John Thune

Posted: July 13th 2009

The Argus Leader Reports:

Officials with the Black Hills National Forest agreed on a plan Thursday to combat wildfire and mountain pine beetle hazards that includes road building, forest thinning and controlled burns.

It also would open up parts of the forest to salvage logging, which would contribute to the West River economy, said Rhonda O'Byrne, Northern Hills district ranger.

That decision, however, is subject to appeal and people have 45 days to file a complaint against its implementation. The Telegraph Project is five miles south of Lead and contains landmarks such as Custer Peak, Crooks Tower, Rapid Creek, Swede Gulch and Roubaix Lake.

"We've had challenges to our projects in the past and we'll go through and see what happens next," said forest spokeswoman Jackie Groce. "But we feel lucky to have an industry here to help us with these projects. I don't think the public fully understands that the (logging) industry does something for the local economy all while doing something for us, by reducing fuels."

Crews will thin and burn areas and build roads to get to badly damaged forest stands within the 63,608-acre project area. The decision follows several months of public comment.
"We heard two different sides from the public," said Chris Stores, National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) planner for the Northern Hills Ranger District. "On one side, some people felt like we weren't doing enough treatment for the pine beetle bug kill. On the other side, some people felt like we were doing way too much treatment - that there were too many roads and that scenery and recreation would be negatively affected."

Since the late 1990s, some 200,000 acres in the Black Hills have been affected by the pine beetle. The insects attack and kill lodgepole, ponderosa, sugar and western white pines. ...

Scientists estimate that the beetle could kill another 22 million acres across the West in the next 15 years. And that wide swath of dead timber could lead to catastrophic forest fires across the West.
"We have to thin trees in order to make progress towards reducing wildfire risks and pine beetle kill," Stores said. "We need to consider everyone's concerns."

Last week, Sen. John Thune, R-SD, proposed a three-point plan to halt destruction from the beetle. Thune's plan would accelerate and expand effective management practices, create a biomass market for beetle-ravaged trees and reform U.S. Forest Service funding for better management and fire response.
"The pine beetle infestation is destroying acres of beautiful forest land at an alarming rate while raising the danger of wildfires to very high levels," Thune said. "The Forest Service has been doing a lot of good things out here, even staying ahead of the infestation in some ways, but I think they'd yield better results if they had more power to do things."