Helena Independent
May 20, 2007
By Eve Byron

Ambitious cooperative grassroots group project aims to add 87,000 acres to wilderness areas, open new land to snowmobilers, restore habitats and build a $7 million biomass electricity plant.

Bruce Gordon isn’t familiar with the Missoula airport and he’s muttering in “pilot-ese” to the radio tower that he hopes the third time’s the charm in his effort to find the right runway for takeoff. He’s got a full load of people in his six-seater Cessna 210 — tail-number 7-6-1-echo-X-ray-echo — which includes a senator’s aide, a rancher, a photographer and two reporters.

He hits the mark and within minutes is airborne, heading east into the morning sun toward Seeley Lake and the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area.

Gordon has been hired this morning by The Wilderness Society, which has learned through the years that reality beats out a paper map and a list of talking points to try to get its story told.

Today, the goal is to bring to life a paper plan that would add 87,000 acres to the Bob Marshall, Scapegoat and Mission Mountain wilderness areas.

The plan includes opening 2,000 acres to snowmobilers and building a $7 million biomass plant to generate electricity for a timber mill and possibly portions of the small town of Seeley Lake. It seeks $400,000 in federal funds per year, for the next 10 years, for restoration projects, which would be matched dollar for dollar from private funds. An additional $350,000 per year n again, for the next 10 years n would pay for planning, management and monitoring of the restoration projects.

Seeley Lake Rancher Jack Rich knows that’s a big order. He’s seated in the Cessna next to Gordon, his broad body towering above the pilot. Rich is here to point out landmarks and explain the value of the landscape that provides the backdrop to his life.

The paper plan is known as the Blackfoot Cooperative Landscape Stewardship Pilot Project, and Rich wants it clear that this isn’t the same as the Blackfoot Challenge, operating generally in the same vicinity. The Blackfoot Challenge involves private landowners working with public agencies and a non-profit group, who have purchased about 88,000 acres from Plum Creek Timber since 2004 in an effort to keep the land minimally developed.

The Blackfoot Cooperative formally is only two years old, although conservation efforts have been a part of life here even before the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area was designated 43 years ago.

Overall, the Blackfoot Cooperative project covers 400,000 acres that unfold like a map below as the Cessna heads east. The remnants of this year’s negligible snowpack still blanket the mountaintops, lending definition to the peaks, and the low clouds hint of the wet May ahead.

Gordon banks left above the flanks of mountains not typically viewed by the public in the Gold Creek drainage. The classic checkerboard pattern of clearcuts is evident here, with logging roads snaking across the slopes. These probably aren’t the trees used to build the homes in nearby Missoula; most of that wood comes from other states or countries.

Gordon follows the Blackfoot River as Rich notes that the Rocky Mountains are about 10 ranges wide, and at this point we’re four ranges from the fabled Rocky Mountain Front. The mountain ranges run north and south; the Blackfoot River is laid out east to west.

“This is one of the healthiest and most diverse ecosystems in what they call the ‘Crown of the Continent,’” Rich says, talking into the microphone that’s connected to the passengers’ headphones, allowing them to hear his comments above the steady drone of the single prop plane. “See those little pockets of water? This is glacial moraine, and those were left in the Blackfoot Valley when the glacier receded.

“This is the Blackfoot-Clearwater Wildlife Management Area, the winter range for about 1,500 elk and 2,500 deer. Most come here out of the Bob.”

Rich points out the window to a crescent-shaped meadow that’s part of the Blackfoot Community Conservation Area. The greater Seeley Lake community has raised $9 million toward the $10 million needed by Sept. 1 to purchase 40,000 acres that will be managed cooperatively “for community values,” Rich said.

“We’ll provide good stewardship but allow grazing, hunting, fishing and timber management,” Rich said. “It will belong to the community itself but managed by a cross-section of people in the community … by consensus.”

The town of Seeley Lake peeks out from the forested land. It’s here that the Blackfoot Cooperative group wants to construct a $7 million 3.2 megawatt co-generation facility and new boiler on two acres owned by Pyramid Mountain Lumber. The work would take place during a five-year period, with Pyramid putting up $2.5 million and the other $4.5 million coming from federal funding.

The plant would use small trees as fuel — the ones not large enough for lumber n and generate power and steam for Pyramid and possibly for the town’s health clinic and school.

The landscape is becoming more mountainous with the roads concentrating in drainages instead of winding toward the peaks. Gordon flies over the Monture Creek trailhead, which leads to 75,000 acres of proposed wilderness adjacent to the Bob Marshall-Scapegoat wilderness.

“It’s not pristine,” Rich said. “It had timber harvests in the ’90s, and in the early ’70s a lot of those roads were punched in by the Forest Service, who was trying to lay claim to those lands before the roadless folks could get to them, just to say ‘There, we don’t have to call them roadless.’”

But Monture Creek also is a “true western wilderness, traversed by packstrings, wranglers, hikers and hunters on 110 miles of traditional pack trails,” according to Mac Minard, executive director of the Montana Outfitters and Guides Associations. In a letter to Montana’s congressional delegation, Minard speaks of the importance not only of Monture Creek, but also of this project.

“… wilderness and wildland-based activities account for nearly half of all income produced by non-resident travel, generating $736 million annually in Montana communities,” Minard writes. “Our livelihood, the jobs and revenue we produce are directly dependent on maintaining the integrity of unspoiled backcountry areas such as Monture, North Fork Blackfoot and Grizzly Basin in their untrammeled wilderness condition.”

Gordon makes another left bank over denuded mountainsides terraced by logging roads. It’s here, in Grizzly Basin, that some of the key restoration projects would take place, not just for soil runoff but also for grizzly bear habitat.

“This is North Cottonwood Creek. There’s two female grizzlies that are denned up there as we speak. Both sows have cubs and neither has come out of hibernation yet,” Rich notes.

He adds that the idea here is to allow livestock grazing, logging and restoration work in the roaded lands at lower elevations. Active management activities will change as the slopes get higher to roadless conservation areas and designated wilderness.

Another left turn and Gordon heads toward the Mission Mountain Wilderness Area. About 6,000 acres in the headwaters of the West Fork of the Clearwater River would be included as wilderness here, as part of the proposal. The day is warming and the Cessna shudders as it dips and rises, catching thermals from the heating ground. It’s warm in the plane and the movement is a bit nauseating, but Gordon swoops low as Rich points to what he says is the last solid piece of old growth spruce left here.

Letters of support for the project also have been sent to Montana’s congressional delegation from Lewis and Clark, Missoula, and Powell county commissions, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, local groups in Ovando and Seeley Lake, The Wilderness Society, the Montana Wilderness Association, Pyramid Lumber and ranchers.

Rep. Denny Rehberg spoke briefly with Blackfoot Cooperative members in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, and said while he hasn’t had time to go over the proposal thoroughly, he appreciates their effort to find consensus and work from the ground up.

“It looks like they have been very comprehensive, but I need to know if they’ve had all the parties involved in the discussions,” Rehberg said on Thursday. “They presented me with a thick notebook full of information, and I need to withhold judgment until I see the legislation in there.”

He added that he’s not averse to expanding the wilderness areas, as long as it’s done in the proper places, and supports the type of energy production that could come from the co-generation facility.

Sen. Jon Tester met with the group’s representatives on Thursday in Washington, D.C., and he too supports their effort n although no commitments were made as to funding, according to Tester spokesman Matt McKenna.

“We have a lot of respect for what those folks are doing; Senator Tester believes it’s really important work,” McKenna said. “We will do everything we can to support them.

“What that ends up as far as a dollar figure, though, only time will tell.”