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Forest Service Investigator Believes Barton Lied About Letter. The lead U.S. Forest Service investigator looking into the cause of Colorado's largest wildfire testified Tuesday that she doesn't believe a burning letter sparked the fire. Agent Kimberly Jones was testifying in a Denver federal civil case where five insurance companies and several property owners are suing the federal government for more than $7 million because a Forest Service employee was responsible. That employee, Terry Barton, was convicted of starting the 2002 Hayman wildfire and spent nearly six years in a federal prison. When Jones testified that she didn't believe there ever...

BIG SUR,CA Weary firefighters got no Independence Day reprieve from a pair of out-of-control wildfires that roared along California's central coast, chewing through opposite ends of an arid forest in the Los Padres National Forest. Despite cooler temperatures and light winds, flames from the stubborn fire that forced the evacuation of Big Sur inched closer to historic vacation retreats. Meanwhile, firefighters farther south dealt with winds with speeds up to 40 mph that fanned a wildfire in Santa Barbara County. About 5,000 homes there were under evacuation orders, while residents in 1,400 homes were warned to pack up and be...

With two-thirds of Oregon county governments, including Lane County, facing financial crises, Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski on Monday urged residents to accept modest local property tax increases and more logging on federal forests to help stave off deep cuts in county law enforcement and other critical services. Those steps are just two of 54 recommendations in a task force report delivered to the governor on Monday. Kulongoski commissioned the report last year to address the imminent loss of about $238 million in annual federal timber payments, including $47 million a year to Lane County. The top recommendation was for Oregon...

A judge awarded more than $4.2 million to a late Nevada rancher's estate after finding that the U.S. Forest Service engaged in an unconstitutional "taking" of water rights out of hostility to the rancher, a property rights activist. The decision ... involved the Fifth Amendment clause against private property being taken for public use without just compensation. The rancher, Wayne Hage, bought the sprawling Pine Creek Ranch in central Nevada in 1978. the taking occurred when the Forest Service made it impossible for Hage to maintain irrigation ditches, which deprived the ranch of water and made it unviable. The government...

Dead lodgepole pines turned into products from pellet fuel to pens. millions of beetle- kill pines in the nearby hills and mountains could explode into a fire ... But locals also realize that using the wood for beetle-kill products is just a start - and not a silver bullet. "There's little stuff going on, but not near what we need," ... But, still, he's grateful. "Small steps lead to big trips," ... Dead and dying lodgepole acreage in Colorado has grown to 1.5 million since the first signs of the mountain pine beetle outbreak in 1996... homes, property and lives...

Terry Lynn Barton has been released from prison after serving a six-year term for starting the worst wildfire in Colorado's recorded history. Barton, 44, pleaded guilty to arson charges stemming from the 2002 Hayman Fire, which blackened 138,000 acres, destroyed 133 homes and forced more than 8,000 people to evacuate. She was a fire spotter for the U.S. Forest Service at the time

Crews will cut trees on more than 200 acres around Vail this summer in their continuing efforts to battle the pine beetle epidemic. This summer’s work will continue to create a ribbon of “defensible space” around the town that seeks to prevent the spread of fire... “It’s to protect lives, homes and property from the effects of catastrophic wildfire,” ... The work is part of the Vail Valley Forest Health Project, a multi-year effort coordinated by the Forest Service that seeks to combat the pine beetle infestation from East Vail to Edwards. The mountain pine beetle epidemic has killed up...

The parents of the 11-year-old boy killed by a black bear last summer in American Fork Canyon are suing the U.S. Forest Service and Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. They say more should have been done to prevent their son's death. Step-father Tim Mulvey, his wife Rebecca Ives and Sam’s father say they have lived with the horror of that father's day weekend every day since and now they want to make sure it never happens to anyone else's family. It is grief beyond comprehension for most of us; a child ripped away from his family in the middle of...

Barton Gets 15 Years Probation, Community Service. A woman who admitted to starting the Hayman Fire will not do any time in Colorado for sparking the largest wildfire in the state's history... "I feel good. It's done," Terry Barton said, looking relaxed at the hearing. Barton is currently serving a six-year sentence in a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas and will be released in June. The state wanted her to also serve time in state prison, but Barton's original state sentence of 12 years in prison was overturned by the Colorado Appeals Court. "Your honor, I'm not asking for...

