Volume fiVe number four, two thousand nine | Winter

Is it Time for More

Wilderness in Montana?

Living Guthrie’s Big Sky

Jim Messina: The President’s
Problem Solver
Absarokee: Cleaned Up and Good as New

The Windbag Saloon

A FRAGILE COALITION
Timber harvest and forest restoration are both part
of the Tester Wilderness Bill, but will Congress reward
the years of heated meetings and compromises
that brought it to the table?

BY S C OT T Mc M I L L ION • PHOTO GR A PH Y BY T HOM A S L E E

M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY 9
 Three Rivers Special

F
Management Area
Management
74,274 acres Area

Forest
74,274 acres
or more than 30 years, How much of it should be declared off limits, forever, to motor Missions Addition
4,501 acres
vehicles, logging, mining and even bicycles?
Montanans have argued
bitterly over how much
How much should be opened to those uses?
Nobody has yet come up with politically acceptable answers.
Bob Marshall and
Scapegoat Additions Roderick
Roderick
Jobs and
Recreation
78,977 acres Otatsy National 26,869 acres
“This has been a long-standing hairball in Montana,” is how 26,869 acres
of the state should be Gallatin County Commissioner Bill Murdoch described the issue
Recreation Area
1,271 acres
declared wilderness, the at an October meeting in Bozeman.
Act Lands
That’s a colorful metaphor, but an apt one. The issue has left
highest level of protection a lot of politicians choking and sputtering.
• Missoula
• Libby
• Libby

the federal government can bestow The last time a Montana wilderness bill became law was in
1983, when the Lee Metcalf Wilderness southwest of Bozeman
on a piece of land. In this state we was designated.
have about six million acres of road- Since then, every attempt has foundered in Congress, except
• Helena
one. And President Ronald Reagan vetoed that one in 1988,
less public land that, at least in theory, granting a campaign gift to Conrad Burns, then running for the
Quigg Peak
8,388 acres
Thunderbolt
Recreation Area
could be designated wilderness. Most U.S. Senate from Montana and, at the time, a staunch critic of Dolus Lakes
9,367 acres
22,037 acres

wilderness. Stony Mountain

of it is national forest and most of it No Montana politician has even introduced a wilderness bill
14,261 acres Electric Peak
4,653 acres
is in the western third of the state. since 1995.
Lost Creek
Protection Area
15,134 acres
Now, the man who took Burns’ job away
Sapphires
from him in 2006, Democrat Jon Tester, 53,327 acres
• Anaconda
himself an interesting cat in a number of
ways, is taking his stab at wilderness legisla- Anaconda-Pintler Butte •
tion. Additions
56,680 acres
This time, things are different. The
biggest difference is that, in addition to Highlands
designating nearly 700,000 acres of new 20,392 acres
wilderness in three national forests, Tester’s West Pioneers Humbug
25,742 acres Spires
bill requires 10,000 acres of logging every West Pioneers BLM
year for a decade. That idea has put a lot of Recreation
East Pioneers
8,892 acres
Management Area Lost Cabin
loggers in his camp. 129,252 acres 76,775 acres
5,223 acres
Tim Baker, executive director of the
Montana Wilderness Association and one of West Big Hole NRA
94,237 acres
the main proponents of the bill, says the bill Farlin
Creek BLM Lee Metcalf
calls for a whole new way of managing public West Big Hole 661 acres
Ruby Mountain BLM
Additions
15,504 acres
land. 44,084 acres • Dillon 18,950 acres
“I don’t really think of it as a wilderness
bill,” Baker said. “It’s about the forest and
how to look at the forest.”
Blacktail
He said he’s hopeful the bill will Mountains BLM
10,667 acres
become a template that will reduce, if not Proposed Snowcrest
Wilderness 86,798 acres
eliminate, the timber wars that have domi-
Proposed Recreation,
nated Montana’s backcountry for decades. Management, and
Protection Areas
Timber Available for
U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., is building a consen- Possible Harvest Centennial Mt. Jefferson The Tester Wilderness Bill
(The existing forest plans dictate Mountains BLM 4,465 acres proposes designation of nearly
sus among resource users that he hopes will result
where stewardship logging 23,256 acres 700,000 acres of new wilderness
in the first bill setting aside wilderness in Montana
according to the Forest Jobs Italian Peaks in three national forests and
since 1983. Lima Peaks
and Recreation Act will occur.) 29,508 acres requires 10,000 acres of logging
35,120 acres
every year for a decade.
COURTESY OF MONTANA WILDERNESS ASSOCIATION
10 M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY 11
 adopt it.
Frustrated, they went to Tester, who decided he would take
their recommendations and make them the heart and bones of a
new wilderness bill.
“We got to thinking, ‘What the hell, can we put this thing
together?’” Tester said in an interview.
Eventually, components dealing with federal land in the
Seeley Lake and Yaak Valley areas were added to the bill.
Tester liked the fact that the bill came “from the ground up,”
that local sawmills and Montana conservation groups were able to
put their differences aside, find the areas they could agree upon
and compromise on the places where they had differences. While
some motorized recreation groups refuse to participate, others
endorsed the plan. Some environmental groups also decried it.
The naysayers staked out familiar turf. The logging mandates
incensed some green groups, while the idea of any new wilder-
ness sticks in the craw of some motorized groups.
Tester maintains the opposition from both extremes indi-
cates he’s reached a good compromise.
The heat from both sides, he said, “is pretty equal. That
might be a good thing.”
He announced the bill on July 17, at a sawmill in Townsend.
The location was not a breezy decision.
The location of the announcement was important because
the bill’s first priority, Tester said in October, was to protect
timber jobs and the human and mechanical infrastructure – the
skills and equipment – that make logging a possibility.
Protecting those assets means the state retains a ready tool
kit for some overdue forest restoration work. But protecting those
tools requires functioning sawmills, which in small towns like
Deer Lodge, Townsend or Seeley Lake are major employers. And
sawmills need a steady supply of logs, in good times and bad
times, to stay on their feet.
And logs have become increasingly hard to obtain. National
forests are selling about 20 percent of what they sold in the
1980s, many mills have closed and remaining mills are hauling
logs from hundreds of miles away. Meanwhile, Montanans are
watching hillsides turn red and die in the worst pine beetle infes-
tation in decades.
“Our forests are turning the wrong color,” Tester tells the
crowds when he touts his wilderness bill.
When he outlines his bill, as he has done in a handful of
meetings around the state, he shows a lot of pictures of trees that
have turned a dull orange, the victims of pine beetles.
But ask him directly and he’ll agree that his wilderness bill
can’t do much about bug-killed trees. There are just too many of
them, in too many places.
What it can do, he says, is put some of those trees through

