From the front window of his district ranger's office, Oliver can see the trees blackened by last summer's Tin Cup fire.
Some sound firefighting, a few strategic breaks in the thick timber and a fortunate change in the wind kept the fire from roaring right into Darby. For two days, the fire was the top priority of national firefighting resources.
“People have been telling us for quite sometime that they want us to do something to reduce the amount of fuel in the wildland/urban interface around Darby,” said Oliver, the Bitterroot National Forest's Darby district ranger.
Last week, the Bitterroot National Forest released three decisions designed to reduce hazardous fuels, provide logs for local mills and improve forest health.
The largest of those three is the Trapper-Bunkhouse Land Stewardship Project just west of Darby.
Close to three years in the making, the project would use thinning and prescribed burning to reduce fuels on about 4,500 acres.
“About 93 percent of that work would be in the wildland/urban interface,” Oliver said. “The 800-acre Tin Cup fire is within the project boundaries.”
The project also includes watershed restoration projects and some decommissioning of roads.
There is some commercial logging proposed, but Oliver said the volume of logs that will produce hasn't been figured yet. The funds generated from those timber receipts will be used to help pay for non-commercial thinning and other work.
“The amount of thinning that's proposed will far exceed the amount of value in actual timber receipts,” Oliver said.
At this point, there isn't any other money set aside to pay for the project.
“We'll start with the salvage portion from last year's fire and we'll do as much as we can from the funds generated from that,” he said. “We've prioritized the work.”
The Rocky Mountain Research Station helped design the fuel reduction portion of the project.
“We used a lot of modeling that helped us predict where fires might spread and where fuel treatments would have the most impact,” he said.
The project includes a research component put together by the University of Montana-based research station that will look at issues like the response of noxious weeds and soil compaction to thinning and prescribed fire.
Initially, Oliver said the agency also planned to consider some travel management in the area, but that was dropped.
A 45-day appeal period began April 15.
If the project isn't appealed, Oliver said work could get started as early as this summer.
The Darby District proposed a second smaller project northeast of Skalkaho Creek in the Weasel Creek drainage earlier this month.
The Weasel Salvage and Underburn Project would allow commercial logging to salvage bug-killed trees on 249 acres. It also proposes to use prescribed burning on 771 acres and non-commercial thinning on 64 acres.
The goal is to restore an open ponderosa pine forest on the site, said Sue Macmeeken, the Bitterroot National Forest's silvaculturist.
On the Stevensville District, the Bitterroot forest wants to treat fuels and harvest timber on about 1,396 acres in the Haacke and Claremont Creek drainages in the Sapphire Mountains.
The Haacke-Claremont Vegetation Management Project would allow for commercial timber harvest on 715 acres and non-commercial thinning on 447 acres. The project would create some scattered openings less than two acres in size and a few larger ones up to 12 acres where patches of decadent lodgepole pine exist.
Prescribed burns would be conducted on another 207 acres to reduce the build-up of fuel.
Both of the projects are currently in the 45-day appeal period. Work is expected to begin this summer if the projects aren't appealed.
These projects mark the last bug salvage sales that will likely be offered by the Bitterroot National Forest, Macmeeken said.
Over the last four years, the Bitterroot forest used salvage sales to harvest timber affected by a bark beetle epidemic that followed the 2000 fires.
“The 2000 fires created a smorgasbord for bugs,” Macmeeken said. “The bug epidemic is really tapering off after hitting historic highs in 2005.”
There are a couple of theories on why.
The bark beetles focus on large Douglas fir trees, Macmeeken said. On the south half of the Bitterroot forest, there just aren't that many of those trees left, she said.
“They've just run out of food,” she said.
The trees that are left may have got some help from the weather.
Over the past couple of years, spring has been really wet. That moisture helps make for healthy trees, which are able to ward off attacks by beetles, Macmeeken said.
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