A light in the forest: an experiment to prove a point instead spawns a partnership that's returning health to Colorado's woods. (Communities).

At first, Tom Colbert says, all he wanted to do was prove a simple point: "You can cut tree s and strn do the forest some good." What began as an almost desperate experiment in Montezuma County, Colorado, has gone far beyond breathing life into the moribund local timber industry and restoring 7,000 acres of ponderosa pine forest. It has also provided on-the-ground verification that rebuilding forest health can support a commercially self-sufficient timber program without subsidies.

At a time when the nation is wrangling over how to restore western forests and pay for the work, the Ponderosa Pine Forest Partnership is a beacon illuminating how rural communities can work with ecologists and economists as well as government agencies. Eight years after the first restoration project on the San Juan National Forest, the bid price for the trees is up and so is the number of bidders. Yet none of the projects has been litigated, and environmentalists agree that the forest itself is healthier than it has been in decades.

"You never know when you plant a seed. You just hope it will grow," says Colbert, 63.

A former Montezuma County commissioner first elected in 1984, he watched the life drain out of the timber industry in southwest Colorado. One by one the county's 20 sawmills began closing as federal land managers responded to a shift in public values and slashed the volume of timber they made available to loggers. Colbert knew the U.S. Forest Service's new focus on ecosystem management would forever change how people conduct business in Montezuma County, where 66 percent of the land is federally owned.

Instead of joining "wise use" and "county supremacy" movements, the Montezuma commissioners in 1992 created a county federal lands office. If local residents were going to get any economic benefits from the federal land, they were all going to have to work together, Colbert says.

"We didn't go into the Forest Service and say 'We're going to bust your face in.' We went in and asked how we could help," he says.

The Forest Service welcomed their involvement, says Cal Joyner, then-San Juan Forest supervisor. "If local officials have a vision, why wouldn't we jump on board?

"It was the economically correct thing to do. It turned Out to be the politically correct thing as well," says Joyner, now Forest Service director of natural resources for the Pacific Northwest.

That began a give-and-take process that entailed meeting after gut-wrenching meeting of local, state, and federal leaders, as well as endless tromps through ponderosa pine forests. The group found what many scientists had been saying for years: The woods were crowded with small trees and brush, a result of nearly a century of high-grade logging, grazing, and exclusion of the fires that naturally occur every 10 to 15 years. Instead of open forests with around 120 trees an acre, the San Juan Forest had up to 390 trees per acre. The average diameter had dropped from 25 inches to eight. The entire forest was vulnerable to insect infestation and catastrophic fire.

The need to restore the forests was as obvious to Colbert as it was to Joyner. For the rancher-turned-politician, the combination of poor forest health and the county's lack of jobs was a golden opportunity. "Nothing happens if you don't try," he says. "That's all we did back then--try to work together so everybody got something good out of it."

The result is the Ponderosa Pine Forest Partnership, an affiance of county, national forest, and timber industry officials joined by university scientists and local citizens. They came together with the mutual goal of demonstrating that healthy ecosystems and healthy economies are compatible--not contradictory--objectives.

PILOT PROJECT

Three years after forming their affiance, the partners launched a pilot project on 500 acres of the San Juan Forest. The Pines Project offered five timber sales under administrative use regulations, which allowed the Forest Service to offset the price per board-foot with the project's research value. Montezuma County bought the sales for $9,999, then resold them to loggers for around $30,000. The county planned to use the difference to fund ecological and economic research.

But loggers brave enough to bid on the experimental sales lost their shirts, says Carla Harper, Partnership coordinator. They knew how to cut and haul the trees but had little use and no markets for the small-diameter materials they harvested. The pilot project was an eye-opener for other participants, too. Bill Romme, then a Fort Lewis College ecologist, and Denny Lynch, a forest scientist at Colorado State University, were not satisfied with their harvest guidelines. The changes they wanted to try, combined with the losses for the local operators, convinced the Partnership to put up another l00-acre sale. This time the loggers made a profit.

Later, Montezuma County refunded some of the money it collected from them.

"We promised them they wouldn't get hurt. They trusted us, and we wanted to make sure they stayed in business," Harper says.

It was a defining moment. The county, the Forest Service, and the research scientists proved they could keep their word to the loggers without compromising the Partnership's goal of restoring the pine forest. That achievement has paid priceless dividends, and the trust inspired by the plot project still guides the Partnership today.

