Funding green lights forest projects

Forests from Black Butte Ranch to the west side of Bend will be made healthier and safer from the destruction of extreme wildfire through the Deschutes Skyline Project, which just won $500,000 in federal funding.

Foresters hope that that is just the beginning.

"The potential is for 10 years of funding to implement this Deschutes Skyline Project," said Sisters District Ranger Bill Anthony.

The project covers 130,000 acres, including private forest lands currently owned by Fidelity National - land the Deschutes Land Trust hopes to acquire as the community Skyline Forest. Some 97,000 acres lie in the Deschutes National Forest.

Roughly half of the federal funds will be used on the Sisters Ranger District to contract for mowing and thinning in the forest with the goal of reducing wildfire fuels and restoring ecological health and balance.

According to Anthony, the Deschutes Skyline Project encompasses the Glaze project near Black Butte Ranch, the Sisters Area Fuels Reduction (SAFR) project - both of which are ready to implement - and the Popper project, which is still in the early planning stages.

Popper will treat the area between the Three Sisters Wilderness to the west and the Fidelity lands to the east, on both sides of Three Creek Road. Included in that area are stands of dead lodgepole pine in the Pole Creek drainage - widely regarded as a tinderbox threatening Sisters with a major wildfire disaster.

Possible treatment options in the stands of dead timber are innovative for this region.

Anthony said that, in areas with road access, there may be an opportunity to create long-term firewood cutting areas.

"Lodgepole today often has far more value dead as firewood than it has green," he said.

Much of the dead timber stands in roadless areas which conservation groups are keen to preserve in that condition and possibly add to wilderness areas.

"When we consider our choices there, we're probably not going to be going in there with logging equipment and building roads," Anthony said.

Instead, those areas may be burned. Such prescribed burns would be conducted in the late fall or even in the early winter, and they wouldn't be the typical underburning actions familiar to the Sisters Country.

Burning-out of dead stands of lodgepole would require stand replacement fires - consuming all of the dead trees.

Anthony says that conservationists are buying into that idea, since stand replacement fires on 75-year cycles are natural in lodegepole stands.

"That's exactly what these stands need," Anthony said.

This idea reflects the dual purpose of the project: wildfire protection and forest health.

There is a third motive: job creation.

"A lot will be done with contract work," Anthony said.

That means employment for many private contract forest workers.

Anthony noted that collaboration among several agencies and local municipalities was a critical element - in fact part of the criteria - in securing the funding for the project.

He noted that Deschutes County Commissioner Allan Unger flew to Washington, D.C. to lobby for Central Oregon's inclusion as one of 10 projects to receive money from the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Act.

Anthony called the funding "a tremendous opportunity to do important work."