Forest sale pits man vs. sawblade

By Tony Lystra / The Daily News | Posted: Tuesday, July 13, 2010 11:52 pm

ARIEL — Walk just a few hundred feet off Highway 503 and it's another world.

Tyler Tjomsland / For The Daily News<br /> Chris Blodgett, 59, stands in a thicket of trees off of the Lewis River Highway near Lake Merwin on Monday. Blodgett says parts of the forrest should be saved because of the trees' age and proximity to Woodland.

Douglas firs, many of them more than 100 years old, tower overhead. An elk trail follows a canyon ridge, and far below is Cape Horn Creek, with a waterfall cascading over rocks.

All of this will change this summer when logging crews strip out most of the trees, which will be trucked to a sawmill in Cottage Grove, Ore. The state Department of Natural Resources auctioned off this 16-acre stand to Starfire Lumber Co. for $232,000 in May. A Woodland company began harvesting the timber for Starfire last week and is expected to complete the work in August.

Chris Blodgett, a 59-year-old semi-retired contractor who is building a house just up the highway from the timber sale, said this is far too pristine a place to be logged. The trees are close to qualifying under state standards as old growth, he said. The canyon waterfall is a terrific view. And, just 16 miles up the highway from Woodland, the place would be close enough to town to bring science classes on field trips, said Blodgett, who didn't know the stand would be cut until he spotted the work last month.

"It's pretty spectacular, kind of one of those heaven places, you know?" Blodgett said as he overlooked the canyon and logging equipment could be heard crunching trees across the canyon.

Jessica Walz, the conservation director for the Gifford Pinchot Task Force, a Portland land conservation group, said the public didn't get a chance to comment on the timber sale because it was so small it didn't require an environmental review.

"Our frustration is we didn't get a chance to look at it," Walz said. "The opportunity wasn't given. Especially when it's valuable, large trees like these, it's recommended that they should be doing public comment on this. ... Some of these issues could have been solved prior to the actual sale and prior to the actual logging."

The DNR announced the sale in a Daily News ad in May. Eric Wisch, who manages the area's timber for DNR, said the public didn't get a chance to formally comment on it because timber sales must undergo an environmental review and two-week public comment only when they are larger than 20 acres or more expensive than $250,000. This sale met neither threshold, he said.

Wisch said the sale meets all of the agency's policies. The parcel, known as the "Cape Horn Again sale" is part of trust lands managed by DNR to benefit education and government programs throughout the state. All proceeds from this sale will go to Washington State University's agricultural program, Wisch said.

Starfire president Robbie Robinson said some of the logs will be milled in Cowlitz County. The majority, though, will be trucked to the Starfire Cottage Grove mill where they will be made into beams for large structures. The company, he said, provided similar beams to the main lodges for last year's Winter Olympics in Vancouver, B.C., and the 2002 winter games in Salt Lake.

Blodgett said he isn't opposed to logging.

"We need the wood," he said.

But he said the trees should qualify as old-growth because they're about 120 years old. Wisch, however, said trees must date to at least 1850 to be considered old growth. Other factors, such as the structure and density of the timber, are also taken into account.

In addition, Wisch said this deal leaves 32 surrounding acres untouched, including a small buffer along the canyon and trees that qualify as old growth timber. "Of the total proposal area of 48 acres, we are harvesting 33 percent," he said.

Wisch said he also worked out a deal with Starfire to leave about 10 additional trees near the canyon walls to preserve the "aesthetic" of the area. Regulations require that a certain number of trees are left untouched on logging sites. Wisch said the arrangement leaves those trees in the area Blodgett is most concerned about.

Robinson said his company agreed to the arrangement because "we want to be good neighbors."

Walz, of the Gifford Pinchot Task Force, said small patches of old timber surrounding the 1.3 million-acre Gifford Pinchot National Forest - which stretches from the Columbia River to Mount Rainier - are important to spotted owls and other endangered species. Those at-risk species need "some kind of buffer zone," she said, in case they are forced out of their habitat by wildfire or competing species.

"We like to say that the Gifford Pinchot is not an island unto itself," Walz said.

Blodgett said he would have liked to see a land conservation group buy about two acres of the area closest to the canyon to preserve it, but nobody got a chance to plan for such a sale.

"If we could have known about this a few months ago, this would have been a no-brainer," he said. "We could have stopped it."