When Fred Mitchell first heard about the Outback Aspen Restoration Project, he liked the idea so much that he agreed to let the U.S. Forest Service use his driveway along Independence Lake Road north of Truckee to complete the work. But today, Mitchell’s backhoe blocks his property’s road, and he has become one of the loudest voices in a growing chorus of critics that is astounded to see ancient trees logged in the name of aspen restoration.
The Outback Aspen Restoration Project was planned by the Forest Service’s Sierraville Ranger District in 2007, and in 2009 it received approval. Currently, logging equipment is clearing conifers near aspen stands on nearly 500 acres of land scattered throughout the valleys near the Little Truckee River and Independence Creek between Truckee and Sierraville. The project is the largest aspen restoration effort to take place in the Tahoe National Forest.
Economy or Ecology?
Walking through ripped up pine limbs and scores of tree stumps, Mitchell slowly approaches the enormous trunk of a 286-year-old fir tree. It is one of the oldest and rarest casualties of a U.S. Forest Service project that has denuded significant swaths of forest and will, in total, send approximately 8.6 million board feet of timber to the sawmill.
Chainsaw marks show the multiple cuts that loggers had to make to fell the giant, which Mitchell estimates sprouted in 1726 — 50 years before the Declaration of Independence was penned and 120 years before the Donner Party ventured across the Sierra crest. A long chisel mark from the center of the trunk to its outer edge marks the location where Mitchell meticulously counted 286 growth rings, confirming the tree’s age.
“I am suspecting that the big trees are the ones that are paying for the project,” said Mitchell. “But that is not aspen restoration; that is logging.”
The Forest Service disputes the claim that large conifers are being felled simply to finance an aspen restoration project that officials say is desperately needed.
“These projects are not designed with commercial viability in mind,” said Eli Ilano, deputy forest supervisor for the Tahoe National Forest. “They are designed to achieve aspen restoration. Is there a commercial component? There is. But if we want to achieve aspen restoration we have to pursue all options to get the work on the ground.”
Imperiled Aspen
Ilano said that research shows between 60 and 90 percent of aspen groves in the Sierra Nevada are shrinking or unhealthy.
“The rate of the decline of these aspen stands are a lot faster than we can restore them,” said Ilano.
Aspens are remarkable organisms that thrived when frequent wildfires burned in the Sierra Nevada. Because the aspens regenerate through their root system, wildfires typically do not kill aspen groves but routinely kill the conifers that, without wildfire, would shade, crowd, and out-compete aspens for water and nutrients.
Once the cycle of wildfire was broken by firefighters, aspens have declined as conifers have grown, sometimes in thick groupings, into aspen habitat. In the case of cutting large conifers — even trees that may pre-date any decline in aspen groves — Ilano said the Forest Service has had to make sometimes difficult decisions.
“That tree was shading the ground. It was a seed source,” said Ilano. “If you want to increase the probability of the restoration of aspen stands, then you need to sacrifice some things on the other side. It is something we struggle with here — to find the right balance.”
Ilano noted that the decline of the aspen is not solely the loss of a beautiful tree. Aspen groves are home to an incredible range of biodiversity virtually unmatched in the Sierra Nevada.
“The biodiversity in an aspen stand is higher than pretty much any other habitat, expect rivers and river bottoms,” said Ilano.
Songbirds, insects, and a wide range of other Sierra plants and animals thrive in healthy aspen groves. A Forest Service aspen researcher named Wayne Shepperd, who is based in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, has toured the Sierraville Ranger District’s aspen groves and said that aspen stands are on the brink of extinction, according to Ilano. The pessimistic assessment by aspen experts has only added urgency to the Forest Service’s aspen restoration work, Ilano said.
“We really are serious about aspen restoration,” he said.
Cutting Conifers
Mitchell has done his own aspen restoration work on his property by hand. He supports aspen restoration on Forest Service land — “Before now, we’ve always been behind the Forest Service,” he said — but when he looks at the logging alongside the aspen groves east of Independence Lake, he sees an economic, as well as an ecological, motive.
“The volume of lumber that is coming out of here — that is making someone a lot of money,” said Mitchell.
