New Forest Service Policy Saves Funds, Fauna

As he walked down an abandoned logging road, Siuslaw National Forest Supervisor Jim Furnish put his foot up on one of the many big fir trees that have fallen across the grassy roadbed.

“In the old days, this log would have been gone for salvage,” he said. “Now, we leave it.”

Other national forests are following the Siuslaw’s lead in giving back to nature hundreds of unneeded forest roads that have added to erosion problems and sent damaging silt into streams, choking salmon spawning beds.

“We are one of the first forests that looked square in the eyeball of roads as a liability,” Furnish said. “This is a good example of what we think is working.”

Across the country, the national forests have a network of roads comprising 373,000 miles developed during the timber boom of the 1980s.

Since lawsuits to protect the northern spotted owl and other threatened and endangered species, the U.S. Forest Service has been forced to focus more closely on fish and wildlife habitat, and the annual timber harvest has plunged 75%.

Producing less timber means less money for maintaining logging roads. Nationally, the Forest Service has a $10-billion backlog of maintenance and an annual road-maintenance budget of just $85 million.

The road-maintenance problem is so acute that Forest Service Chief Mike Dombeck has proposed an 18-month moratorium on building new roads in areas that have never had a road until a comprehensive policy is developed.

Dombeck has said he wants to accelerate the retirement of unneeded logging roads. To date, 20.5% of the 373,000 miles of national forest roads have been retired.

Plans call for obliterating 1,500 miles of unneeded roads this year, and an additional 3,500 next year with a special $5-million allocation.

At the heart of the back-to-nature plan is the growing awareness that logging roads and the erosion they cause are a primary factor in declining salmon populations in the Northwest.

Forest Service surveys indicate that old logging roads are the biggest source of landslides in the national forests and that roadless areas have the healthiest populations of threatened salmon.

Located in Oregon’s Coast Range, where heavy rains and moderate temperatures make Douglas fir trees grow like weeds, the Siuslaw was once the most intensely logged national forest in the country. The old visitors’ map looks like a plate of spaghetti, with myriad road spurs going nowhere left over from the logging boom of the 1980s.

The new map no longer shows many of those roads. Those that remain are major arteries, with big patches of green in between.

“The map defines reality in the Forest Service,” said Andy Stahl, executive director of the Assn. of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics. “If it ain’t on the map, it ain’t there. And those roads aren’t on the map anymore. Given Mother Nature’s growth rate in the Coast Range, they won’t be there in the future.”

The Siuslaw is the only national forest in Oregon’s Coast Range and a critical source of spawning habitat under Gov. John Kitzhaber’s innovative plan to restore dwindling populations of coastal coho salmon.

The timber industry and people like Siuslaw Rod and Gun Club president John Smith are unhappy with the idea of getting rid of something that federal revenues paid to create.

“To me, they are valuable for fire control and access into the forest,” said Smith, a retired farmer. “I think they’re going too far with it.”

But environmentalists believe many forests are not going far enough, both in terms of protecting fish and wildlife habitat and cutting costs.

“Roads are expensive,” Stahl said. “They are the single biggest cost associated with forest management.”

The key to the Siuslaw’s road retirement plan was finding a cheap way to put roads to bed.

Under the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan for protecting fish and wildlife habitat, the Siuslaw saw its annual timber harvest fall from a peak of 350 million board feet a year in the 1980s to just 5 million board feet last year.

Instead of turning out timber for two-by-fours and plywood, the Siuslaw is concentrating on thinning the many 30-year-old stands of second growth left from the era of intensive logging and restoring habitat for species protected by the Endangered Species Act, such as salmon, northern spotted owls and marbled murrelets.

Many of its 2,400 miles of logging roads just aren’t needed anymore, but they still cost a lot to maintain.

So far, the Siuslaw has obliterated 120 miles of road, put 1,035 miles into long-term retirement and is working on retiring about 700 miles more. That will leave it with about a quarter of its old road system.

There are two central elements to retiring a road: the water bar, a shallow ditch cut diagonally in a roadbed 15 to 20 to the mile to channel off small amounts of water, and removing fill dirt around culverts, which can plug up with debris and blow out, sending a torrent of damaging silt into salmon streams below.

The floods of February 1996 tested the techniques and showed that they work. Treated and untreated roads suffered similar numbers of small failures. But untreated roads saw twice the number of big blowouts.

“People are looking for big, dramatic solutions to problems, but this is a very small, undramatic solution,” Furnish said as he squatted next to a water bar cut in a roadbed. “These are like gold, but they cost about 15 bucks apiece.”