When Rick Bass first found himself in the area referred to as Unit 72 by the United States Forest Service, he felt desperate and unanchored.

He was walking up what was once an overgrown logging road but had recently been clear-cut into a 200-foot-wide strip of barren land. Roughly one million board feet of sellable timber had been removed, and only a few of the largest larch remained. The Forest Service had cleared the area as a firebreak in response to the Davis fire, ignited by lightning in July 2018 in the remote, rugged Yaak Valley, which is situated within the Kootenai National Forest in northwest Montana.

Blowdown lined the edges of the firebreak. Trees once insulated from the elements were newly exposed and didn’t have the roots to sustain full-force winds.

Bass, a 66-year-old writer and conservationist, crossed a thick section of fallen old spruce, balancing himself on the larger trunks. After living in the Yaak Valley for nearly four decades, he’s sturdy, and no stranger to bushwhacking. Finally, he stepped out of the hot, dry clear-cut and through a cool, emerald-green portal. As far as recorded history could reveal, the forest he was entering—Unit 72—had never been logged.

Blanketed with ferns and dripping with moss, the forest looked like it was plucked from the Pacific Northwest and moved 350 miles inland. It’s one of the few remaining echoes of an ancient rainforest that tens of millions of years ago spread from the Washington coast into Montana. Grizzlies, lynx, and wolverines sniff and scratch through 800-year-old larch and some of the largest western hemlock, western red cedar, and Engelmann spruce in the valley. The area is one of only six habitats in the lower 48 states considered large and intact enough to support a grizzly bear population.

Relief washed over Bass. Then he saw long strips of flagging, and blue and orange paint slathered across some of the larger tree trunks. The Forest Service, it seemed, planned to log here too, in the old growth.

His first reaction was rage, but he had learned over the years that wrath was not an effective tool in the fight to protect these trees, which were too important to risk. They had survived centuries of wildfire, drought, pests, and logging that decimated other forests in the region.

Now they’re engulfed in discord, their fate to be decided by humans who can’t agree whether to actively manage the area through clear-cutting or to leave it alone.

In 2017, the USFS staff responsible for the Kootenai National Forest (KNF) proposed a sweeping 95,000-acre forest-management plan, called the Black Ram project, to “improve resilience and resistance to insects, disease, and fire.” Unit 72 would be effectively clear-cut. In the words of the KNF supervisors, they would “restart the stand” to improve the forest’s “ability to adjust to climate change.” This sparked an impassioned battle—on the ground and in federal court—between environmental advocates, local and federal governments, and other stakeholders. After seven years of disagreements, Unit 72 has yet to be logged, but it hasn’t been permanently protected, either.

With wildfire season becoming longer and more intense across the U.S. and Canada, people are desperate for answers, and the debate of how best to mitigate such fires rages on. Many at the Forest Service and in the timber industry argue that forest-clearing projects similar to the Black Ram are the answer. But it’s unclear whether these measures, which have gained popularity in the past decade, are always undertaken with the sincere goal of mitigating wildfire. Many conservationists believe that the Forest Service and the timber industry are capitalizing on the public’s fear, and that painting these projects—many of which include cutting down old growth—as restorative is merely a convenient way to justify logging.

A hefty volume could be filled with the years’ worth of court documents, scientific studies, and letters to the editor generated by the different sides of the Black Ram dispute. But let’s begin with the one thing everyone agreed on—that the Forest Service has mismanaged public forests for more than a century. A hundred years of fire suppression and immense amounts of logging have left our forests vulnerable to wildfire, insect infestation, and disease, all of which are compounded by a changing climate.

There’s good research—and people—on both sides of the Black Ram debate. The more important question is, who and what are we protecting these forests for?

The post In Montana, a Threatened Swath of Old Growth Fuels a Longstanding Debate appeared first on ���ϳԹ��� Online.

It’s no surprise that mountain towns across the West have a problem. The pandemic-fueled real estate boom has priced out locals from Bozeman, Montana, to Bend, Oregon. In the Colorado towns of Ouray and Telluride, housing shortages have led to worker shortages, forcing businesses to operate at reduced capacity. And in Crested Butte, Colorado, the 2021 school year began��without school buses, because the district can’t find anyone in the area to hire to drive them.

But for some mountain-town residents, this problem is nothing new.

Karla Garcia Gonzales moved from Peru to Telluride in 2004, where she began working as a cultural outreach coordinator and organizing for immigrants’ rights. For more than a decade she tried to bridge the Latino community with the wealth and opportunity that exist in Telluride. But she could never reconcile the fact that she could casually talk to a billionaire at the coffee shop and then walk down the block to help a single mother with multiple jobs figure out how to make rent.

San Miguel County, where Telluride is located, ranked eighth in the nation in highest income inequality, according to a . And it isn’t exactly the most racially equitable either. The Latino population there makes up a significant percentage of the local workforce but until recently not have access to federally funded affordable housing because many of them are undocumented, leaving few options in an already limited workforce-housing market. Many are forced to commute long distances or share housing. Meanwhile, Black residents make up less than 1 percent of the population.

