document fires.  It’s definitely a staffing and a budget thing:  Close to half of the SCNF’s $20 million budget supports their fire fighting personnel and equipment.  60 of the SCNF’s employees 250 employees are attached to the Forest’s fire-fighting helicopters alone.  

It is definitely a fire thing:  244,000 acres of the 4.3 million acre forest burned last year.  100,000 acres burned the year before that and 400,000 acres the year before that.  

The SCNF’s focus on fire is mirrored by the agency in general.  This year, Congress appropriated $1.2 billion of the Forest Service’s almost $4 billion total budget for fire fighting.  With two months of the fire season still to come, the agency has burned through a billion dollars, and is starting to rob Peter to pay Paul—transferring money from individual national forests to pay for fire suppression operations.  The Washington office estimates this summer’s fire fighting costs will exceed $1.6 billion, $400 million over-budget.  But it could go even higher.  The Forest Service is one large fire incident away from spending more money on fire fighting than they do on all other operations put together.  

3.6 million acres have burned so far this year.  The ten-year average for the nation is 3.7 million acres.  The five-year average is 4.9 million acres.

A big reason this season’s fire fighting has been so expensive is because many fires are burning in areas of California that have a lot of homes.  Fighting fires near housing developments is 50% more expensive than fighting fires in the backcountry.

What this means for the Salmon-Challis is that as much as $1 million of their $20 million budget will be siphoned off to pay for fire fighting costs in California.  Among other things, this means that 600 acres of planned fuel reduction thinning on the forest won’t be completed.  Nationally, the Forest Service is yanking $30 million from the fuel reduction budget to pay for fire suppression.  

This is a little like our national health care system, where the taxpayers foot the bill for a pound of cure when the uninsured show up at hospitals with preventable diseases.  

Or like our national defense policy where we sell arms to… oh, nevermind.  

It has been suggested, by the Wilderness Society and others, that the Forest Service essentially be split in two, with a new Fire Service that has a separate budget, insulating the old Forest Service budget from the annual emergency.  

It’d be nice if the national forest system had a budget that wasn’t subject to an annual raid from the fire shop, but I don’t like idea of two separate agencies doing what should be one well-integrated job.  Forests are adapted to fire, and the Forest Service manages forests.  So they should also manage forest fires.  

The best way to fight fire is with fire.  Increasing wildland fire use (allowing fires to burn consistent with resource objectives) and prescribed fire are part of the solutions to controlling fire costs.  

Congress should act to put more of the onus for controlling fire risk on states, counties and local municipalities.  If local government has to share the costs for Forest Service fire suppression operations they will be motivated to control development in fire prone areas and to require firewise measures—building design and landscaping that make homes survivable during wildfires (I’d recommend taking a moment to read Andy’s take on “shelter in place” here: http://www.fseee.org/forestmag/0904pub.shtml).  

If homeowners designed their properties to survive fire, the great expense of deploying fire fighting resources to protect homes (and the risk to fire fighters) could be significantly reduced.  It is well past time for westerners to adapt their lifestyles to fire.  

Most of the expense in fighting fires currently comes from pouring resources into large fires driven by high winds—efforts that are largely futile.  Forest fires can generally only be controlled when the weather cooperates.

My radical idea for controlling fire costs is to identify fire adapted forests that haven’t had fire for a long time, deploy fire fighting personnel and equipment around these areas when weather conditions are expected to be conducive to controlling fire, and then setting the area on fire.  It is essentially fuel reduction on a large scale, and is also essentially what happens now with large fire incidents, except that fire managers will choose the time and place for the incidents.  

Most employees I’ve talked to have scoffed at this idea.  Some fire will inevitably escape.  There’ll be a lot of smoke.  “Sounds like a big lawyer show to me,” one fire management officer told me.  I guess he doesn’t have room in his office for boxes of legal papers.

At the end of the day I think a basic problem is that Congress wants to fight fire instead of putting fire to work for us.  Congress needs to act to 1) pay for prescribed fire and other fuel reduction measures with the same commitment that they pay for fire suppression; 2) make local government responsible for firewising properties; 3) create variances for smoke (in the long run the smoke from prescribed fire and fire use will be less of a problem than smoke from out-of-control wildfires); and, 4) shield the Forest Service from liability from carefully planned fire on the landscape.  

I am going to be in northern Idaho and western Montana for another week, trying to unravel the local ecology (I’m on a mission to find a nice stand of white pine, if any still exists), meet with local Forest Service employees, and take a few field trips to try and get a handle on the tricky issue of thinning to reduce fuel.  

This is a controversial subject that will take more than a couple posts to dispose of.  It’s a story about silviculture (controlling the establishment, growth, composition, health, and quality of forests to meet diverse needs and values).

Don’t despair, I’ll break up my posts on the subject with some ruminations about politics and white pine.  And some more pictures of Zella.  

Most everyone approaches forest management with some biases derived from their personal values and experience, so I’ll start my discussion of northern Rockies silviculture by disclosing my formative experiences with the Forest Service’s timber program.  I worked for more than 10 years as a lobbyist, litigator, grassroots organizer and general rabble-rouser to stop the Forest Service’s old growth logging program in western Oregon.  A major target of these efforts was the Willamette National Forest.  

The 1.7 million Willamette National Forest—which occupies most of the central portion of the Oregon Cascades—used to be the flagship timber forest of the national forest system.  It is outstanding timber growing country, characterized by Douglas fir and western hemlock, which typically grow in centuries-old stands that often exceed 150,000 board feet an acre (enough to build about 15 new homes).  Throughout most of the 1980s, the Willamette National Forest’s annual timber target was an extraordinary 1 billion board feet.  The Forest Supervisor at the time famously kept a sign on his desk that read:  “A billion board feet or bust.”  At the time, this one national forest in Oregon accounted for 12% of all the dimension lumber consumed in the entire United States.

Logging on the Willamette in almost all cases meant clearcutting stands older than the United States.  The largest stump I’ve ever found on the Willamette National Forest was 11’ 9” in diameter.  The oldest stump I’ve found belonged to a tree that was 1,098 years old when it was cut down in the 1980s.

(The author at the Berry Patch timber sale, last old-growth timber sale logged on the Willamette National Forest.)

Historically, anywhere from 50-80% of the Oregon Coast and Cascade Range was covered in an emerald blanket of classic old growth forest, with overstory trees between 200-850 years old.  After decades of overcutting, around 10% of the original old growth forest cover remains.  Old growth clearcutting, to put the matter in ecological terms, had reduced old growth cover far below the historic range of variability and had replaced wildfire as the dominant disturbance agent on the landscape.  Populations of old-growth dependent forest species like the spotted owl crashed, leading to court injunctions which reduced the Willamette National Forests logging program from a billion board feet in 1987 to about zero in 1992.  

The first thing that Bill Clinton and Al Gore did when they took office in 1993 was to assign a team of scientists to write the Northwest Forest Plan, a compromise plan that placed about two-thirds of the remaining old growth in the region in late-successional reserves that are off-limits to clearcutting and left a third available for harvest.  On the Willamette NF, about 150,000 acres of classic old-growth habitat was still on the chopping block.  

Which was too much for me and others, who waged low-intensity war on the Willamette for six years after the Northwest Forest Plan went into effect.  After six years of protests, administrative appeals of timber sales, lawsuits, bad press, and intervention by the local Congressional delegation, the Willamette stopped planning old growth timber sales.  Today, the Willamette has a very modest timber target of approximately 50mmbf a year, about half of which comes from thinning of 20-50 year old tree plantations that are a legacy of past clearcutting.  The other half comes from innovating thinning operations in older second growth timber.  

I toured one of the latter projects during a brief trip back to Oregon along with FS silviculturists, a Congressional staffer and a couple of folks who profess to oppose the projects for reasons that remain somewhat murky to me.  The project in question—The Oakridge Wildand Urban Interfacing Thinning Project—would thin a stand of fire-regenerated 100-year old Douglas fir in a half-mile arc east of the small town of Oakridge.  

To make a very long story very short, I was quite struck by the following dynamic:  The Forest Service and activists’ roles on the Willamette have reversed themselves in the last eight years.  On the dozens of occasions I went into the field with Willamette National Forest staff in the ‘90s to complain about old growth clearcuts, my colleagues and I typically offered long and detailed explanations as to why old-growth clearcuts were indefensible from an ecological perspective.  

In those days the Forest Service didn’t have much of a response to criticisms offered on the basis of science, law, public opinion or anything else.  All they had to say for themselves was:  “Well, the Northwest Forest Plan tells us to plan timber sales in old growth so that’s what we did.”  

Those were frustrating conversations.  

Out in the field looking at this thinning show, the local FS silviculturist and the district ranger described the ecological rationale for the project at length and made a convincing case.  The activists, for their part, had no particular rebuttal to offer, other than to remind everyone that it was, afterall, a logging show, and, presumably, a bad idea on that basis alone.  

Driving east on I-80 to Idaho I took a call from a friend, who writes for a Eugene, OR newspaper.  She said she’d gotten calls from the 2 or 3 activist types in Eugene who think the Oakridge thinning project was a bad idea.  

