Pinchot Partners Forest Projects
Cowlitz Valley Road Project Plantation Restoration Project Stand Inventory Project Smooth Juniper Timber Sale Iron Creek Watershed Restoration Cat Creek Stewardship Project

Cowlitz Valley Road Project

The Gifford Pinchot National Forest currently has over 4,000 miles of roads. Yet staff capacity and funding from Congress only allow the GPNF to maintain a small portion of these roads. The unmaintained roads wreak havoc on the safety of those who use the roads as well as fish and wildlife populations. Properly maintaining and in some cases removing sections of the road system is one of the most important, known climate-change adaptation strategies for flood-prone areas like the Cowlitz Valley. In addition, adequate maintenance of forest roads is vital for forest users such as recreationists, hunters, fishermen, people who collect special forest products, and for forest management activities.

The Cowlitz Valley Road Maintenance and Improvement Project aims to maintain and improve our existing forest service road infrastructure, which will have a long-term benefit for the communities of Lewis County and the GPNF. Specifically, the Project goals are to:
1) Provide improved access for forest users and forest monitoring and management activities;
2) Better position the Cowlitz Valley Ranger District to compete for dollars coming from Congress;
3) Reduce impacts to water quality, aquatic habitat, and threatened, endangered, and sensitive aquatic species caused by landslides, gullying, seasonal and permanent impassible culvert barriers, and surface erosion associated with unneeded roads;
4) Reduce road maintenance costs by removing unneeded roads.

The Pinchot Partners received over $150,000 for our Cowlitz Valley Road Maintenance and Improvement Project from the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000 (Public Law 106-393) Title II funding. This project aims to improve access on Forest Road 84 by replacing the decking. In addition, the project will work to prepare contracts for 22 miles of road removal identified in the Pinchot Partners Plantation Restoration Project, which will ready projects so additional funding for implementation can be leveraged. The project will also reduce maintenance costs and restore hydrologic function by implementing one high priority road project identified for removal in the Pinchot Partners Plantation Restoration Project.

The Pinchot Partners carefully selected the 22 miles of road for removal based on access needs and road impacts. High aquatic impact roads have been designated as such by the Forest Service. These roads are not needed for access for timber harvest or fire control and do not access developed recreation sites. Fish populations are affected by sediment and toxins that enter into creeks from road dust and water through roadside ditches, culverts, and bridge crossings. Sediment impacts are one of the largest limiting factors to fish recovery in the area. Some species of wildlife (e.g., Elk, Wolverines and Bear) are particularly sensitive to roads and generally use areas with very low road densities. Very selective removal of specific roads to increase habitat with low road density can have extremely beneficial impacts on these wildlife populations.

The Plantation Restoration Program is, essentially, the collaborative group’s long-term vision put to work on the ground. After learning a great deal from our previous forest projects, the collaborative group decided to scale up and work on a project that could have far-reaching implications for forest management on the GPNF. The popular Plantation Program aims to provide a stable, predictable level of restoration work on the Cowlitz Valley Ranger District by creating a restoration plan and environmental planning document that brings together diverse interests and sets the stage for a long-term, non-controversial program of forest work. The Pinchot Partners Restoration Plan Environmental Assessment was released in the beginning of September 2009. We had an Open House that took place on September 10, 2009 and about 20 people from the Forest Service, Pinchot Partners and the public attended. The public was able to view maps, copies of the EA and ask questions to Forest Service officials and Pinchot Partner members.

The Plantation Restoration project will thin and restore 1,540 acres of plantations on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest (GPNF) outside of Packwood, (Washington). The Pinchot Partners completed the EA for the Plantation Restoration Project themselves, which is unusual in that the job is generally completed by the Forest Service. The EA was prepared to assess the potential effects of restoration-based commercial thinning and restoration work that will take place on the GPNF.

The restoration work for this project will include thinning, snag and down wood creation, road maintenance and removal, aquatic restoration and invasive weed treatment. The project will offer a series of stewardship contracts that combine thinning works with other restoration projects such as road decommissioning of high impact roads and culvert replacements to project and maintain important access routes as well as a fish habitat.

