Norbeck Society, Mertz concerned about lack of timber competition

There aren't enough litigators to sue the Forest Service allowing Republicans to infiltrate management of the Black Hills National Forest and there is no evidence to support the claim that logging is effective insect control. Some imaginary war with the bark beetle on the BHNF is really more a fight for clean water because after all dead trees don't suck aquifers dry. Until forest managers and South Dakota's Earth hating congressional delegation get that they are being preyed upon by the Neimans to take legacy trees and leave the doghair for someone else to deal with because they aren't focused on hardwood release, prescribed fire and restoring the Hills bioregion to what it was 150 years ago.

The above images and the following copy appear at the Norbeck Society's Faceberg page.

Unit 5 of the Stinger Timber sale on the Northern Hills Ranger District. This timber sale was part of the infamous Black Hills Resilient Landscape Project (BHRL). The Black Hills National Forest has largely moved on from BHRL (which involved tens of thousands of acres of overstory removal) so hopefully this is one of the last timber sales covered by that terrible project.

Unit 5 was cut with an overstory removal prescription. This involves cutting most or all of the large trees on a stand and leaving the remaining understory of smaller trees. As you can see, what remains is a doghair thicket. This is some of the worst doghair we have seen on the Forest. How does a situation like this develop? It's hard to say exactly but it was probably a result of a really good pine cone crop years ago followed by really good spring moisture. In other words, perfect conditions for establishing Ponderosa Pine seedlings.

What remains now is a mess. These doghair thickets are really are not good for anything. Under the right conditions, they are a substantial fire risk. Virtually nothing grows underneath them, and they really don't serve any purpose for wildlife.

The Northern Hills Ranger District does have a fairly good track record of pre-commercially thinning young tree stands, as funding allows. Thinning allows them to grow substantially faster and healthier. The sticker is that there is never enough funding to thin all of these dense young stands. We want to be clear, these doghair thickets are a much bigger threat to the sustainability of the Forest than what remains of the sawtimber across the Forest.

We hope that the Northern Hills Ranger District will commit to thinning this doghair thicket.

Dave Mertz is a retired natural resource officer for the BHNF who attended a 2024 roundtable discussion in Spearditch hosted by South Dakota's Earth hating US Representative Dusty Johnson when Johnson sicced two fellow Republican congress members on Regional Forester Frank Beum and BHNF Supervisor Shawn Cochran. His comment below appears at the Norbeck Society's FB page.

Money paid for a regular timber sale can still be used in part to fund the KV Fund. KV stands for the Knutsen-Vandenburg Act. It was passed in 1930 and allows the Forest Service to use some of the proceeds of a timber sale to put back into the sale area for things such as pre-commercial thinning. I believe this is what you are talking about. The Forest used to have a K[V]  fund worth many millions of dollars. The problem is that it has been tapped so much to make up for other budget shortfalls that there is not that much left. Also, timber stumpage values have been relatively low, compared to times in the past, and that results in not much money going into the KV fund. Little competition also results in low bid rates. [Mertz]

Wildfires are still popping up on the Forest but the Bureau of Land Management conducted a prescribed burn north and east of Newcastle, Wyoming to control doghair and reduce fuels.