Hauling timber: Logging company resumes harvest

By Justin Post of The Montana Standard - 12/18/2007

Kelly Logging Company founder Bill Kelly shows harvested saw logs stacked in a deck that will be cut into framing lumber at mills run by RY Timber in Livingston and Townsend. Walter Hinick / The Montana Standard

Amidst the aroma of fresh-cut timber one recent morning, Bill Kelly stood beside a log deck and motioned toward a huge swath of browning lodgepole pine.

“It’s a sea of dead,” he said.

A mechanical logging machine, called a feller buncher, droned several hundred yards away in a stand of Douglas fir as Kelly climbed into his vehicle and continued down the frozen logging road.

Kelly, owner of Missoula-based Kelly Logging, was surveying his company’s progress to log 2,600 acres of pine beetle-killed timber in the Basin Creek watershed.

The project resumed in recent months and is nearly 40 percent complete after being shut down for almost two years at the behest of environmental groups.

An appeals court panel in June denied a request from See TIMBER, Back Page Timber ...

Continued from Page A1 environmentalists to halt the project south of Butte.

The groups earlier this year asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to suspend the project pending their appeal.

The request was denied and Kelly hopes to continue hauling logs until the spring breakup in March.

“If we could have worked the year or two they had us shut down there would be a lot more saw logs,” Kelly said. “We’re trying to utilize everything we can for saw logs.” For every 10 loads hauled on the project, Kelly estimates that three or four are pulp logs to be hauled to the pulp mill in Missoula.

“Right now we’re getting to where we break even on that,” said Ed Regan of R-Y Timber, which holds the logging contract.

R-Y Timber operates sawmills in Livingston and Townsend and hired Kelly Logging to harvest the timber.

The mill pays the U.S. Forest Service 38 cents per ton for pulp logs, a stark contrast to $32 per ton for saw logs.

“The more timber that dies the less money the government is going to realize,” Regan said. “We're doing the best we can under the circumstances, but there is quite a bit of it that is not merchantable because of time.” Once mountain pine beetles infest and kill a tree, the time in which a log can be harvested for use as a saw log decreases each year, Regan said.

Salvageable logs from the watershed are hauled to R-Y mills and sawed for framing lumber.

Butte officials have supported the project saying it reduces the potential of wildfire impacting Basin Creek reservoir, the source of roughly 40 percent of Butte’s municipal water.

Tom Woodbury, a Missoula lawyer representing environmental groups Native Ecosystems Council, Wildwest Institute and Alliance for the Wild Rockies was not immediately available Monday for comment.

The project includes clear cutting 1,100 acres and building 14 miles of new roads. Woodbury has argued the work could impact black-backed woodpeckers, northern goshawks and the American pine martens.

- Reporter Justin Post may be reached via e-mail at Justin.post@lee.net.