Hellroaring log harvest underway

If you’ve seen logging trucks on the road in Bigfork, they might be coming from the east shore of Flathead Lake.

As part of an annual target of 18 million board-feet, logging began in the Hellroaring Road area of the Flathead Indian Reservation in July. The Hellroaring Management Area logging project — located southeast of Finley Point — is scheduled for 6.5 million board-feet a year through 2017.

Steve McDonald, an inventory and planning forester with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, said that planning for the project began two years ago. The environmental assessment for the project was signed in June by a Bureau of Indian Affairs officer. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was not actively involved in the Hellroaring project because it was outside the tribes’ Grizzly Bear Management Zone, McDonald said.

“We would leave the best trees,” McDonald said of the project. “We’re leaving healthy Ponderosa pine, Douglas fir and larch where possible.”

Due to the exclusion of fire a lot of forests are out of balance, he said, noting the tribes are trying to restore the forest to its historical condition.

Project goals include: improving overall forest health by using silvicultural practices and prescribed burns; reducing fire hazards within wildland-urban interface areas; increasing long-term growth by decreasing mistletoe and root rot; thinning overstocked tree stands (too dense); providing income and employment opportunities for the tribe; and reducing open roads.

McDonald said that the tribe plans to close less than four miles per square mile of roads based on elk management guidelines.

“We have tribal loggers do a lot of work for us, but not all of the workers are tribal,” he said.

Other logging projects going on in the Flathead Reservation include one that’s wrapping up in the St. Mary’s area near St. Ignatius and a fire sale in the Jocko primitive area near Arlee.

From 1982 to 2000, McDonald said the tribes targeted logging 35 million board-feet per year, but that was changed when their forest management plan was updated in 2000. The tribes are looking to update the current forest management plan in the near future, he said.