Since that first timber sale in 1995 the restoration program has offered 12 timber sales under conventional regulations. All are small and calculated in acres rather than in board-feet, ranging in size from 15 to 1,480 acres. Scale is key to the success, says Phil Kemp, a San Juan district silviculturist. For every acre Kemp selects for harvest, he analyzes six. The size of these restoration projects has allowed the partnership to operate without much national scrutiny, adapting new projects by applying what they learned on the previous ones.

FOREST RESTORATION

What distinguishes the Partnership's projects from both traditional timber sales and hazardous fuels reduction is how they determine what is cut and what left standing. The objective is forest restoration. instead of harvesting a few big trees to maximize sawlogs, each tree is carefully chosen to create openings, leaving trees of various sizes in clumps. Instead of cutting small trees and brush to reduce the forest fuels, the goal is to replicate historic ponderosa stands, which included many diameter classes. The restoration plan also calls for controlled burns within a year of thinning to discourage oak brush and increase the diversity of forbs and native grasses.

The cutting prescriptions are based on Romme's research. Now at Colorado State University, Romme earned the respect of environmentalists for his scientific work at Yellowstone National Park prior to the 1988 fires. In 1992 he was working with the Forest Service on an analysis of 11 million acres in southwestern Colorado and northwestern New Mexico. As an ecologist, Romme's main concern is that overstocked forests are vulnerable to catastrophic fire and insect infestation. The Partnership hired him to provide a Scientific foundation for their projects.

That was a crucial move for environmentalists, says Greg Aplet, a forest ecologist with the Wilderness Society. They view Romme as a researcher they can trust. When he designs a thinning project, environmentalists are confident the objective is restoration, "not just clearing out the competition to maximize the crop trees," Aplet says.

If Romme is the mind behind the Partnership's projects, Kemp is the legs. An agency forester with 20 years experience, he arrived on the San Juan National Forest in 1992 itching to implement biological diversity, ecosystem management, and other progressive concepts. Kemp gives Romme's scientific principles on-the-ground reality, training the crews who mark the trees and supervising the woods work.

He forbids the removal of any old-growth ponderosa pine, regardless of whether it's 10 inches in diameter or 40. And he insists on an explanation for cutting any tree larger than 16 inches in diameter. "There are some good reasons, but somebody better be prepared to present them to me."

ECONOMIC VITALITY

Restoring ponderosa pine forests to health is only part of the Partnership's goal. Equally important is making restoration a sustainable commercial enterprise. "If there's a right ecology, there ought to be a right economy," says Lynch, the Colorado State researcher.

He began analyzing the costs for operators and uses for the materials they removed in the pilot project. Lynch spent months in the field determining the break-even point for the loggers. He counted every piece of wood that was cut and timed how long it took to skid it. He concluded that removing only trees less 12 inches in diameter creates a loss. The ideal economic relationship on a ponderosa pine restoration project is 40 percent sawtimber and 60 percent small diameter, Lynch says.

That's a huge adjustment for local loggers. But Harold and Doug Ragland, partners in Stonertop Lumber, faced the challenge and began changing their operation. Despite 30 years of traditional logging, the brothers accepted Romme's oddball cutting prescriptions and opened their books to Lynch. Gradually Stonertop Lumber has adopted more efficient ways to harvest small trees and developed new products: posts, poles, and specialty beams for the small trees; compost, playground cover, and cement additive for the chips.

The Raglands have shown both "guts and initiative," says Harper. Their ingenuity has stimulated new markets, all of them local. This allows the mill owners to avoid transportation costs and helps to keep the money in the community, further stimulating the local economy.

The restoration projects have also changed the loggers' view of the forest. After decades of taking the biggest and the best, Harold Ragland now believes forests should be cultivated to encourage everything from old-growth ponderosa pines to "bunnies" and other ground nesters. "Forests should be treated like gardens," he says.

That is a paradigm shift, says Lynn Jungwirth, executive director of a California forest worker training center and former chair of the Seventh American Forest Congress Communities Committee. It indicates a transition from focusing just on product to focusing on entire ecosystems." When we get loggers working as gardeners in the woods, we're looking beyond tangible products to intangible products like restoration," Jungwirth says.