Agriculture chief's priority: avoid jail By MATTHEW DALY, Associated Press Writer Sat Feb 23, 10:12 AM ET WASHINGTON - He overhauled federal forest policy to cut more trees — and became a lightning rod for environmentalists who say he is intent on logging every tree in his reach. After nearly seven years in office, Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey still has a long to-do list. Near the top: Persuade a federal judge to keep him out of jail. Rey, a former timber industry lobbyist who has directed U.S. forest policy since 2001, also wants to set up state rules making it...

Bears that barge in on people in the forest have become enough of a nuisance that more of them should be hunted, state wildlife managers have decided. The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, responding to a spike in human-bear contacts and an 11-year-old boy's death in June, want to issue 296 black bear hunting permits for Utah's 2008 spring and fall hunts, a 20 percent increase from the 248 permits offered this year. DWR officials say the state's black bear population is high enough to warrant the permit increase. Wildlife managers also say bears and humans clashed too many times...

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...

About 20 piles of downed pine and aspen trees will be burned Wednesday and Thursday ... The trees were cut down this fall by crews building a buffer between the forest and neighborhoods to prevent the spread of wildfires. Once more snow falls, some of the 250 piles of timber remaining on the upper bench of Donovan Park will be burned.

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...

Nick Dole has set up a hunting camp in the same area of the Lewis and Clark National Forest every year since 1982 and stayed there for up to five weeks at a time, so it bothers him that the U.S. Forest Service stands to break his tradition by enforcing a 16-day limit on camping. Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., also finds the decision disturbing and wants the regional head of the Forest Service to intervene. "Our personal camp has been -- what, a 20-some-year situation -- and they want to change it," Dole said Monday from the camp he and...

The self-described “Land of Many Uses” will likely have several fewer in the coming years as the U.S. Forest Service explores closing 10 amenities in northern Colorado. The Forest Services employs the “Many Uses” slogan because national forests are home to logging, grazing, mining and recreational pursuits, but the point remains that the agency is the steward of public lands along much of the Front Range. The list for closure includes five sites in Larimer and Boulder counties, including the Tom Bennett Campground on the north flanks of the Mummy Range, picnic areas along the North Fork of the Big...

Jefferson County officials said last week that plans to aid an Arizona businessman in his quest to construct a bio-energy facility in Golden are moving forward. Wade Yates, special project coordinator for Jeffco, said the county has finalized a $161,700 contract with CVL Consultants of Colorado for an engineering study and design plan for the proposed wood-pellet fuel biomass plant. If the report finds the site is appropriate for the Front Range’s first biomass facility, the consultants will help Jeffco rezone the land from agricultural to industrial uses and develop a comprehensive site development plan. At that point, “we’re really...

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,...

As flames advanced on the wealthy vacation community of Sun Valley, real estate agent Todd Conklin sent his wife and kids to safety, then offered spa treatments to some of the more than 1,600 firefighters and National Guardsmen arriving in town. “They said, ‘No, we don’t need that,”’ Conklin said. “So we just started buying them dinners.” Conklin’s offer is emblematic of how this town where Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Kerry, Demi Moore, Jamie Lee Curtis and Tom Hanks have second homes has dealt with a 78-square-mile wildfire that broke out more than two weeks ago. As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously...

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...

Crews cutting trees in hopes stopping wildfire from jumping between neighborhoods and the forest. As the color red has grown in the forest... The mountain pine beetle epidemic has hit ...hard. Whether it’s a lightning strike or a barbecue sparking a blaze, Spaeh says she understands the risk of a destructive forest fire. ....town, county and the U.S. Forest Service are cooperating to create a layer of “defensible space” — a 200-to-300-foot barrier — that aims to stop the spread of a fire, either from the forest into the neighborhood or vice versa. “This is a really good thing,” ......

An unstoppable wave could devastate 3 million acres of lodgepole pines. Mountain pine beetles are obliterating a forest that stretches from British Columbia to Mexico, and in the process are creating a hazard for fire, public safety and water supply. “What we’re looking at is an entire lodgepole pine forest dying right before our eyes,”... Severson described the problem to the Colorado Water Congress at its convention last week.... More than 22 million acres eventually will be destroyed in the American West. Meanwhile, the beetles are making their way across Canada toward the Atlantic Ocean as well. The lack of...

