Conservationists Seek to Restore Protections for Imperiled Wildlife in Flathead National Forest

The 2.4 million-acre Flathead National Forest for the next 15 years or more. As part of the “Crown of the Continent,” the 2.4 million-acre Flathead National Forest in northwestern Montana is a haven of rugged mountain peaks, rich, thick forests, and cool, clean mountain streams, with some of the last remaining intact wilderness and free-flowing rivers on the continent. Unfortunately, outside of protected wilderness, this national forest suffers from a long history of unsustainable logging and an excessive road system. Photo by USFS.

Here’s a press release that should be of interest to readers of this blog.

For Release: August 6, 2020

Conservationists to Federal Agencies: Restore Protections for Imperiled Wildlife in the Flathead National Forest

Flathead Forest Plan favors resource extraction over grizzly bears, Canada lynx, wolverine, and bull trout

MISSOULA, MT—Four conservation groups have filed their opening salvos in a lawsuit to require the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to restore proven safeguards for the protection and recovery of imperiled grizzly bears, Canada lynx, wolverine, and bull trout on the Flathead National Forest in northwest Montana.

WildEarth Guardians, Western Watersheds Project, Swan View Coalition, and Friends of the Wild Swan charge that the recently revised Forest Plan for the Flathead National Forest violates the Endangered Species Act and National Environmental Policy Act by favoring destructive activities such as logging, grazing, road building, and motorized use over protection and restoration of these species and their habitats.

“The Flathead National Forest plays an essential role in the long-term recovery of grizzly bears and other imperiled species,” explained Adam Rissien, ReWilding Advocate for WildEarth Guardians. “In its recent decision overturning the de-listing of the Yellowstone grizzly bear population, the Ninth Circuit recognized the importance of inter-population connectivity and genetic exchange to ensure the grizzly bear’s long-term health and recovery. The Flathead’s revised Forest Plan fails to ensure this connectivity and thus threatens grizzly bear recovery as well as other species such as threatened bull trout and lynx.”

The revised Forest Plan is critical because it will govern all future activities on the 2.4 million-acre Flathead National Forest for the next 15 years or more. As part of the “Crown of the Continent,” the Flathead is a haven of rugged mountain peaks, rich, thick forests, and cool, clean mountain streams, with some of the last remaining intact wilderness and free-flowing rivers on the continent. Outside of protected wilderness, however, this national forest suffers from a long history of unsustainable logging, an excessive road system, and motorized use, including ATVs and snowmobiles, that harm and harass wildlife, fragment fish and wildlife habitat, and degrade sensitive riparian areas and water quality.

“The agencies’ conclusions that the revised Forest Plan will not jeopardize grizzly bears and other imperiled species are contrary to science and will undoubtedly put endangered species at risk of extinction,” said Jocelyn Leroux, Washington and Montana Director for Western Watersheds Project. “Rather than provide for robust and diverse ecosystems, the Plan prioritizes destructive special interests.”

The Flathead National Forest’s Bob Marshall Wilderness Complex, along with neighboring Glacier National Park, are the core of the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem (NCDE) grizzly bear recovery area, which contains the largest grizzly population in the lower 48 states. The top grizzly bear scientists emphasize the importance of linkage areas that connect the NCDE to other isolated recovery areas such as the Bitterroot range to the Southwest, the Greater Yellowstone to the South, and the Cabinet-Yaak-Selkirk to the West. Notably, these same linkage areas are important for other imperiled species such as lynx, and contain important bull trout habitat. The lawsuit’s main thrust is the impacts that the revised Forest Plan’s authorization of increased road building and motorized use will have on these key migration corridors.

“The old Forest Plan had strict limits on how many logging roads and culverts could exist in grizzly bear and bull trout habitat and a program for removing a lot of them,” said Swan View Coalition Chair Keith Hammer. “The revised Forest Plan has no limits and the Flathead National Forest is now busy building more roads with more culverts. It’s a disaster in the making.”

