Mistake, not mistletoe, takes old growth pine

About 176 trees mistakenly marked for logging by the Forest Service have been cut and will go to the mill despite protests by the Sisters Forest Planning Committee, a local environmental group.

The trees, including 121 with diameters of 21 inches or greater and regarded as "old growth," were sold to Crown Pacific which is currently harvesting the Walla Bear Timber Sale about 10 miles south of Sisters despite furious opposition from Paul Dewey, a Bend lawyer and environmentalist active with the SFPC.

The Walla Bear sale was initially announced in 1985. Dewey appealed the sale in 1986. The sale was awarded to DAW Forest Products in 1988. Dewey filed a lawsuit over the sale in 1991, which was settled in 1993.

In response to Dewey's lawsuit, the Forest Service redesigned the timber sale, according to Sisters District Ranger Karen Shimamoto. The sale volume went from 10.2 million board feet in 1985 to 5.6 million board feet in 1993, with the amount of Ponderosa pine in the sale dropping from 5.3 million board feet in 1985 to 1.8 million board feet in 1993.

A board foot is a board one inch thick and one foot square. A log truck holds between 4,000 and 5,000 board feet.

The contract change was agreed to by the original purchaser, DAW, and Crown Pacific, which purchased DAW's interests in Central Oregon, according to the Forest Service.

The lawsuit settlement also stipulated the Forest Service would improve future monitoring of timber sales. Walla Bear was also involved in the 1989 timber theft by Layton and Bartlett, a company that stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal timber. Paul Dewey discovered that timber theft.

Dewey and the SFPC eventually endorsed the Walla Bear sale.

But when Dewey was reviewing the sale last July, he discovered that 7 acres of the 950 acre sale area had trees that were improperly marked for logging.

The trees intended to be cut were supposed to have been badly infested with mistletoe, a parasite that twists and reduces the health of pine. However, about 176 trees with little or no mistletoe were mistakenly tagged, including the 121 old growth, according to Dewey.

The Forest Service agreed that a mistake had been made, and on August 29, 1995, Dennis Dietrich, Contracting Officer with the Forest Service, wrote to Crown Pacific proposing "some modifications to the timber designated for cutting in Subdivision 39 of your Walla Bear Timber Sale..."

Dietrich suggested that Crown Pacific not harvest the mistakenly marked pine, totaling about 95,000 board feet, and instead harvest most of the white fir in the area, adding about 60,000 board feet of that species.

An old growth Ponderosa can have between 500 and 1,500 board feet, depending on trunk diameter, height and quality of the bole. Clean Ponderosa is bringing in the neighborhood of $700 per thousand board feet. White fir is less valuable.

Crown rejected that offer. Instead, Crown's Purchaser Representative James A. Goad wrote Dietrich on September 27 that the timber company would only be interested in exchanging the mismarked trees for other trees "of the same species, size and quality...Green trees adjacent to this unit would be acceptable."

But there were no other trees available in the sale area that "that would not cause a new visual problem if (they) were removed," according to a press release issued by both Crown Pacific and the Forest Service.

According to Crown Pacific spokesman Fletcher Chamberlain, their contract with the forest service did not make a "distinction between trees that had mistletoe and those that did not, and the trees in question were "marked to be cut."

While Crown was willing to trade for equal quantity and quality of timber, "we had been through enough reduction and we were not willing to reduce it any further," Chamberlain said.

Without the consent of Crown, the Forest Service's options were limited to a recommendation that the sale be canceled because "serious environmental degradation or resource damage would occur," according to the press release.

But logging Walla Bear the way it was marked still allowed the agency to meets its ecosystem objectives and a claim of "serious environmental damage" could not be supported, according to the agency.

District Ranger Karen Shimamoto told The Nugget that by law, the Forest Service was prevented from going outside the sale area to find additional trees.

On October 11, Dietrich wrote to Goad, saying that he (Dietrich) had "since discussed the situation further with our resource specialists and the District Ranger. Our final conclusion is that logging the sale the way it is currently designed will still allow us to eventually reach our long-term ecosystem management goals for this subdivision."

On October 25, Forest Supervisor Sally Collins wrote Paul Dewey, telling him of the decision and explaining that finding other pine to cut "would have required additional analysis (including visual quality analysis) and a new decision, and would have resulted in removing large trees from elsewhere in the project area.

Collins wrote that "This could easily have had a higher risk of affecting the visual quality of the sale than the unit as currently designed. Therefore, the Forest will not pursue this further. The unity will be harvested as marked."

In letters to the agency and in interviews, Dewey alleges this is yet another example of the Forest Service "not doing what it said it was going to do," a charge he has fired at the Forest Service on this sale for 10 years.

Forest Supervisor Sally Collins disagrees. She acknowledges that a mistake was made, but said she was "extremely pleased with the results we are achieving on the ground."

To The Nugget she pointed out that mistakes involving 176 trees on seven acres are not extraordinary for an agency managing 2.6 million acres in Central Oregon.

Dewey is outraged. He feels that in light of the history of Walla Bear, and the new procedures for monitoring timber sale activity that were part of the settlement of his lawsuit against the agency, it is incredible that the Forest Service first did not catch and then were unable to prevent the cutting of the trees in question.