Gov. Schwarzenegger recently escalated a battle of words with federal officials over how to manage the remaining wilderness areas in Southern California's national forests. In an August letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Schwarzenegger accused the federal government of not doing enough to make sure wilderness in the San Bernardino, Cleveland, Angeles and Los Padres national forests is protected from road construction. The state and environmental groups want more restrictions on forest roads than are outlined in new forest management plans, 10- to 15-year master plans for land use in the forests. Schwarzenegger charged the federal government with not...

Wildfires in several western states have stirred embers of the "Sagebrush Rebellion," as ranchers and politicians have criticized federal agencies, the courts and environmentalists over policies they say are contributing to the fires. Nevada's Republican Gov. Jim Gibbons and U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., claimed environmental groups and federal bureaucracy have contributed to fires, including one at Lake Tahoe that burned more than 250 homes. And this week, Idaho Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter, a rancher, and the state's two senators, Larry Craig and Mike Crapo, joined ranchers in blaming federal safety rules for crippling early efforts to douse a 1,000-square-mile...

Goal of cutting is to reduce fire danger, salvage timber and regrow forest. Removing beetle infected pine trees will help new and healthy pine trees grow. It will also promote the growth of aspen, which are naturally fire resistant. By clearing out these trees, they’re prevented from falling on the ground, which not only adds to the fire danger, but also hampers growth of new trees. Dead trees also obstruct movement of large animals such as deer and elk. The dead trees left behind shed their needles and branches and then fall to the forest floor. The pines, filled with...

Gov. Bill Ritter said Wednesday that the pine beetle epidemic that has killed nearly half of the state’s lodgepole pine trees will have an “impact for generations to come” and will change the look of Colorado’s forests. After getting a look at stands of dead trees from the air, Ritter said the outbreak is part of a natural cycle that has been encouraged by the drought, milder winters and the fact there are so many clusters of the same type and age of tree that are attractive to the beetles. He said the epidemic can’t be stopped, only managed to...

Park officials are hoping to break the bruins of their dining habits. But if the bears stay, they may have to be killed. A couple of marauding black bears have prompted Rocky Mountain National Park officials to close five backcountry campsites in hopes of shifting the bears' dining habits. At least 13 break-ins have been reported since June 26, including nine just outside the park's eastern boundary near the Wild Basin area, and rangers fear the bears are learning to associate humans with food. Park officials have closed the Pine Ridge, Tahosa, Aspen Knoll, Siskin and North St. Vrain campsites...

....The excess fuels story has done wonders for the Forest Service budget. Ever since a fire burned several hundred homes in Los Alamos in 2000, Congress has dumped money on wildfires. The Forest Service's total fire budget has more than tripled, and the biggest percentage increase has been for hazardous fuel treatments. Now, after spending $11 billion on fire and hazardous fuel treatments since 2000, we have another fire destroying hundreds of homes. It is increasingly clear that the Forest Service strategy of treating fuels and aggressively suppressing almost all wildfires is the wrong approach. First, there are too many...

The 73-year-old man who strung heavy cables across a trail on the San Francisco Peaks that clotheslined a motorcyclist won't be going to jail. J.D. Protiva will receive supervised probation for one year after pleading guilty to three counts of felony endangerment in a case in which a motorcyclist hit one of the cables and was thrown from his bike in September. He was also banned from the Coconino National Forest. Protiva was sentenced Tuesday after telling a Coconino County Superior Court judge he had gone too far in a frustrating attempt to ban motorcycles and protect nesting sites for...

More than 50 miles of roads and trails southwest of Colorado Springs would be closed to vehicles under rules proposed by the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM on Tuesday released the Arkansas River Travel Management Plan, which would change travel rules on 240,000 acres of public land ... There are now 232 miles of roads and trails open to vehicles. That would drop to 181 miles under the proposal. A complete list of proposed closures is available on the BLM’s Web site. Officials said the change is needed because of the increasing number of people coming to the area...