THE CHALLENGE

Not everything the Partnership has hoped for has happened. Drought and high fire danger, combined with other Forest Service priorities have reduced the annual controlled burns to around 7 percent of the acres harvested. The land won't truly be restored without fire, says Kemp. And despite a commitment to local operators, the restoration projects have not guaranteed a consistent level of work for loggers like Ragland. "That makes it hard--a gamble, like anything else in life," he says.

But the successes are so significant that some fear they could foreshadow the Partnership's demise. If their projects get painted as examples of how thinning programs can be managed as commercial timber sale programs, it could hamper the on-the-ground work. Restoration is not the same as fuels reduction, says Joyner, the Forest Service official. "I'd hate to see the Ponderosa Pine Partnership get sucked into the forest health vortex."

The challenge for the Partnership is to maintain the programs it has developed through time--beyond the excitement of its current successes and after the original participants have moved on. Harper believes monitoring is the key. Her faith is in careful scrutiny of forest wildlife, water, and vegetation. The data collected will show what has worked well and what needs to be adapted for better results. If that process becomes part of how the Forest Service manages the ecosystem and how the local economy responds, forest restoration will continue, Harper says.

"Monitoring is our legacy. It will carry us on beyond Phil, beyond the Raglands, beyond me," she says. "Whoever comes in after us will use what we've done to create better innovations."

Colbert, the county commissioner, is even more confident. "We already proved our point. I was excited about it back then and I still am."

RELATED ARTICLE: TYNER: RESTORING PRIVATE LAND

Tyner 34, owns Timber Tech West, a Durango-based company that thins trees and removes brush to make the land safer from wildfire. Some of the work readies subdivision lots for sale. Some helps homeowners develop mandated wildfire prevention plans. All of it is designed to improve the property's value and restore forests to a more natural state.

Tammy Lee Tyner jams her Ford pickup into low gear and creeps up a steep rocky double-track to a hilltop at the base of the Colorado Rockies near Pagosa Springs. She jumps out of the truck, covers 25 yards to a tractor-mounted skidder, and prepares to crank it up as easily as if it were a chipper or a chainsaw.

For around $400 an acre Timber Tech will reduce an overstocked stand of trees to a healthy few and pull out the oak brush and other flammable vegetation. The company will also sell the material for the landowner to make the best use of all resources removed. Logs and small-diameter trees are hauled to local sawmills. Any firewood the owners don't want Tyner donates to needy families or Durango High School for student fundraisers.

The cleanup process produces immediate results. "People have a beautiful site within 30 days," she says. Timber Tech, one of the first forest restoration companies in Colorado, has nine employees. They are among the 1,500 workers statewide engaged in fuels mitigation. With more and more people moving into once-isolated mountain areas, the threat of wildfire has become a national concern. Public lands managers are thinning their overstocked forests while entrepreneurs like Tyner are tackling private lands. She works with loggers, environmentalists, fire departments, developers, and county planners--professionals who have traditionally fought over forest management.

"This company pulls them all together. Everybody wants the same thing: healthy forests," Tyner says. Petite and energetic, she brings the enthusiasm of a believer to her work. After spending five years on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel, Tyner completed four years at Colorado School of Mines. But she jumped at the chance to buy her father's thinning business as an opportunity to work in the environmental arena. That, she says, is her passion. "When I leave this earth I want to know that I've made a difference to it," she says.

Up at 4 a.m., on a job site by 5, never far from her cell phone, Tyner works with the Colorado State Forest Service and Colorado State University scientists to determine which trees to remove. Every cut is calculated to protect the site from fire while honoring the natural stand. At first she balked at cutting any trees, but she soon realized she could provide a service to the land as well as property owners.

"There's nothing we can do about the number of homes being built. There is something we can do about developing the land responsibly," Tyner says.

She refuses some jobs. One landowner wanted her to clearcut a mesa to improve the view. "Forest health is number one for me. Clearcuts for a view--I can't do it." Tyner is convinced the key to fire mitigation is forest restoration. "If you restore forests to what they should look like, you have mitigated wildfire."

Down the hill near a cluster of home sites, Tyner's crews have reduced the pines and cedars from 300 to 70 trees an acre grouped in multi-aged clumps. Across a meadow, a cow elk whistles from a copse of aspen trees. Tyner grins.

"You work your rear end off to make a place better for everyone, including the wildlife. There's my reward."--Jane Braxton Little

Contributing editor Jane Braxton Little covers environmental topics from Greenville, California.