The bill calls for some logging, some wilderness, and a lot of
acres that lie somewhere in between.
A late July poll — commissioned by supporters just a few
days after the bill was released — suggests that 70 percent of
Montanans support the bill.
But that doesn’t mean it’ll be any easier to huck up that
hairball.
HEAT FROM BOTH SIDES
It’s an irony of Montana politics that Conrad Burns, long a
punching bag for environmentalists, in 2005 kicked over a rock
that tumbled downhill and landed in Tester’s hands this year in
the form of a wilderness bill.
Workers grade lumber at Pyramid Mountain Lumber in Seeley Lake. Custom Granite &
Concrete Countertops
Tester’s bill would mandate the sale of 10,000 acres of timber every year
in an attempt to bolster the timber industry and reduce fire danger.
had long since softened his opposition to new wilderness in
Montana.)
Loggers didn’t like the Forest Plan. Neither did environmen-
talists. Both sides said the Forest Service had been ignoring them. • Premier supplier of custom countertops and tile
Both appeared on a discussion panel and aired their complaints
on that shivery day. Burns listened for a while, noted that both • Most comprehensive selection of natural
sides had similar gripes, and made a simple observation.
“At one point, he looked at the panelists and said, ‘you guys stone slabs in Montana
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at Sun Mountain Lumber in Deer Lodge.

