The Boise quickstep - forest management in Boise, Idaho

American Forests, Jan-Feb, 1993 by Herbert E. McLean

A bold plan to restore the health of this Idaho national forest is being watched closely throughout the tinderbox West.

Idaho's heart-thumping Foothills wildfire last August, which gobbled more than 257,000 acres of range and forest lands and potentially threatened Boise (pop. 102,000) in a 31-mile romp, came as no surprise.

Historic fuel loads (dead, dry standing and down timber), steep slopes, and low humidity in these tinderlands needed only a fire start. Twelve dry-lightning strikes took care of that on August 19. And for the next 12 suspenseful days, locals prayed that a wind shift wouldn't turn the fire toward the state capital.

While racking up a $16-million suppression cost, the firestorm also left a curious footprint, one that sent a compelling message about fuels, fire, and forest health:

In Tiger Creek a remote canyon just north of tiny Prairie, near the southern end of the Boise National Forest, the crowning blaze stopped in its tracks, then skirted a particular 2,500-acre stand of ponderosa pines. They were left unscathed--the only such living survivors within miles.

The Tiger Creek stand, it turns out, had been commercially thinned, then "defueled" by the use of prescribed fire that had been allowed to burn through the understory without "crowning" into the tops of the trees. The process replicates an age-old fire-ecology dynamic that had been suppressed for years in these forests.

Without that added fuel as a "come-on," the fire simply moved elsewhere.

Tiger Creek has special significance because it points directly to some core forest-management issues on the Boise and on other western national forests: whether or not to thin commercial timber, whether or not to conduct prescribed burns. Of more urgent interest there, it sheds important light on the question of defueling forests by "express-salvaging" burned and bug-killed trees.

A Forest-Health Strategy

There's little question about where Boise National Forest stands on all three issues.

In a bold "Forest Health Strategy" published last May, Forest Supervisor Steve Mealey cites the loss of 400,000 commercially valuable trees (about one-fifth of the available timber on the forest) that have died since 1988 from catastrophic insect epidemics, caused indirectly by a six-year drought.

Three significant steps are spotlighted in the Boise National Forest's action plan:

* Quickly salvage dead and dying timber suitable for commercial timber harvest, in order to remove potential fire-feeding fuel from the forest and to recover that timber's economic value.

* Restore and improve forest health by reducing the number of trees competing for water, accomplishing this through thinning and "fire-management techniques" (meaning prescribed burning of the understory).

* Participate in a broad-based partnership study led by AMERICAN FORESTS, and share forest-health information, with special emphasis on forest-ecosystem resilience.

Running Up the Salvage Flag

In what Mealey calls "a very precise proposed action," Boise National Forest ran up the dead-tree salvage flag last spring, announcing plans to sell 67 million board-feet of bug-killed trees. After that level was reached, the forest kept right on salvaging the growing mass of dead timber, hitting more than 80 million board-feet by year's end.

The effort may be unprecedented for any national forest. Indeed, under the new strategy, 95 percent of all trees sold on the national forest for both 1992 and 1993 will be either dead or dying trees. That, too, may be a record.

Heavy-lift helicopters were used extensively in roadless areas, removing as much as 80 percent of the salvage timber there. The accent has been on "soft-touch" logging in this erosion-prone land.

Making the "express salvage" action possible are forest-management provisions |36 CFR 217.4 (a)(11)~ that, for purposes of "recovery and resources rehabilitation," allow the Chief of the Forest Service to exempt certain salvage sales from the appeals process--a drawn-out affair that can consume years. The Boise has used the process aggressively: All of its 1992 salvage-sale decisions were exempted from appeal.

With only a year or two available to harvest fire- and bug-killed trees before they deteriorate, the exemptions make good sense economically in the name of fuel reduction. But a string of local environmental organizations is protesting the salvage effort.

"We don't want the Forest Service to hastily conclude that a natural process |bugs in an ecosystem~ is a 'disaster' in efforts to expeditiously salvage wood fiber," states a January 1992 letter to Supervisor Mealey from seven Idaho environmental groups.

"It is in everyone's best interest to see the |Boise~ forest managed from an ecosystem perspective. We don't want the Forest Service to become too obsessed with salvaging wood fiber at the expense of other forest resources," the letter emphasizes.

Despite those statements, the emphasis is on dialogue between the Forest Service and the environmentalists, and from that, it is hoped, may come solid solutions to shared concerns.