Furnish: GTR findings likely to be upheld on BHNF

After a century of fire suppression, a decades-long moratorium on prescribed burns, a lack of environmental litigators and GOP retrenchment the Black Hills National Forest has been broken for decades but the Black Hills Resilient Landscapes (BHRL) project was intended to fix some of that. 

The first project to receive a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) categorical exclusion (CE) on the Black Hills National Forest was the Tepee Canyon project approved by the Trump Organization in July, 2018. The BHNF is in Region 2, based in Colorado and today is struggling to hire personnel because a Republican governor is driving young people from South Dakota.

Hulett, Wyoming-based Neiman Enterprises seeks to modify the Forest Service's General Technical Report (GTR) that significantly reduces logging on the BHNF but GTR-422 remains intact.

Jim Furnish was deputy chief of the US Forest Service from 1999 to 2002 and believes all the fuel treatments in the area before the Jasper Fire were entirely ineffective in preventing the blaze. He lives in southwestern New Mexico.

As to the Black Hills harvest levels, facts are stubborn things. The fire cited above, coupled with bark beetle mortality, and departure ABOVE ASQ [Allowable Sale Quantity] for several years (BH Resilient Landscape projects to reduce stocking levels) succeeded to the degree that Research GTR said such harvest levels were unsustainable and needed to drop by about 60%. FS is finally dealing with this in anticipation of Plan Revision. Tool most prominently used for last several years has been overstory removal of all sawtimber leaving nuked landscapes; in effect clearcuts of several hundred acres. Very tragic what happens when timber industry is appeased. [Jim Furnish, blog comment]

Despite whining from Republican governors in South Dakota and Wyoming Furnish believes Neiman Enterprises will ultimately close its Spearditch sawmill.

The BHNF is burning hand and machine piles as snow levels permit but every watershed on the Forest is at grave risk. Preserve the mature, old growth and legacy pine by saving them from the Neimans, clear cut without building new roads especially where doghair guzzles water supplies, chokes aspen, birch or hazelnut and burn, baby, burn.

ip photo: aspen emerges as the mountain pine beetle erases overgrowth atop the Limestone Plateau on the Black Hills National Forest.