A deeper look at the process

Model forestry for the Columbia Highlands

The Northeast Washington Forestry Coalition has worked in coalition to create for the Columbia Highlands a novel management plan that promotes ecosystem health, jobs in rural communities, and protection of wild forests. The plan sets out three levels of forest management—responsible management areas, restoration forests, and protected wilderness.

Creating the blueprint

A critical first piece of the plan has been a draft map that defines the different land allocations:
1) sustainable forestry zones near homes, communities, and along essential travel routes—called responsible management areas;
2) old-growth forest restoration areas where thickets created by fire exclusion are thinned to protect old trees and re-establish those lost to past management—called restoration areas; and
3) wilderness, the heart of which is contained in the area's inventoried roadless areas.

First, the drafters of the management plan broke the Colville National Forest into polygons depending on their degree of wildness—grading them from small unroaded to large roadless. The smaller landscapes were mostly assigned to restoration areas, while larger roadless areas were mostly in wilderness. The coalition categorized as responsible management areas forest stands within one and a half miles of the public/private forest boundary and within a quarter mile of existing forest roads.

1) Responsible management areas

Malo-East Lake is a good example of a responsible management area as envisioned in the Columbia Highlands blueprint. The 30,000 acre Malo-East Lake sits on the west slope of Kettle Range, west of Profanity Inventoried Roadless Area and east of the town of Malo, Washington, and features a mix of warm, to cold and dry, to moist forests of ponderosa pine, sub-alpine fir, and Engelmann spruce. It falls within the wildland-urban interface: that is, at least some of the area lies within one and a half miles of a boundary between private and public forest and includes forest that lies within a quarter mile of an existing open road. Like other wildland-urban interface  forests, Malo-East Lake includes areas that are, because they were previously logged and roaded, heavily stocked with second- and third-growth forests.

Here, in a responsible management area, the overall management objective is to maintain naturally functioning forest ecosystems that benefit wildlife habitat and provide recreation opportunities. Other objectives for responsible management areas are to:

• Reduce fire risk to homes and other structures on private lands and create a defensible space for fire-fighters to fight wildland fire;
• Produce a sustainable flow of timber, supporting rural economies, while using ecologically sensitive forestry techniques; and
• Maintain a diverse and resilient community of tree species and sizes.

In the responsible management area, safeguarding soil health and permeability will be required of timber cutting techniques, timing, and equipment. No new roads can be constructed unless they are replacing—mile for mile—roads that are ecologically damaging: for instance, removing a road from beside a fish-bearing stream and rebuilding it out of the floodplain.

Prescribed fire may be used in the responsible management area in some circumstances to reduce fuel loads and to reestablish dry forest plant species. Where appropriate, trail maintenance and construction would also be part of project goals.

2) Restoration areas

Restoration areas are the second arm of the blueprint, and Gibraltar Mountain is a good example of this landscape allocation. Gibraltar Mountain sits just a couple miles southeast of the town of Republic, and its 4,000 acres of unroaded national forest lands adjoin another 2,000 acres of lands previously logged and roaded. The entire area features stands of old-growth ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, and western larch mixed with younger forests primarily comprised of Douglas fir less than 100 years old and ranging from sapling to mature trees. Historically, the area saw frequent, low-intensity fires occurring every 25 to 50 years or so, which created an open and widely spaced forest, except in wet draws and on cooler north-facing slopes.

Under the blueprint, the overall objective for a restoration area like Gibraltar is to enhance ecological integrity and ecosystem function by restoring natural processes and resiliency, which will improve watersheds, wildlife habitat, and opportunities for recreation. The primary management objectives are to:

• Restore areas of previous management, including thinning smaller diameter trees while retaining larger diameter trees to mimic historic, pre-fire suppression, stand structure; and
• Thin smaller trees encroaching on and increasing fire risk within old-growth stands.

In restoration areas, prescribed fire will be used to reduce fuel loads after thinning and periodically to reestablish and maintain plant species which thrive under natural fire regimes. No new roads would be constructed and, where appropriate, trail maintenance and construction would be part of project goals.

3) Wilderness areas

Wilderness areas are the third key focal point of the visionary blueprint for the Columbia Highlands. Owl Mountain in the Kettle River Range is a beautiful example of a wilderness-quality landscape. Five miles southwest of Christina Lake, British Columbia, and just north of Orient, Washington, this magnificent roadless area of approximately 14,500 acres contains thousands of acres of low elevation old-growth dry ponderosa pine, ranging to interior rainforest of western red cedar and devil’s club and including stands of rare native hazelnut trees. Numerous ponds, springs, and perennial creeks provide rich amphibian habitat. The area provides a critical landscape connection for wildlife migrating between the Rocky Mountains and Cascade Range, and lies within a few miles of the Mount Gladstone Wilderness Park just across the border in Canada.

The overall goal of establishing wilderness areas such as Owl Mountain is to honor a common cultural heritage, to protect the land’s diversity, integrity, and resilience, and to maintain nature as a living laboratory to provide in perpetuity the fundamental building blocks—the seeds of life—of our northeast Washington forest ecosystem and the larger Cascade to Rockies connection.

Wilderness protection, says the 1964 Wilderness Act, “assure[s] that an increasing population, accompanied by expanding settlement and growing mechanization, does not occupy and modify all areas within the United States and its possessions, leaving no lands designated for preservation and protection in their natural condition … to secure for the American people of the present and future generations the benefits of an enduring resource of wilderness.”