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The logging industry, once synonymous with the Kamas Valley, is seen as key to reducing fire risk on the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. Logging permits have expanded in recent years, with 80% of them aimed at removing dead trees.
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The logging industry, once synonymous with the Kamas Valley, is seen as key to reducing fire risk on the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. Logging permits have expanded in recent years, with 80% of them aimed at removing dead trees.
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Jared Horrocks operates a wheeled harvester in the High Uintas. Horrocks said when he was young, many of the trees in the national forest were still green.
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Wes McPhie, U.S. Forest Service timber sale administrator. “Under all those dead trees, there’s a very healthy, robust forest,” he said.
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The logging industry, once synonymous with the Kamas Valley, is seen as key to reducing fire risk on the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. Logging permits have expanded in recent years, with 80% of them aimed at removing dead trees.
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The logging industry, once synonymous with the Kamas Valley, is seen as key to reducing fire risk on the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. Logging permits have expanded in recent years, with 80% of them aimed at removing dead trees.
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The logging industry, once synonymous with the Kamas Valley, is seen as key to reducing fire risk on the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. Logging permits have expanded in recent years, with 80% of them aimed at removing dead trees.
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The logging industry, once synonymous with the Kamas Valley, is seen as key to reducing fire risk on the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest. Logging permits have expanded in recent years, with 80% of them aimed at removing dead trees.
The sound of heavy machinery rumbled through a crystal blue sky in the Uinta Mountains one recent morning, accompanied periodically by the crack, whoosh and thud of a tree being felled, 40 feet of timber reduced to ground level with only a puff of snow lingering in the air to mark where it once stood.
The scene could have taken place in any of the last 15 decades, though with different equipment: loggers cutting down trees as snow hastened the end to another season.
But there was another key difference besides the state-of-the-art tools being used on the trees surrounding a sun-drenched snowy meadow: All of the trees these modern-day loggers were taking were dead. And they had been for some time.
A U.S. Forest Service official estimated that beetle infestations have killed 80% of the mature Engelmann Spruce and Lodgepole Pine trees in the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache forest.
The dead trees bring many problems, chief among them the fuel they can provide forest fires, increasing the likelihood that a megafire in the Uinta Mountains, which contain the headwaters of major water systems, could threaten the drinking water supply for millions of Utahns.
Officials have pursued fuels reduction work, like the project conducted in Summit Park just before the Parleys Canyon Fire threatened that neighborhood this summer, but the cost of treating the hundreds of thousands of acres in Summit County that need treating would be astronomical.
Some see the private market as the only solution, but the local logging industry has shrunk dramatically amid what the industry claims were years of restrictive permitting practices by the U.S. Forest Service.
There has been a commercial logging industry in the Kamas Valley since white settlers came to the area in the mid 19th century, with the first sawmill built in the valley in 1860.
But where once there were a handful of mills, now there is only one, which is helmed by John Blazzard. He says the local logging industry has been crippled by an environmentalist-driven agenda to reduce logging on the forest.
“There used to be six or seven sawmills in the Kamas Valley and they just flat out weren’t selling enough timber. Starved everybody to death,” he said. “We’re the last of the Mohicans. I think we must be the dumbest ones, I don’t know.”
Over the past few years, though, the Forest Service has increased its timber permitting to levels last seen in the 1970s, according to Wes McPhie, a U.S. Forest Service timber sale administrator.
“I think the thing that’s really turned the page is the wildfires,” McPhie said of the renewed interest in timber sales and fuel reduction work.
Looking out on a portion of the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache that he oversees for timber sales, McPhie pointed to a ridge that was “dog-hair thick” with dead wood.
He contrasted it with another hillside that loggers had treated, which left behind smaller stands of healthy trees and a patchwork forest where the ground was clearly visible.
The treated area would slow the progress and intensity of a forest fire and allow younger, healthier vegetation the room to grow.
“Under all those dead trees, there’s a very healthy, robust forest,” McPhie said.
Now, officials, including those on the Summit County Council, are hoping to remove as much standing dead and deadfall as they can in the forest before a megafire hits.
“We’ve got 400,000 acres of dying forest in our county, and if we don’t do something about it, it’s only going to get worse,” said County Council Chair Glenn Wright. “Eventually we’re going to have a really big fire.”
Past
Summit County Historian and South Summit native Joe Frazier said logging was an integral part of the Kamas Valley and had been since settlers arrived.
“There were distinct areas,” Frazier said. “Coalville had coal mining, Park City had precious metal mining. The (Kamas) Valley, that was logging.”
The lumbering industry supplied materials for mines and railroads, Frazier said, and was “essential” to the Kamas-area economy and identity.
Up until the late 1990s, the valley supported a half-dozen saw mills. Today, only one remains — Blazzard Lumber.
“That major environmental movement from the early 90s to the late 90s sounded the death knell for those (mills), at least in the Kamas Valley,” Frazier said.
Each one provided 15 or 20 jobs, Frazier estimated, and was generally a family affair.
Kamas Mayor Matt McCormick said he grew up working summers at Leavitt Lumber, which he characterized as hard, dangerous work. When the mills shut down, “a part of our valley shut down, too.”
