(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.
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