Forest Service mulls thinning options

The Sisters Ranger District is asking citizens how the Forest Service should manage the forest along Highway 20 between Black Butte Ranch and Sisters.

The district has mailed surveys to 400 people. So far about 38 people have responded, most of whom acknowledge the danger of catastrophic fire and approve of thinning the dense understory.

Rick Dustin, the district's landscape architect, created the survey.

He said he intended "to get the public's opinion on what kind of landscape people desire. The hope is that through this outreach people will feel that they are part of the decision-making process."

The agency will use these surveys, along with data from its scientists and specialists, to formulate a management plan which it will present to the forest supervisor or district ranger for decision in October.

Some forest activists believe the surveys lead respondents to a pre-set conclusion.

Susan Prince of the East Side Protection Project thinks the that the district is "skewing the survey toward their desired goal, which is clearly to lower the stocking level of stands by lowering vegetation and opening stands."

Prince argued that the examples provided in the survey all furthered these goals.

"It is not a fair representation of what people might think if they saw the whole picture," she said.

Dustin acknowledged that the main goal of the Sisters Ranger District "is to get fire back into the ecosystem, and to return the forest to a sustainable condition that will perpetuate itself."

He said the surveys were an attempt to see how the public would feel about the thinning and understory burning the district has recently advocated and proposes for the Highway 20 corridor.

The survey does not address how the project will be funded. But Dustin admits that cutting only small trees that have little or no economic value presents a new problem.

"The question is, how do we pay for this activity?" he said. "If there is no timber sale, it will be the taxpayer paying for it rather than the timber industry."

He explained that decades of fire suppression by the Forest Service have created an unnatural condition.

"Those educated about ecology know the stands are overstocked; there are too many trees per acre," he said. "We need to thin the understory to save old growth trees. There is just so much water and nutrients per acre. Big Ponderosa pine trees are dying because of a lack of water and nutrients."

Paul Dewey of the Sisters Forest Planning Committee agrees that it is necessary to "relieve some stress on the big trees," and that, "clearing out the brush and smaller trees" is a good idea, to the extent the agency cuts only trees under eight inches in diameter.

And Dewey concurs that naturally occurring fire should have cleaned out the dense growth of rabbitbrush, ceoanosis and manzanita that grow in thickets beneath the ponderosa pine and use most of the available water.

But he cautions, "I would hate to see the emphasis on thinning the corridor so people could see distant views. In the past they have clear-cut so people could see Three Sisters views from along the highway."