The grandfather of a boy killed by a black bear while camping blamed the U.S. Forest Service Tuesday for not getting the word out about an earlier attack. Before 11-year-old Sam Ives was attacked and killed Sunday night, the same bear had attacked campers in the same spot hours earlier. Eldon Ives is the boy's grandfather. He told reporters Tuesday that he hoped the Forest Service will do a better job of protecting campers after Sam's death. He said the violent way his grandson was killed is a sorrow that will never heal. Sam Ives would have been a 6th...

An 11-year-old boy is killed by a black bear overnight at a popular campsite in American Fork Canyon. This morning authorities are searching for the bear. The boy was asleep inside a tent he was sharing with his family at the Timpooneke Camp area, about 10 miles up the canyon. The family was camping about two miles up a dirt road from that campground. The boy, his mother, stepfather and a 6-year-old brother were sleeping in a large tent with several sections, and the 11-year-old was in a section of the tent by himself. Around 11 p.m. family members heard...

SEQUOIA NATIONAL FOREST, Calif. - Firefighters were trying to contain a wildfire that had burned about 2,400 acres of grass and brush in Sequoia National Forest and was spreading into wooded areas Monday. Officials asked residents in a recreation area called Horse Meadow to evacuate their cabins and trailers after the Goldledge Fire inched about a mile away from the private property, said Geri Adams, a U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman. "We're getting some really strong winds and the humidity is low, so the fire is really active," she said. The fire started across the street from the Goldledge Campgrounds on...

Insect could help fight spread of tamarisk. residents who have battled with the invasive tamarisk, or salt cedar, could find relief in the form of a beetle. The Colorado Department of Agriculture is introducing a beetle - the only known natural enemy of the tamarisk. The beetle comes from Asia, where tamarisk first originated. The tamarisk is an invasive, nonnative plant that was originally brought to the United States from Asia to control erosion. But the noxious shrub is said to cover 10,000 acres in Montezuma County. It can have roots that run as deep as 100 feet and can...

The Colorado Army National Guard will maintain its annual high-altitude helicopter training on Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands in Eagle and Garfield counties at 3,000 hours. The Guard also has agreed to additional stipulations in order to protect wilderness areas, wildlife and livestock, the White River National Forest and BLM announced today. The military believes high-altitude combat training is vital for the protection of pilots and aircrews. In combat, aircrews trained in high-altitude aviation have a higher mission success rate as well as fewer accidents. As such, the Army had asked for 6,000 hours that could...

Millions of acres of prime recreational opportunities in Montana are threatened with closure. Your action could mean the difference between a "closed" sign and a "trail open" sign. Please take a moment to read the information below and act on the action items. the U.S. Forest Service is planning a de-facto Wilderness management regime on all "Recommended Wilderness Areas" (RWA). Under normal circumstances, the "Recommended" Wilderness classification is just that: a recommendation. The decision of "whether Wilderness" is supposed to be left to Congress and the American People. Sadly, the Northern Region of the U.S. Forest Service seems to think...

WASHINGTON - Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth will retire next month and move back to Missoula, crossing paths with his replacement, Abigail Kimbell, who will move from that city to become the agency's first female chief. Kimbell has been regional forester for the Northern Region since February 2004. She will be the agency's 16th chief. Bosworth, whose retirement will be effective Feb. 2, received a standing ovation from agency employees who gathered Friday afternoon to hear the announcement of his replacement. "I started with the Forest Service at a time when our focus was on getting out the timber cut,"...

An Arizona appeals court on Wednesday upheld a jury’s $600,000 judgment in favor of a rancher in a defamation lawsuit, rejecting an environmental group’s argument that documents it posted on the Internet were shielded by the First Amendment. The Court of Appeals upheld a Pima County Superior Court jury’s award of compensatory and punitive damages to Jim Chilton in his lawsuit against the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit with offices in Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington, D.C. A lawyer for the rancher said the appellate court had stood up for a person wrongly defamed, while an attorney...

The federal judge who overturned the Bush administration’s Roadless Rule declared Wednesday that energy companies can’t set up their drill rigs on any undeveloped oil and gas lease issued since 2001 within a roadless area. U.S. Magistrate Judge Elizabeth D. LaPorte ruled in September that President Bill Clinton’s 2001 Roadless Rule be reinstated, protecting 4.4 million acres of roadless areas in Colorado national forests and more than 58 million acres nationwide. Her ruling Wednesday prevents the U.S. Forest Service from approving or allowing any surface disturbance of a mineral lease issued after Jan. 12, 2001, on which drilling or development...

