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New mill to turn dead trees into pellet fuel. Colorado's first wood-pellet mill owes its birth to pine beetles that are killing millions of trees near the town of Kremmling and across northwest Colorado. The diseased trees will be the new Kremmling mill's chief input - a new twist for the pellet-fuel industry. The 18,000-square-foot plant is billed as the largest west of the Mississippi. It's slated in February to start grinding trees into environmentally friendly pellets for wood-pellet stoves and industrial and commercial pellet boilers. Many of the trees are too skinny or too cracked and old to be...

When the U.S. Forest Service received no bids on two small timber sales in Eagle County earlier this year, the agency's local rangers encountered what is becoming a problem throughout the intermountain West. The federal agency got a lesson in market economics and the three-way tug of war over lumber in national forests. There were no bidders for the timber "salvage" sales designed to remove trees killed by infesting pine beetles. The Forest Service also wants to sell the dead trees so they won't add extra fuel to wildfires. The glut of dead trees is occurring at a time when...

Local foresters predict that up to 90 percent of lodgepole pines will die in some areas near West Vail. Local firefighters say that creates a veritable tenderbox that could easily ignite and spread. Sackbauer was pleased to see lots of work being done near his home this summer to reduce the risk of fire spreading, either from the forest into the neighborhood, or vice versa. workers created a 200- to 300-foot barrier of “defensible space,” a clear-cut area that aims to help stop the spread of fire. The town also hired a six-man “hand crew” to cut trees on town-owned...

WHITEFISH, Mont. — William P. Foley II pointed to the mountain. Owns it, mostly. A timber company began logging in view of his front yard a few years back. He thought they were cutting too much, so he bought the land. Mr. Foley belongs to a new wave of investors and landowners across the West who are snapping up open spaces as private playgrounds on the borders of national parks and national forests. In style and temperament, this new money differs greatly from the Western land barons of old — the timber magnates, copper kings and cattlemen who created the...

U.S. Forest Service officials have released a plan to reduce destructive wildfire potential on about 8,100 acres of forest land east of Estes Park. The goal of the Thompson River Fuel Reduction Project is to reduce the spread and intensity of wildfires that could affect private property and municipal water supplies in and around the Big and Little Thompson rivers and to protect the forest’s ecosystem. Historically, small fires thinned forest undergrowth and kept the chances for a large wildfire to a minimum. But through much of the 20th century, people suppressed those fires. That left a more dense undergrowth,...

Tree-thinning to begin in fall in Colorado, Wyo. The U.S. Forest Service is launching a major effort to battle bark beetles across an 80,000-acre swath of Colorado and Wyoming, its largest assault to date on the fire-prone forests. The plan, announced Friday, calls for thinning and tree removal in five Colorado counties and two in Wyoming. The program, aided by $8 million in new federal funding, relies on partnerships between the federal agency and the mountain counties where rust-red trees are causing the most danger to humans. Mary Ann Chandler, a Forest Service spokeswoman, said the agency has structured the...

Despite the anti-forestry scare tactics of celebrity movies, trees are the most powerful concentrators of carbon on Earth. Dr. Patrick Moore is a co-founder of Greenpeace and chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. in Vancouver. It seems like there's a new doomsday documentary every month. But seldom does one receive the coverage that Hollywood activist Leonardo DiCaprio's latest climate-change rant, The 11th Hour, is getting. When we're bombarded anew with theatrical images of our earth's ecosystems when the film opens across B.C. this Friday, I'm concerned that we're losing sight of some indisputable facts. Here's a key piece...

So Much For Saving The Spotted Owl By MICHAEL MILSTEIN   A spotted owl on National Forest land west of Veneta, Ore. (Photo by Torsten Kjellstrand)     OLYMPIC NATIONAL PARK, Wash. — Two decades after the wrenching drive to save an obscure bird divided Americans and reshaped the economy of the Pacific Northwest, the northern spotted owl is disappearing anyway.Even the most optimistic biologists now admit that the docile owl — revered and reviled as one of the more contentious symbols the nation has known — will probably never fully recover.Intensive logging of the spotted owl's old-growth forest home...

SEATTLE - A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction Wednesday to stop Weyerhaeuser Co. from logging in spotted owl habitat on four parcels of private land in Washington. U.S. District Judge Marsha J. Pechman did not grant, however, an additional request by the Seattle Audubon Society to stop the state of Washington from granting permits to log in spotted owl habitat. The injunction from logging covers spotted owl habitat within 2.7 miles of the center of four circles of land in southwestern Washington that are owned by Weyerhaeuser. "It really shows the Endangered Species Act still has some teeth in...

9th U.S. Circuit - Sen. Smith's brother blasts decisions, then faces blowbackWednesday, July 25, 2007 It's a common refrain in Northwest timber country: Misguided federal judges are hastily shutting down logging instead of letting professional foresters do their jobs. Now the refrain is coming from a judge on the top federal court in the West -- who also happens to be the brother of Oregon Republican Sen. Gordon Smith. In an unusually blunt and wide-ranging opinion on a lawsuit over a small Idaho timber sale, Milan D. Smith Jr. blamed his own court for taking the law too far and...

