The Thorn Fire Salvage Recovery Project (Malheur National Forest)
In the summer of 2006, a series of wildfires burned near Aldrich Mountain, just southwest of John Day in eastern Oregon's Malhuer National Forest. Within weeks of the fire, the Forest Service had proposed the Thorn Fire Salvage Project, a large-scale commercial logging project across 2,529 acres of the burned landscape, including extensive logging in wilderness quality areas and a designated back-country recreation area. The Cascadia Wildlands Project has been keeping a close eye on the Thorn Project as it has evolved through different planning stages over the past year and a half, and we have been extensively monitoring and documenting the condition of the area from the ground and from above.
Update 5/23/08
With litigation looming and trees about to fall, the Cascadia Wildlands Project, Oregon Wild, Sierra Club, and Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project sat down with the Forest Service and timber industry to try one last time to keep the chainsaws out of the previously untouched and otherwise pristine areas. After more than two weeks of intense negotiations, and despite what seemed like impossible odds and decades of irreconcilable differences, an agreement was finally reached on May 23 that protects every single square inch of unroaded, backcounrty, or wilderness quality forest in the Thorn Fire area. The agreement also includes a similar arrangement for another post-fire timber sale in the area, called the Egley timber sale, which was originally another massive timber sale, but which will now only consist of roadside hazard tree logging. In total, more than 30,000 acres of beautiful burned and never-before logged forests will remain standing and left to recover naturally after the fires.
Legal documents include:
1. Administrative appeal
2. Settlement agreement
