The South Cottonwood drainage in the northern Gallatin Range proposed wilderness lies immediately south of Bozeman, to the west of Hyalite Canyon. The Forest Service’s nearly 8,000-acre Hyalite Cottonwood Hazardous Fuels Reduction Project threatens some of the proposed wilderness. Keep in mind that one acre is approximately equal to a football field. So, imagine what logging 8000 acres will do to the area!
The proposal demonstrates the agency’s maniacal devotion to logging as the cure for anything that threatens a forest. Of course, the timber industry defines a threat as any natural evolutionary process that kills trees. Insects are a problem. Log the trees. Fire is a threat? Gotta log the trees. Drought killing trees? Cut the trees to “fix” the forest.
It’s what I call the Vietnam approach to forest “health”. To “save” the forest, you cut it down. Ironically, in some studies, the combination of trees executed by chainsaws, and perhaps later killed by fire or insects, is more than would have died if the forest were left alone.
Just the name suggests the Forest Service’s bias. “Hazardous fuels” ignores the area’s normal fire regime for the area’s lodgepole pine forests, which are characterized by long fire-free periods interrupted by an occasional high-severity blaze, often hundreds of years apart. In the intervening years, fuels do accumulate. But this doesn’t result in fires.
It is not fuel that drives fire in these forests, but climatic conditions of drought, high temperatures, low humidity, and high winds. You don’t get a large blaze if you don’t have those conditions. And the probability that all these factors will occur in the same place with an ignition is extremely low, usually less than 1 percent.
Logging and prescribed burning can often increase the chance of a fire by opening up the canopy, which dries the soil and surface fuels, and increasing wind penetration, which is the major factor in large fire creation.
Prescribed burning influence is short-lived, and when vegetation regrows, it often increases the amount of “fine fuels” like grasses and small shrubs on the ground, again increasing the probability of a fire.
So, to preclude a natural fire that may only happen once in a hundred or two hundred years, the Forest Service plans to log what is one of the vest-pocket wilderness areas in the Gallatin Range, destroying its wilderness condition.
The Forest Service is claiming they will “Fix the Forest”. How arrogant?
The dominant tree species in the Gallatin Range is lodgepole pine, which evolved tens of millions of years ago. It is a wonder that these trees survived all these millennia without human intervention to keep them “healthy.”
Lodgepole pine is adapted to periodic high-severity fires.
It is a mistake to suggest they required a “low severity” fire to remain “healthy.”
The Forest Service is like one of those Snake Oil salesmen selling you the magical elixir, chainsaw medicine, that can cure any ailment.
Now we learn the Forest Service Snake Oil Salesmen are pushing to log the South Cottonwood drainage. Recognizing that South Cottonwood was previously saved from the chainsaw is essential.
Back in the 1990s, the Plum Creek Timber Company owned every other section (one mile square) in the drainage. The company planned to log its South Cottonwood sections. However, public opposition, along with the assistance of Senator Max Baucus, obtained federal funds to buy out Plum Creek’s checkerboard sections.
The primary justification for this acquisition was to preserve the opportunity to designate the South Cottonwood drainage as part of a larger Gallatin Range Wilderness, as the Gallatin Yellowstone Wilderness Alliance has proposed.
Allowing the Forest Service to log South Cottonwood is a betrayal of the public interest. Tell the Forest Service to keep its hands off of South Cottonwood and manage the area for its wilderness values.
If you wish to comment on the scoping proposal, you can reach the Forest Service at this link. Comments are due by May 8th.
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