“The Flathead is a stronghold for bull trout whose strict habitat requirements of cold, clean water with little fine sediment make them an excellent indicator of water quality,” said Arlene Montgomery, Program Director for Friends of the Wild Swan. “The previous Forest Plan required culverts be removed before roads are closed because they can clog up and wash out the roadbed dumping tons of sediment into streams. The revised Plan eliminated this important standard and will lead to degraded habitat for native fish. This is unacceptable.”

The conservation groups are represented by attorneys with WildEarth Guardians, the Western Environmental Law Center, and Earthjustice.

LINKS:
Brief in support of motion for summary judgement
Joint motion for summary judgement

2014 slumping of the gated Sullivan Creek Road 547 on the Flathead National Forest into Sullivan Creek due to interruption and concentration of subsurface water flow by the road. Sullivan Creek is one of the most important bull trout spawning streams on the Flathead National Forest. According to FNF data, 24 culverts remain stranded in the road beyond the slump, which has in subsequent years taken the entire road out and blocked motorized access to maintain or monitor culverts. One of those culverts is 3’ in diameter and rated as “high risk” of failure and as a “critical situation” due to its location immediately above bull trout spawning habitat in Sullivan Creek. The Flathead National Forest has refused Swan View Coalition’s requests to remove those culverts. Photo by Swan View Coalition.

17 thoughts on “Conservationists Seek to Restore Protections for Imperiled Wildlife in Flathead National Forest”

  1. Seems to me what this lawsuit is complaining about is just the natural consequence of the travel management rule, which allows the Forest Service to “decommission” a road simply by removing it from the MVUM, with no on-the-ground work required. In Colorado, there are hundreds of miles of “decommissioned” roads that still exist on the ground and in fact are regularly driven by the public, because the Forest Service has never so much as put up a sign or gate marking them as closed after removing the route from the MVUM and calling it good.

    Seems to me this is a lose-lose situation for everyone. From a motorized perspective, it makes it far too easy for the Forest Service to decommission roads and close them to the public, since they don’t need to allocate any resources or do any actual work other than issue new maps. And I would think this paper decomissioning negates any actual environmental benefit from decomissioning since in practical terms the roads are still there. It’s basically just a way for the Forest Service to placate environmental groups seeking to close roads without having to spend any money or put in any real work to do it.

    I wonder if motorized groups and environmental groups could actually agree on a rule that says the Forest Service can only decommission roads if they are able to actually perform the work to fully obliterate them within a certain number of years. There might be fewer decommissionings overall since the Forest Service could no longer decommissioned roads solely on paper, but those routes that are decommissioned would actually be rehabilitated on the ground, not just left in place.

    As a side note, I’m really glad we don’t have grizzly bears in Colorado. It seems their presence in northern states is just the gift that keeps on giving for anti-motorized activists up there.

    Reply
    • Patrick, I couldn’t quite pick out the necessary info from all the hyperbole in the press release. But I think your ideas are interesting.

      I could flip your lose-lose into a win-win-win, though.. LIEGs (litigatorily inclined environmental groups) get to claim victory. People still get to use roads. The FS doesn’t have extra work. In fact could have less work as the roads don’t need to be maintained.

      I like, of course, the idea of motorized and LIEGs agreeing on something, But in my experience something like this “if they are able to actually perform the work to fully obliterate them within a certain number of years.” would require a realistic view of the budget for decommissioning. Jon and others probably know more about how these requirements could/would work in practice. I do think there was some kind of lawsuit about something around Pike’s Peak that required the FS to put a certain amount of money into monitoring. Anyway, I think it’s an intriguing idea.

      Reply
      • I’m not recalling the Pike’s Peak case, but here’s what I think about monitoring. It’s hard to make an agency do anything that costs money (it’s at least possible where there is a legal deadline for doing it). It is easy to adopt a forest plan standard that says, “you can’t do this until you do that,” such as limiting activities in a watershed until monitoring shows improved outcomes. We could view this as a reward for future accomplishments, but the Forest Service would choose to die on that sword.

        The same idea applies to closing roads. ESA can help with coercion, and roads have been closed in grizzly bear country because the FWS has demanded it to comply with consultation terms and/or to allow the FS to take some other action affecting bears. (And now the issue of what is sufficient “closure” had been litigated.) Independent of ESA, the Forest Service could impose a condition on itself in a forest plan that would allow something to occur only if roads have actually been effectively closed, but again I think there would have to be legal hook motivating them to do that.

