Flathead forest pushes fuel-reduction efforts

Standing on national forest land just above West Glacier, a person could throw a rock and hit the roof of a house, and there's at least a dozen houses not much farther away.

It could be considered ground zero in the U.S. Forest Service's push for fuel reduction projects, except there are many other places just like it.

"We've got a lot of this on the Flathead National Forest," said Hungry Horse District Ranger Jimmy DeHerrera during a Friday tour of areas where the Forest Service has planned or carried out fuel reduction work.

The site at West Glacier offers a view of contrasts: about 8.5 acres of national forest land closest to the homes were thinned out last summer, while 200 yards away there is a fence-like thicket of timber.

The thinned area once looked like the thicket, but now the forest canopy is opened, with contractors removing mostly lodgepole pine and leaving behind a park-like spacing of more desirable, fire-tolerant species such as fir and larch.

"A fire isn't going to hit this and stop," said James Barnett, a forester with the Hungry Horse Ranger District. "But it is going to change."

A fire is more likely to drop out of tree crowns to the forest floor, where it will lose intensity, Barnett said. Firefighters would have a better and safer chance of defending the homes, just a stone's throw away.

The Hungry Horse-West Glacier Fuel Reduction Project was mostly completed last summer, covering a total of 212 acres.

Now the Flathead Forest is pursuing thinning on 920 scattered acres in the Cedar Flats-Spoon Lake area north of Columbia Falls, and it is proposing similar work for another 952 acres as part of the Blankenship Fuels Reduction Project.

"Why was there only eight acres done here?" asked a Blankenship-area resident, referring to the West Glacier site.

"We started out small," DeHerrera responded. "This was the first fuel reduction project we did not only on the district, but on the whole forest."

DeHerrera noted that there was considerable skepticism about the Forest Service's plans for fuel reduction when the Hungry Horse-West Glacier project was planned more than two years ago.

Early debates over the best approach to fuels management erupted just after the 2000 fire season, when 948,000 acres burned in Montana.

There was disagreement over where "fuel reduction" should occur, with environmental organizations opposing those efforts in heavily forested areas far from homes.

Even now, groups like the Wilderness Society charge that the Forest Service has made ineffective use of National Fire Plan funding. That organization contends that most communities are surrounded by private forested lands and federal funding has done nothing to alleviate the fire danger for those communities.

But that's not the case on the Flathead Forest, where fuel reduction work has been targeted at textbook examples of national forest lands directly adjacent to private lands.

And the forest's initial efforts have focused on an area with a significant fire history - the corridor between Columbia Falls and West Glacier, where the 1929 Half Moon fire ripped across 110,000 acres in just a few days.

That landscape is now mostly covered with a carpet of mature lodgepole pine that foresters and fire ecologists consider to be ripe for fire.

Like the Hungry Horse-West Glacier and Cedar-Spoon projects, the Blankenship fuel reduction work will be carried out through stewardship contracts that involve paying loggers a fixed price to deliver specific conditions in the forest. Standard timber-sale contracts involve incentives to remove timber volume.

Another advantage to stewardship projects is that the Flathead Forest retains any revenue generated from them for future stewardship work, rather than forwarding the money to the federal Treasury.

Despite having an emphasis on removing smaller trees and leaving larger ones standing, the Hungry Horse-West Glacier project proved to be a money maker.

"We not only paid for all the work, we netted over $200,000" on the Hungry Horse-West Glacier fuel reduction project, DeHerrera said.

There are similar expectations for the Cedar-Spoon and Blankenship projects.

"I'd say I think the concept is really good," said Shari Halloran, whose home is close to an area targeted by the Blankenship project. "I'm concerned about how it will be implemented and future management in these areas."

Halloran had many questions for the Forest Service. She asked how the Forest Service monitors its projects, how many and what species of trees are left standing and whether there will be an increased potential for off-road vehicles entering lands where timber has been thinned.

DeHerrera said the off-road-vehicle question has been common with the recent fuel reduction projects, because they involve lands that are close to people's homes.

There is potential for off-road vehicle use, he said, but a relatively new regional policy now restricts off-road vehicles to designated roads and trails.

The fuel reduction projects have drawn scant opposition. In some cases, Barnett said, private landowners are following the lead of the Forest Service or their neighbors in thinning their own adjacent properties.

Since the West Glacier thinning work was completed last August, a neighboring landowner has done the same type of work.

"I didn't even know that until I came up here today," Barnett said.

The Hungry Horse Ranger District is taking public comments on its Blankenship Fuels Reduction Project until March 25. A decision on the project is expected by May and work could get under way by this fall.

For more information on the project, contact the Hungry Horse Ranger Station at 387-3800.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com