Cutting Through The Screens
By Dylan Darling, K-Falls Herald & News
October 8, 2005

CHILOQUIN - Before logger Joe Pariera starts dropping trees on national forest land, he walks the ground to find the best route for dragging the trees out.

He watches for steep grades, rock outcroppings and other natural barricades.

And, because of U.S. Forest Service rules for logging on the east side of the Cascade Range, he also has to figure out how to get the logs out while leaving trees with diameters of 21 inches or more undamaged.

”It definitely changes how we log and how they manage forests,“ Pariera said.

Even before Pariera enters the timber sale area, Forest Service crews have already gone through the same woods. They spray orange paint onto the trees that have the 21-inch or bigger diameter at breast height, or 4 1/2 feet from the ground.

The paint means the trees stay.

The 21-inch rule is designed to produce stands of mature timber like those that stood before settlers came west. Environmentalists say the larger trees have more benefits for wildlife.

Loggers say the result is a crumbling of the timber industry. Smaller trees are less valuable and yield less lumber, factors that contributed to the closing of sawmills over the last decade.

Both environmentalists and loggers agree that the rules - called the ”eastside screens“ - have had an impact, for better or for worse.

Permanently temporary

It was in 1994 that the federal government adopted the eastside screens - so called because proposed timber sales had to be screened to ensure they complied with new environmental rules that were adopted on a temporary basis.

Eleven years later, those temporary rules have become pretty permanent.The screens were enacted to protect forests while officials crafted a grand plan to cover forests from near Klamath Falls to the Canadian border. Called the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project, the project would have covered nine national forests in Oregon, Idaho, Washington and Montana.

Most of the forests have watersheds that feed the Columbia River, which gave the plan its name. The Fremont-Winema National Forests were included in the plan because they also lie on the east side of the Cascades and they have arid forests similar to the other seven, although they don't have streams or rivers that feed the Columbia.

The plan was to be similar to the Northwest Forest Plan, developed by the Clinton administration to save the northern spotted owl by barring loggers from old-growth timber in national forests on the western side of the Cascades.

The planning process for the Columbia Basin project had started in January 1994, but it was expected to take three years. After a week of work, forest managers put the eastside screens in as amendments to the existing forest plans on the nine national forests. Study and revisions followed and the screens were clarified in 1997, but their original basic tenets remained, including the protection of trees 21 inches in diameter or bigger.

The eastside screens were to be a fix while the plan was crafted. Three years after the planning process for the Columbia Basin project started, scientists had collected volumes of data on animals and plant species in the different forests. But the plan still wasn't done.

The planning process continued another year. And another. And another.

”It appeared it was going to be never ending,“ said Brent Frazier, a wildlife biologist with the Fremont-Winema National Forests. ”It was just an enormously complex attempt.“

During 2000, with Democratic President Clinton on his way out of the Oval Office and Republican George Bush looking to take over, the pace of the work on the plan picked up. Although those working on the plan tried to finish it before the general election in November, it was still a work in progress when Americans went to the polls.

Bush won, and the plan never got done.

Although the idea of a plan covering the national forests on the east side of the Cascades has been scrapped, the information gathered during the effort was not.

In June 2003 Linda Goodman, Pacific Northwest regional forester for the Forest Service, issued a letter saying that the managers of the individual forests should start using that information and other studies to update their forest plans.

Depending on the budget

Now the U.S. Forest Service is set to have the nine national forests that would have been part of the Columbia Basin project come up with plans that cover only their land, or their land and a couple of neighboring forests. Two national forests in the Blue Mountains - the Malheur and the Wallowa-Whitman, have already started working on their plan revisions.

Over the next couple of months, the Fremont-Winema National Forests, which merged in 2002, will start putting together a team that will craft a new plan on the forests' 2.3 million acres in Klamath and Lake counties, said forest Supervisor Karen Shimamoto. The team will work out of Klamath Falls.

The size of the team and how much work they do depends on how much funding is earmarked for it in the fiscal year 2006 budget, which will be released in November.

”If it is a limited budget, it will be limited work,“ Shimamoto said.

Once the planning starts in earnest, it's expected to be a three-year project

In the meantime, the eastside screens are still in place, protecting trees with a diameter of at least 21 inches, which is about the height of this newspaper page.

The goal is ”to regrow the forests in the way they were,“ said Jerry Haugen, environmental coordinator for the Fremont-Winema.

In implementing the eastside screens on timberland in the Fremont-Winema National Forests, managers looked at historic photographs from the 1930s and 1940s, images that showed cars driving through the natural open spaces in between massive trees, and read through explorer John C. Fremont's journal from 1843, telling of travels through picturesque pine forests. Fremont led one of the first European explorations into the Klamath Basin.

Logging, starting in the late 19th century, changed the complexion of the forest.

”With the removal of those big trees, grazing and the extinguishing of fire, the woods were left with smaller trees, ” Frazier said.

The Forest Service still sells timber off of the Fremont-Winema, but the focus now on smaller trees.

A new plan will eventually be needed to sustain timber harvests on federal land, said Allan Hahn, timber sales specialist for the Fremont-Winema.

”Down the road at some point we are not going to have those (small) trees anymore and will need the eastside screens to go away,“ Hahn said.

Still split

Environmentalists and loggers remain divided over the impact of the eastside screens.

Environmentalists say the screens have protected fragile forests and are leading to restored habitat for woodland creatures. Loggers say the eastside screens were just another body blow in the knockout of logging in the Northwest, and prevented loggers from cutting trees needed for mills.

”They have protected the remaining old growth ponderosa pine forests for the last decade,“ said Mike Anderson, senior resource analyst for the Wilderness Society, a national non-profit group that says its mission is to protect wilderness and public lands.

He said the old forest plans, adopted in the late 1980s and '90, were geared toward logging old growth and replacing their stands with tree plantations.

”That approach spelled disaster for wildlife,“ he said.

Retaining large trees is leading to recovery and protection for animals and plants, Anderson said.

But a debate still lingers over what exactly constitutes old growth, and if the 21-inch rule is an appropriate indicator. The diameter represents a medium-sized ponderosa pine.

Gary L. Johnson, contract manager and log buyer for Fremont Sawmill in Lakeview, said he would like to see the tree size rule changed.

”All the mills are starving for material,“ he said.

There used to be three mills in Lakeview. Now there is only Fremont. Johnson said the change is thanks in part to the eastside screens.

”(They have) caused the Forest Service to go way back on the amount of timber they would sell,“ he said.

Although there still is logging on federal forests near Lakeview, the amount of timber coming from each sale produces has dropped.

Before the screens the average sale would produce 5,000 to 6,000 board feet of wood per acre, Johnson said. With the screens in place, the sales produce 500 to 2,500 board feet.

”That is just too low of a volume for equipment,“ Johnson said. ”You got a million dollars plus worth of equipment getting four to five loads per day - it just doesn't cut it.“

To cut trees smaller than 21 inches in diameter, loggers prefer to use mechanized feller bunchers, skidders and limbers that can quickly topple, move and ready the trees for the haul to the mill.

Many in the logging industry would like to see the eastside screens removed or reworked, but Johnson said there still will be a number of restrictions, from roadless rules to the Endangered Species Act, that make it complicated to take timber off federal land.

And what about the possibility of going back to the plans that were in place before the eastside screens came into being?

”That's never going to happen,“ Anderson said.

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