Forest considers options for fire area
It is a sprawling burn, with blackened trees covering one slope after another for miles and miles. And the Tally Lake Ranger District is now deep into the task of figuring out what to do with the landscape burned by the Brush Creek Fire last summer.
District staffers led a field tour through the 30,000-acre burn Wednesday, explaining how the fire progressed and discussing management options for timber salvage and mushroom picking, as well as weed and insect infestations that are certain to happen.
While no structures or lives were lost, the fire scoured a huge swath of land with long-term ramifications for the Flathead National Forest's timber program.
"We lost a considerable amount of the timber base to this fire," said Ed Lieser, the district's silviculturist.
Outbreaks of Douglas fir bark beetles are likely to claim surviving trees within the fire perimeter and threaten stands outside that perimeter, Lieser said, citing the district's experience following the nearby 1994 Little Wolf Fire.
"Like Little Wolf, the bark beetle will be an important driver" in post-fire management plans, Lieser said.
The burned area is in the heart of the district's historic timber basket - about 35 percent of the burned area had been harvested in the 1980s and 1990s, mostly in response to pine beetle infestations.
Those areas won't be viable for timber salvage plans that are being developed in a "proposed action" plan that is expected to be released for public review by the end of November, said Bryan Donner, the district's planning team leader.
Gary Hall of Olney, a member of Montanans for Multiple Use, quizzed Donner about how much timber salvage might be proposed. He noted that after the 2003 fires in the North Fork Flathead and the Swan Mountain Range, salvage operations were conducted on less than 20 percent of the burned areas.
"Those areas had more limitations," Donner said.
The 2003 fires encompassed inventoried roadless lands and areas that were less accessible, and they involved grizzly bear recovery areas. The Brush Creek burn doesn't have those limitations, Donner said.
But the proposed action still will have to account for riparian areas, fragile soils and places where there is poor timber salvage potential.
Public comment on the proposed action will be considered in developing a draft environmental impact statement that likely will be released for another round of public comment next April or May, Donner said.
Barring appeals or legal challenges, salvage operations could be under way by summer or fall of 2008.
In the meantime, the district is pursuing funding for measures to keep insect infestations in check, such as pheromone traps or pheromones that can repel beetles away from vulnerable stands.
"It's a holding kind of action that might buy us some time until we can remove the trees that cause the threat," Lieser said.
The district also is planning for an outbreak of noxious weeds in burned areas. That expectation is partly based on the unprecedented infestation of tansy ragwort that followed the Little Wolf Fire, prompting a closure of infested areas that lasted more than 10 years.
District Ranger Lisa Timchak (formerly Lisa Krueger) said there was an aggressive effort to wash all firefighting vehicles while the Brush Creek Fire was active that should pay off.
Timchak said she does not anticipate any long-term closures within the burned area.
The Brush Creek Fire burned for seven weeks, fueled by record high temperatures, extremely dry fuels and many days of single-digit humidities.
Timchak noted that the fire had the potential to be much larger than it was. If the fire had crossed containment lines on Fox Mountain, it would have surged into the Good Creek drainage, threatening more than 40 homes.
"We were looking at going from a 29,000-acre fire to an 80,000-acre fire," Timchak said, calling the containment on Fox Mountain a "last stand."
Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by e-mail at jmann@dailyinterlake.com