        Patrick’s proposal also reminds me of the wilderness/mountain bike discussion on the Nantahala-Pisgah, where I think (I can’t find the thread) wilderness recommendations could be increased only after more mountain bike trails were created. (That idea was not adopted.)

        Reply
  2. It’s too late to be usefully important any more, but we should at recognize that the Forest Service was responsible for wildlife habitat, including on the Flathead NF, while the mountain caribou was extirpated from the Northern Rockies. The Forest Service could at least admit: “Oops”.

    Reply
  3. These groups have anointed themselves the deciders. Categorizing logging as destructive. Says who? I know that all of the harvest projects we have undertaken have been considered beneficial to man, wildlife and the land by many. Also, without managed grazing we would have a lot more problems than we currently have. Just saying that these activities are harmful, doesn’t always make it so.

    Reply
    • If people were required to state facts/experiences to support their claims discussions would be more detailed and more interesting IMHO.

      Reply
      • Sharon, Can you please point out how, in your opinion, the people quoted in the press release are not stating facts or experiences?

        Keith Hammer (a former logger, by the way) has lived next to the Flathead National Forest for four decades. Arlene Montgomery has lived in a small town next to the Flathead National Forest for over three decades and became a forest activist because of blatant U.S. Forest Service mis-management of public lands during the 1980s and 1990s.

        Should a short group press release about a lawsuit include in-depth, essays from the people involved?

        Read Arlene’s comment again:

        “The Flathead is a stronghold for bull trout whose strict habitat requirements of cold, clean water with little fine sediment make them an excellent indicator of water quality,” said Arlene Montgomery, Program Director for Friends of the Wild Swan. “The previous Forest Plan required culverts be removed before roads are closed because they can clog up and wash out the roadbed dumping tons of sediment into streams. The revised Plan eliminated this important standard and will lead to degraded habitat for native fish. This is unacceptable.”

        How is this possibly not stating facts based on decades of experience?

        Here’s Keith Hammer’s quote again:

        “The old Forest Plan had strict limits on how many logging roads and culverts could exist in grizzly bear and bull trout habitat and a program for removing a lot of them,” said Swan View Coalition Chair Keith Hammer. “The revised Forest Plan has no limits and the Flathead National Forest is now busy building more roads with more culverts. It’s a disaster in the making.”

        Is Keith lying about the old Forest Plan? Is Keith not speaking for over 40 years of experience?

        When Patrick McKenna makes the rather fantastic and clearly biased claim that “I know that all of the harvest projects we have undertaken have been considered beneficial to man, wildlife and the land by many”…why don’t you require him to state facts?

        Sorry, Sharon, but once again your profound bias is showing.

        Reply
    • Many people use clearcuts as their example of “logging”, in comparing logging versus preservation. They also often use that comparison to push for preservation of all public lands. Even on public lands that have not seen clearcuts for 27 years.

      It would be nice if the Forest Service and BLM could distance themselves from BOTH partisan extremes. I have no problem with an active marginalization of both of those extremes.

      Reply
      • FWIW: The word “clearcut” is used zero times in this press release. However, it’s also a fact that the U.S. Forest Service still does “clearcut” forests in the northern Rockies. We’ve been over this numerous times on this blog. Larry will now talk about Dr. Chad Hanson…..

        Reply
        • Just a LITTLE bit ‘triggered’, eh, Matty? *SMIRK*

          Of course, one COULD say that clearcuts are often bad but… it pulls in more donations if you say “Logging is Bad”. (And, you don’t have to go on record in explaining about how some logging is good, some logging might be good, some logging might be bad, and some logging is bad.)

          Notice, also, that my comment is about the comparisons of “Logging versus preservation”, and not about any one kind of specific logging in a specific place.

          Reply
  4. Matthew, my point was only that press releases don’t explain enough of peoples’ thinking or experience for me, and yes, here are some specific examples. You picked the ones that are more concrete, but I was talking about the more generic claims.

