Judge OKs chopper logging in bear habitat

By JIM MANN

The Daily Inter Lake

A federal judge says timber salvage projects on the Flathead National Forest can continue in "core" grizzly bear habitat, but the value of trees that burned three years ago has diminished substantially.

In a ruling issued Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy of Missoula dissolved a restraining order that prevented helicopter logging on 1,026 acres in the West Side Reservoir and Robert-Wedge project areas that wildfires burned in 2003. The acres in question fell within grizzly bear "core" habitat - lands on which all motorized access should be prohibited, claimed the Swan View Coalition and Friends of the Wild Swan in a lawsuit against the Flathead National Forest.

Molloy initially sided with those claims in a temporary restraining order issued in June 2005, later amending it to allow helicopter logging to continue last winter, when grizzly bears were denned.

This week's ruling focused on a single legal issue - whether the Forest Service had considered adequately the "cumulative impacts" of salvage logging, snowmobiling and other motorized access in and around the project areas.

The judge found that the Forest Service did "take a hard look at cumulative impacts" in the environmental impact statements that were developed for the projects. The temporary restraining order was dissolved and a preliminary injunction was denied. But Molloy has yet to rule on other merits of the case.

The logging halt in core areas affected several timber purchasers, but the greatest impact was Pyramid Lumber, a Seeley Lake mill that had purchased the Beta Timber sale just southwest of Hungry Horse Dam. While the mill was able to remove most of the 18 million board-feet associated with the sale contract, it had to leave several million board feet on the ground, said Pyramid Manager Gordy Sanders.

"From our perspective, Judge Molloy's decision is very positive in terms of the end result," said Gordy Sanders, the manager at Pyramid. "It's unfortunate it took as long as it did to reach that conclusion."

Sanders said that the Beta sale was providing logs not only to Pyramid, but also to F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber in Columbia Falls and roughly a dozen small log-home businesses across western Montana.

"There's been millions of board-feet of timber that could have provided a great economic benefit to numerous small businesses around western Montana," he said. "Over the last year and a half, there's been a lot of deterioration in that wood."

Based on inspections of the area last winter, Sanders said, the best estimate is that there may be 1 million to 2 million board-feet of marketable wood remaining. And that material has to be moved through expensive helicopter logging that probably can't begin until early December.

The loss of material during the past year did not cause lasting financial trouble for Pyramid, but it did cause problems.

"It put us in a position to have to pursue and secure other sources for raw materials," and that meant finding logs even further from the Seeley Lake mill, he said.

Swan View Coalition Chairman Keith Hammer said he is disappointed with Molloy's ruling.

"In essence, he's giving the Forest Service permission to kill more bears than they said they would in their forest plan," Hammer said, explaining that the Flathead Forest Plan prohibits motorized activity in core grizzly habitat. "Whether that motorized activity is overhead or on the ground makes no difference."

"That's a misinterpretation of the forest plan," said Joe Krueger, the Flathead forest's environmental coordinator.

Krueger and other forest officials maintain that motorized access provisions in the forest plan are strictly tied to road densities. Core areas, in fact, are defined by their lack of roads.

Krueger notes that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - the agency charged with enforcing Endangered Species Act protections for the grizzly bear - was consulted on the timber salvage projects.

"We're not in this as a tit-for-tat with a federal agency," Hammer said. "We're in this to protect wildlife. This is a decision that only a bureaucrat could be happy with."

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