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For the regular mountain bikers, runners and dogwalkers using the popular trail network west of Missoula this summer, Blue Mountain has been getting a bit bluer.
Long-planned logging, thinning and wildfire fuels reduction work is moving closer to a reality on portions of Blue Mountain Recreation Area, where stripes of blue paint now mark the trees whose days are numbered.
The Lolo National Forest in December 2023 issued a decision to move forward with forestry work on about 16,000 acres of National Forest land mostly spanning the area between the Sleeman Creek and O’Brien Creek drainages.
Activities in the area will run the spectrum from prescribed fire to commercial logging. Most of the work will be non-mechanized, including meadow restoration, controlled burning and thinning smaller trees with hand saws, on 13,500 acres. The remaining 3,700 acres is slated for mechanized treatments.
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The timeline for the work is unclear, and a Lolo National Forest spokesperson was unable to provide any information about the project when contacted Tuesday and Wednesday.
In a change to long-standing policy, local Forest Service employees have been forbidden from speaking publicly about their work in nearly all circumstances under the administration of President Donald Trump.
But according to David Atkins, a member of the Lolo Restoration Committee who has worked with forest planners and others on the project’s nearly decade-long development, timber harvest is unlikely to happen until sometime next year. The commercial logging contract will be put out for a bid sometime this winter.
“The objective is to have a resilient forest that is still desirable for disc golf, and mountain biking, and bird watching, et cetera,” Atkins said.
In some spots, especially on the more densely forested north-facing hillsides in the recreation area, nearly half the Douglas firs and other trees appear marked for harvest, compared with more moderate thinning planned for the already-open Ponderosa stands.
“From an aesthetic standpoint, it’s going to look really different for a while,” Atkins said.
For the grassy hills due west of the Blue Mountain Trailhead and main parking lot, meadow restoration is planned, with a mix of mechanized logging, hand thinning and prescribed burning planned to the north, west and south. The Maclay Flat area along the Bitterroot River is also slated for non-mechanized thinning and prescribed burns.
The goal for the project is long-term wildfire resilience, Atkins noted. The upcoming work on Blue Mountain is just one component of Wildfire Adapted Missoula, a fuels treatment project being planned for up to 177,000 acres of forest lands from Lolo to Clinton over the next 20 years.
Planning got underway in 2016, originating with a former Lolo National Forest district ranger who wanted to identify parts of Missoula’s wildland-urban interface that were at risk for large wildfires.
“We thought that was a really good idea, it was appropriate,” Atkins, an ecologist and former Forest Service silviculturist, said. “We have a lot of dry forests in the immediate area that, through fire suppression, we’ve got really dense forests — more dense than they were when the Salish people managed the forests around here.”
In Missoula and elsewhere in the West, government policies of fire suppression have caused buildups of forest fuels that historically would have periodically burned either through natural processes or the practices of Native tribes.
Local research has shown that forests along the edges of valleys historically frequented by the Bitterroot Salish would burn, on average, every six or seven years, Atkins said. Deeper in the surrounding forests, that natural fire frequency was closer to every 25 or 30 years.
“The result of that frequent fire was that you ended up with more open forests, a forest that was dominated by ponderosa pine,” Atkins said.
Most trees in Montana, from Douglas firs to lodgepole pines, are fire-adapted to different extents, but Ponderosas are particularly resilient to wildfires. They develop thicker bark, have open crowns that allow rising heat to dissipate and drop their lower branches to reduce “ladder fuels” that allow a fire to leap from the ground level to the flammable needles in the canopy.
Also on the tour was a stop along Blue Mountain Road, overlooking the Black Mountain Fire burn scar in the O’Brien Creek drainage, Atkins said. Over a five-hour period in August 2003, that fire erupted from 1,400 to 7,300 acres, burning through thick timber and creating a firestorm that engulfed two houses on Cedar Ridge Road and threatened a hundred more.
“We don’t want to have that high-severity fire,” Atkins said. “The fire will come, but if we do the thinning and the prescribed burning, when the fire does come it’s going to be less intense and less severe.”
The forestry activities planned for Blue Mountain and the surrounding area were authorized last year, while the planning on the remainder of the Wildfire Adapted Missoula Project remains ongoing. That smaller authorization from the Lolo National Forest anticipated a decision for the larger project sometime in 2025.
Sam Wilson is the outdoors and environment reporter at the Missoulian.
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