    “Outside of protected wilderness, however, this national forest suffers from a long history of unsustainable logging, an excessive road system, and motorized use, including ATVs and snowmobiles, that harm and harass wildlife, fragment fish and wildlife habitat, and degrade sensitive riparian areas and water quality.”

    If that is the Flathead that you are presented with, then why are species currently apparently doing OK? I think that this is an important point because the only way you can actually not “degrade” via roads and recreational use is to close all the roads and kick everyone out- conceivably even of Wilderness Areas (hunters disturb grizzlies).

    How do they know logging is “unsustainable” or that ATV’s “degrade sensitive riparian areas?

    “The Flathead’s revised Forest Plan fails to ensure this connectivity and thus threatens grizzly bear recovery as well as other species such as threatened bull trout and lynx.”

    Grizzly bear pops are expanding, so how could one forest’s actions “threaten recovery”? Similarly lynx. How can a Forest Plan “ensure” connectivity? (what exact actions are bad for grizzlies/lynx will occur under the Forest Plan that would not otherwise have occurred)?

    “The agencies’ conclusions that the revised Forest Plan will not jeopardize grizzly bears and other imperiled species are contrary to science and *will undoubtedly put endangered species at risk of extinction,”* I don’t think that’s accurate, as many species pops are not in contact with pops on the Flathead. We actually don’t know enough about mammal genetics to be “without doubts” about anything.

    I suppose any Forest Plan that allows anything that might disturb bears (MBing, hiking, hunting) could “jeopardize grizzly bears” as in individuals, not the species.

    So Patrick also made a claim “know that all of the harvest projects we have undertaken have been considered beneficial to man, wildlife and the land by many.”

    The only way we could have a meaningful convo to get into this is to look at some of the harvest projects and then look at what the LIEGs involved say about them specifically and figure out why people disagree. It would be a great TSW field trip if we could pick three sites, get Arlene and Keith and Patrick and the forest folks (including fish and wildlife bios) out to discuss. I would go to Montana for that. But perhaps the litigation Cone of Silence has already fallen on the forest.

    I agree with you that I am biased, Matthew, I think right now it is toward those whose voices seem to be less heard in these discussions..

    Reply
    • Sharon, I think you have a very unrealistic expectation of press releases. I certainly didn’t invent press releases, but they are typically a brief document that provides something newsworthy to the media so that members of the media can decide to explore the issue further.

      In this specific case, the press release was about briefs filed in a lawsuit over aspects of the Flathead National Forest’s recently revised Forest Plans. Links to the court documents are provided.

      If you want to reach out to Keith and Arlene and anyone else to arrange a field trip to the Flathead National Forest in Montana, go for it. I have never known Keith and Arlene to shy away from showing people specific examples of what they are witnessing on the Flathead National Forest. I also believe that outside of a couple USFS employees, Keith and Arlene are likely the most knowledgable people on the planet when it comes to the previous, and current, Flathead National Forest plans.

      Regarding your idea that “species currently apparently [are] doing OK” on the Flathead National Forest. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (as of June 2020), the Flathead National Forest has 8 threatened, endangered and candidate species. Yes, some parts of the Flathead National Forest provide important habitat for these imperiled species, other parts of the Flathead National Forest, not so much.

      Reply
  5. I get what Matthew is saying about you can expect a brief press release to define every term or offer in-depth analysis supporting every claim it makes. And most of the things in that paragraph are just standard WildEarth Guardians talking points that I know they have other in-depth reports talking about. Still it is worth questioning their assumptions, or at least digging into what they actually mean.

    For instance, what do they mean when the say a national forest has an “excessive road system”? Environmental groups have been making this claim for decades, both before and after the massive road system reductions that have been made in every National Forest since the introduction of the Travel Management Rule. If the remaining road system after the 50-90% reductions that have already been made in almost every forest over the last 20 years are still considered “excessive”, what would these groups consider NOT an excessive number of roads?

    The answer of course is zero. I’ve read the “Rewilding” manifesto in the 1992 Wild Earth magazine that was pretty much the founding charter of groups like WildEarth Guardians. It couldn’t be more clear. No roads, no off-highway vehicles, no logging, nothing. The only acceptable uses of public lands is either “core wilderness reserves” or “connecting corridors” and buffer zones, which are all dedicated solely to wildlife habitat and permit no human use except (grudgingly) some hiking.

