Unique 15-year plan approved for Medicine Bow Forest
Unique 15-year plan approved for Medicine Bow Forest
By Carrie Haderlie
Rawlins Times
Via Wyoming News Exchange
RAWLINS – Decimated by a pine beetle infestation and disease, the Medicine Bow National Forest is no longer a healthy forest.
With this in mind, Forest Supervisor for the Medicine BowRoutt National Forests Russell Bacon signed a 47-page record of decision Aug. 13 authorizing a landscape scale project to create a healthier forest, after years of planning and work. The Medicine Bow Landscape Vegetation Analysis Project (LaVA Project) includes up to 288,000 acres of vegetation management on the Medicine Bow National Forest under one decision for the next 15 years.
The purpose of the LaVA Project is to mitigate hazardous fuel loading, provide for recovery of forest products, enhance forest and rangeland resiliency to future insect and disease infestations, protect infrastructure and municipal water supplies, restore wildlife habitat, enhance access for forest visitors and permittees and provide for human safety.
“This is designed for the health and resilience of the forest in general,” Forest Service District Ranger Jason Armbruster said. “People can tell at first glance that it is not a healthy forest. There are a lot of dead and downed trees, and that means higher severity and larger wildfires that are very resistant to control, very dangerous to control.
“Or, look at the number of dead or dying trees out there that are around areas people care about, like ski trails,” Armbruster continued. “This gives us the ability to manage those trees on a larger scale, for the safety of our forest visitors and recreationists but also for permittees and folks that are grazing livestock and have fences to maintain.”
The LaVA Project scope reaches from Albany to Carbon County in Wyoming, from the Colorado/Wyoming border north across the Snowy Range and Sierra Madre Mountain Ranges, from approximately 25 miles west of Laramie to about 25 miles east of Baggs. It encompasses approximately 850,000 acres of National Forest System lands — the entirety of the Snowy Range and Sierra Madre portions of the Medicine Bow National Forest, Brush Creek/Hayden and Laramie Ranger Districts. The project is a hazardous fuel reduction project, and is within the boundaries of a designated priority landscape area for treatment of insects and diseases. Treatment can’t be approved on the entire area, as only 288,000 can be treated as stipulated in the LaVA plan.
“The decision doesn’t describe which acres, so it gives flexibility to treat where it is most needed,” Armbruster said. “It gives flexibility because it is a landscape-scale project intended to be implemented over 15 years, so conditions on the ground could change. We could have a major wildfire come through and significantly change what needs to happen on those particular acres.”
The approved plan also excludes inventoried roadless areas in the project area from treatment, different from a modified draft released in April. That change was made to address a broad range of resource management and public use concerns.
The LaVA Project is relatively unique when it comes to forest management, as previous management tools encompassed smaller areas and projects of a shorter duration.
“Those have typically been smaller scale, and haven’t covered as much acreage or allowed for that adaptive management approach,” Armbruster said.
The LaVA Project reflects the many reasons national forests exist in the first place, and why they are managed for multiple resource objectives.
“Certainly recreation is probably the way that most people interface with the national forest,” Armbruster said. “When you go up in our forest, there are a lot of challenges associated with the aftermath of the insect and disease epidemic, the aftermath of the beetles, in terms of access. It affects peoples’ recreational experience, whether they are hikers or hunters or campers.”
Armbruster said the Forest Service will continue to engage the public throughout the process with in-person workshops and online forums.
“A big part of the plan is how we engage with the public as we move through implementation,” Armbruster said. “We recognize it is a long time and people want to continue to have input into what we are doing.”
Because plans for mitigation efforts around Ryan Park have already gone through the public process, that area could be treated as soon as this fall.
“People locally understand that there is a major need to do fuels treatment around that community, and so we don’t want to wait any longer than we have to,” Armbruster said. “We could be doing a major fuels reduction project in the Ryan Park area hopefully this fall.”