“It was just part of what I heard everyday, saw everyday,” he said. “It was just part of Kamas.”
John Blazzard, president of Blazzard Lumber, blamed the shutdown on restrictive permitting by the U.S. Forest Service.
“It’s just sad to me. When the trees were green, they had very high-quality, high-value wood in them,” Blazzard said. “Now they’re all dead and firewoody, and now they’re ramping up selling on it.”
The reduction in lumber sales started in the 1970s, according to “A Summit County History,” a history of the area published to mark the state’s centennial.
Blazzard said the trend has reversed in the last few years as officials try to grapple with a dying forest.
“Of course now it’s all dead, they’re not trying to save anything,” he said. “They’re trying to clear out the fuels before they have a catastrophic fire.”
Present
For years, drivers passing through higher elevations on the Mirror Lake Highway have seen dead trees on either side of the road, stark reminders that the forest stretching for miles beyond the roadway is struggling.
The risk of a fire is obvious, as are many of the negative effects of a burnt forest. But a catastrophic wildfire in the High Uintas could affect more than just the local land, as much of the water that flows out of taps on the Wasatch Front and Back starts as snow in the Uintas.
Blazzard blamed the state of the forest on mismanagement from the U.S. Forest Service and a lack of logging, saying the older and sicker trees that loggers previously removed provided the beetles that have ravaged the forest ample food to spread.
“I blame that, the way our forests are now. They’re all dead, dead and dying,” he said. “Trees got so old and couldn’t fight off the bugs anymore.”
He said he’s seen an increase in logging permitting the past five or six years and said his firm has cut nothing but beetle-kill trees in that time.
“It makes me sick to my stomach,” he said. “I’ve lived here, worked up in the mountains my whole life. Just makes me sick to my stomach to see all of the big trees dead.”
McPhie pushes back on the assertion that mismanagement killed the forest, saying while it may have contributed, beetle infestations are natural phenomena that occur cyclically throughout history.
He referred to studies that examined pollen sediments in lake beds that showed previous mass die-offs of similar species in the past.
But he agreed that logging sales were a key strategy to removing problematic trees, first to reduce fire risk and second to restore the health of the forest.
Wright, the County Council chair, discussed the consequences of a megafire occurring in the High Uintas. He referred to the 2018 Dollar Ridge Fire that scorched nearly 70,000 acres in the adjacent Ashley National Forest. He said sediment runoff from that fire necessitated a $24 million improvement to water filtration at Starvation Reservoir.
Wright pointed to Weber Canyon as a particular concern. A fire there would threaten the cabins and people in the area, who would rely on the canyon’s single road to evacuate.
If such a fire had impacts similar to the Dollar Ridge Fire, it could affect the Rockport Reservoir, which provides drinking water to the Snyderville Basin and elsewhere.
“It’s a really vulnerable area we need to protect for our watershed,” he said. “… A scorching fire there runs debris into the river that will trash the Rockport Reservoir.”
The dead trees in the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache stretch for acres, creating more problems than just fire risk. The bugs eating the trees from the inside emit greenhouse gases, and the dead trees no longer remove carbon from the atmosphere, making the areas a net carbon emitter, Wright said.
And the trees are packed so closely together that when they fall, the “jackstraw” is so thick that animals and some other plants no longer can survive there, McPhie said.
But once an area is thinned and sunlight is allowed to hit the smaller plants, they shoot up “like forest fire.”
McPhie said that 80% of timber sales now are for dead trees.
Loggers said the areas they’re accessing have already been decimated by the beetle infestation for years. It’s a point borne out by the 5- or 6-foot logs that remain on hillsides after an area has been treated. The bottom portions of the trees have been rotting while the tree is standing and are discarded by logging crews as unusable.
McPhie indicated that in an ideal world, forest managers would be able to hyper-focus logging operations to stop a beetle infestation as it started, something done in some European forests. But he said the sheer size of the forests covering Summit County and the broader region make that impossible.
Future
Removing dead and dying trees from the forest is a priority, but the local economy no longer exists to accomplish that.
Wright indicated that officials should be creative in seeking solutions.
“For-profit timber sales going forward are really important,” he said. “If we’re going to rely on annual appropriations from the Forest Service for the forest, we’re never going to get the job done.”
The county recently hired a public land manager and has won several grants for fuel mitigation work. Officials are also pursuing a “resiliency fund,” a pool of money that could be used to leverage federal and state dollars to pursue forest health projects. They are targeting a $10 million initial funding level.
Officials have discussed using proceeds from the county’s proposed open space bond to fund some of the work if the $50 million measure is approved by voters this fall.
Wright indicated the private sector would be key to solving the problem.
“We have to create a market for the timber industry to be revitalized in the Western mountains, including Summit County,” he said.
He discussed working with private firms to build a biofuel plant in the county, which would take vegetation and even some of the county’s solid waste and convert it to diesel fuel or jet fuel.
Wright referred to it as a renewable liquid fuel resource.
While it might sound far-fetched, Wright indicated it was likely going to happen soon somewhere in the West, and that some firms he’d spoken to were eyeing locations.
“Not only do I think it can happen, I think it has to happen if we’re going to be successful in creating a healthy forest,” he said.
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