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — Bush administration efforts to boost salvage logging after wildfires suffered a loss Tuesday when a federal appeals court upheld a ruling that had stopped harvest of burned trees in an old-growth forest reserve on federal lands in southern Oregon. The 2-1 ruling by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling by U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken in Eugene that stopped the U.S. Bureau of Land Management from logging 23.4 million board feet of timber from 961 acres burned by the Timbered Rock fire outside Medford in 2002. The...

Environmentalists are quick to lecture the rest of us about the ways of nature. Don't clean the dead trees off the forest floor, it's natural. Cattle and horses on the range aren't native, so let the grizzlies and wolves devour them, it's natural. Man isn't part of the ecology, lock him out of vast areas of land, it's natural. It's interesting to note how the "natural" argument only applies when it is used to impose the radical environmental agenda. Case in point, the Northern Spotted Owl. Spotted owls, we were told a decade ago, were disappearing because big bad timber...

Don Young calls measure 'terrorism,' proposes selling forest to Alaska. The U.S. House of Representatives has limited federal spending on logging roads in the Tongass National Forest... part of the 2008 Interior appropriations bill. It now goes to the Senate. If the amendment is approved, it would block spending on roads constructed for use by private companies for logging operations. This is the fourth time that Reps. Steven Chabot, R-Ohio, and Robert Andrews, D-N.J., the measure's co-sponsors, have tried to curb the spending program, which has been described as a federal subsidy for the private logging industry. "To call them...

Residents are pulling for a neighbor who was forced to amputate his left leg below the knee using pocket knives after a tree fell on him, pinning him for about 11 hours. Al Hill, 66, was cutting trees on a property near the Big Dipper Mine last Friday when a tree fell on his leg and trapped him, authorities said. Alone in the woods and in an area where cellular phone service is spotty or nonexistent, Hill was forced to take the extreme measure to save himself. Eventually, a neighbor in the area heard Hill's cries for help. Eric Bookey...

A two-year campaign by environmental activists that set beautiful women in sexy lingerie against photos of denuded boreal forest ended yesterday as the corporate parent of Victoria's Secret pledged to use "greener" paper in its mammoth catalogue run. Limited Brands, a retail giant that publishes 350 million Victoria's Secret catalogues a year, will no longer use suppliers who obtain paper from any caribou habitat in Canada unless the paper has met the stringent requirements of the Forest Stewardship Council, the company said. It's the latest round in an ongoing battle where commodities - be it coffee, cotton or conifers -...

The U.S. Forest Service has not developed national guidelines to assess the risks communities face from wildfires and is unable to ensure that the most important fire prevention projects are funded first, an independent government audit has found. And while the majority of catastrophic wildfires occur in the West, nearly 58 percent of the total acres treated in fiscal year 2004 were in the southeastern states, the report said. "The Forest Service cannot clearly identify the level of risk to communities from wildfire," it said. "It cannot demonstrate to stakeholders its accomplishments in reducing those risks with the funds provided."...

WASHINGTON – The federal government spent nearly $11 million to salvage timber from an Oregon wildfire in 2002, yet it stands to get less than $9 million from selling the wood, congressional investigators say. The Bush administration and its Republican allies in Congress have said lawsuits filed by environmentalists caused delays that added to the cost of the fire. The report by the Government Accountability Office acknowledged that the delays cost money, but said the administration's decision to dramatically increase logging, coupled with the size of the fire and the complexity of environmental laws, were actually to blame for the...

Logging trucks are again rumbling through town after a nearly 15-year hiatus. The Forest Service has reopened - or has plans to reopen - numerous drainages south of Eagle Ranch to logging... There are currently two active sales south of Eagle, with another in the works, said Cary Green, the White River National Forest's timber management assistant for the Eagle area. The 60-acre Beecher Gulch salvage timber sale, on Hardscrabble Mountain, sold in 2005, and about 500,000 board feet of timber is currently being harvested... A typical 2,000-square foot, single-family home requires about 27,000 board feet of framing lumber, paneling...

BOILING SPRING LAKES, N.C., Sept. 23 (AP) — Over the past six months, landowners here have been clear-cutting thousands of trees to keep them from becoming homes for the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. The chain saws started in February, when the federal Fish and Wildlife Service put Boiling Spring Lakes on notice that rapid development threatened to squeeze out the woodpecker. The agency issued a map marking 15 active woodpecker “clusters,” and announced it was working on a new one that could potentially designate whole neighborhoods of this town in southeastern North Carolina as protected habitat, subject to more-stringent building restrictions....

Millions of mountain pine beetles are swarming the Rocky Mountains...looking for new trees to destroy. The Colorado State Forest Service wants residents to help stop the spread of the devastating pest before the Pike and San Isabel national forests take on a brown cast like those in Summit and Grand counties. "It's currently at an epidemic level," ... Dead trees are a sign the forest is unhealthy; they also pose a fire risk. The U.S. Forest Service... Trees are succumbing by the millions. "If the beetle is successful in getting underneath the bark of the tree, mama mates and burrows...