The Colt Fire grows rapidly during its initial start on July 20. The fire was halted before it reached Highway 83 because of a road hidden in the trees across this image.
A new request from Lolo National Forest would open roughly 22,000 acres of federal land to commercial timber harvesting, fuels reduction and road decommissioning, with the main goal of clearing dead and infected trees to prevent wildfires and beetle kill.
Similar projects have been completed on the west side of Highway 83. While parts of the treated forest burned during the Colt Fire, Seeley Lake District Ranger Quinn Carver attested that the active management stunted the fire and kept it from homes.
The North Seeley Wildland Urban Interface Highway 83 project opened for public comment last week. The project would include immediately harvesting some stands, doing pre-commercial thinning, fuels treatment and decommissioning old roads that came from industrial timber lands acquired by the Forest Service.
"Just fixing this piece right here, from the north, Seeley will be well protected," Carver said.
Because of the recent Good Neighbor Authority passed by Congress in 2018, the Forest Service has new power to approve larger timber projects with an emphasis on fire protection. A cover letter for the project said Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack approved the project as an Emergency Action Determination - limiting public comment to one month-long period.
Members of the public can comment from Aug. 29 to Sept. 28. Comments can be sent online https://www.fs.usda.gov/project/lolo/?project=64580, or sending mail with the subject "ATTN: North Seeley Wildland Urban Interface – Highway 83" to Seeley Lake Ranger District, 3583 Highway 83, Seeley Lake, MT 59868.
With the ambitious project, Carver said Seeley Lake could be in a good defensive position from fire for the next decade. But projects like Highway 83 have been slowed in court challenges by environmental groups, who argue fuels reduction hurts endangered wildlife populations.
That included the project that helped contain the Colt Fire this summer, which spent five years in court before work actually started.
Past work
The Colt Summit project was first scoped almost a decade ago, with the original plan to reduce fuels on roughly 2,000 acres around Lake Alva to Summit Lake. The project was first approved in 2011, but litigation from several environmental groups held up implementation until 2016.
The case centered on grizzly bear and Canadian lynx habitat, which U.S. District Court Judge Don Molloy mostly threw out. Additional environmental assessments for the lynx were set in place before the project went forward.
Similar action was taken on the Beaver Creek drainage project in the Swan Lake Ranger District. Swan Lake Ranger Chris Dowling said the project went to court for two years, delaying the start of work, which is still in progress.
"If the Beaver Creek project had been fully implemented it likely would have sped the development of containment lines around the (Colt Fire) and created more ability for firefighters to safely engage the fire," Dowling said in an email.
One of the main challengers was the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, which Executive Director Mike Garrity said was because of threatened lynx habitat and the downfalls to logging the land. While some projects help the ecosystem, Garrity argued that wildfire is more likely to rip through recently logged lands.
"The Jocko Lakes fire burned through a heavily-logged clearcut in 2007," Garrity said. "I don't know why logging prevents fire when the Jocko Lakes fire almost burned down Seeley Lake."
Garrity argued instead that projects should focus on fireproofing individual homes in forested areas. Non-flammable roofs, decks and a yard clear of dangerous fuels should give people better protection than thinning larger forested areas in the area, he said.
On Colt Summit, Carver said the fuels reduction wasn't meant to treat the entire forest in the area, but instead focus on defensible positions that could keep wildfires from the Highway 83 corridor. The project also rerouted a road off of Colt Creek to be a better containment line.
"The whole idea is we are designing treatment ahead of time to protect our values," Carver said, pointing to a map of houses and campgrounds near the Colt Fire. "This original road ran basically right up this steep Colt Creek drainage. So the decision was to move it up out of there for fuel hazard and for fisheries."
After moving the road, the Forest Service thinned the lands around the road, and burned the area in 2020 to clean the understory, which upset some residents because of the smoke generated in the valley, the Pathfinder previously reported.
When the Colt Fire sparked in July, it burned through heavy dead and downed trees, and the original roadway. But when it reached Forest Road 646 - where treatment had been done - it laid down and only a couple spot fires jumped the road.
Without the protection, Carver feared the fire would have crossed the highway and burned much more acres.
"This is a perfect example of some forethought of prior projects that have definitely been built out to protect these values of risk," Carver said. "We created a break for ourselves to give us a chance."
Future Proposals
The proposed Highway 83 project stretches along the east corridor of the Clearwater River, and would treat vastly different ecosystems within the forest. There's 761 acres of old growth trees, 3,770 acres of riparian habitat, and more than 10,000 acres categorized under timber management.
Part of the focus of work would be to undo almost 100 years of different management practices, which included clear-cut timber lands. After multiple cuts, Forest Service experts said in the scoping document that younger stands are often homogeneous, too close together, and riddled with disease.
A focus would be placed on keeping larger western larch trees and ponderosa pines, while cutting down middle-sized trees. Many of those trees would be Douglas fir and lodgepole pines, which have been affected by beetle infection.
"So over the long term we want to retain Douglas fir on the landscape, but we don't want it to be such a high component (for fire) because the beetle makes that decision for us, they are killing the big ones," Carver said. "We will be retaining these smaller, younger fir across the landscape so they persist."
While much of the project focuses on trees, a couple thousand acres are included in the project just to assess and decommission roads from industrial timberlands. Carver said the only treated vegetation will happen in Missoula County's Wildfire Protection Plan.
"It looks like a lot, but there will be some stands where there won't be a lot coming out of," Carver said. "It's objective based to try and get widely spread out larch trees over time."
Garrity did not say whether the Alliance for the Wild Rockies would sue over the Highway 83 project, but he did critique the framework of the Seeley Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) brought by the Forest Service.
"A WUI is defined as anywhere within a mile and half of 40 homes," Garrity said, adding that the Wild Rockies recently won a case against an expansion WUI in Idaho. "Highway 83 is not a community, and it shouldn't use that designation."
Garrity said instead of building more in remote and forested areas, that towns should focus on internal growth that can be more defensible from a large fire. That way, he said, forests can naturally develop without human intervention, and eventually become more fire resistant.
Carver, while looking over a map of the Seeley Ranger District at the lakeside headquarters, noted all the fires that have gotten close to Seeley. The 2017 Rice Ridge Fire burned to just within a mile of the town, but he said it didn't get through because of older thinning projects.
"We need to give ourselves a shot to prevent a big fire from coming into town," Carver said. "We have seen again and again that this is how we do it."
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