Mitchell and other local residents heard details of the project before it was approved and said that Forest Service officials never gave any indication that logging would be this widespread. The Forest Service sold the timber in the project for $697,300.
“They never hinted that this project would be so enormous and they’d be taking so many large trees,” said Mitchell.
Stepping past the stump of the felled fir, Mitchell walks past 10-foot-high piles of logs and up a dusty hillside. A logging road has been etched into the ground and every tree has been cut on the lower section of the dry slope leading down to the aspen grove. Mitchell doubts the moisture-loving aspens will ever move up this waterless swath of logged land.
“This entire hillside has been denuded, and I bet you anything that 10, 20, 30 years from now it will still be a bare, ugly hillside,” said Mitchell.
Mitchell continues walking, passing through an aspen grove and crossing a small creek. The aspens grow thick along the creek, but there are also concerning signs. Aspen “skeletons” — ghostly white poles of leafless, dead aspens, poke into the sky, often surrounded by thickets of white fir. This, Mitchell says, is the real threat to aspens.
“The only conifer they should worry about is the smaller white fir,” said Mitchell. “The white fir is so prolific, they grow like weeds. If they were taking out just the white fir that would be fine.”
The Big Trees
Mitchell continues walking to an area that is in the bull’s eye of the next phase of the Outback Aspen Restoration Project. Behind Mitchell’s property, blocked by a creek and now by his backhoe, lies an area that a rancher who has run cattle in the area for decades calls “The Big Trees.” Here, enormous Jeffery pine, white fir, and red fir tower over the landscape. A clearing stands in between the giant trees and an aspen grove. The aspens have not crossed the clearing, but the towering conifers — one of which the Forest Service has bored into and found is 230 years old, according to Mitchell — are within 150 feet of the aspens, which makes them fair game for logging.
A couple of the largest trees have large white marks on their bark, meaning they will be spared the chainsaw. But others have no markings at all, which means they most likely will be felled, chopped up, and trucked to the sawmill. Mitchell loaned his 100-foot tape measure to a friend who measured the distance the trees sat from the aspen grove.
“Some of these big trees were 148 feet from the aspens. That dooms them,” said Mitchell.
But the Forest Service says they are still in the process of determining which trees to take down and which trees to leave in this part of the project, which is slated for logging next summer.
“We have been reviewing the areas that have not been treated yet, trying to strike the right balance,” said Ilano. “We hope to spend some time with Fred Mitchell back there and better understand his concerns.”
Meanwhile, Mitchell has contacted U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s office, toured the project with ecologists like Chad Hanson, executive director of the John Muir Project, and walked interested citizens like Truckee’s John Eaton across the logged areas.
Mitchell is also concerned about future U.S. Forest Service aspen restoration projects. One, called the Dingo Project and slated for Rice Canyon north of Independence Lake, is very similar to the Outback Aspen Restoration Project. The 166 acres of aspen restoration could begin as early as next summer, according to the Forest Service.
“There is a lot of proof out there that you don’t have to do this type of clear-cutting to get the aspen to grow again,” said Mitchell.
Aspen Expansion
The Forest Service says the Outback project, which they admit looks like a logging operation today, will be a thriving aspen grove in years to come.
“I understand that it is the first month after the aspen restoration effort and it does not look pretty,” said Ilano. “This year it is not going to look pretty, but in four years and five years it is going to look beautiful.”
Craig Wilson, the wildlife biologist for the Sierraville Ranger District, said the aspen roots are already buried in the earth that has been logged. Next year a strong “flush” of aspen growth will rise up from the ground.
“There will be three feet of growth a year if we did our job right,” said Wilson.
In five to six years, the aspens will have grown higher than a person’s head, he said.
Mitchell does not deny that portions of the project will spur aspen growth. But he still cannot understand the logging of ancient trees that even Ilano said “co-evolved” with the aspen grove.
“I think it is going to benefit aspen and cottonwood. There is just a lot of unnecessary stuff going on here,” said Mitchell. Then, looking across a vast swath of tree stumps and forest slash he adds, “They could have left a sprinkling of larger trees.”
