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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.