    So when WildEarth Guardians calls a road system in an individual forest “excessive”, they really mean that there are any roads in it at all. Same for logging or any other use they don’t like. Their absolutist worldview permits no compromise, and we see that clearly in the way their press releases casually dismiss all uses of National Forest land as anything other than dedicated wildlife habitat as harmful.

    Reply
    • According to the Swan View Coalition: The Flathead already has 2,000 miles of roads like this one in Sullivan Creek (pictured in the original post above) demoted to Maintenance Level 1 Basic Custodial Care, where they don’t receive the care needed to keep their ditches and culverts from plugging and then washing the roads into your trout streams! (Another 1,400 miles are open to public motor vehicle use and have their own costly maintenance issues).

      As you can see at the link above, the Swan View Coalition link points the general public to lots of additional information, including various USFS websites like this:

      Flathead National Forest Final Travel Analysis Documents.

      According to that Flathead NF analysis, “The Flathead NF has 3,519 miles of NFS roads. Twenty seven percent of the roads are managed for passenger vehicles. An additional 14 percent are managed for high clearance vehicles, but still open for the public. The remaining 59 percent of the NFSRs are in custodial care (ML 1, closed to public motorized use).”

      One might have the opinion that a national forest containing 3,519 miles of roads is “excessive.” For context, if you drove from LA to New York City you’d put 2,789 miles on your car.

      Yes, it’s true that many of these “excessive” roads on the Flathead NF are in custodial care (ie closed to public motorized use). However, it’s also true that many of these roads continue to cause problems for water quality and fish and wildlife habitat, spreading weeds, etc. Many of us who are labeled as “extremists,” “radicals.,” “terrorists,” and “fringe groups” think a chunk of these “excessive” roads could be decommissioned to benefit clean water, fish and wildlife, biodiversity, etc. I pretty sure thousands and of people within the USFS and thousands of independent scientists and researchers would agree.

      Just because some of you folks don’t agree with this position doesn’t make it radical or illegitimate or un-supported by the basic principles of science and ecology. Thanks.

      Reply
      • It would be interesting to know the full travel management history of that forest. How did 60% of its road system end up in ML1 status, which to my knowledge is basically a sort of limbo that’s not open to the public and only rarely used for admin access, but not fully decommissioned and removed from the road system either? My guess would be these road were mostly all originally open to the public, but when the Travel Management Rule came along, the Forest felt compelled to close most of them to the public. But it didn’t have the money to fully decommission them, so they just got left to rot in limbo. Including roads like the one in the picture that, aside from a few washouts that could be easily repaired by volunteers and funded with OHV grants, looks like it would be a perfectly usable road that would provide high value public access to a scenic river valley. It probably was heavily used by the public before it was arbitrarily closed. Or perhaps it washed out and it was closed because the Forest Service decided it didn’t have the resources to repair it?

        Anyway, so there was a ~60% reduction in roads open to the public, and you still consider the existing road system open to the public excessive? Kind of makes my point. Looks like there are only around 1400 miles of roads open to the public currently, of which only 400 miles are ML2 roads which are the most valuable for motorized recreation. That is basically nothing as far as a large National Forest is concerned. You could easily drive the entire high-clearance road system in a week. Also a quick Wikipedia search reveals roughly half the total acreage of the Bitterroot is already in designated Wilderness Areas. So apparently that’s not enough. You want to close more roads and manage the rest as Wilderness too.

        Honestly seems like the huge number of ML1 roads in this particular Forest was a problem of environmentalists’ own making. You demanded tons of road closures and got them. But since the Forest didn’t actually have the resources to obliterate them on the ground, they are neither being maintained nor rehabilitated, setting up the worst of both worlds. It would have been better for the Forest to leave them open to the public and allow volunteers from local motorized groups to maintain them, which has worked very successfully in Colorado. But I would guess that whenever that 60% of roads were originally closed, WildEarth Guardians trumpeted it as a huge victory against evil off-road vehicles. Sooo, yeah.