“Let me put it into some historical perspective for you,” I said.  “It’s a tale of at least three generations of activists.  The first wave was folks like my boss Andy who gut shot the Willamette with the owl injunctions.  Then came along people like me, we bayoneted the wounded.  Now you got a couple of dingbats who want to molest the corpses.”  

She laughed.  “Now that’s a quote!”  She paused for a moment.  

“It’s not much of a story, though, is it?” I asked.  

“No, not really.”  

If a tree falls in the woods but no one hears it…  Or if a tree falls in the woods and the public actually understands and supports it…  More later.

A little background about grazing management on Forest Service land:  The basic unit of livestock management is a grazing allotment (the Ashely NF in northern Utah, just as an example, has approximately one million acres of the 1.3 million acre forest divided into 80 different grazing allotments).  The use of a national forest grazing allotment by a rancher, like all commercial activities on national forest land, requires a permit.

Congress, in its wisdom, has passed a series of legislative riders, most recently in 2005, which waive NEPA’s requirement to complete the detailed environmental analysis for grazing permits that the Forest Service performs for other commercial permits and other major management activities (like timber sales).  Instead, grazing allotments are “categorically excluded” from NEPA, provided that the allotment “meets or is satisfactorily moving toward” the objectives of the Forest Plan that governs management of that national forest.  In other words, each grazing permit can be renewed without analysis of environmental impacts if the Forest Service judges the allotment comports with the Forest Plan, or is heading in the right direction.  

I have investigated 14 different grazing allotments in the Rocky Mountains so far.  I pack along an NRCS range health assessment sheet to each one and look at each of NRCS’s 17 range health indicators to gauge site stability, hydrologic function and biotic integrity.  

This is a random but not necessarily a scientific survey—I’ve probably passed by a thousand allotments and have selected only a few of them, mostly based on convenience to my line of travel.  And I’m only looking a small portion of what are usually large allotments.  

Almost every Forest Service employee I’ve talked to has told me that grazing allotments in the Rockies are well managed.  I would say this is generally true, based on my unscientific survey.  12 of the 14 allotments had only “none to slight” or “slight to moderate” deviation from the expected conditions, according to the NRCS survey protocol.  Most range specialists would consider them to be in decent shape, and they are probably meeting or trending towards the Forest Plan requirements.

The other two allotments I looked at were in deplorable condition, similar to the allotment in the Raggeds Wilderness I described in the last post.  In these two allotments, forage utilization in the areas I walked far exceeded the Forest Plans’ 50% utilization requirement.  The allotments were completely overun with invasive species and the streams I looked at were badly eroded, head cut, and trampled.  In general, I would characterize these allotments as disaster areas.  

The basic problem with national forest grazing management is that there’s a huge difference in the condition of different allotments, the differences are mostly due to the standard of care employed by different ranchers, and there doesn’t appear to be good—or at least not consistently applied—tools to distinguish between good cattle management and bad management.  One district ranger put it to me this way:  

“There are a lot of challenges there [with the grazing program].  I think that there are some permittees who are very conscientious and others that don’t spend much time with their herd.  Some are very good at following the annual plans and others are not.  Simple things can make a big difference, like where put you salt blocks.  Some do a very good job of that.  Some don’t.  Some do a good job maintaining water developments and fences and there are those who could do a better job.”  

Forest Service managers can take action against permit holders who aren’t following the rules, and they could find that a particular allotment isn’t meeting or trending towards meeting the Forest Plan when it comes time to renew a permit.  Having or not having a federal lands grazing permit, though, is often the difference between barely making it in the cattle business and going under.  Going under is bad news for the rancher, but also bad news for the national forest, because unprofitable ranches are often subdivided, with open space adjacent to national forest land lost forever and all the problems that subdivisions bring in terms of increased recreation pressure, habitat fragmentation, fire risk, etc.  “The worst ranch is better than the best subdivision” is a frequent refrain among Forest Service managers.  

Grazing management on national forest land can be problematic because at the end of the day Congress has made it an arbitrary judgment call for managers.  Judgment calls come out differently depending on the circumstances.

“That’s a hard call,” the District Ranger quoted above told me about the decision to cancel a permit or reduce the herd a rancher is allowed on an allotment.  “You cut a guy’s throat.  They’re hard calls politically and they’re hard calls personally.”  

Here’s my solution:  First, Congress should waive grazing fees.  The current fee structure is a joke.  The Forest Service currently charges ranchers $1.13 to graze a cow and a calf on for a month—it probably costs more to pay someone to process the paperwork for the fee than the grazing brings in.  The Forest Service should establish objective environmental standards that ensure ecological integrity for each allotment.  Conditions should be monitored.  If conditions are being met than permits should be renewed.  If they aren’t being met, permitee should be required to pay for necessary restoration, exclosures, developments, etc (an “upward trend” is one thing, paying until the standard is actually met will make for a meaningful trend).  If restoration is impossible with cattle remaining on the allotment, or if the permittee can’t afford restoration treatments, the permit should be canceled.  Second, the Forest Service needs to go into the conservation easement business in a big way, providing funds to neighboring ranchlands to maintain open space when grazing can’t pay.  This investment save money in the long run—as discussed in previous posts, subdivisions cost the Forest Service an arm and a leg when it comes to fire protection work, recreation management, and infrastructure maintenance.

These are imperfect suggestions that won’t make everyone (anyone?) happy.  I welcome better suggestions.  

It was 9:30 PM and I was booming down Highway 80 east of Salt Lake City, having finished with my last Salt Lake meeting (a great party, actually—thanks much to Andrea and Shane).  I was thinking about Utah and the West and the sign that marked the on-ramp I’d taken fifteen minutes earlier:  

There’s a world of difference in that choice of direction, west or east out of SLC.  The eastern route spills gently down the Platte River into rolling prairies and fields of corn and wheat—the American heartland.  The western route toils up the Sierra Nevadas and spits you out onto the fruit orchards of the Sacramento River Valley and the broad golden gate of San Francisco.

So, I was thinking about travelers and immigrants with the dull gleam of the Great Salt Lake to my right, and I suddenly remembered my own family’s Utah connection.  

My great grandfather Ern Wettstein first came to this country from Switzerland, oh, I guess about a hundred years ago or more.  He was ten years old (I may get many of the details of this story wrong).  Then as now the Mormon Church sends missionaries around the world and my great, great grandparents were Swiss Catholic converts to the Mormon faith whose two sons—Ern and his brother Louis–were sponsored to come to America by a Utah LDS church.  They made the trip across Europe, across the Atlantic and across the United States (probably taking a route near modern day Hwy. 80) by themselves.  

The boys were separated when they got to Utah.  Ern was sent to the mountains to help herd sheep.  His only companion was an elderly sheepherder who promptly died, leaving the ten year old stuck on a mountain with a bunch of sheep and a dead body for weeks (months?) before someone came and got him.

That is the story as I remember it.  I will have to send this link to my grandmother—the family historian.  She can correct any inaccuracies.  At any rate, I don’t think anyone in the family has had much to do with ranching or the Mormon Church ever since.  

I’ve looked at 14 different cattle grazing allotments in the Rockies.  It’s been a hit and miss experience.  Most allotments appear to be well managed.  A case in point was a huge sheep allotment I visited in the Flat Top Wilderness on the White River National Forest.  Other than some rutted stream crossings (which I believe were caused by recreational pack stock), the allotment appears, to casual inspection, to be in almost pristine condition.  All of the native grasses are present in great abundance. The streams are all Rosgen Class E—sinuous bowed channels of crystal clear water. 

I actually encountered a large sheep herd and their Peruvian herders—skilled sheep handlers who were careful to maintain grass cover by moving their herd every day around the 235,000-acre wilderness area.  Relatively small numbers of animals in a large landscape is the basic conservation strategy.

Trout Creek in the Raggeds Wilderness on the Grand Mesa-Uncompahgre and Gunnison (GMUG) National Forests was an entirely different story.  There are cows everywhere.  The wilderness trail that follows Trout Creek (#836) is nothing but a dusty and rutted stock path.  Grass heights are well below the 4” utilization standard of the Forest Plan with at least two months more to go in the grazing season.  There are non-native invasives everywhere.  As for streams, the photo below pretty much says it all.  Yes, that is a stream, or at least what used to be a stream. 

Why the world of difference?  I am going to try and answer this question and suggest some solutions in the next post.  

This is the next to last post that involves the state of Colorado.  I think Colorado is the second most scenic state in the Lower 48.

Colorado is a lot like Oregon, where I’m from.  It is a squarish shaped state, divided in two by a mountain range.  At 104,000 square miles, Colorado is the 8th largest state.  Oregon, at 98,000 square miles, is the 9th largest.  Oregon has the 4th highest percentage of federal land (53%, with 15.6 million acres of national forests).  Colorado has the 10th highest percentage (37% with 24 million acres of national forest land).  

The biggest difference between Colorado and Oregon as far as I’m concerned is the scale and intensity of development within national forest lands.  National Forests in Oregon may have the occasional inholding or resort, but in general when you’re driving in an Oregon national forest all you see is… forest.

