Logging equipment works on the Westside Bypass project near Seeley Lake.
US Forest Service Wildlife Biologist Scott Tomson points at the Westside Bypass sale map.
Jon Haufler, the president of the Clearwater Resource Council Board, talks about forest management at the Marshall Creek Wilderness Management Area.
Jim Burchfield, the co-chair of SWCC, sits on a log at a site where the trees have recently been thinned.
Caryn Miske, the Executive Director of Clearwater Resource Council, discusses private land forest management and stewardship at a private land fuel mitigation site at Eagle Point.
SEELEY LAKE - The Clearwater Resource Council (CRC) and the US Forest Service joined the Southwestern Crown Collaborative (SWCC) for a Seeley Field Tour on July 20. The SWCC brings together citizens, businesses, government agencies and conservation organizations to consider creative solutions in the management of National Forests in the Blackfoot, Clearwater and Swan River valleys.
SWCC began meeting regularly in July of 2009 in response to the creation of the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration (CFLR) program, a program that promotes community well-being and forest restoration. With the investments of the CFLR program and private match dollars, SWCC has since started to implement a decade-long restoration strategy with the help of local and national conservation groups, federal and state land agencies, local citizens and the University of Montana.
The field tour included a variety of sites on Forest Service, Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC), Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks (FWP), The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and private lands.
For each site, forest and wildlife experts highlighted topics including forest restoration, fuel mitigation, disease management in beetle-kill stands and more.
The first stop on the tour was FWP's Marshall Creek Wildlife Management Area. Region 2 Montana FWP Biologist Mike Ebinger discussed wildlife and forest management.
For the last 50 years, Marshall Creek WMA has been actively managed for commercial timber production. The property supports grizzly bears and Canada lynx, two federally Endangered Species Act (ESA)-listed terrestrial species, as well as candidate species fisher and wolverine.
Ebinger said recruiting and maintaining forest stands remain at the top of FWP's priorities, specifically for responsibly stewarding wildlife habitat. This stewarding includes maintaining mid-successional habitats, habitats that are in transition from grassland to forest.
"I like what we do with our wildlife management areas because this one's a little bit unique," Ebinger said. "Most of our wildlife management areas have been purchased for big game winter range primarily for deer and elk. Typically we're dealing with conifer encroachments and thinning but here we have a little bit more flexibility with forest management."
The tour also visited a Westside bypass site to view the management of mature timber stands, followed by a visit to the USFS project site for the Highway 83/Rice Ridge to view insect-prone Douglas fir stands.
Decades of fire suppression, periodic drought and a rapidly warming climate have spurred beetle outbreaks across the Intermountain West. Quinn Carver, the Seeley Lake District Ranger, said since the Rice Ridge Fire swept through, the Douglas fir bark beetle issues had only intensified the issue.
"The Doug-fir bark beetles are creaming us right now," Carver said. "We're trying to increase our prescribed burning acreage and all I can see is that none of us have enough capacity to take it on ourselves."
Along with government and state agencies managing the forest, private landowners are also practicing forest management on their lands. The tour ended with a brief visit to a private fuel mitigation site on Eagle Point southwest of Seeley Lake. Ryan Bell, the CRC Community Forester, discussed his involvement in forest management on the Stanley Property.
"The property was basically just a wall of lodgepole and fir," Bell said. "I instructed them that my idea was to mimic fire and burn small patches but it doesn't look like he did that here on the Stanley property. I think he cut more trees than I initially planned."
Caryn Miske, the Executive Director of CRC, also discussed CRC's most recent fuel mitigation project at Big Sky Lake. Utilizing CRC's grant program and expertise, property owners voluntarily thinned their properties on their own. Miske said the project has been in the works for two years and will be finished in the fall.
"This [project] resulted in roughly two thirds of the total number of properties being thinned," Miske wrote in an email. "This is meaningful ... The BSL community as a whole is now more likely to prevent catastrophic loss of human life and property as they reached a critical tipping point in the total number of properties thinned."
To learn more about SWCC, visit their website https://www.swcrown.org
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