Oregon Timber Sale Ignites Furor : Environment: One last battle is playing out in the Siskiyou National Forest. At the heart of the contest is the fact that the trees of Sugarloaf stand within an area designated as an ancient forest preserve.

Standing in the ruins of a U.S. Forest Service fire lookout, Lou Gold told a group of schoolchildren the story of how a fawn saved the mountain from an evil demon.

Gold, shaking his rattle of deer hooves, said people once lived in harmony with the spirits on their mountain, but traded the mountain to a demon for vacuum cleaners and cars.

The demon broke its promise to care for the mountain, leaving garbage like the pile of splintered boards and broken glass of the abandoned fire lookout and scars from logging and mining. But the people were afraid to challenge it.

The fawn, however, wasn’t afraid. It tricked the demon into turning itself into a walnut and then led the people back to the mountain.

Gold pointed to a tract of timber on the distant flanks of Grayback Mountain and asked the children, from a private school in nearby Takilma, to join him in a coyote howl to cement their commitment to be like the fawn.

“Hear that, President Clinton,” Gold yelled as the howls echoed off the mountain. “If you don’t stop the Sugarloaf sale, no one anywhere will believe in your forest plan.”

Gold, a former political science professor, spent the summer on top of Lake Mountain--to pray that the Sugarloaf timber sale be withdrawn.

Environmentalists have won nearly all the other battles over logging the Northwest’s old-growth forests in court.

The northern spotted owl wasn’t protected as a threatened species until a judge ordered the government to reconsider. Another judge banned logging on millions of acres of public lands until the government devised plans to save the owl from extinction. The result was the Clinton Administration’s forest plan, which cuts logging on national forests by 80%.

But one last battle that can’t be fought in court is playing out on the Siskiyou National Forest.

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The Siskiyou Regional Education Project, a local environmental group, has taken out full-page ads in newspapers charging that the Forest Service falsely portrayed Sugarloaf as a thinning of dense younger stands when most of the timber comes from big trees. The ads urge people to write the White House and Boise Cascade Corp., which bought the timber, asking them to leave the timber standing.

Headwaters, another environmental group, is lobbying the White House.

And Gold camped atop the mountain.

At the heart of the battle is the fact that Sugarloaf stands within an area designated as an ancient forest preserve under the Clinton forest plan. Though the entire sale wouldn’t qualify technically as old-growth forest--fires have left stands of various ages--none of it has ever been logged and a portion of it contains trees that could be as old as 700 years.

Under the new rules, logging would be allowed only to salvage dead trees or improve the health of the forest, not to produce timber.

The controversy over Sugarloaf goes back nearly 20 years, when the Forest Service first proposed logging in the area.

In 1989, Sugarloaf was one of a group of sales that Congress exempted from court challenges to provide timber while logging was tied up over the spotted owl.

Under Clinton’s plan, the Forest Service must allow such sales to go forward, even in ancient forest preserves, as long as they comply with the Endangered Species Act and standards for protecting the watershed.

Sugarloaf, which was sold to Boise Cascade for $2.3 million, has passed review on all counts.

Fearing that opponents might organize protests or otherwise stop the logging, the company won’t say when it plans to harvest. It has until the end of 1997.

Mike Lunn, Siskiyou National Forest supervisor, and opponents of the sale agree that the logging can be stopped only if Clinton steps in.

Tom Tuchmann, who shepherded the forest plan as director of the U.S. Office on Forestry and Economic Development, doesn’t anticipate any presidential intervention.

The Administration is committed to honoring past commitments to provide timber, as well as ensuring that future timber is cut in a way that is environmentally responsible, he said.

“The Sugarloaf sale is one of the last of the old timber sales, not one of the first of the new timber sales,” Tuchmann said.

Sugarloaf and sales like it represent some of the only public timber being offered in the Northwest as the Forest Service struggles to restart its timber sale program under the new forest plan, he added.

Boise Cascade argues that Sugarloaf is not old-growth forest and sees the objections raised by environmentalists as a fund-raising gimmick.

When Clinton called together combatants in the Northwest timber wars in 1993 in Portland, “one of the issues he talked about was the feeling that no one would be happy,” said Lunn. “This is probably the epitome of the idea nobody is happy.”

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Where opponents disagree most strongly is over plans to log big trees, 1,100 of them over 44 inches in diameter, to provide 40% of the 10.5 million board feet spread over 739 acres.

“If we were to go out and do the sale fresh now, it wouldn’t have the large trees in it,” Lunn said. “That’s not a choice I had.”

But Sugarloaf has been changed in other ways.

The large clearcuts planned originally are gone. Trees have been marked individually for logging.

An area where a pair of spotted owls nest is left alone, along with most of the big trees where they shade a creek.

The Forest Service told Boise Cascade to use helicopters, and not build roads, to haul out the timber.

Smaller firs surrounding huge ponderosa pines will be cut to keep the pines healthy longer and give young pines room to germinate.

Silviculturist Chip Weber said he designed the logging to lessen the threat of fire and help the forest more quickly grow into the old growth favored by spotted owls.

Dave Perry, a professor of forest ecology at Oregon State University, argues that removing big trees is the wrong thing to do if the Forest Service hopes to make the stand healthier.

With their thick bark and crowns hundreds of feet from the ground, they are better equipped to survive fire.

Until the snow drove him out in late October, Gold kept his vigil on Lake Mountain.

He plans to return next spring.

He spent 12 summers praying for peace on Bald Mountain, the site of one of the opening salvos in the Northwest old-growth wars, where protesters in 1983 lay down in front of bulldozers to stop the spread of logging on the Siskiyou.

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During the winters, Gold crisscrossed the country lecturing about the need to save the remnants of ancient forest as a kind of Noah’s Ark, which hold the secrets of forest life.

On the edge of a meadow, Gold sat in the folds of a big rock, where he had put red-shafted flicker feathers in a crack and sprinkled tobacco as a kind of altar. At night, he can look far below to the Illinois Valley and the lights of the Rough & Ready Lumber Co. sawmill.

“I suspect I’m going to be here for awhile,” he said.