In Colorado it doesn’t seem like you can drive Forest Service roads for more than a couple dozen miles (usually less) without encountering ranchettes, developments, resorts, etc., etc.  

Part of it is that Colorado has a somewhat more extensive history of mining, which left more inholdings.  It has to have a lot to do with differences in land use regulation.  Until recently, Oregon had the strongest land use planning in the country.  It’s hard to develop forestland.  

Maybe the biggest difference is demographics.  Colorado and Oregon are the same size, but Colorado has a million more people.  

Here’s a photo of the ugliest of the many ugly developments I encountered traveling roads within Colorado national forests. 

This atrocity is known as “Bishop’s Castle.”  It was designed and built by one Jim Bishop, who is a character, or a total idiot, depending on who you ask (I say if he were any smarter he’d be an idiot).  He acquired this tiny parcel within the Pike-San Isabel National Forest outside of Pueblo, CO thirty years ago and has been slowly building the castle ever since.  His latest addition is a moat.  

Jim is what you’d call an anti-government nut.  The whole area is festooned with signs explaining why you don’t have to pay income taxes or get a drivers license.  According to a Forest Service employee I talked to, most of the rocks that went into construction were stolen from adjacent Forest Service land.  Both the Forest Service and the state of Colorado and the Forest Service have fought a long-running battle with Bishop over the rocks, building permits, etc., etc.  Jim appears to have outlasted them.  

“Well, don’t quote me…” said one Forest Service employee I talked to.  So I guess I won’t quote him.  But the Forest Service appears to have essentially given up on trying to restrain the bizarre behavior of their unruly neighbor.

On any given day Bishop’s Castle is not only the worst eyesore in the Rocky Mountains but also a genuine hazard to motorists.  (Everyone stops to gawk, but there’s no parking, so there’s dozens of cars jammed alongside the road, pedestrians milling about, etc.)

“You have to sign the guest book before you go up to the top,” a crazy looking older lady told me as I contemplated the weird Kievan Rus meets Monty Python minarets and leafed through the anti-government propaganda.

“I think I’ll just, uh, stay on the ground,” I told her.  

“Well, you still have to sign in,” she said.  ““It’s a release of liability when you sign the book.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” I told her.  “I’m a sovereign citizen.  I’m not bound by any Article III courts.”  I held up one of the pamphlets.

“Oh!  Well, of course.”  She looked a little hurt.  “But you still have to sign in.  And, um… that’s a really pretty pooch, but there’s no pets allowed.”  She pointed to a sign:  NO PETS.  

“This is a service animal,” I told her.  

She put her hands on her hips.  “You’re not disabled.”  

“I have a social anxiety disorder,” I told her.

She wagged her finger at me.  “You’re not crazy,” she exclaimed.  

They were on to me.  

I just spent several hours on the phone with Sprint trying to figure out why my wireless card isn’t working.  After much back and forth they informed me that the problem was that the card is broken.  So I am only going to have internet access between now and when I am back in Oregon on August 13 if I stop at one of them internet cafes. 

Hopefully some photos of Zella will tide everyone over until I get back online (I know it’ll keep SJ happy).  My updated schedule is also below.  Drop me a line if you’re anywhere around these stops!

Zella napping on the San Juan NF.

Zella investigates pipeline route on the White River NF.

Updated schedule:

August 9-10:  Meetings with folks in Salt Lake City.

August 11:  Ashley NF, Vernal, UT

August 13:  Willamette National Forest, Oakridge, OR

August 14th:  Eugene BLM, Elkton, OR

August 15:  Portland, OR

August 18:  Seattle, WA

August 22:  Clearwater NF, CouerdAlene, ID

August 25:  Salmon-Challis NF, Salmon, ID

Sept. 2:  Lewis and Clark NF, Great Falls, MT

Sept. 3:  Gallatin NF, Bozeman, MT.

Sept. 5:  Dakota NGs, Bismarck, ND

Sept. 8:  Black Hills NF, Custer SD

I apologize for the delay in writing.  I have been experiencing some Internet difficulties.  

I have been writing for a month and only mentioned fire tangentially, which is a huge oversight.  Fire management, as anyone who works with the Forest Service knows, increasingly dominates the time, energy and resources of the agency.  According to Randall O’Toole (http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=12596), the Forest Service’s budget for firefighting, adjusted for inflation, increased by 253% between 1980 and 2002.  At the same time, the National Forest System budget (which funds everything from timber sales to trail maintenance) declined by 37%.  O’Toole claims the Forest Service is becoming the Fire Service.  

(Only of the dozens of employee I’ve mentioned these seemed to be aware of this vast differential.  That guy, a senior regional planner, told me he was convinced that increased purchasing costs and overhead meant that the real budget of the NFS had declined by more than 50%).  

Fire was on everyone’s minds when I visited with the Caribou-Targhee National Forest and Curlew National Grassland two days ago.  The office had just gotten news of the helicopter crash on a fire in the Shasta Trinity NF in northern California.  Several CTNF employees were on that fire and everyone was very nervous that they might have been killed or injured.  Thankfully, no one from the CT was hurt.  But the latest news I’ve heard, which I can’t confirm, is that nine firefighters and air crew were killed, including two from an Oregon company I used to work with.  

I am trying to rely entirely on my own thinking when it comes to this blog, but as is often the case, everything that I could say about fire fighting already got said much better in this news article, a must read for everyone: http://www.idahostatesman.com/387/story/447061.html.

I really have to insist that people read this piece.  Half the Forest Service’s fire fighting budget—more than a half billion dollars or so—is spent protecting structures, but this effort is profoundly ineffective at protecting structures compared to simple actions that homeowners take to “fire wise” their property.  

I have visited four completed and two planned fuel reduction projects in the Wildland Urban Interface.  I made a point of checking out nearby houses.  Not one of them (in Colorado and Utah) had so much as cleared brush around their houses.  About a third of the houses I looked at had wooden roofs.  

Is thinning in the wildland urban interface a waste of time?  I have spent a considerable amount of time studying this issue.  The bottom line is that carefully planned thinning can moderate fire behavior.  More moderate fire should, in theory, better protect homes if for no other reason than it allows for deployment of fire fighting resources that might otherwise be drawn back in the face of big fast moving flame fronts.  

(A Forest Service study, the 2002 “Interim Hayman Fire Case Study Analysis,” looked at the 21,000 acres of modified fuels including previous wildfires, prescribed burning, thinning, logging, etc. that were encountered by the 2002 Hayman fire southeast of Denver.  Forest Service researchers and university scientists found that the fire’s response to these fuel modifications “was complex and does not lend itself to any one conclusion or summary.”)
 
But it’s equally clear that all the time and energy reducing fuels—and defending structures during a fire—is Sisyphean task if homeowners aren’t compelled to firewise their homes.

The conventional wisdom among the silviculturists and planners that I’ve talked to in R2 and R4 holds that the region’s massive mountain pine beetle outbreak has significantly increased fire risk and that beetle killed trees around homes need to be salvaged as quickly as possible.  But the researchers at Colorado State and the Rocky Mountain Research Station I’ve talked to take a considerably more nuanced view.  They say it’s theoretically possible, as I’ve suggested earlier, that fires in beetle killed stands might badly damage soils 20-50 years down the road when all that fuel’s on the ground.  But in the short term, the pine beetle has actually reduced the risk of fast running crown fire by defoliating the tree (it’s the needles that fuel crown fires). 

I tried to flesh out these intricacies in a conversation with one senior resource planner at the Rocky Mountain Region in Denver, but didn’t get very far.  “Science has nothing to do with this,” he said.  “If a fire gets started in there, it’s going to go through their like a banshee.  This is about a massive amount of dead woody debris around houses—there’s no science to that.” 

No science to fire.  A nearby public information officer winced as I furiously scribbled notes.  I feel bad relating it—I am here to learn and not try and make people look bad.  But I really can’t keep that one to myself. 

By the way, I am a supporter of a strong Forest Service silvicultural program, and I’ll take up the subject in more detail soon.  

I was just wondering what would come up first if I Google “aspen.”  The pretty tree or the wretched berg?  Predictably, it is not the tree.  

Aspen the tree is an interesting species (the overpriced municipality is to be avoided).  One Forest Service employee told me it is the most common forest cover in the US.  Aspens typically grow in clonal colonies—stands usually easily regenerate after disturbance (fire, logging, blow down) via root suckers.  The tree—at least the tree trunk—usually only lives for 40-150 years, but the root system can be absurdly long lived.  Another employee has provided me directions to “Pando” a colony of aspens on the Fishlake NF in Utah that is supposed to be 80,000 years old, making it the oldest and largest living thing in existence (the Malheur National Forest in Oregon also claims to have the oldest and largest living thing—some sort of fungal mat).   

Aspen is ubiquitous in Colorado.  It is also, in areas, experiencing a mysterious and, to many, disturbing decline.  Older aspen stands are dying of the usual aspen old-age sorts of things:  Canker infections and insects like the poplar borer.  But there’s no regeneration of younger aspens.  This problem, called “Sudden Aspen Decline” has affected as much as 340,000 acres.  The GMUG, San Juan and Rio Grande NFs have been particularly hard hit. 

