Judge Lodge Allows Forest Service To Log Lewis and Clark Trail Lodge Allows Feds To Continue With Categorical Exclusion Loophole By Josh Mahan

LEWIS AND CLARK HISTORICAL TRAIL, Idaho -- A federal court has ruled that the Forest Service did not overstep its bounds by drawing up three cutting units adjacent to one of the last pristine sections of the historic Lewis and Clark Trail.

U.S. District Judge Edward Lodge dismissed a lawsuit on Friday brought to him by an Idaho couple who have spent decades conducting historical research on the trail, as well as by three conservation groups.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit have since appealed Lodge’s decision to allow the logging to the Ninth Circuit Court. The date of that hearing is Thursday, June 9. For the time, though, old-growth falls in the historic corridor and 5,000-acre roadless area.

Jake Kreilick and Mike Roselle toured the cutting units today (June 7), and reported that Unit Two had been cut, as well as most of Unit One, but little of Unit Three, one of the roadless units.

“We just don’t know how many standing, green trees will be left if the Ninth overturns Lodge’s ruling,” Kreilick said.

The 177-acre salvage sale is located on Wendover Ridge, site of a 2003 fire that burned a mosaic in the three logging units. A walk through Unit Two by Lowbagger last week found that 80 percent of the trees marked to fall were alive, green and old growth.

After the Forest Service was served with the lawsuit, Pyramid Lumber mobilized a cutting crew over Memorial Day weekend to begin felling the green trees before the suit could shut the loggers out of the historical zone.

Lodge’s 14-page ruling said that Powell District Ranger Joni Packard had indeed taken a “hard look” at the impacts of logging the area. Aside from being literally right next to the National Historic Corridor, two of the units are also in a roadless area. At the legal hearing Packard said she simply didn’t think the area was fit for wilderness.

The battle to protect the Lewis and Clark Trail from logging on the bicentennial has been an interesting one, pitting outfitters and historians against the Forest Service and loggers.

But the playing field has been more than uneven. It hardly even exists. There has been no forum for the outfitters and historians to have a say in the management of the trail. Which brings us back to that dreaded categorical exclusion rule, a dangerous tool in a rogue District Ranger’s hands. A ranger like Joni Packard.

The Wendover Ridge Salvage Sale was a categorical exclusion, excluding public comment and a thorough scoping. The only recourse left was a hasty lawsuit in the court of a Reagan-appointed judge who ended up doing a cut-and-paste job from the Forest Service defense in his ruling. The man obviously never set foot on the site of the sale, where one can’t ignore the capriciousness of Forest Service tactics. Granted, Judge Lodge is busy. But in the polished mahogany courtroom, fiction is easy to spin with scientific sounding terms aimed at lofty achievements like weeding the forest to save it from itself, and its natural manipulator – fire.

But when you walk into a stand of spring-green old-growth fir marked with blue chalk as fire-salvaged trees that need to be cut before they die and lose their market value, you can understand that the Forest Service just needs to get some trees to market.

The Powell Ranger District has a disturbing trend of pulling timber from erroneous places, and without much forethought. It begs the question of, is this just ignorance (a scary thought for an institution that operates top-down), straight-up malfeasance, or a combination of both.

The Forest Service needs to stop excluding the public from participating in the management of the common lands, i.e. national forests. If they do I’m sure they’ll resoundingly hear that resource extraction will no longer be tolerated in roadless areas and precious gems – like the historic Lewis and Clark Trail.

Wake up Forest Service and let’s hope that the Ninth Circuit might have some more sense than the District Courts when it comes to managing national forests.