Cutting trees to protect the forest

Drive Forest Service Road 14 into Camp Sherman today and you will see stacks of small-sized trees thinned from the dense forest stands along both sides of the road. Come back in a few years, Forest Service officials say, and you will see a more open healthy forest being restored to what the Metolius Basin forests once were.

Machine and hand thinning of the dense stands in the basin got underway this winter. Foresters hope to reduce the impact of catastrophic wildfires, insects and diseases on residents, visitors, tribal values and recreational developments in the basin, plus enhance the late-successional forests of the area.

Two pieces of small maneuverable equipment shear off the larger trees at the ground and stack them in piles. These piles are then moved to the roadsides where they may be made available for firewood. Or they may be sold for chips if the market is there. Crews then come in and thin the smaller trees.

Forest Service employees operate the equipment while a 10-to 12-man Oregon Department of Forestry contract crew does hand work with power saws. This crew is on leave for the month of February because of department employment constraints.

“The project area is about 15,000 acres with another 2,000 acres of private land,” said Brian Tandy, silviculturalist with the Sisters Ranger District. “We plan on treating to various degrees about 12,500 acres. Besides thinning of young stands of different diameters, there is some burning and aspen enhancement projects. Creating fuel breaks is effective in helping to control low-intensity fires.

“When you get a fire of the B & B Fire magnitude, all bets are off. While you may save your house, everything around is lost. The reason you built your house there is no longer there.”

In the Metolius Basin, the Forest Service elected to try the landscape approach, treating most of the land to different degrees, he added.

“This thinning work is not a job for volunteers,” district ecologist Maret Pajutee explained. “ Some of these small trees are eight inches in diameter, but 30 to 40 feet high. They weigh hundreds of pounds and it takes equipment to move them a half a mile or more over areas with no existing roads.”

A cubic foot of ponderosa pine weighs about 50 to 60 pounds, Tandy added.

“This is the time of year when there is usually too much snow on the ground to do any work, but this year is unusual,” said Tandy.

The project was initiated by the Camp Sherman community after the giant ice and snowstorm rolled through in the mid-1990s, Pajutee explained.

“There was a lot of breakage and bent-over trees resulting in a huge fuel bed on the ground. There were thousands of trees impacted.

“All of a sudden, people were looking around and saying ‘there are a lot of little trees around here’ and most of them were bent over,” Pajutee added.

“The district was inundated with requests to do something about the problem. We had an incredible amount of public involvement in the project with an ongoing participation by many stakeholders.”

“I think it has been an evolutionary thing following some of the past practices that had been criticized,” Tandy said.

“There was something new here that we could all work together towards getting what we want.”

Support for the work is growing as the stakeholders gain more trust in what the Forest Service is doing and what the project looks like after work is completed.

The project was initiated in 2001 with a Record of Decision issued in July of 2003. The B & B Fire started in August of 2003 and burned through some of the project area. The League of Wilderness Defenders-Blue Mountain Biodiversity Project filed an appeal of the decision in September of 2003.

Over 100 people showed up at an appeal resolution meeting to support the Forest Service decision. The Regional Office then denied the appeal.

This led to a lawsuit filed by the same group in April of 2004.

The main issue in the lawsuit seems to focus on the big trees, which the Forest Service defines as trees over 21inches in diameter.

However, work is progressing as the lawsuit is being considered since no injunction or restraining order has been filed to stop the project.

Two local environmental organizations, Sisters Forest Planning Committee and the Friends of the Metolius, continue to support the project.

“Because of the major wildfire, the project was reviewed again and some adjustments were made, but we still got the lawsuit,” Tandy said.

“We were funded for some thinning that is now underway and we hope to use our ‘stewardship authority’ in the future to negotiate with contractors to trade goods thinned for services.

“In other cases, we are allowed to keep receipts here on the district instead of sending them on to the Treasurer.”