(Low to moderate SAD stand.  Note some aspens are defoliated.)

Nobody knows exactly what’s going on, but aspens on low elevation and south and west slopes are the worst affected.  These sites are the driest and warmest, so it is possible that this cold tolerant species is experiencing a climate-change induced range adjustment.  

I spent the day on Terror Creek outside of Paonia, CO on the GMUG with Wayne Shepperd and Skip Smith.  Skip is a researcher at CSU in Fort Collins.  Wayne used to work for the Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station.  Wayne claims to be retired, but a fishing pole is not among the gear in his pickup.  

Wayne and Skip are looking for nine different units or plots of trees on Terror Creek with with low, moderate and heavy incidents of SAD.  Portions of each unit will be logged this winter.  Each unit will have an unlogged control, allowing the researchers to confirm if logging helps arrest SAD.   

We tramp around for the better part of the day looking for “moderate” intensity SAD outbreaks.  It is harder than you’d think.  Each plot has to be at least 15 acres to allow for logging and a control.  It can’t be too SAD, or not SAD enough.

 

(Skip and Wayne)

I ask Wayne a lot of questions about the Rocky Mountain Research Station, where he was a research silviculturist for thirty years.  The biggest change, he says, is in funding.  The research arm of the Forest Service used to be the pride and joy of the agency, figuring out how to reforest tough sites, maintain water flows and more.  Today, research stations around the country are losing retiring personnel that aren’t being replaced.  Labs are quietly closing.  “Now you have to hustle for money,” Wayne says.  In his last years with the RMRS he became an expert grant writer.  

Wayne is an old school researcher.  He radiates can do.  Every obstacle the forester encounters will yield to a carefully planned siege of replicated experimental plots.  He tells me I’ve got to go look at the Black Hills National Forest.  “A very well managed forest—what forest management should be, if you ask me.”  (I’ll be on the Black Hills on Sept. 8).  

Wayne and Skip were pretty well skunked finding moderate intensity plots.  But at the end of the day, walking back to Wayen’s rig with thunder sounding ominously overhead, we find the perfect plot.  More than 15 acres, some SAD… but not too much.  

“You never find it until you stop looking,” Skip beamed.  

Water seems to be more and more in the news.  In California, it’s lack of water—this spring was the driest ever in San Jose, which has been keeping records since 1875.  The same week I began this trip there were 842 wildfires burning in California—most of them started by dry lightning (think regular thunderstorm where the rain evaporates before it hits the ground).  

In the Midwest it’s too much water and massive flooding.  

Here in the Denver area, it’s been something like 20 straight days of 90+ temperatures, which beat a record set in 1874.  I spent a good part of the afternoon up to my neck in the Boulder Reservoir.  Zella doesn’t care for water.  She’s a ridgeback, a dog bred for the desert with small knuckly paws and almost zero body fat.  Even Zella was in the water—she looks like an oversized muskrat when she swims.  

Almost every Forest Service employee I’ve talked to in Colorado brings up water, or lack thereof.  Water is a major reason we have national forests.  The Organic Administration Act of 1897, which established the national forests, sets forth only three reasons why a national forest can be established:  “To improve and protect the forest,” “to furnish a continuous supply of timber,” or “to secure favorable conditions of water flows.”  

There is a growing sense within the Rocky Mountain Region that providing water will be a major 21st century mission.  

“Water is the big ecological issue in the context of climate change,” a San Juan NF employee told me.

“Water’s just a huge issue for us,” a GMUG line officer told me.  Grand Mesa alone has 300 small reservoirs that provide water for municipalities and irrigators.

“Water, water, water and water,” a line officer on the Rio Grande told me when I asked him to name the top three (3) issues he deals with.  On the Rio Grande, water is even more important than oil and gas.  140,000 acres of gas leases between Monte Vista and South Fork were deferred because farmers “are nuts about water protection.”  

“We’re just starting to try and figure out the effects of climate change on water storage, just starting to ask ourselves:  How are we going to be responsive to what’s coming” one senior Rocky Mountain Region planner told me several days ago in a meeting in Golden.  Several people have told me they foresee more hydropower development on national forest land.  Many people have told me it’s likely that the Forest Service will be asked to construct more high elevation reservoirs to capture snow pack runoff.  There will be less snow pack, and it will melt earlier, possibly earlier than irrigators need it for crops.  Hence more reservoirs.

Forest dynamics impacts water.  Most people in the know will tell you that 3 million acres of lodgepole will be dead within the next five years.  In twenty years, most of those trees will be jack strawed on the forest floor.  The fire and fuels guys say this huge fuel bed will burn the heck out of soil when there’s a fire.  There could be widespread watershed cumulative effects that impact water delivery.  

Grazing affects water.  More on that later.  

Oil and gas development impacts water quality.  Dozens of reservoirs in Colorado have mercury warnings.  Researchers are starting to notice dramatic changes in acid neutralization capacity in alpine lakes from gas development emissions.

Climate change impacts water.

People impact water.  More people require more water.  

Invasive species impact water. Zebra mussels and Quagga mussels are starting to have big impact on water recreation on national forest lands.  

Moose impact water.  When Lewis and Clark traveled through the Rockies they didn’t see one moose. Since then thousands of moose migrating from the north have been tearing up riparian areas, suppressing willow growth.  Ditto elk.  Managers are trying to reduce the elk herds on most national forests in Colorado.  Wolves have migrated into the north part of the state.  Research in Yellowstone shows wolves can improve riparian conditions by chasing elk out of dense wolf hiding cover in riparian areas into more open upland zones (“the ecology of fear” is what OSU researchers call the phenomenon).  

Many riparian areas in the Rockies are in bad shape because cottonwoods are aging, declining, and not being replaced by young cottonwoods.  Cottonwoods have a tiny seed that only competes on silt deposited by floods.  Most rivers are regulated by dams and there’s no flooding.  

There’s the Ditch Bill, the 1996 Colorado statute that lets the Forest Service permit existing irrigation ditches on national forest land (“ditches, ditches, oh, ditches, yeah, we deal with a lot of ditches” one line officer told me, his eyes audibly rolling around in his head).  He paused for a long moment.  

“Water is a huge issue for us.”  

This is another post about forest ecology that may be boring for some folks but is necessary background for future observations about Rocky Mountain forests.  I am including a lot of photos, hopefully that will keep people’s attention…

Good forest management has to recognize that forests are very different.  Some forests want to get quite old—some don’t.  I grew up in the Oregon Coast Range, a very moist region dominated by Douglas fir/western hemlock forests.  This forest type experiences stand replacing fire quite infrequently and individual trees often grow to be quite old—Douglas fir is capable of growing to be 700-800 years old or even older (the oldest age cohort in the Coast Range tends to be around 400-500 years old).  

The Forest Service used to refer to these old growth stands as “decadent”—biological wastelands of rotting trees that needed to be “regenerated” (clearcut) to make room for fast growing young Douglas fir.

More recently the Forest Service has recognized that “decadence”—copious rotting logs and broken off trees—creates a unique and increasingly rare habitat.  I know of no silvicultural treatment that makes much ecological sense in these classic moist old-growth Douglas fir/western hemlock forest.  Regenerating the stand can mimic the effects of stand replacing fire… but there’s already way more than enough young even-aged stands in western Oregon.  

Other forest types don’t like to get very old.  A classic example is aspen, which I’ll discuss in a future post.  

We’re frequently told that forests in the West are too dense, in danger of burning up in unnaturally severe fires, and require thinning to restore more open forest conditions.  This is true, but only in some forest types.  There are many fine examples of ponderosa pine forests in the Rockies, found between 6,000–8,000 feet in Colorado where I’ve been for several weeks.  In some parts of the Rockies, especially in southern Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, ponderosa pine grows in stands that were once quite open, the open conditions maintained by frequent, low intensity fire that killed understory plants but left the widely spaced overstory trees.  Thinning to remove understory trees and restore open forest conditions makes a lot of sense in these stands.  The open forest provides unique habitat for different species, and there is compelling evidence that these forests are not resilient (see 7/10 post about forest change and resilience) and that severe forest fires will convert these ponderosa stands into brush fields.  

Open, park like ponderosa stands were less common in other parts of the Rockies.  Dendrochronological (tree ring dating) research in the Front Range in northwestern Colorado indicates that ponderosa pine forests there might have grown to be quite dense and experienced severe fire at times.  It is less clear that thinning is appropriate in this forest type—at least to achieve strictly ecological objectives.  

Lodgepole pine and spruce and fir forests grow at higher elevations sites in the Rockies between 9,000–11,000 feet.  These sites are colder, receive more precipitation and are snow-bound for longer than lower elevation sites.  As a result, they don’t burn as frequently as lower elevation forests and are often quite dense.  In general, there is little or no ecological rationale for thinning these forests—they have always burned in infrequent, high severity fires.