 

One of our latest projects is the Stand Inventory Project.  One of the largest barriers the Pinchot Partners have encountered in working to create a steady supply of forest thinning and restoration work is a lack of accurate and up-to-date stand inventory information which is needed to plan restoration thinning projects and accurately project the number of acres that could be thinned for ecological reasons in the next 20 years. The Forest Service’s current vegetation database is insufficient. Due to decreasing budgets and limited staff capacity, the Forest Service is not able to collect this information making the larger goal of producing a predictable and stable level restoration work and investment very difficult. The collaborative group has thus designed and leveraged funding to identify suitable stands for thinning and to update current Forest Service stand inventory information on 25-80 year old stands on the Cowlitz Valley Ranger District. The 2007 and 2008 field seasons saw the bulk of the stand exam work completed, with 2009 serving as a wrapping-up of a final few exams and the compilation of a project report to be delivered to the Cowlitz Valley Ranger District. The district will use the report to plan when and where future commercial thinning harvest will occur.

The project targeted young, managed stands (age 25-60) for inventory, but also included a few older, natural stands (age 60-100). Over the three field seasons we inventoried a total of 655 managed stands and 17 natural stands across 38 sixth-field watersheds for a total of 31,253 acres examined. This work identified at least 13,551 acres that would be available for commercial thinning over the next five years, with several thousand additional acres available in the fifteen years beyond that.

The bulk of the exams were performed by Ron Pfeifer and Garry Wassenaar. This summer Garry trained and used the talents of a Mossyrock high school student Jordan Bowman to help him with his exams. Jeremy Grose also completed a small portion of the exams. The inventory work in the natural stands was done by WSU silviculture professor Mark Swanson.

Another exciting success is the metamorphosis of Smooth Juniper from a controversial project likely to be targeted for litigation to a 3-million board foot timber sale that all collaborative partners support.  Pinchot Partners, led by Regan Smith with Conservation Northwest, decided to take Smooth Juniper "off the Forest Service shelf" and write a collaborative alternative for the project. The Forest Service selected the collaborative group's alternative and the contract was awarded in 2005 to Zumstein Logging. We will continue to monitor this project over the coming years.

 

 

The Pinchot Partners started work on the Iron Creek Watershed Restoration Project in 2004 and completed work in 2008. We first identified the Iron Creek subwatershed as a priority in 2004 because Iron Creek is located in the Lower Cispus watershed and has the highest sediment delivery in the watershed—one of the limiting factors in this area for the recovery of species including winter steelhead and coho. Our first restoration project in the Iron Creek subwatershed was replacing and right-sizing culverts along two miles of road to restore fish passage and reduce sediment delivery to the Lower Cispus River. Our next project was implemented in 2006 and included the removal of a .2 mile road segment that was at risk of failing and dumping very large sediment loads in the creeks and river in the watershed. The road was so damaged that is was already inaccessible. Our most recent project was removing 1.9 miles of road in the Iron Creek subwatershed. This road was slated for decommissioning in the 2003 Gifford Pinchot National Forest roads analysis, which considered access needs before recommending decommissioning. The road segment removed had seven stream crossings, which were a major source of erosion and sediment delivery into Big Creek and the Lower Cispus watershed.

Both road removal projects were completed by one of the most talented restoration contractors in the Northwest, LKE Corporation. Kim Erion owns and operates LKE. This past August, the Gifford Pinchot Task Force coordinated a field trip for the Pinchot Partners to see the 1.9 miles of road removed by LKE Corporation and were extremely impressed with LKE’s dedication to restoring the watershed. The project generated ~350 hours of work for three contractors working for LKE Corporation, making an hourly wage range of $27-$45 dollars. “All restoration jobs are good jobs,” says Kim Erion, “I just wish they would do more.” The Gifford Pinchot National Forest has over 4,000 miles of roads on the 1.37 million acres and a $50-$60 million + road maintenance backlog that grows each year – demonstrating the need for more road maintenance and removal and the challenge of finding funding to remove roads.

The success of the Iron Creek projects has been exciting for the Pinchot Partners and gives us real hope that we will truly be able to meet our vision of restoring the Cowlitz Valley while creating high quality jobs for local forest workers. The greatest obstacle we see to implementing this vision is a lack of investment from the politicians in Washington D.C. Restoration of public lands could be the greatest public works and employment project in our country’s history, rivaling the public works projects created during the Great Depression.