BIA forester Frederick von Bonin inspects timber. When emergency harvest is over, the Apache mainstay will be severely curbed for a century.
Posted on 12/29/2002 8:13:49 AM PST by madfly
Photos by Aaron J. Latham / Arizona Daily Star
BIA forester Frederick von Bonin inspects timber. When emergency harvest is over, the Apache mainstay will be severely curbed for a century.
This summer's Rodeo-Chediski fire, largest in Arizona's history, burned 276,507 acres of Apache land, 462,606 acres in all.
Fresh snow shows through the stands of scorched forest almost as far as the eye can see on the White Mountain Apache Reservation. The tribe is harvesting a century's worth of timber in six months.
CIBECUE - The forests above this creekside village on the Fort Apache Reservation buzz with industry this winter as the White Mountain Apaches try to salvage a century's worth of burned timber in six months.
The attempt has already killed two men. Logger Rex L. Hendren, 42, of Kooskia, Idaho, died Dec. 11 when a tree he felled knocked him 70 feet down a slope.
An Apache man, Rothwell Gooday, 21, of Carrizo, died the next day when his vehicle collided with a logging truck.
Authorities urge caution this winter on reservation roads and state highways in the White Mountains. Logging trucks, 60,000 pounds of steel and timber each, will make more than 100 runs a day to railheads in Globe and Snowflake, adding to traffic flowing to Apache mills at Cibecue and Whiteriver.
The recent accidents add to the Apaches' profound sense of loss at the death of a third of their forest in this summer's Rodeo-Chediski fire.
The fire, largest in Arizona's history, began a few miles from here June 18. Fire burned 276,507 acres of Apache land, 462,606 acres in all.
Just north of the reservation, in the Mogollon Rim and White Mountains tourist towns, the fire destroyed 500 buildings. And less than a month before, the 30,563-acre Bullock Fire threatened hundreds of homes on Tucson's Mount Lemmon.
Even as they're busy harvesting trees on the reservation, or rebuilding second homes in nearby Overgaard, or marveling at how close the flames came to Summerhaven, people across Arizona's high country are looking ahead in fear.
They're using this winter lull between the annual fire seasons to dig out and prepare, knowing that 80 years of fire suppression - coupled with extended drought - means the chance for another conflagration is just a few months away.
At Cibecue on the reservation, where 100 percent of the people still speak Apache and remain connected to the old ways, the loss so far is much more than economic, say its two tribal councilmen, Ronnie Lupe and Jacob Henry.
The fire, kept west of Arizona 60 by a massive effort to protect the towns of the White Mountains, burned most of the Cibecue district, home to the tribe's most remote and most traditional villages.
Lupe, 72, points to his head. "The word we have for our mental process, ní, is the same as the word we have for land. We cannot be separated from our land."
Lupe grew up in Cibecue, now a 20-mile drive on a paved road from Arizona 60, but much more isolated then.
This fire, blamed by authorities on an Apache arsonist and a lost woman's signal fire, destroyed more than valuable timber. "It burned our living room, destroyed our swimming holes, our sacred places," Lupe said.
"If you look at the burned areas, that is where I live. It was wonderful to walk in any direction, the mountains, the canyons, and just soak in the solitude and communicate with the land itself.
"I'll give you an example," he said. "There is a place called White Springs. When you walk up to that, you hear it. When no soul is there, the spring is quiet. We say, 'That's the water people telling the forest we have company.' "
Springs were fouled and creeks clogged when flood followed fire in the tribe's watercourses. This summer's monsoon rainfall was below average, but the rain that fell on the moonscape of charred trees and ash-covered ground ran off quickly. The perennial streams - Cibecue, Carrizo and Canyon creeks - overflowed their banks, ripping out vegetation and creating wide, silt-covered, barren flood plains.
The watershed will repair itself in time, said Bureau of Indian Affairs forester Frederick von Bonin, but for the next five to 10 years, further flooding is a danger.
Repair of the forest will take much longer. For each of the next 10 years, the tribe plans to plant 1.2 million seedlings to reforest an estimated 73,000 acres that have been severely burned.
The damaged timber, 95 percent of it ponderosa pine, is being offered at fire-sale prices. The tribe hopes to collect about $5 million from its outside contracts. The value of its lost lumber is estimated at $152 million.
When this emergency harvest is completed, timber operations, the tribe's economic mainstay, will be severely limited for the next century.
It's a blow to an area that is already economically devastated. Timber is one of the few year-round enterprises, employing up to 350 Apaches on a reservation where the family poverty rate is more than four times that of Pima County and the median household income, $18,903, is about half Pima County's $36,758, according to the 2000 U.S. Census.
The White Mountain Apache Tribe took the rare step of seeking outside help in salvaging the burned trees. When a helicopter logging operation on the reservation hits its peak next month, it will fill 120 logging loads a day.
Half will head south on Arizona 60, through the Salt River Canyon, to the railhead at Globe. The other half will go north to another railhead at Snowflake.
The lumber is bound for two California sawmills operated by Sierra Pacific, which bought the rights to 194.7 million board feet of the Apaches' timber. If all of it is harvested, Sierra will pay the tribe more than $3.8 million.
Another 44.7 million board feet went to TCB Construction of Mississippi for a bid price of $1.15 million.