Many of these high elevation types are experiencing significant insect outbreaks that are killing enormous swaths of trees.  Spruce are being killed by the spruce beetle (see 7/13 post about spruce).  The mountain pine beetle has killed more than 750,000 acres of lodgepole pine in the northern Rockies.  Neither epidemic is without historic analog—these sorts of massive die-offs have happened before and are not “unnatural.” 

The factors that contribute to big die-offs interact with one another in complex ways.  The biggest culprit is probably drought, which stresses trees and makes them much more susceptible to attack by bugs.  The other major contributing factor is stand age and structure.  Many contemporary lodgepole stands in Colorado date to large fires in the 1850s (many of them associated with early land development, especially mining—see 7/16 post).  Today, these stands are relatively old for lodgepole.  They are mostly even aged, closely spaced stands—the stand structure that is most vulnerable to bark beetles.  Thinning is generally ineffective in preventing these outbreaks and I am not aware of a particular reason why we should prevent these outbreaks.  Some people don’t like the aesthetic of dead trees.  I think they look cool.  

A number of researchers and managers I’ve spoken to have told me that they think that the fires in the lodgepole type—like 2002’s 138,000-acre Hayman Fire—are somewhat larger than they’ve been in the past.  These folks have suggested that the most appropriate ecological outcome would be patchy fires of 1,000–5,000 acres that create a more diverse mosaic of age classes on the landscape and break up fuel continuity. 

“Fire is the solution, not the problem,” one Forest Service line officer told me two weeks ago.  I’ll have a lot more to say about fire later.  

A sign at the Comanche National Grasslands reads:  “Anyone can love a mountain, but it takes soul to love a prairie.”  Someone at the office told me that Teddy Roosevelt said that.  Personally, I don’t believe it.  TR did not count “soul” as a virtue, and the line has nothing of the rhythm or diction of his conservation or outdoors aphorisms.

The Forest Service is as diverse as the landscapes it manages—landscapes which are found from sea level to 14,500 feet, from 200 inches of precipitation a year to practically nothing at all.  The agency manages trees that can grow four feet a year and trees that grow four feet every thousand years or so.  The Forest Service manages rainforests (both temperate and tropical), glaciers, wetlands, mountains… and prairies.  The latter is a bit of a puzzler, since prairies are sort of the antithesis of forest, the other side of the coin, as it were.

Four million acres of grassland came to be managed by the Forest Service as a result of “agricultural maladjustments,” in the words of New Deal/Progressive era agricultural technocrats.  They were either the least productive, or the most badly used farmlands (or both)—mostly in the Great Plains—that started to literally come apart at the seams during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when billions of tons of soil were blown halfway across the country in storms that lasted weeks.

They are, as an employee at the Comanche Grassland office in southeastern Colorado told me, lands “that never should have seen a plow.”  They were initially “land utilization projects,” lands purchased by the federal government from bankrupt farmers under (Franklin) Roosevelt’s national soil conservation program.  They were passed around an alphabet soup of now mostly defunct New Deal bureaucracies until the found a home with the Forest Service in 1960.  Like all national forest lands, they are managed under a multiple use mandate, used for grazing, minerals, recreation and more.

(The Great Plains National Grasslands are, an employee told me, “still a recovering landscape.”)

The major ecological challenge currently facing the grasslands is, just as it was in the 1930s, drought.  Seven of the last nine years have been dry, very, dry.

The Great Plains is no place for tenderfeet.  On Saturday Zella and I were caught in a truly spectacular thunderstorm hiking out to the Pawnee Buttes on the Pawnee Grassland in northeastern Colorado (managed by the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest).  The sky was cobalt blue with a few big puffy white clouds when I broke out my camera tripod and the big 6×7cm format camera and began serious contemplation of the buttes.  Ten minutes after that a shadow fell on the short grass prairie and I felt a chill gust of wind.  Ten minutes after that we were being pelted by walnut-sized chunks of hail.  Zella jumped on the back of my legs as the first bolt of lightning touched down a quarter mile away and we slid on our butts down a steep embankment into three inches of muddy water in a gully that’d been bone dry thirty minutes before.  I laughed to reassure Zella.  She wasn’t buying it.

Ten minutes after that the sun broke through a light rain and a big rainbow grew out of the tops of one of the buttes (an image that won’t see the light of day until I get this huge bag of film developed.  Boy are you guys in for a treat!).

Models of global warming in the Great Plains predict both more heat stress events—periods of 90+ degree heat that lasts for more than three days and damages stock and crops—and an increased frequency of high intensity rainfall.

These rapid climactic mood swings are a typical breeding ground for tornadoes.  In 1999, a rash of F4 and F5 strength tornadoes struck the southern plains, causing a $1 billion in damages and killing 54 people.  Recent flooding in the Midwest may also be a symptom of changing climate.

I have no idea what the management implications of these changes will be for the grasslands.  Improvements in agricultural practices and erosion control will probably avert another 1930s style Dust Bowl.  We think.  But what other “agricultural maladjustments” are lurking behind the corner of changing weather?  What role will the national grasslands, and the Forest Service play in helping society adapt?

I rambled on for too long in the last post about the Bull Mountain pipeline and the Clinton Roadless Rule.  Unfortunately, I’m not quite done with the subject.  The somewhat bizarre (to me at least) interpretation of the Roadless Rule in the case of the Bull Mountain pipeline snaps into blurrier focus when considering the case of the West Elk coal mine’s efforts to capture methane gas, which I’ll describe for you as I watch Zella play in one of Fort Collins’s many fine dog parks.

(It’s funny the way different towns have different attitudes about dogs.  In Moab, dogs are prohibited in city parks, even on a leash.  Other municipalities worship dogs, constructing elaborate parks complete with exercise equipment and, in the case of Fort Collins, a giant swimming pool.  In Boulder, dogs can own property, run for city office and bring civil suits.)

Anyway, in the last post I described the twenty mile-long underground Bull Mountain pipeline that travels through several inventoried roadless areas on the Grand Mesa-Uncompahgre and Gunnison (GMUG) National Forests.  A twenty-mile road is being constructed to build the pipeline and a right-of-way will be maintained for decades to service the pipeline with motorized vehicles.  None of this, according to the Forest Service and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, constitutes road-building or a violation of the Roadless Rule.  

The GMUG is also one of just four national forests in the country that has a coal mine within the forest boundary.  Actually, I think they have several.  One of the largest is the West Elk mine on the Paonia District.  Methane, a greenhouse gas that that is almost 20 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than CO2, gets released from rock formations during coal mining.  In the West Elk Mine, the methane is vented into the atmosphere for workers’ safety (methane explodes).  Local environmental groups, led by the Western Slope Environmental Resource Council (http://www.wserc.org/) have been pushing the company to capture gas, which can be used to generate energy (the mine uses a lot of energy), reducing greenhouse gas emissions.  The company didn’t think the idea would pay, but under pressure to be a good corporate neighbor, they relented.  Kudos to WSERC!

Problem #1:  The BLM, which manages minerals (methane is a “mineral” in the federal mining/energy bureaucracy) underneath Forest Service land can’t just let the West Elk Mine harvest methane.  They have to buy the methane via a competitive bidding process… even though the West Elk Mine is the only one who could conceivably make use of the methane (which is only released because of their mining).  This problem, amazingly, got solved after several members of the Colorado Congressional delegation twisted different bureaucratic arms.  

Problem #2:  The surface above the mine—and the methane—is an inventoried roadless area.  Harvesting the methane is essentially a matter of burying small diameter pipes overhead.  But laying small diameter pipes violates the Roadless Rule, according to the Forest Service.  So plans to capture methane are on hold.  

Go figure.  

As discussed in the last post, the Clinton Roadless Rule, battered by litigation and counter rulemaking by the Bush administration, is still the law of the land.  It prohibits logging and roadbuilding in inventoried roadless areas.  

It pays to pay close attention to the details (and definitions) of rules, laws, regulations, etc.  You could read the fine print and find out that a lot of things you thought were roads were not roads.

That being said, there’s actually very little leeway when it comes to how the Clinton Rule defines roads:

Road:  A motor vehicle travelway over 50 inches wide, unless designated and managed as a trail. A road may be classified, unclassified, or temporary.  66 C.F.R. 3272 (Jan. 12, 2001).

So, the Forest Service can’t build a road in a roadless area and then obliterate it.  That’s a temporary road, which is still a road.  They could theoretically build a road that is less than 50 inches wide.  Or they could designate it as a trail.  “Trail” is not defined in the Rule, but, presumably, it means a “trail,” as distinguishable from a “road.”

So, is this a road?

This is the road the Forest Service is building across the Clear Creek, East Willow, Reno Mountain and Baldy Mountain roadless areas on the Grand Mesa-Uncompahgre and Gunnison National Forests.  It is not a typical national forest road in the sense that it’s designed to provide access to timber sales or hiking trailheads or the like.  This road is being used to provide access for the construction of an underground natural gas pipeline from the Bull Mountain gas fields to the I-70 transmission corridor.  

