Aside from Tim Lillebo, who travels all over eastern Oregon looking at Forest Service projects and meeting with a variety of stakeholders on public lands, Oregon Wild's staff doesn't get out "in the field" as much as we'd like to to look at projects east of the Cascades - we usually have to make do with paper descriptions. So it was a treat for Doug Heiken and I to check out three different Forest Service projects on the Fremont-Winema National Forest earlier this week and get to know the agency staff and other involved parties - like The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the Klamath Tribe, and Drs. Jerry Franklin and Norm Johnson.

Monday, we toured the proposed Black Hills Project, north of the town of Beatty and surrounding Spodue Mtn. (Never heard of Beatty? Here's a map.) The project area is huge - nearly 30,000 acres - and the forests proposed for restoration range from dense second-growth ponderosa pines with some legacy old-growth trees, to old lodgepole pines with aspen stands in the understory, to mixed conifer with white fir, Ponderosa, and sugar pines. Overall, we liked the proposal for protecting large and old trees, focusing on thinning out small trees leaving clumps and gaps, and reintroducing fire. It's great to get a feel for the area and the proposal so we can send really informed comments to the Forest Service and help improve the project even more.

One highlight of the day was having lunch along part of the Wild & Scenic Sycan River. The spring-fed Sycan includes a TNC-managed marsh a few miles upstream, and this lovely spot complete with beaver dams and healthy willows.

The next day we took a peek at some recently completed fuels reduction along the Silver Lake Highway called Lower Jack. While the overall thinning effect seemed fine, there seemed to be a lot of churned-up soil and big stacks of small trees left behind. We hope those piles get taken care of, or the "fuels reduction" goals would be completely unmet!

Finally, we checked out part of the Modoc Restoration Project - currently in planning as well - on the western slope of Yamsay Mountain. This project also includes lots of dense young pine grown up after many old-growth trees were logged and since natural fires have been excluded from the area. While much of the proposal to thin these dense forests could be beneficial, we saw some areas where thinning white firs would leave huge gaps in the forest. Now that we've seen it, we'll let the Forest Service know our concerns and see if we can get any changes we think are needed so we can support the project.

All in all, the trip helped us get a good lay of the land for the central part of this huge National Forest, and helped us build connections to people who can help us move eastern Oregon forest management towards ecological restoration.