Logging project near Bend a 'model' for Oregon's federal forests

Black Butte Glaze Meadow project provides basis for larger eastern Oregon forest legislation.

The Bend Bulletin recently wrote about how a forest thinning project west of Sisters could indicate what federal forest logging will look like in Oregon if a bill proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, becomes law.

The Bulletin's Kate Ramsayer explains how environmentalists, the timber industry, tribes and the U.S. Forest Service carefully negotiated the parameters of the Glaze Meadow Forest Restoration Project, sometimes down to a single clump of trees.

In the end, no one filed an appeal against the Glaze project — making it the first project involving commercial timber to avoid appeals since 1996.

“I think this is the way we're headed,” said Maret Pajutee, an ecologist with the Sisters Ranger District of the U.S. Forest Service.

The project, which The Oregonian wrote about in 2005 and 2007, emulates many of the principles included in a deal announced last month by timber industry groups and environmentalists over logging in eastern Oregon.

The full details of that deal, which formed the basis of the Wyden bill, are here.

The Bulletin story says work began on the project last week, though it came to a temporary standstill Monday because the ground was not sufficiently frozen to keep heavy log-haulers and harvesters from causing too much soil damage.