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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.