First look at Forest Plan

The Flathead National Forest released the proposed action for its Forest Plan last week, a first significant step in developing a permanent Forest Plan.

“This is just the starting point of the discussion,” Flathead Forest planner Joe Krueger said.

The 166-page proposal includes 188,000 acres of recommended wilderness — about 80,000 acres in the Tuchuck Mountain and Whale Creek areas of the North Fork, additions to the Bob Marshall and Mission Mountain wilderness areas, and absorbing the entire Jewel Basin Hiking Area and surrounding lands into the wilderness system.

Recommended wilderness is managed as wilderness until Congress designates it by law. The additions recommended in the proposed action do not include trails that currently allow motorcycle use.

The recommendations fall short of what the Montana Wilderness Association and Headwaters Montana had suggested in reports to the Forest. Most notably, the proposed action does not include wilderness in the Bunker Creek area of the Swan Range, instead designating it non-motorized, which would allow mountain biking.

The proposed action also projects timber sales at 28 million board feet per year for the next 20 years. That’s just for saw logs, Krueger noted. Additional sales, such as firewood, boost that figure to 30 million to 34 million board feet per year.

The allowable sale quantity hasn’t been calculated. The Forest’s modeling took into account recent wildfires and the acquisition of about 40,000 acres of land in the Swan Valley from Plum Creek Timber Co. It will be 40 to 50 years before the Plum Creek timber is suitable for harvest again.

The timber harvest projections are based on budgetary constraints and security issues for grizzly bear, lynx and other wildlife. The plan includes harvesting in core grizzly areas but is designed to be sensitive to grizzly bears. It also adheres to a grizzly bear conservation strategy, which the Forest is developing with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The plan classifies about 735, 000 acres as general forest, which allows a wide variety of uses, including timber harvest. Of that general forest, about 637,419 acres are considered suitable for timber harvest, which is about 70,000 acres less than in the 1986 plan, but about 100,000 acres more than in a 2006 plan that was never completed. About 1 million acres, or 44.8 percent of the Flathead Forest, is already in the wilderness system. Wilderness additions would increase that figure by 8 percent.

The proposed action maintains the “status quo” for current road closures — no significant new roads or decommissioning of existing roads is proposed, Krueger and Forest planner Rob Carlin said. Under the current Forest Plan’s Amendment 19, about 700 miles of roads were decommissioned for grizzly bear security.

The planners are also working to include a grizzly bear conservation strategy to guide land and bear management after grizzlies are delisted into forest plans for the Flathead, Helena, Kootenai, Lolo, and Lewis and Clark national forests.

The proposed action includes a new designation called “focused recreation areas” that would allow higher recreational uses on about 33,000 acres of forest. The action also makes some changes to snowmobile use, reducing allowable areas along the Hungry Horse Reservoir near Sullivan Creek and up the Skyland drainage near Puzzle Creek, while expanding areas in the North Fork.

The action took note of community collaborative efforts. The Whitefish Range Partnership, a group of stakeholders interested in the North Fork, submitted several recommendations for management. Those recommendations were included in the action, save for some tweaking of boundaries in some areas, Krueger noted.

The action will be presented in a public meeting at the Flathead Forest offices, 650 Wolfpack Way, in Kalispell, on Tuesday, March 17, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. and can be viewed online at www.fs.usda.gov/goto/flathead/fpr. The grizzly bear component is available online at www.fs.usda.gov/goto/flathead/gbamend.

The proposed action will undergo a 60-day comment period, and interested parties can comment online or directly to the Forest Service. After comments are documented, planners will work on a draft environmental impact statement that could be issued in January 2016 and will be open for public comment. A final EIS and record of decision are expected in January 2017.

For more information, contact Joe Krueger at 406-758-5243 or flatheadplanrevision@fs.fed.us.