Free Republic

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...

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...

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...

Celebrity attorney Johnny Cochrane, magical frogs and vampires did not translate Friday into permission to cut more than 15,000 burned and hazardous trees in Eastern Oregon's Malheur National Forest. U.S. District Judge Ancer L. Haggerty quickly rejected arguments by federal and timber industry attorneys that environmental groups use one-size-fits-all legal arguments as their personal "magical incantations" to shut down logging on public lands. Haggerty shut down six of seven timber sales in the Malheur after finding that the U.S. Forest Service had illegally tried to squeeze the sales through a procedural shortcut that permits pruning and clearing of roadside...

Forest defenders in southern Oregon have taken the struggle to save Peak to the next level. People are now occupying treesits to make a stand for some of the last remaining native forests in Oregon. The Mazama Forest Defenders take action to resist the Peak timber sale, the replacement volume program, and the continued destruction of our last native forests. Activists are occupying tree-sits in the Peak timber sale to resist the imminent logging of this ecologically important native forest. The construction of platforms high in the canopy of trees marked for cutting follows a multi-faceted grassroots campaign to end...