A number of local conservation groups sued the Forest Service, arguing that a road is a road is a road.  According to the Forest Service’s EIS, this particular road is temporary—the 1,000-foot construction right-of-way will be will be rehabilitated and revegetated.
Trees, however, will not be allowed to regrow in the pipeline’s permanent 50-foot
right-of-way. In addition, “surface patrols,” including “motorized vehicles,” will be “authorized on a case-by-case basis in order to access the right-of-way for emergency repair needs”

50 foot… motorized…  It sounds exactly like what the Roadless Rule prohibited, but in this case the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the Forest Service that this road was really a “construction zone,” not a road, and threw out environmental plaintiff’s lawsuit.    

I walked two miles of the road corridor with Sloan Shoemaker and Peter Hart of Carbondale, CO based Wilderness Workshop, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against the road.  There’s already a dirt ATV track that’s been punched across streams, through false hellebore meadows, wetlands, wildflower meadows and aspen groves.  (Hundreds of acres of forest is on the chopping block to build the “construction zone,” including 200+ year old spruce trees.  The trees will be sold to logging companies.  The Roadless Rule also prohibits commercial logging.)

“What a gorgeous place,” Peter told me.  “This place has world class wilderness values.  And they’re just going to despoil it.”  

This story would start to sound a little hyperbolic if I told you that we ran into a grizzled elk guide decked out in grimy jeans, jean shirt, cowboy hat, complete with sidearm… a guy with a bright, clear eyes, and a gravelly voice that breaks when he talks about the pipeline scattering the game…  So I won’t get into too much detail about that chance encounter, but, yeah, it actually did happen.  

“We’re getting our asses handed to us on energy development,” Sloan admitted to me when we were back in his truck, heading back to civilization.  I thought about this for a while.  I suggested in the previous post that energy development is to the Rockies what “get the cut out” used to be in the Pacific Northwest.  An inexorable tide of development for which there was no recourse.  

Timber companies logged off 90% of the classic western hemlock and Douglas fir old growth in Oregon and Washington until court injunctions pulled the rug out from under the timber program.  Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking there’s any such thing as a strictly objective judiciary.  Judges’ decisions track fairly closely with mainstream conventions.  The bottom line when it comes to old growth logging in the Pacific Northwest is that judicial decisions reflected a widespread conviction that we didn’t really need to log 400-year old trees to maintain a high quality of life in the region.

We’re definitely not there yet when it comes to energy development.  Your average person thinks we need cheap energy to maintain their quality of life.  And given what’s happening with the economy as fuel prices have soared, they may be right.  

A final thought:  Natural gas like they’re pumping across Colorado roadless areas is a relatively clean burning fuel…  and it doesn’t come from the Middle East or Africa.  Do a Google Image search for “oil Nigeria.” It’s a travesty what’s happening to roadless areas in Colorado, but it’s nothing compared to what’s happening to the people and ecosystems of other countries.

The U.S. courts won’t find obviously illegal road building for energy development to be illegal until they think our society can do without fossil fuels like they know we can do without old growth timber.  The courts will apply the Roadless Rule to stop “construction zones” for gas pipelines in roadless areas when motorized vehicles run on hydrogen.  

The Clinton Roadless Rule of 2000 generally prohibits logging and roadbuilding on the 60 million acres of remaining unprotected roadless areas on national forest land.  It is a sweeping and historic conservation initiative that is controversial throughout the West.  It is controversial and also gets rather complicated in Colorado.  

Approximately 4.4 million acres of Colorado’s national forest are protected by the rule.  As everyone who follows national forest issues knows, the Roadless Rule was the most high profile of the Clinton-era conservation measures thrown under the tracks by the Bush administration.  In 2004 the administration replaced the Clinton rule with a process that required individual governors to petition the Department of Agriculture to protect roadless areas.  The administration’s petition process was declared illegal by the courts in 2006.  

One outspoken critic of the Clinton Rule was then-Governor of Colorado Bill Owens, who claimed in a legal challenge to the rule that Colorado would face “irreparable harm” if Colorado’s 4.4 million acres of unprotected wilderness were made off-limits to logging and road building.  

Owens has strong alarmist tendencies.  When he flew over the Hayman Fire in 2002, a reporter asked him what it looked like from the air.  “It looks as if all of Colorado is burning today,” the Governor announced grimly (actually, just .19% of Colorado was on fire). The tourist industry, the mainstay of Colorado’s economy, was furious at headlines warning visitors that the whole state was on fire.  

Owens changes his mind a lot.  When Ben Nighthorse Campbell retired from the U.S. Senate, Owens decided to run… then decided against it.  He endorsed Republican Bob Schaeffer’s run to replace Campbell, then abandoned Schaeffer to endorse Pete Coors when the beer magnate jumped in the race.  

Owens and his wife Frances separated in 2003, “resolved their issues” and got back together in 2005, then announced they would divorce last January.  Stay tuned.

(Okay, it is not my intention to here to act partisan and make fun of Gov. Owens.  This is just what I know about the guy.)  

Owens opposed the Clinton Rule, but ultimately sent a 26-page petition (which is 17 pages longer than Owens’s master’s thesis—that’s right, the guy wrote a 9 page master’s thesis) to the Bush Administration asking that almost all of Colorado’s 4.4 million acres of roadless areas be protected (there are exceptions for fuel treatments, coal mining and ski area expansions).  

“Few things are more important to Coloradans than the responsible stewardship of our National Forests,” he wrote.  “The scenic landscapes, abundant wildlife and mountain vistas make Colorado such a wonderful place to live.”  Presumably protecting the scenery, wildlife and vistas would no longer cause “irreparable harm.”

In 2004, Republican Owens was replaced by a Democratic Bill Ritter.  Ritter, who describes himself in cryptic terms as a “semi-progressive,” also takes a somewhat muddled stand on the roadless issue.  Unlike Owens, he supports the Clinton Rule and opposes the Bush state petition process.  But he decided to go ahead with Owens’s roadless petition anyway, even after the Bush roadless rule was thrown out by the courts.  He says that the petition is an “insurance policy” in case of…  In case of what, no one is really sure.  (A third Bush term?)  It is certainly not an insurance policy against litigation that challenges the legality of a roadless petition process that has been declared illegal, or litigation to enforce the Clinton roadless rule in Colorado.   

The long and short of it is the Forest Service is preparing, at some expense, a big EIS to protect Colorado’s roadless areas.  Which are protected already by the Clinton Roadless Rule.  Which was replaced by the Bush Roadless Rule.  Which was thrown out by the courts.  So, the taxpayers are footing the bill for a roadless planning process that will protect almost all of the 4.4 million acres… Or will 4.4 million acres (all of it) be protected by the Clinton Roadless Rule?

If any of this is unclear, it’s because it is all fundamentally unclear.      

Will Colorado’s roadless areas be protected by Bill, or Bill, or Bill?  

Next post:  The road that isn’t a road in a Colorado roadless area (yes, the roadless issue in Colorado gets even weirder).  

The Bush administration has been unfairly accused of ignoring global warming.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The administration has a comprehensive plan for global warming:  They plan to make it worse by accelerating the production and consumption of fossil fuels.  In addition to renewing vows in our classic abusive, co-dependent marriage to Middle Eastern oil producing states, the administration’s plan for another decade of oil fixes takes square aim at the national forests.

A key feature of the administration’s 2005 Energy Bill is direction to the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to work together to expedite development of new oil and gas resources.  It exempts much oil and gas exploration from the Clean Water Act.  It provides for tens of thousands of acres of federal forest to be cleared to create new power transmission cables.  And it gives out $85 billion worth of subsidies that will make previously uneconomic drilling in the backcountry turn a profit for big oil and gas companies.  

By far the most dramatic effects I’ve seen from the national scaling-up of oil and gas development on national forests is on the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania, which already had more than 8,000 active oil and gas wells before the 2005 Energy Bill, more than all 154 other national forests in the country at the time.

The Allegheny National Forest Plan, completed last year, projects a total of more than 16,000 wells on the forest in 15 years.  With the ink on that document still wet, the Forest Service planners who wrote it say that these estimates are almost certainly too conservative.  By one estimate, there’s been more than 9,000 wells drilled in just the last two years.  

According to the Allegheny Forest Plan, as of 2006, around ten percent of the 513,000-acre forest had already been cleared to make room for oil and gas developments.  Extrapolating the Forest Service’s conservative estimates, this means that by the year 2022, more than a fifth of the total forest would be stripped of vegetation, converted to an oil field.

This is the most extreme case of oil and gas development on a national forest (private companies own the rights to more than 95% of the sub-surface estate on the Allegheny).  But on almost every national forest I’ve visited, oil and gas development is a gathering storm cloud on the horizon.

On the Dixie National Forest in southern Utah, there’s a major energy development EIS process underway.  The “likelihood of finding oil and gas is high,” one line officer told me.  “There’s a lot of pressure on us, internally and externally, to get on with leasing.”

A White River NF (central CO) employee told me “oil and gas is huge on this (western) side of the forest.”  There’s 78 active wells on the Rifle District of the WRNF, and the forest is in the process of completing a forest plan amendment to cover expected development in next ten years.

On the Grand Mesa-Uncompahgre and Gunnison NFs, oil and gas development “has picked up some and it is controversial.  We spend a lot of time on gas development.”  There’s 16 wells on the Paonia district.  The Grand Valley just got it’s first gas well and there’s 30 more on the way.  

