by Bob Williams, Stevensville
This is only a very simple view of the Bitterroot Front Project, where the USFS is planning to actively reduce forest fire hazard in a wide swath, from McClain Creek 57 miles south to Trapper Creek, by removing forest material that might become fuel for a forest fire.
A wide swath of National Forest will be treated by prescribed burning, thinning of some heavy stands, some commercial clearcut logging, and reducing vegetation slash.
I have no idea how many trees per acre will remain standing in the wide treatment swath.
In addition, treatment will happen way up both Lost Horse drainages to the Idaho border, and part way up Blodgett Canyon.
A lot of taxpayer money will be spent to protect a lot of people and property!
Therefore, USFS, please show us in our two local newspapers, good, detailed maps of the fuels reduction treatment area! You know we live in this valley! You know we have legitimate need to see and use maps showing which areas will be impacted when.
In my reading, the logging treatment will mostly happen (nearly ¾ acreage) in 2024. Then finish in 2025, followed by brush removal, prescribed burning, and soil compaction 2026-7.
The maps on the Bitterroot Front Project online site are not good maps. We need to see some good maps with detail. Also with a mile scale, so we can see how actually wide is the treatment swath that we will be looking at forever.
The recently designated cutoff date, for the 30 day public comment period for the Bitterroot Front Project, is September 16, 2023. Only two days ago, on August 23, 2023, did I read the newly published Bitterroot Star article about the Bitterroot Front Project. No wonder I have only a simple, incomplete view of that very large project.
Put your best foot forward, USFS! Show us the maps you are looking at.
Recognize our need to know. Put some detailed maps in the two local newspapers. Then give us a month to comment!
We’d like to see where commercial and non commercial logging will happen way up the Lost Horse drainages.
Looking at the online Bitterroot Front Project, here’s some rounded numbers I come up with:
• 43 square miles of commercial logging.
• 55 square miles of non commercial white bark pine logging.
• 5 square miles of stand improvement.
• 28 square miles of vegetation slash removal and prescribed burned.
I’m thinking that treatment completion may reduce some property insurance premiums for people who live along the treatment swath.
Here’s the link to see the 386 pages about the Bitterroot Front Project (Treatment maps are in the Appendix.)
https://www.fs.usda.gov/project/?project=57341
Go there, and you may be redirected to another site where you, like me, are looking at a small screen of narrative, squeezed in between two very wide border screens.
Here comes a wildcard surprise. Go to that site, and if you can, please spend extra time there reading about Condition Based [Forest] Management.
The Bitterroot Front Project will follow emerging principles of Condition Based Management.
Whoa, that’s way over my head!
Hopefully, local, knowledgeable authorities will submit LTEs and Guest Columns to the Bitterroot Star, also the Ravalli Republic, pointing at pros and cons of how Condition Based Management may long term impact the foothills of the Bitterroot Mountains from just south of Lolo to just south of Conner, Montana.
That’s a whole new way of “treating” USFS forests. No published, colorful mapped areas of old growth. No delineated areas of different bug infestations to be “treated.” No objectives of how many trees left standing. No stumpage. No calculable estimate of how many logging truck loads when. No prescribed monitoring of work in progress.
Only after reading and understanding cons and pros can the public make evidence based, fact checked, reasoned, public comments about the Bitterroot Front Project.
IMO there darn well should be a public information meeting about the Bitterroot Front Project, and how and where to direct local and national public comments.
That’s very important! With this project, there is no period where the public has months to file objections. This project is under Emergency management, which takes away the NEPA process of having a public objection period, then a USFS decision. After that decision, under NEPA, previous objectors can file objections against the USFS decision. Then a more consensual final decision can be achieved.
At minimum, we should petition the USFS to extend the public comment period on the Bitterroot Front Project.
Bill LaCroix says
Keep it simple. Comment and say no to all these huge, open-ended, undemocratic projects that, like the writer wisely put it, will only reduce insurance premiums for wooden mansions on ridges that should have never been there in the first place. Grrr….
Larry Campbell says
The BNF wants the public owners of the forest to buy a pig-in-a-poke without getting a look at what we are buying. There are no detailed maps because the BNF plans to make it up as they go along. Opportunities for the public to speak up will be over by the time we are informed about what the FS, in all its wisdom, will be doing. To go along with such an approach would require blind faith and trust in the FS.
And this is not the only landscape scale “conditions-based” pig-in-a-poke project planned for the BNF. Under the direction of Supervisor Matt Anderson they are having a feeding frenzy of logging on our surrounding forest while keeping the public owners in the dark and marginalizing our role..