The Custer Gallatin National Forest last month revived a long-awaited and controversial forest project near Cooke City with a slightly smaller scope. The agency rescinded it earlier this year following a legal threat filed by environmental groups.
This newest iteration of the Cooke City Fuels and Forest Health Project, resubmitted in October, will thin 2,788 acres of forest within a broader, nearly 20,000-acre swath of the Custer Gallatin around Cooke City, just northeast of Yellowstone National Park. The main goal of the project, according to the agency, is to increase fire resilience in the area.
Commercial harvest dropped by about 54 acres in the new proposal. The Forest Service also trimmed a large swath of habitat for the threatened whitebark pine from the project.
“We’re really pleased to see the Forest Service respond to the public comment period,” said Max Hjortsberg, co-director of the Livingston-based nonprofit Park County Environmental Council.
Bethany Allen, PCEC’s wild habitat director, described the changes as a “partial win.”
And some area locals have a similar view. Heidi Barrett, a property owner in nearby Silver Gate, wrote 121 pages of comments to the Forest Service over the project. “I’m sure I’m the record-setter because that was very obnoxious,” she said.
In particular, Barrett was happy to see the agency remove sections of the project adjacent to her cabin from its scope. But she still questioned the extent to which forest projects, like what the agency has proposed, actually makes the community more resilient to fire.
Jesse Logan, a co-plaintiff in the lawsuit and retired federal scientist who focused on whitebark pine, voiced particular concern over the fate of the tree he spent 14 years studying. The project will still involve more than 200 acres of a polarizing treatment called “daylighting” around whitebarks in a research plot, which involves cutting out competing vegetation so individual trees can thrive. Another 1,500 acres of the project are also in whitebark habitat.
“They acknowledge that they lack the scientific basis,” Logan said, “but they’re going to go ahead and do it anyway.”
The Cooke City project is not the only logging and wildfire-related proposal pending in the region. The long-controversial Bear Palmer Forest Health Project near Jardine is moving through the NEPA process. And earlier this week, the agency released a scoping letter for a new project that would treat more than 3,500 acres between Emigrant and Tom Miner Basin.
Mountain Journal talked with Custer Gallatin National Forest Supervisor Matt Jedra about the project, fire resilience and how the effort fits in with the forest’s priorities.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Mountain Journal: Tell me about the genesis of the Cooke City project and why it’s important.
Matt Jedra: The purpose and need of this project is firefighter and public safety. It’s there to reduce the fuel loading around Cooke City. Fire is infrequent in that community. But when it does come through, it is very high severity. Highway 212 is the only way residents and emergency personnel can get in or out during a fire.
But we’re looking at it not only from a wildfire protection for that community — for the wildland-urban interface — but also from a forest health standpoint. With fire being removed from that landscape for so many years, that forest is overgrown. It’s super dense. It’s really susceptible to insects and disease, like bark beetle outbreaks. So, overall forest health is a big driver of it, but the overarching piece is trying to treat that area of the wildland-urban interface for fuels reduction.
The project has been in the works for for quite some time — close to 10 years for the planning side.
MoJo: Let’s talk about this iteration of the project. What has changed since it was withdrawn?
M.J.: We heard from the public about their values in this small mountain community. We listened and we made changes accordingly. We heard a lot of input around whitebark pine particularly. Some of the treatment units were next to peoples’ homes. We reduced 429 acres of whitebark pine treatment. There’s got to be more work on monitoring. There’s got to be more work on looking at the efficacy of the treatments. Now, we’re going to work with the Rocky Mountain Research Station to develop a long-term monitoring plan to be able to understand the [daylighting] treatment more. Daylighting is still going to happen, just on a smaller scale than it was before.
MoJo: Some of the pushback related to this project was related to other federal priorities: rescinding the Roadless Rule and NEPA rollbacks, among others. But you said this project has been in the works for 10 years. How do you communicate the merits of this particular project amid the other things many people are mad about?
M.J.: This question comes up a lot for us. We line up our program work about 5-7 years in advance. All the projects we’ve been doing for the last two years have been on the books for the last five years or so. It’s not a product of a shifting administration or changing priorities or anything like that. It’s all part of creating a resilient landscape and a healthy forest. That’s the big driver; it’s not this push for timber for us.
MoJo: People can have a gut reaction to commercial logging. They can conflate commercial thinning with industrial-scale logging or clear cuts. How do timber objectives fit into this project, if at all?
M.J.: We do contribute to it. It’s part of [Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz’s] priorities, it’s the [U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins’] priorities. It’s our priority. We do deliver timber, but timber is the byproduct of the work that we do. So, when you’re doing a landscape-level treatment and you’re looking at reducing the fuels, reducing the hazardous fuels, thinning out the trees, making them more healthy for long-term restoration and long-term resilience, mechanical thinning is just a tool we use to get the right result.
We don’t have a big timber program compared to other forests, either in Montana or throughout the West. The Custer Gallatin is vast. But here it’s also high elevation; it’s moisture limited; trees are very small. So, we don’t have a big timber program, but we do contribute 6-8 million board feet, up to 10 million board feet, annually.
We pay for a lot of our projects. The timber in there does not profit enough in order to pay for the project. So we use other dollars — appropriated dollars, grants and partners — to help get that project work done. The timber alone is not valuable enough.
MoJo: I know you can’t comment on ongoing litigation, but litigation is an ever-present issue. It often delays projects by years and can make it hard to get things done. Can you break down what this means for you in your supervisory role, and what it means for the priorities of the Custer Gallatin?
M.J.: We’ve heard from people that were opposed to it but we also got lots of letters of support. The key is balancing between the two: How do you make that final decision? But the idea is to make a resilient forest for future generations. That’s the driver.
Litigation happens across the West. We go through a process of getting this out to the public. We’re very transparent about our work, being upfront with the open and the best available science. So the litigation does have an impact. It delays our time to get the project work done. I’m hoping in the meantime that we don’t have a big fire on the landscape that could impact that area.
Litigation is an issue that’s been here for a long time. We get lots of litigation. But I’ll say we still put the best foot forward. We’re still putting out more projects to do some great work in some of these communities. It’s just part of our process. We work through it. I think that’s agency life.