(I call all this stuff “oil and gas development” from force of habit.  Mostly in Colorado it’s natural gas.)

Oil and gas development is “looming on the horizon” on the San Juan NF.  There’s a couple hundred new wells going in every year.

I get the feeling that energy development is to the Rocky Mountains what “getting the cut out” used to be to the Pacific Northwest.  Most of the Forest Service employees I’ve talked to have adopted a “doing the best we can with a bad situation” attitude.

“We’ve taken the approach that if we’re gonna do it, we’re gonna do it right,” one line officer told me.  “We’ve told the companies up front that we’re going to do it differently on the national forests.”

“We’re trying to do better than our neighbors,” said another line officer two days later and a hundred miles away.  

Hopefully the Rockies won’t look too much like the Allegheny.  

Tomorrow I sort out roadless confusion in Colorado and assorted confused Colorado politicians.

The State of Oregon (still my favorite) is defined by the Cascades, which divide the state topographically, climatically, and culturally.  Most of the human population stays crowded in an around Portland and the Willamette Valley on the westside, a land of moist winters, mild summers, busy streets, bumper-to-bumper traffic, ballgames, and overpriced coffee. 

Everything changes east of the craggy, glacier-clad Cascades.  A blazing hot sun, or towering thunderclouds and violent blizzards replace perpetual overcast.  Sprawling metropolises give way to endless views of hay fields, sagebrush prairies and lonely stretches of highway.  The monochromatic greens of Douglas fir forest and over-watered lawns are supplanted by a million shades of spare, lovely and changeable colors.

There’s a similar east-west divide in southern Colorado that’s reflected in the personalities and attitudes of the different Forest Service offices.  The eastern half of the mountains is managed by the Rio Grande NF.  The receptionist at the San Luis Valley office wears a uniform.  So does the deputy forest supervisor who is manning HQ while the boss is out on a fire.  

One of the planners I met with summed up the politics and culture of the San Luis Valley for me this way:  “Logging, grazing, and mining:  Okay.”  The employees all like living in a rural area.  Denver is a 4-5 hour drive, “which is about right for me,” says one employee.  We talk grazing and range conditions.  Everywhere I’ve been the Forest Service staff has been very welcoming and friendly, but the Rio Grande extends to me the tremendously solicitous hospitality of folks who live in a dry place and don’t get a lot of visitors.  I like them all a lot (thanks for the coffee mug!).  

If the Rio Grande reflects the culture and attitudes of the San Luis Valley, the San Juan National Forest Supervisor’s office is more of a reflection of Durango, an increasingly trendy college town of 20,000 in the southwest corner Colorado.  There’s three people at the front desk to handle the half dozen or so people milling around in the lobby at any given time.  No one is in uniform.  The Forest Supervisor (a very smart and capable guy) is dressed in short sleeves.  We talk climate change and sustainability.  

Here’s some numbers I gleaned from the Internet about Durango and the San Luis Valley:

Durango
Median age:  29
Median household income:  $34,892,
Known for (according to Wikipedia):  Mountain biking, skiing, fly-fishing and golfing.

San Luis Valley (aggregated numbers for four municipalities)
Median age:  38
Median household income:  $27,192
Known for (according to Wikipedia):  Cattle mutilations, UFO sightings, and “unusual military activity.”

To the north, the White River National Forest in central Colorado encompasses both the rural conservative and urban liberal attitudes.  The split is also east-west, but in the case of the White River it’s the western half that is rural and more politically conservative, with an economy that revolves around ranching and agriculture.  The Meeker District on the westside manages the largest elk herd in the lower 48 and hunting is a local religion.  A guy Zella and I meet in downtown Meeker asks me if she’s a red-boned hound.

“Nah,” I say.  “Rhodesian Ridgeback.  Type ‘a African hound.”
“Looks like a red-bone,” he grunts.  

To the east, on the crest of the Rockies, are Aspen, Vail, Dillon, Snowmass and the über-wealthy, über-liberal second-home-in-the-mountains set.  “People in Aspen have a lot of money and a lot of time on their hands and they just don’t got any sense.  It’s a weird place,” a Meeker Ranger District employee told me.  

Zella and I sat outside in an Aspen bar two days later, me eating a $13.95 salad and nursing a $5.50 beer.  I have my laptop out, writing emails and am looking up the value of the automobiles that pass by (which adds up to approximately $12 million dollars in thirty minutes minutes).

(This meal, I am thinking to myself, is about 99% water, or $1.50 per ounce of water, or approximately a dollar per 20 calories… I haven’t even calculated a tip into this, at a 20% gratuity, let’s see that’s… [a forty something yuppie is making a crude comment to his friends about our waitress, I oughta leave her 25% I think…] Cripes, Johnston, get a grip on yourself, you really need to quit doing math in your head and talking to yourself on top of it, and for another thing…)  

“That’s a nice lookin’ dog,” the crude guy at the next table says to me.  “Is he a Vizla?”  
“She’s a Rhodesian Ridgeback,” I tell him.  “Type ‘a African hound.”  
“Huh!  From Africa?”
“Maryland,” I say.  “One of Jay Hyman’s dogs.” (As though everyone’s heard of Jay.)
“Ohhh…” he says.  “Some kinda show dog, huh?”  I nod.  (I have to post a photo of Zella.  She’s no show dog, but she is very good looking, and when in Rome…)  “My wife’d like to meet him,” he says.  “She’s into that s%#t.  She…”  The waitress is back around and the guy says something crude to his friends again.
“Where you from?” he asks me, grinning (nobody in Aspen is from Aspen).
“Meeker,” I say.
He laughs.  “That’s a lot of dog for Meeker.”
Zella’s been stretched out, prostrate on the ground this whole time, but at this point her head comes up, looking at me.  She is a very sensitive dog.
I laughed too, and drank a dollar’s worth of beer in a long gulp.  Set the glass down carefully and leaned toward him.  
“In Meeker,” I told him, with a cheery grin.  “We’d throw your ass out a window for your rude talk.”  
He laughed, a little uneasily.  I laughed, too (Cripes, Johnston.  You are on the clock here.  Outreach.  Outreach.  Andy [my boss] would throw me out a window for this kind of talk).  
The guy is looking at me shaking his head, chuckling nervously. I have a week’s worth of beard and my haircut looks like I’ve just been released from prison and I’m wearing a pair of ratty shorts and a white T-shirt covered in dirt and dog hair and a little splotches of blood from where I’ve crushed mosquitoes.  
 “Yeah… Meeker…” he’s mumbling.  
“Oh, yeah, Meeker.  We’re a little weird, huh?”  I say.  I reach out my hand.  “Sorry for my rude talk,” I say.  “I’ve been doing too much driving.”  Zella puts her head back down.  I pull a copy of Forest Magazine out of my pocket and give it to him.  I tell him about the National Forest Tour.  He says he might subscribe.  He offers to buy me another beer, but I demure.  I am heading east… or west… or south, actually.  Out of Aspen.  

I’ve indicated in previous posts that the Forest Service managers’ major challenge isn’t managing resources, it’s managing people.  A field trip I took with Pike-San Isabel NF staff and Rocky Smith of the environmental group Colorado Wild was a case in point.  

Rocky is clearly very good at his job, which is essentially to hound the Forest Service into making what his organization considers the most ecologically desirable decisions (“hound” — v : pursue or chase relentlessly).  He’s a workaholic, he’s passionate, dedicated, somewhat paranoid, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the myriad laws, regulations and policies that govern the Forest Service.   

Our day began at the Leadville Ranger Station, with Rocky delivering a rapid-fire critique of the North Leadville fuel reduction project to Leadville District Ranger Jon Morrissey, a lean, spare mustached guy who spent a good part of Rocky’s diatribe staring at a spot at the table approximately four feet in front of him.  I take very fast notes but still missed a good part of Rocky’s speech, which went something like this:  

 “What we’ve got here is an extreme violation of the roadless rule…  Eighty to one hundred is a good standard to making it more resistant to beetles… that’s not the real issue, the real issue is 400 foot, is one, we have a very troubling violation of the roadless rule… the word ‘desirable’ is inserted, but that is not found in the regulations… if you listen to that exception… as we all know… the fire regulation is in the CP standards…  It will be very hard to say that this decision, however useful you think it is, or I think it is… you are going to need to rescind this decision or I am going to appeal it…  It goes back to two other rangers, I won’t name names…  I don’t want to use the word, but sleazy, you know and…”  

Rocky’s problem with the North Leadville Project centers on Unit C and part of Unit B.  Both units are completely typical wildland-urban interface (WUI) treatments—non-commercial hand thinning and pile burning in dense lodgepole pine stands within 400 feet of a cluster of homes that some genius built right next to forest type that really likes to burn.  The problem from Rocky’s perspective is that this particular WUI also happens to be a part of the RARE II inventoried Holy Cross East Roadless Area, contiguous to the Congressionally designated Holy Cross Wilderness.  The Clinton-era Roadless Area Conservation Rule prohibits logging, including thinning, in these areas.  