Spurred by ATV riders and snowmobilers angry about plans
to shut down motorized access to much of the Gallatin National
Forest, Burns held a Senate hearing in Missoula. But Senate hear-
ings are a pretty big deal, and in this case the agenda morphed
until it focused more on the Beaverhead-Deerlodge forest and
ongoing disputes over its Forest Plan, a document that would
outline management for the next decade.
(It’s worth noting that Burns, then seeking a fourth term,
Custom Tile
Then they brought in a few other groups. They pulled
out the maps, they had a lot of meetings and more than a few
heated discussions. After several months, they came up with a
plan. The loggers and the environmentalists, long accustomed
to pelting each other, had managed to agree on which parts of M A R B L E • S OA P S TO N E • G R A N I T E
the Beaverhead-Deerlodge forest should be wilderness and which Q UA R T Z S U R FACI N G • T I L E • CO N CR E T E
areas should be available for logging.
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12 M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY 13
a sawmill and harvest some economic value before they crack
and split on the stump. And it can remove some fuels in criti-
cal places, where a major wildfire could wreak havoc with forest
neighbors and with headwaters streams that provide clean water
to farms and towns.
In a nutshell, the bill mandates that the Forest Service
sell 10,000 acres of timber every year, 7,000 acres on the
Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest and 3,000 acres on the
Kootenai National Forest. The money from those timber sales
would then finance forest restoration projects: better culverts to
protect streams, removing erosive roads that don’t go anywhere,
and taking out some non-commercial but highly flammable
brush. There could be some biofuel projects down the road.
Whether it will work that way remains to be seen. There are
plenty of doubters.
Mike McGinley is a Beaverhead County Commissioner and
one of the skeptics. He said the bill, as currently written, will
divert Forest Service logging revenues away from county coffers.
And while it permits livestock grazing and mechanized recreation
to continue, he worries about creeping regulations down the road
that make those activities impossible.
And since his county lacks much of a timber industry, any
logging jobs will go somewhere else.
“If there are jobs to be had, (other counties) are getting
them,” McGinley said. “And we’re getting the wilderness.”
He said he sympathizes with the sawmills, but doubts they’ll
see much job protection because the bill still allows anybody with
a checkbook and a lawyer to challenge any of the timber sales.
Michael Garrity, president of the Alliance for the Wild
Rockies, a group that sues — and usually wins — to halt many
of the timber sales in the state, finds the bill odious. He says
his group will do everything it can to halt Tester’s bill and, if it
passes, will continue to file appeals and lawsuits.
Tester counters that groups like Garrity’s will have a harder
time in court if the bill passes.
Passage will clarify the intent of Congress, and judges have
to heed that, he said.
“This will very much allow the judges to make the correct
decisions,” he said.
Garrity conceded that Tester has a point.
“A judge is going to have a hard time ruling in our favor. But
we’re still going to try,” Garrity said. “Even if we lose, we’re going
to slow them down.”
The bill has institutional barriers to leap as well. The Forest
Service doesn’t have a long history of marketing these kinds of
conservation-based logging projects, formally called stewardship
contracts, and the timber industry in the state has been slow to
embrace them.
They’re tough to design because they must contain enough
commercial wood to pay for the non-commercial activities, like
Montana’s forests are turning from green to a beetle-killed dull orange
and sometimes to black like this swath of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge
National Forest near Anaconda. Joe Brabender, a fire management
officer for the Pintler District, says beetle-kill is a good fuel for the first
three years, while the needles are still on, and then not again until 30 or
more years later when the trunks fall over and “jack-straw.”
erosion control. And all environmental laws — the
National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered
Species Act, roadless policies and others — must be
followed.
“The Forest Service is learning how to put them
up and we’re learning how to do them,” said Sun
Mountain Lumber’s Colter. It’s really a mind change
to get people in our business to take a look at them.”
But a new approach is critical, he said.
Currently, about six major sawmills remain
working in Montana. But those mills supply a pulp
mill and a particle board plant in Missoula with
wood chips and sawdust.
“If you lose another sawmill or two, you don’t
have the critical mass to support the pulp mills,”
Colter said. And the remaining mills lose a customer
for a byproduct that, while not of high value, can
help them survive lean times.
And even if the bill passes, it will need a chunk
of cash to kick start it into life, at least in the early
stages. Nobody is saying just how much.
“We’re probably talking millions, maybe,” Tester said. Tester has been stumping around the state for his bill. Here he meets with
constituents in Bozeman.
And that could be a major stumbling block. Even the bill’s
backers agree they face an uphill struggle. continue to shrivel.
“We have our challenges ahead of us. There’s no doubt about Comparing the Quincy group to Tester’s plan is something
that,” said Ed Regan, senior resource manager for RY Timber of an apples-and-oranges endeavor, if only because Tester’s bill
mills in Livingston and Townsend. is so much smaller. But spending money to mandate logging is
something that Congress remembers.
ONCE IT GETS TO CONGRESS Another potential problem could arise if other green groups
try to add more wilderness areas to the bill, making it resem-
Pat Williams is no stranger to Montana’s wilderness debate. ble a statewide bill, which would generate more reluctance in
During his 18 years in Congress, he introduced 16 wilderness Congress.
bills. Since he retired in 1997, nobody in Montana’s delegation Over the past dozen years, Congress has looked more favor-
to Washington, D.C. has taken a leadership position on the issue. ably at smaller wilderness bills that included collaboration by
Until Tester came along. Williams, who strongly endorses the locals.
bill, gave Tester a lot of credit for picking up the ball. “Congress waits until local people, as best they can, have
“Sen. Tester has broken the Montana wilderness drought in worked out local agreements,” Williams said.
Congress,” Williams said. “People ought to be grateful for his There’s been considerable progress on that point. Some green
courage. Whether or not it will pass is another issue.” groups and loggers are on board. But some motorized groups, the
He said he sees a couple potential problems in Congress. more strident environmental groups, and some county commis-
First, Congress is loathe to endorse bills that mandate sioners are holding their nose.
logging, especially when money must be appropriated to do so. If Congress makes major changes to the bill, or balks at
“Congress is inclined not to give cash for mandated logging,” funding, things could fall apart.
he said. “Right now, there’s a fragile coalition, and I mean really
One reason for that reluctance arose in northern California, fragile,” Williams said.
where the Quincy Library Group, an assemblage of loggers and But it’s still a coalition. Even if not everybody is on board,
environmentalists in the 1990s, put together a plan everybody the big players — the timber industry and major environmental
in the group could live with. The Forest Service refused to adopt groups — are at last seeing eye to eye.
the plan, but supporters went over the agency’s head to Congress, “It’s clear that Montana’s forests need a new plan and that’s
which passed a bill that mandated it. the intent here,” Tester said. “This was put together by folks of
Between 1999 and 2006, the Quincy project has spent various political ilks. Just a few short years ago you wouldn’t have
$167 million while bringing in $12 million, and local sawmills caught these folks in the same room together.”
M O N T A N A Q U A R T E R LY 15