The number of Colorado lodgepole pines killed by bark beetles jumped nearly fivefold in 2006 as the explosive, decadelong bug epidemic continues to gain steam. About 4.8 million lodgepoles were killed this year, up from roughly 1 million trees last year, according to Bob Cain, an entomologist with the U.S. Forest Service in Golden. The lodgepole acreage under attack by mountain pine beetles jumped about 50 percent this year to 644,840 acres, up from 430,526 acres last year. The new numbers, which are considered preliminary, come from aerial tree-damage surveys conducted this summer. "We had a significant increase in both...

Legislation designed to control and eradicate tamarisk was signed into law by President Bush Wednesday night, U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., announced Thursday... creating funding for a large-scale effort to control tamarisk, also known as salt cedar... "The tamarisk is causing severe problems throughout Colorado and the West," said Allard. "The President's signing of this legislation marks a major milestone in the ongoing effort by Congress and this administration to provide critical resources for the removal of this destructive and invasive species." The tamarisk has invaded the margins of streams, lakes and wetlands throughout the Western United States. An individual...

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."...

A small band of archers has been shooting bows and arrows for 37 years on a range in the Pike National Forest north of Deckers, paying the U.S. Forest Service about $450 a year for a permit. This year it will all end because the Forest Service presented the Columbine Bowmen with a bill for $23,000 for the one-year permit, said club president Tom Younger. The same fate faces the 180 or so members of the Buffalo Creek Gun Club, who shoot targets in the Pike forest near Bailey. The club's annual permit fee of $150 over the past 40...

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...

Federal officials on Friday were tracking 60 large, active fires that were burning more than 1 million acres, or more than 1,500 square miles, across the West. The states in the region with the most number of fires included Idaho, Nevada, and Montana, according to the Web site of the Boise-based National Interagency Fire Center, composed of various federal agencies that coordinate to battle wildfires. In Idaho, fires had burned more than 231,000 acres, or 360 square miles, the center reported. State officials toured fire camps to survey the damage -- as well as to tell federal firefighting crews here,...

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...

Experts and emergency management officials in Grand County worry that a large stretch of forest devastated by pine beetles may be waiting to burn in a massive wildfire. At least a quarter million acres of lodge pole pines are either dead or dying because of the mountain pine beetle. They've turned once green forests into large areas of dead, red colored trees. "Some of these county roads are very thin," Billy Sumerlin, director of Grand County's Natural Resources department said. "It makes it very difficult for fire apparatus to get in, especially if we're in the process of trying to...

Experts paint grim picture for local trees, eye future forest.. It seems there’s just not much good news for trees these days... Pine beetles decimating lodgepole pines across the West ...foresters are already looking ahead to what the landscape will look like in the future. “This mature pine forest is a goner,” said Cal Wettstein, district ranger for the Holy Cross and Eagle ranger districts. “We’re focusing on the next forest.” Asked what the future holds...Wettstein said simply “large fires.” Over the next two decades, the beetle-killed trees will shed their needles and their branches, then fall down and contribute...

The dispute between dominant species over shared habitat in the West is escalating. The proposal emphasizes continued protections for endangered species, and it states that such measures "shall be directed at the offending animal" while not jeopardizing the "viability of predator populations." The "offending animal" is the one perceived as a threat to people and livestock. There now are more than 1,000 wolves in the Northern Rockies region. In Idaho alone, the offspring of 35 Canadian wolves now number more than 500. Their main prey are...deer and elk. But they have attacked domestic animals as well...through 2005...( at least )...

This ski town has stepped up its campaign to battle pine beetles, which have killed countless trees and threatened others in the surrounding valley and nearby counties. Everyone including residents, local government and giant resort operator Intrawest Corp. has been footing the bill to blunt the bugs’ impact on a swath of the state whose economy depends heavily on its scenic lands. “The situation will get worse. It’s one of those things that grows exponentially each year,”... During a Front Range outbreak in the 1970s, the government launched a $20 million program to control the beetles. But now, perhaps more...