MOSCOW — A Sierra Club workshop Saturday here focused on how to convert U.S. Forest Service numbers into maps of the Clearwater National Forest.
Maps of four areas on the Clearwater’s North Fork Ranger District entered the session on the University of Idaho campus splotched with red, the color chosen for clearcuts.
Those at the workshop set out coloring their maps as Forest Service watchdogs, intending to challenge both assumptions and decisions. But the agency’s North Fork ranger, Arthur S. Bourassa, said he welcomed their scrutiny, or at least their continuing education.
At least by using the same sets of numbers, the Sierra Club and the Forest Service will be able to argue issues from points other than emotion, he added.
‘’It gives everybody a better idea of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it,’’ he added.
Bourassa was invited to critique the progress on the maps but instead spent much of his half of the workshop explaining how the agency goes about its business.
The dozen people gathered for the workshop spent more than an hour poring over numbers on computerized tables. The numbers represented what Forest Service employees had found while cruising timber in the areas.
Timber cruising boils down to measuring the age, height and diameter of trees in small areas. Foresters then apply the information to the larger stand of trees, which may cover dozens of acres.
Leroy Lee, a Santa-area resident and part-time Forest Service timber cruiser, directed the workshop. Lee began coloring the Emerald Creek area of the St. Maries Ranger District by number more than a year ago.
His bright-hued depictions of that area near Fernwood became an exercise in tactical forestry. By showing where the clearcuts were, and the young timber, rocky slopes and mature timber, a sense of the future took shape.
In that area, Lee concluded the agency’s plans for the next year or two will mean the virtual end of logging there for probably the next two decades.
That analysis led to the Sierra Club’s workshop and to a study of the North Fork District. The district, home to both the Mallard-Larkins Pioneer Area and Kelly Creek, looms as a major battleground.
The battles will flare because of the two areas’ proposed wilderness designation.
But Lee said he intended to focus attention in precisely the opposite direction, the Forest Service’s logging of areas outside the wilderness debate.
‘’We’re just trying to work into a new level of cooperation with the agency,’’ Lee said. ‘’If we can educate ourselves, we can at least talk to them.’’
Tim Warner, a Kamiah resident, said the bitter feud over wilderness has led to overcutting roaded areas on the Clearwater. Warner said he considers logging a proper occupation on the national forests. Even clearcutting, within limits, has its place, he said.
He shrinks from the label ‘’environmentalist’’ for that reason and its general perception in Idaho as anti-logging, preferring to call himself a conservationist or naturalist, Warner added.
‘’But if we’re going to have any kind of forests in the future, we have to make sure what is left is managed properly,’’ Warner said.
‘’To me for a lot of years, the environmental movement got sidetracked by wilderness and let a lot of other things slide,’’ Lee added.
The Forest Service itself must wrangle with the issues the maps illustrate, whether too much logging is planned in developed areas, Lee said.
‘’They’re the kind of hard questions that they’re asking themselves. We’re not asking anything they haven’t asked themselves,’’ he added.
For Bourassa’s part the issues demand a hard look. His staff has been working on a 4,000- to 5,000-acre area known as the Barnyard analysis area.
The Clearwater Forest Plan calls for logging 6.5 million board feet from the area. Bourassa estimates the actual total may be closer to 0.5 million.
The reason is some 70 percent of the area has already been logged. Since the agency allots 100 years from seed to log for timber, and since logging has only been under way for 30 years in the area, something is askew, he said.
Instead of having 70 percent of the timber left for the next 70 years of one timber rotation, only 30 percent is. Also, an agency policy that 5 percent of old-growth timber must be left further trims the timber sales in the area.
While the workshop sought to display where the agency’s numbers show the timber is, the Forest Service has launched a search of its own, Bourassa said.
The new search will yield detailed information about the forest’s timber stands. It also will test the agency’s long-range management plan for the Clearwater.
That plan, approved two years ago, calls for the Clearwater to yield 173 million board feet of timber. But questions about the Clearwater’s ability to produce that much timber are gaining ground, sparking the agency’s search.
‘’This is something I would rather not be doing now, but now is right,’’ Bourassa said. ‘’This should have started 10 years ago when we started working on the plan.’’
This story was published in the Feb. 4, 1990, edition of the Lewiston Tribune.
