Logging violation at Bullshead alleged: 30-inch diameter said exceeded

Tuesday, Sept. 16, 1997 | 6:13 a.m.

Karen Kindsvater of the California Wilderness Coalition said trees cut by loggers on the Bullshead project include one in a ravine that was about six feet in diameter and 350 years old.

Kindsvater added many other trees that are more than 30 inches in diameter have been cut since logging began Aug. 20, despite a Forest Service commitment to allow only smaller trees to be felled.

She and other critics of the project also said 80 percent of the trees being cut are healthy, green trees even though the Forest Service claims the sale is designed to remove mainly dead and dying trees.

But Karen Jones of the Forest Service denied Tuesday that cutting of live trees has been that heavy. She and Bruce Troedson, the Truckee-based Forest Service staffer monitoring the cutting, added the goal is to leave big, healthy trees spaced 14 to 20 feet apart in the area.

The Wilderness Coalition said the project goes against President Clinton's goals of protecting the Tahoe area's fragile ecosystem - a promise made during a visit to Tahoe this summer.

But Jones rejected the criticism and said the end result will be "a healthier forest, and that's what the Tahoe Basin needs too."

Bullshead straddles Highway 89 in eastern Placer and Nevada counties, extending from the entrance to Alpine Meadows ski area to just south of Truckee. Covering some 2,470 acres, about 12 million board feet, or 80 tons of timber, will be removed by the time the logging is completed in three years.

The timber sales project was offered in the closing days of a controversial congressional timber salvage rider which let the Forest Service sell dead, dying and insect-infested timber with little environmental review.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein intervened in the dispute last December and a compromise was reached then with various environmental groups. Sierra Pacific Industries was awarded the logging work in February and began work Aug. 20.

Troedson said timber sales inspectors have been in the field checking on logging practices and have reported no problems.

But Kindsvater, who hiked the area over the Labor Day weekend with Carl Gustafson, an Olympic Valley activist, disagrees.

"The Forest Service has a very different perspective than how I see things. They may say they are cutting for the health of the forest, but they really are logging for timber production," she said.

Tahoe National Forest officials will walk the sales area with Kindsvater Sept. 29, in hopes of quelling environmentalist fears about the work and affirming that they are indeed reducing wildfire danger and protecting wildlife habitat.