By Michael Howell
The Ravalli County Commissioners agreed last week to send a letter expressing their objections to some road decommissioning proposals included in the Bitterroot National Forest’s Meadow Vapor Project. The project area covers approximately 8,400 acres surrounding the communities of Springer Memorial and Bonanza, east of Sula on the Darby/Sula Ranger District. Drainages within the project area include Meadow Creek, Vapor Creek, Needle Creek, Lick Creek, Reynolds Creek and Tepee Creek, all of which drain into the East Fork of the Bitterroot River.
The proposed action includes commercial timber harvest, non-commercial thinning, slash piling, and prescribed burning on approximately 3,200 acres. According to the agency, the proposed treatments would reduce the potential of crown fire behavior in low and mixed severity fire regimes within the Wildland Urban Interface, reduce current and future fuel loadings, and improve forest resilience to natural disturbances. The action also proposes road improvements, and decommissioning and storage of routes “to improve watershed condition by reducing sediment sources.”
Commissioner Jeff Burrows noted that the road storage and decommissioning being proposed goes against the county’s Natural Resource Policy, which opposes the removal of any roads from the existing system unless an equal number of miles is being added. But he said the main problem is not the road closures so much as the re-conditioning and re-contouring work that is proposed.
The project proposal involves the decommissioning of a total of 29.5 miles of road with 8.1 miles of that being “treated,” which could mean de-compacting the road to facilitate new growth and/or re-contouring the road to match the mountain slope.
Burrows points out that the sections of road being “treated” appear to be at the access points to the roads and seem more for the purpose of stopping traffic than for the stated reason of improving watershed conditions.
“I don’t see any threats to the watershed on these roads,” said Burrows. He said the roads being decommissioned didn’t border any creeks but were only surrounded by other roads.
Commissioner Greg Chilcott said that the roads made a “terracing effect” that should slow erosion in the area.”
Burrows said that he could support decommissioning some of the roads, but not the re-contouring. He called it “a huge waste of dollars.” He showed some photographs taken over time that showed a road being progressively covered with vegetation until a re-contouring project was implemented and the road was denuded and completely open to view once again. He said there were roads in the project slated for de-compacting that already have small trees growing on them.
He suggested that the county’s policy might “need some clarification” to state that decommissioning roads and taking them off the inventory and maintenance lists might be acceptable for certain reasons, but it should clarify their objection to the useless de-compacting and re-contouring of roads when they could recover in a natural process and still leave a potential road base for emergency and wildfire use.
The county is also doing research based on 1970 aerial photographs to determine what roads in the project area may be open to the public under the rules that prevent the Forest Service from closing roads that were in public use in 1976.