The Fort Apache Timber Co. has the rights to another 123 million board feet, which it will haul to its mills at Cibecue and Whiteriver.
In a normal year, Fort Apache is the only lumber company working these forests and averages about 40 million board feet.
While this massive salvage effort represents full employment for loggers and mill operators in the White Mountains, it is a one-shot deal.
Future timber sales will be small. "We are looking at 150 years to go back to the same kind of commerce," said Ben H. Nuvamsa, superintendent of the Fort Apache Agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. "The west end has basically been taken out of operability."
Nuvamsa, whose agency manages the forest in trust for the White Mountain Apache Tribe, said he doubts the tribe will be able to keep its Cibecue mill operating after the salvage is completed.
Because timber must be harvested before burned trees succumb to insects and fungus that reduce its value to nothing, it is being sold, for the first time in half a century, to outside contractors.
Sierra Pacific hired Columbia Helicopters Inc. to do its logging. Columbia is deploying 57 loggers and four Boeing Vertol 107 helicopters in the high slopes above Cibecue, said Gary Hammitt, Columbia's on-site project manager. The operation was going full- bore before last week's snowstorms grounded the helicopters and kept the trucks off the web of forest roads.
Von Bonin said crews from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the tribe are working ahead of the cutters. Normally, they identify cutting areas. For this effort, they found it easier to simply flag areas that can't be cut.
They include stands with less than 25 percent mortality where forest critters most likely took refuge after the fire, and buffer zones 400 feet from perennial streams or 200 feet from intermittent ones.
They've identified "owl areas," potential mating sites for the endangered spotted owl where 25 to 75 percent of the trees are dead. They must be worked first, so that loggers are out of them before the spring mating season.
Within the allowed areas, trees with 15 percent of their crowns still green must be spared.
The tribe's foresters have met with the loggers to instruct them on identifying the doomed trees. On a tour of the area Dec. 19, von Bonin found those decisions easy to make. There were plenty of tall trees with no crown left.
Downed, charred trees 80 to 110 feet tall, littered the steep slopes of Cibecue Canyon. The trees had been growing for 90 to 220 years, von Bonin said.
Logs cut from the trees weigh up to 5,000 pounds. The helicopter, trailing a 200-foot cable, lifts them one or two at a time and drops them near the road where they are stacked and loaded onto trucks by giant bulldozer-like "grabbers."
A few of the stacked logs already showed signs of "bluing," or decay.
Beetles, loopers and aphids were already attacking as the state's prolonged drought limited the trees' ability to "pitch-out" and create a natural bug repellent, said von Bonin.
The beetles introduce a fungus that turns the wood blue, reducing its value within the first year. There is a market for this "blue pine" as paneling, but it's a small one. Within two years, said von Bonin, further insect damage will reduce the trees' value to zero.
That pushed the BIA to develop a plan for harvesting the timber in four months. It usually takes two years to prepare a timber sale, said Nuvamsa.
The tribe hired a private contractor to do an environmental assessment because the overtaxed BIA, which has detoured resources away from other areas and spent about $8 million on the fire and its aftermath, could not have done it on time.
The logging, however, is not being done in haste, said Hammitt, of Columbia Helicopters. Idaho logger Hendren was an experienced hand who didn't rush his cuts, Hammitt said. "That's one of the worst parts about this job," he said. "It can happen to anyone, any time."
Loggers are 27 times more likely to be killed than the average for workers in all other jobs, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
As devastating as the fire was, firefighting officials were always proud of the fact that it produced no casualties. But the final toll of the Rodeo-Chediski fire has yet to be recorded.
The big problem was transportation. The continuing destruction of the industry by the Sierra Club and its ilk means that there is only one sawmill in the entire state of Arizona, and it can handle only so many logs. To pay for the operation they had to find a way to get sufficient volume milled or there wouldn't have been a way to restart the forest with new trees.
The California Forest Association lent Phil Aune and other former Forest Service people to go down there and help figure it out. Phil is a great guy who had the tragic experience of rehabilitating a reburn up in Tahoe where the ground had been fired into a ceramic.
Most of the Environmental "whackos" are Urbanites who have never really seen a forest. They think of the trees in the city park as a forest.
I've already learned the hard way not to talk to them about their wood frame houses or wood furniture.
Because they are the majority of voters in the US. Until the rest of us can manage to get more than 45% of our neighbors to go to the polls, they win every time.
You probably missed your chance to agree with him and say "Of course, all animals are murderers. A lot of plants are murderers too", and watch his eyes start spiraling around... (Such ripostes only occur via 20-20 hindsight, of course - oh well)
My big question is why do we have nuts like this teaching in our colleges? Even in Idaho?
Because no one else wants the job. College teaching doesn't pay worth a damn compared to the real world, and there isn't nearly the challenge or stimulation. Also, cloistered environments like colleges and government agencies tend to attract spineless losers who can't cope with the competition of industry.
So who gravitates toward a "Career" in teaching? The ultimate spineless losers of the world - leftie-liberal fruitcakes. Then, of course, once they're ensconced in their little sinecures, they close ranks to exclude anyone who disagrees with them, since (being spineless losers) they can't tolerate disagreement.
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