The Leadville District is about 70% lodgepole pine cover.  In Oregon, where I’m from, lodgepole is a weed that lives fast and dies hard.  It’s a prolific seeder that regenerates rapidly after fire and grows rapidly in dense thickets until it gets to be 80-100 years old when it usually burns up in spectacular fashion.  Lodgepole fires create excellent habitat for a variety of critters, especially bird species that feed on insects that eat dead wood.  

Rocky Mountain lodgepole seems to be a somewhat more complicated species.  On many high elevation sites with short growing seasons (and wet cool conditions that keep fire out), it can get to be 300 years old.  I was surprised to find a multi-aged lodgepole stand with relatively complex canopy structure and highly variable ground cover in the North Leadville Project.  Many of the older trees had fire scars from low-intensity ground fire, which is something I’ve never seen in a lodgepole stand.  I suspect it would be difficult to piece together the stand’s “natural” fire history—the oldest trees dated to the late 1800s when Leadville (current population 2,688) was a booming mining town of 44,000 people.  Miners logged the hills surrounding town when they were sober, and burned off the rest when they were drunk.  

I have several master’s level fire ecology classes under my belt but I have no idea how wide of (or if) a thinning corridor in this lodgepole stand will keep the inevitable fire from burning up the houses downhill.  I’ve got a good notion that putting a metal roof on these houses will make a lot bigger difference than the difference between 200 feet of thinning and 400 feet of thinning uphill.

Other than the interesting interpersonal dynamics, I’m pretty unmoved one way or another about the prospect of non-commercial hand thinning in mining era lodgepole leftovers.  To me, it’s another purely symbolic conflict with little or no ecological relevance whatsoever.  

I ask Morrissey is he doesn’t think we’re all just kind of whistling in the wind.  I was surprised by the earnestness of his response.  “No,” he said.  “I worked in recreation, you know, and I have my own strong roadless values.  And Rocky has his.  I appreciate this dialog and I’m hoping we can find some common ground.”  

The cynic in me thinks Morrissey is BSing me, but after observing him carefully over the course of the afternoon I decided he was perfectly serious.  You don’t get to be a District Ranger in the Forest Service these days without having a pretty good attitude about dealing with the public.  I’ve got a good idea he is going to spend the next week rifling through the project file, burning up the phone lines with the Supervisors office, and generally doing whatever he can to get this project out the door and keep Rocky happy… and keep the local home owners happy, too.  I am guessing they think a 400-foot deep thinning zone isn’t nearly enough.  

Even the most casual observer can see something’s amiss as they travel the high plateaus of south-central Utah.  All the trees are dead.  

Maybe it’s just me but I don’t mind the aesthetic a bit.  You whiz by silvery spruce snags set against green meadows bright with yellow flowers.  But I admit it’s a little disconcerting to drive hours past hundreds of thousands of acres dead trees.  

The dead trees are spruce mixed in with aspen and true fir.  There’s approximately 750,000 acres of this spruce-fir forest type in Utah—and almost all of it is dead.

Found between 8,000 and 10,000 feet, this is the highest elevation forest type in Utah.  Because it’s so high, it gets a lot of annual precipitation, mostly as snow.  And it stays pretty cool.  This is important and we’ll get back to it in a moment.  

The culprit in the massive spruce die off is the spruce beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis), which exists in small numbers in all spruce forests.  They typically only attack individual trees weakened by wind breakage or old age.  

What we’re seeing on the high plateaus of Utah today is best explained as the denouement of the spruce forest life cycle.  There are few natural stand density controls in this wet, high-elevation forest type.  Spruce grows slowly, is under snow for much of the year, and rarely burns.  Spruce stands simply grow older and denser until there’s a big replacement event, usually insects, and usually triggered by drought.

Most of the spruce stands on the high plateaus are old (200+ years), there’s an on-going drought in the West, and now seems to be the time for a big die-off.  There’s evidence of a similarly intense and widespread beetle event in this area about 300-400 years ago.

The dynamics of these spruce stands is interesting.  Following the beetle epidemic, spruce snags typically persist for more than a hundred years, providing excellent habitat for a wide range of cavity nesters and other species.  Subalpine fir is the early seral colonizer on the site and persists for at least a hundred years before soil conditions favor spruce again.  There may not be as old and as dense a spruce forest on these sites for another 300-400 years, at which point there’ll probably be another big die-off.

The dead trees stay moist throughout the year and rarely burn.  So far, there’s only been a few small fires up on the plateau that have easily been controlled with the help of cool weather and frequent summer rain showers.  By the logic of my post about forest change and resilient, I would have to say the spruce forest in the high plateaus of Utah is perfectly resilient, in the sense that it is experiencing the natural range of disturbance variation and the structure, composition and ecological processes associated with this forest type will emerge again over time.  Probably.  

There’s a couple troubling possibilities that occur to me.  First, today’s spruce stands got established during the Little Ice Age, a period of global cooling between approximately 1650 and 1850.  The plateaus during this wet and cool enough to exclude large fires.  What if climate change makes the high plateau warmer or drier, drying out the enormous fuel bed created by dead spruce?  Could a large fire started in the brush and pine zone at lower elevations spread over the high plateaus?  Will future climate conditions be conducive to spruce re-establishment on this site?  Or will a different forest type emerge from the silvery spruce snags?  

I am aware of no scientific inquiries along these lines, although I plan on putting these questions to some researchers I’ll meet later in the swing through Colorado.  I am also not aware of any management techniques or methods that might address these possibilities.  The Dixie National Forest salvage logs 15-16mmbf of dead spruce a year for “scenic enhancement” and to vary the forest structure on the forest.  This amount of timber harvest doesn’t put much of a dent in the miles and miles of dead trees.

I looked at several examples of spruce salvage and could barely tell there’d been any logging.  Post harvest, the forest was still thick with aspen regeneration.  I suffer from a certain type of clearcut myopia common to folks born and raised in the industrial forestlands of the Oregon Coast Range.  If the hillside hasn’t been completed stripped of vegetation it looks pretty good to us.  

So far I’ve visited with employees on the Humboldt-Toiyabe (Nevada), Dixie, Manti-La Sal NF (Utah), Pike San Isabel, White River, Rio Grande and San Juan NFs (Colorado).  I have a ton of stuff scheduled through the end of the month.  Here’s the tentative schedule:

July 14, Meeker, CO.  Meeting with White River NF staff.
July 15, Paonia, CO.  Meeting with Grand Mesa-Uncompaghre-Gunnison staff.
July 16-17, Outside Paonia, CO.  Field trip with Rocky Moutain Research Station.
July 18, Outside Paonia, CO. Field trip with Wilderness Workshop.
July 22 and 23.  Holding for meeting with Pike-San Isabel staff in Pueblo.  
July 27-31, Denver, Golden and Fort Collins.  Holding for meetings with Colorado State University, FS Region 2 staff.
August 6, Idaho Falls, ID.  Meeting with Caribou-Targhee NF staff.
August 7, Price, UT, Meeting with Manti-La Sal NF staff.
August 8, Richland, UT.  Meeting with Fishlake NF staff.
August 11, Salt Lake City/Provo, Holding for meeting with Uinta-Wasatch-Cache NF staff and R4 staff.  

I am back in Oregon for a few days in the middle of August, then back out on the road.  My time in Colorado has been somewhat poorly organized.  I had thought that trying to organize meetings three weeks in advance of my arrival was sufficient, but no such luck.  Folks are so busy I’ve been forced to sort of criss-cross the state to make different meetings match up with FS schedules.

I would love to make some more meetings with employees from central Colorado National Forests from July 19-21, and with employees from northern Colorado, southern Wyoming and southern Idaho national forests anytime between July 31 and August 5.  I still have not met with anyone from the Routt-Arapaho-Roosevelt NF and am really looking forward to do doing that in early August, so drop me a line if you’re from that neck of the woods.  

I am trying to organize dates in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and South Dakota well in advance so I can travel in a relatively straight line west to east from Spokane, WA to Custer, SD and then back again in a relatively straight line, with less back and forth.  Here’s what I have scheduled so far:

August 20-21, Outside Priest Lake, ID.  Holding for Priest Lake RNA.  
August 25th, Salmon, ID.  Meeting with Salmon-Challis NF staff.
September 5, Custer, SD.  Meeting with Black Hills NF staff.  

Please drop me a line if you want to meet in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota or South Dakota in August-September.

Does anyone know of any particularly scenic areas on the Fishlake National Forest?  I’ve been trying, with good success so far, to take one really nice photo of every national forest I’ve visited.  I have no photos of the Fishlake so far.

I am not traveling in October or November.  During that time I will be spending a lot of time trying to create a brief sketch of each national forest I’ve visited, complete with photos.  So please send along whatever interesting information you might have about national forests in ID, MT, WY, ND, SD, CO, WY or NV.  Or anywhere else for that matter, because I plan to go to them all eventually…

Okay, photos (and other images I’ve been meaning to get on the blog).  I haven’t had time to shop for a digital camera so I can post photos immediately.  I am also experiencing some technical difficulties with this blog, so please just be patient and check back soon for photos/graphics.