        This whole situation reminds me very much of the situation I am currently involved with in Wildcat Canyon in Colorado, where we are fighting to get the Forrest Service to reopen some roads that have been in ML1 status since they were closed during the Hayman Fire in 2002. In 2004 the Forest Service issued an EA saying it would be best to let the relevant counties take jurisdiction over these roads so they could be maintained by the local 4WD club that had done so successfully for decades. One county was allowed to do so, but anti-motorized Forest Service employees in the neighboring ranger district and county blocked that county from adopting its half of the trail system, and it’s been left to rot in limbo ever since, with motorized groups only allowed to maintain the half that’s currently open. Now the Forest Service is trying to use the environmental damage caused by their own refusal to allow any maintenance on the closed portions of the roads to justify decommissioning them, even though the 2004 EA predicted that exact harm if the roads were not reopened and maintained. And this whole time, the closed roads have continued to be driven regularly because the Forest Service never bothered to even put up a sign marking them as closed.

        Reply
      • Matthew, you said

        “Yes, it’s true that many of these “excessive” roads on the Flathead NF are in custodial care (ie closed to public motorized use). However, it’s also true that many of these roads continue to cause problems for water quality and fish and wildlife habitat, spreading weeds, etc. ”

        It may be hard for us in drier Colorado to envision how this happens (what does a road look like that isn’t open.. how (or is it?) maintained, how does a closed road “cause problems for water quality and fish and wildlife habitat”? How do weeds get spread if no one is on it? Is the real problem that they are continuing to be used even though closed?

        The caption to the photo said:
        “According to FNF data, 24 culverts remain stranded in the road beyond the slump, which has in subsequent years taken the entire road out and blocked motorized access to maintain or monitor culverts. One of those culverts is 3’ in diameter and rated as “high risk” of failure and as a “critical situation” due to its location immediately above bull trout spawning habitat in Sullivan Creek. The Flathead National Forest has refused Swan View Coalition’s requests to remove those culverts.”
        So is the problem that the FNF doesn’t have access to be able to remove the culverts because they are “stranded”? Would they have to rebuild the road at the slump to get to the culverts in question?

        Reply
        • Hi Sharon,

          All your questions can be answered right on the Swan View Coalition’s website. Please note, all the words and information below are taken directly from the Swan View Coalition’s website. If you, or anyone else, has additional questions, please direct them to the Swan View Coalition. Their full contact info is here: http://www.swanview.org/

          Click here for the “Roads to Ruin: The Flathead National Forest Shirks its Road Reclamation Duties,” which includes the TMRD report as an appendix.

          Click here for the First Supplement to Keith Hammer’s “Roads to Ruin” and “TMRD” Reports, which details requirements that reclaimed/decommissioned roads be revegetated and no longer serve as a motorized or non-motorized trail.

          Click here for the Second Supplement, which reviews Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service documents since 1995, confirming that Amendment 19 requires roads be decommissioned and no longer serve as a road or trail in order to not be counted in TMRD – serving as a cap on the miles of road that can exist in grizzly bear habitat. It also details how the Flathead NF has invented a new category of “impassable” roads to unlawfully substitute for road decommissioning. This leaves the roads available for both motorized and non-motorized use various parts of the year, without being counted in TMRD and hence allowing an unlimited number of such roads to exist in the habitats of threatened species like grizzly bear, lynx, bull trout, and threatened-candidate wolverine!

          Click here for the Third Supplement. It describes how Total Motorized Route Density evolved from Total Road Density, how it is based in the South Fork Grizzly Bear Study (Mace and Manley 1993), and how in Flathead Forest Plan Amendment 19 it requires that roads be decommissioned, revegetated and removed from the “system” to lower TMRD. It also shows how Mace and Manley 1993 answered the Flathead’s questions about how to calculate road densities, showed that Total Road Density must be considered in addition to Open Road Density, and points to why A19 capped the total miles of road that can exist in griz habitat due to the importance of roadless areas to female griz.

          Click here for all the supplements Issued to “Roads to Ruin” Report.

          Reply

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