Cover Story: Bark Sounds Off for Restoration

In early June 2008, Amy Harwood wondered if anyone would show up to her eight-day campout next to Oregon’s Clackamas River. Ominous clouds began to form over camp as volunteers started to arrive.  Rain began to fall, forcing 50 people to huddle under large tarps for the first road survey training. Despite eight days of snow, sleet, and rain, volunteers surveyed 150 miles of Forest Service roads.  The data collected during the “roadtruthing campouts” over the summer of 2008 helped push a big change in Mt. Hood National Forest.  It used to be that removing roads required justification, but now it is the road’s continued existence that must be justified.  This shift has led to some of the most aggressive road decommissioning efforts in the Pacific Northwest.  But surveying the roads was just one step of many along the way.

Threatened salmon + drinking water + recreation = 29MMBF?

Mt. Hood National Forest is unique in many ways.  It is home to five populations of threatened salmon.  The mountain is second only to Japan’s Mount Fuji for the most annual climbs of a glaciated peak, contributing to a total five million visits to the forest each year. Ninety-eight percent of the 1.1 million-acre forest contributes to a municipal drinking water source.  But Mt. Hood shares one trait with other forests; it is riddled with logging roads--3,400 miles according to the Forest Service’s recreation map.

In the 1990s Portland’s population grew by over 20%.  The increasing urbanization of Portland has led Mt. Hood National Forest to become a canary in a political coal mine.  Water quality and quantity are increasingly potent issues, as are recreation and quality of life.  Yet these values continue to take a back seat to the timber sale program, which in 2008 sold 29 million board feet.

Meanwhile, a new vision is coming out of Washington D.C.  In his first major speech regarding the future of the Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said “Restoration means managing forest lands first and foremost to protect our water resources, while making our forests more resilient to climate change.”  But will the Mt. Hood National Forest rise to the management challenge, and prioritize water quality over timber production?

Hitching a ride on the pineapple express

Readying the shovels

Untouchable roads

Midstream through this first phase, we encountered our first hurdle, a dichotomous key designed by agency staff to determine which roads would be surveyed and which would not.  The first qualification was whether the road posed a hydrological threat—e.g. was it bad for streams.  While this sounds good, the decision tree then adds a second filter: whether the road provides access to a commercial harvest or fuels reduction opportunity that would occur within ten years. 

The most frustrating aspect of the decision tree was that it was being used at the very beginning of the process to limit the road surveys themselves, not just to make management decisions.  How would the agency determine the impacts of the road system if it won’t even survey all of the roads?  This turned our entire process on its head.  The result: The Forest Service reneged on its commitment to survey all of the roads in the Upper Clackamas subwatershed.

Soon the full impact of this became apparent.  The agency had no intention of understanding its baseline road system, but instead targeted only the lowest hanging fruit for potential decommissioning.  Among the roads excluded by the timber filter: roads leading to future timber sales; roads still being used despite being labeled “decommissioned” in agency records; unauthorized user created routes; and miles of old timber sale roads that were never published on Forest Service maps. 

All said and done, of the 380 mapped road miles in the subwatershed, fewer than 50 were surveyed, and 113 were ultimately proposed for decommissioning.  Road surveys were delayed during creation of the dichotomous key and snow fell before the 1The result was hailed a success by the Forest Service.  Restoration was happening and at least one source of future funding, timber , was secure.  After all, roads leading to future stewardship contracts (i.e. timber sales) were not only excluded from decommissioning, but were not even surveyed for potential impacts.

How to hide 3,400 miles of road and get away with it

Voicing extreme disappointment in the survey process, the Clackamas Stewardship Partners convinced the Forest Service not to exclude timber roads from future road decommissioning efforts.  The dichotomous key was amended to include “decommission with delay” as a potential outcome for these roads.  Practically speaking, this means that at some point in time all roads will be surveyed and if a particular road accesses timber but is otherwise a hydrological threat it will be decommissioned upon completion of the next timber harvest.  Progress.

The Forest Service is now pursuing a second phase road decommissioning project in another subwatershed within the Clackamas River system.  In 2009 it surveyed nearly 100% of the roads in the watershed by utilizing a dozen interns from nearby community colleges.  Bark recently received a preliminary proposed action that indicates a much higher percentage of decommissioning will occur due to better data collected from the field.  Progress!

Interestingly, instead of using “decommission with delay” for all roads leading to future timber sales, the document prescribes the more immediate “decommission” for most of them.  But there is a catch, as clarified at a Clackamas Stewardship Partner meeting in the spring of 2009. 

In response to Mt. Hood’s head fish biologist describing the importance of hydrologically stabilizing roads, one of the timber planners remarked that decommissioning is a cheap way to “store roads.”  The preliminary document’s use of “decommission” describes closing the road and using water bars to stabilize, or store it, for future logging operations.  So it will be a form of hydrologic closure, but they will not be fully reclaiming these roads by recontouring them and removing them from their system maps.  In the short term it’s a step in the right direction from a watershed perspective, but what impacts will result from multiple logging entries in the long-term? Restoring watersheds?  

You are reading the RoadRIPorter so it is likely you already understand the benefits of permanently reclaiming Forest Service roads.  In many ways Mt. Hood National Forest is leading the pack in addressing its burdensome road system, but Bark believes that the toughest fight is yet to come.  After all, in its two attempts to deal with the problem, the Forest Service first exempted timber roads altogether and is now “storing” them for later. 

Through our involvement with the Clackamas Stewardship Partnership, we also learned first hand how stewardship contracts, which couple restoration with timber receipts, make this fight tougher.  Unlike the Legacy Roads program, which directly funds road-removal for watershed restoration, stewardship contracts encourage a perpetual restoration and logging paradigm -- a paradigm dependent on the continued existence of an over-sized road system.

Nonetheless, the inventory work that both Bark and the agency completed has resulted in real benefits on the ground.  For example, the regional office directed a significant portion of its Legacy Roads funds to decommissioning projects in the Clackamas River watershed because of the data collected through this process and the commitment of the Partners.  From our conversation with other activists, we know the same is true in other forests as well – local engagement helps dictate future spending.

While most of us are excited to see people at work restoring our rivers, now is the time to start asking the tough question, “Is the stewardship contract paradigm a sustainable restoration solution, or is it leading us back to a perpetual cycle of mitigation?”  And perhaps more importantly, how can we ensure that Legacy Roads funds continue to flow, so the agency doesn’t have to depend on stewardship contracts to restore water quality and watershed health.