Suit challenges timber sale near Pierce

A pair of environmental groups is legally challenging a large timber sale near Pierce, claiming it will harm habitat for threatened steelhead.

The Moscow-based Friends of the Clearwater and the Alliance for the Wild Rockies in Missoula, Mont., filed a lawsuit recently against the project known as Lolo Insect and Disease. The timber sale that was approved last year calls for logging across 3,380 acres in 30 harvest units. It will produce about 43 million board feet of timber and, according to analysis by the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest, sustain as many as 963 jobs.

The 78,500-acre project area includes Upper Lolo, Musselshell, Middle Lolo and Eldorado creeks, and is crossed by the Lolo Motorway and Lewis and Clark and Nez Perce national historic trails.

As its name implies, the sale in the upper reaches of Lolo Creek is designed to address tree mortality caused by bug infestations and tree ailments such as root rot. It was developed in part with advice from the Clearwater Basin Collaborative and also shaped by public comments and consultation with the Nez Perce Tribe, according to Forest Service documents.

The project will include clear-cut-like harvest on more than 2,500 acres dominated by mature shade-tolerant tree species like grand fir, and where root rot and insect infestations are prevalent. Less intensive cutting will happen on another 743 acres.

Loggers will use ground-based equipment, skyline yarding and helicopters to remove the logs. Following the logging, the area will be replanted with species like ponderosa pine, western larch and western white pine.

The environmental groups describe the sale as “massive” and say it, combined with associated road building and the damage from timber sales of the past, will cause silt to reach streams where steelhead spawn.

“The Forest Service intends to build nearly 14 miles of new roads in the Lolo Creek watershed and log nearly 3,400 acres, including 2,644 acres of clearcuts or near clearcuts,” said Gary Macfarlane, Ecosystem Defense Director of Friends of the Clearwater.

Mike Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, noted steelhead were protected under the Endangered Species Act more than 20 years ago and remain in trouble today. Their numbers have been exceptionally poor over the past three years, but he claims analysis connected to the timber sale didn’t incorporate the latest data.

“The National Marine Fisheries Service used high steelhead returns from 2014-2015 for the Lolo Project’s biological opinion despite issuing the document in 2019, a year when returning steelhead numbers were at a 25-year low,” he said.

The groups also contend the timber sale violates the National Forest Management Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for Idaho.

More information on the project is available at http://bit.ly/2FVGu3z.

Barker may be contacted at ebarker@lmtribune.com or at (208) 848-2273. Follow him on Twitter @ezebarker.