Ponderosa pine only reached central Montana about a thousand years ago and coal seam fires regularly burn parts of the Ashland District on the Custer Gallatin National Forest but native aspen, bur oak and hazelnut are still crowded out by pine overgrowth.
University of Montana entomologist, Diana Six has been studying the relationship of water, forests, fungi and bark beetles for decades. Her work outlines how native insects are clearing clogged watersheds being decoupled by the Anthropocene. The mountain pine beetle is hard at work clearing centuries of overgrowth throughout the Rocky Mountain Complex, so is the western spruce budworm. But leaving dead or dying conifers on the forest produces methane, an even more dangerous greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is.
In 2012 the fast-moving Ash Creek Fire burned bridges on US212 near Ashland and Lame Deer, Montana while another blaze nearby on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, the Coal Seam Fire spread to some 700 acres. In 2017 wildland fires on private ranch land in southeastern Montana dwarfed those on public ground in the western part of the state. The Sartin Draw Fire near Broadus and the Battle Complex near Birney burned at least 100,000 and 185,000 acres respectively, decades of invasive grasses and poor stewardship to blame. The nearly 50,000 acre Huff Fire burned through the white supremacist town of Jordan, known as the home of the Montana Freemen. The Bobcat fire near Roundup in Musselshell County was over 41 square miles in size.
Last year a smoldering coal seam started the Richard Spring Fire on the Ashland District that burned primarily in non-native cheatgrass beneath a ponderosa pine overstory. Fine, flashy grasses and sagebrush were the main fuel sources.
The Forest Service hopes the South Otter Landscape Restoration and Resilience Project will “help restore and maintain the structure, function, composition and ecological connectivity of the forest landscape in order to increase resiliency to future natural disturbance events like wildfire, insects, and disease." Commercial logging would take place on 41 square miles of the 292,000 acre Ashland District. Thinning of doghair pine and prescribed burns would happen on some 200,000 acres. 460 miles of new roads will be decommissioned after the project.
Just a hundred and fifty years ago bison, wapiti, bighorn sheep, pronghorns and deer cleared the grasses driving eastern Montana's fire years. If grasses remained in the fall tribes burned the rest.
Some are opposed to the treatments because categorical exclusions provided a bypass of the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA. But, a fuel accumulation urgency intervened, local sawmills will get a boost of socialism, firewood for local tribal communities will be plentiful and the decommissioning of some Forest Service roads beats the hell out of bulldozers carving up hillsides willy-nilly to suppress wildfires on public lands.
Learn more at Montana Free Press.
Image was captured with a BlackBerry on US212 near Alzada.
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