Timber sales look to make forest more fire resistant

A total of three timber and stewardship projects are ongoing up the east side of the Hungry Horse Reservoir this winter. All told they’re expected to bring in about 16 million board feet of lumber and improve the forest health in the woods along the reservoir and near homes in the Canyon, Paul Donnellon, a forester with the Hungry Horse-Glacier View District said during a tour last week.

All three are utilizing local loggers and local mills. The Liger (short for Lion and Tiger Creeks) project is being done under the Good Neighbor Authority, a Congressionally-approved program that allows states to partner with the Forest Service on stewardship projects. St. Onge Logging of Kalispell is current harvesting timber in that project. The Royal Tiger Project is being harvested by F.H. Stoltze Land and Lumber and is up Emery Creek. Stoltze hasn’t started harvesting it yet, but has been doing roadwork in the area. The Abbot Basin designation by prescription project is also being done by a local contractor — Randy Birky Logging of Kalispell.

The “designation by prescription” means that the contractor is given the responsibility of harvesting the correct trees under the contract, rather than having a Forest Service crew go out and cruise the sale — marking the trees that shouldn’t be cut.

It saves thousands in project costs, Donnellon noted.

The Liger sale is the first Good Neighbor Authority project on the Flathead National Forest.

“It’s been going really well, surprisingly smooth,” Ben Garrett, a forester with the state Department of Natural Resources said. “We all have the same goal and vision.”

That vision for the woods is one with a thinner stand that encourages the growth of species like larch and white pine.

Right now the woods have larch and white pine, but they’re also thick with Engelmann spruce, lodgepole and subalpine fir. If they were to catch on fire, it could quickly turn into an inferno.

“The long term goal is to manage for large diameter larch,” Donnellon said. “A more fire resilient forest.”

Larch has thick bark that is resistant to fire. It’s also a coveted species for lumber and firewood.

One of the main goals of the Good Neighbor Authority is to complete more projects, as it allows state resources, like foresters and other personnel, to be used in cooperation with the Forest Service on federal lands.

While the state might not benefit directly financially from a sale, it does create jobs and reduces the fire risk overall, Garrett noted.

“It ensures the timber industry is healthy and at capacity,” Garrett said.

It’s also strengthened the day-to-day relationships between the state and the Forest Service, both Garrett and Donnelon agreed.

The Abbot Basin project, is also taking a different tack against wildfire, by thinning the understory using a masticator — a machine that’s attached to a skid-steer loader that grinds up the understory. It’s working in a unit Forest Service woods off Seville Lane that’s near a host of homes in Coram.

The idea there is to create a woods with about 100 to 140 trees per acre, opposed to the thousands of trees per acre it has now.

While the thinning doesn’t guarantee a wildfire won’t happen, it’s much easier to fight a fire in a mature woods with wider tree spacing than to fight one that is choked with thousands of saplings, Donnellon noted.

As a bonus, it also encourages huckleberry bushes.

While the sales may seem like a lot of work, they’re actually producing quite a bit of revenue, Donnellon noted — in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases. Those funds can then be used on other projects to improve water quality, manage forests and to maintain roads, he noted.