Eventually, for Gonzalez, the wealth inequality was “too much in her face.” She worked tirelessly for her community but couldn’t afford to buy a home. In 2011, she moved to Denver, away from the friends and landscape she loved.

“The joys of skiing and small-mountain-town living have disproportionately been conferred to wealthy white people,” says Willa Williford, an affordable-housing consultant for mountain communities across Colorado.

Many of these mountain towns began to address racial and social inequities more seriously in response to the Black Lives Matter groundswell in 2020. Now they are struggling to house even the longtime locals (who are largely white and middle class). Yet what feels like two separate losing battles actually creates one collective opportunity. If these places can find a way to stop catering to the ultrarich and instead create more accessible, just, and equitable atmospheres for BIPOC residents and visitors, they may have a chance to save what is left of their middle-class souls.

In Williford’s opinion, the first thing to address is affordable housing. In Telluride, where the median household income is $66,000 and the average residential property sells for $2.1 million (not to mention the many houses listed in the area at $36 million), the pain of inequality is felt by nearly all of the full-time residents making local wages.

Williford says that many mountain communities where she works are keenly aware of the ways that state and federal resources don’t adequately address housing needs; as a result, local leaders are innovating solutions that could be applied elsewhere. In Steamboat Springs, is working on housing-advocacy programs for its��Latino community. In Leadville, are negotiating with a mining company to donate land for a project aimed at increasing the rental pool. In Crested Butte, is exploring ideas to provide housing specifically to attract BIPOC folks. And in Bozeman, creators of an innovative, are hoping to further prove that smart, equitable growth is possible.

“I think we need to do a white paper on the cost to these places of keeping people out,” says Christine Walker, former director of the Jackson/Teton County Housing Authority, in Wyoming, and now a workforce-housing consultant. She notes that to be inclusive, you must increase density, a concept that most mountain communities fiercely resist to such an extent that residents have often relocated in an effort to escape crowds. In the end, though, this exclusivity hurts all members of the community.

Low-density zoning policies in many mountain-resort towns favor large, expensive single-family homes that are often used as second homes and vacation rentals. (Generally one- to two-thirds of housing stock in ski-resort communities aren’t occupied year-round, according to a conducted by the Colorado Association of Ski Towns and the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments.) The simple equation of finite land and increased demand for housing means that a local wage is not enough to buy a home, and workers are forced downvalley. Small-town perks like biking to work or living next to friends are lost. Business owners struggle to find employees. Water and energy are used inefficiently, traffic increases, carbon dioxide emissions rise, and wildlife collisions increase.

When a community has to import its workforce, it leaves residents, commuters, and visitors exposed. For example, when a massive storm is expected to roll through the Tetons, emergency responders employed in Jackson—many of whom live outside Teton County—have to decide whether they will go home for the night and risk sketchy or closed roads in the morning, or stay somewhere in town (local hotels offer discounted rates for these occasions). One such storm could prohibit 20 percent of teachers from getting to school, 18 of 21��Teton County patrol officers from reporting for duty, and almost half of its hospital employees and critical workers, like snowplow drivers and mechanics, from getting to their jobs.

In San Francisco, a city notorious for its absurd housing prices and the resulting gentrification, a 2018 report showed that an average teacher could afford just 0.7 percent of the available housing, and first responders could afford 2.4 percent of the currently listed housing. To help solve their housing crises, voters a ballot measure that increased taxes on property sales worth over $10 million. This revenue will help fund rent relief and affordable housing for low- and middle-income residents. Seattle passed in July, imposing an additional tax on high-income earners that will then go toward community development, local business assistance, and workforce housing. Vancouver, British Columbia, Oakland, California, and Washington, D.C., have implemented taxes on homes that remain vacant a majority of the year. Mountain towns need to follow suit.

Fortunately, some are. A Teton County legislator is proposing a second-home fee, and Breckenridge, Colorado, is buying houses in town and converting them to deed-restricted dwellings to increase the number of diverse inhabitants year-round. Other places, including Summit County, Colorado, Truckee, California, and Steamboat Springs and Crested Butte, have all elected to tax themselves and/or visitors to create dedicated local funding sources for housing.

An increasing amount of demonstrate that individuals who interact with different socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds, whether at school, work, or in neighborhoods, fare better in mental health, personal finances, academics, and employment rates. There’s evidence that corporations with better gender and racial representation have higher profits and are more , that children who attend more integrated schools develop more , and that diversity fosters more and consensus building.

Inclusivity is also good for business. Even Rob Katz, the CEO of Vail Resorts, admits��that the ski industry has waited far too long to invest in communities of color. Katz wrote an to his employees, acknowledging that the lack of diversity in the ski industry is “not only a moral and societal issue, but a business issue.” The U.S. Census Bureau projects that more than half of the country will be non-white by 2044, and according to a report by the National Ski Areas Association, visits by people of color have remained fairly stagnant in the past decade and are not tracking with the growth of minority populations in the U.S. Katz recognizes that the ski industry must broaden its base to more skiers of color if it wants to survive. Similarly, the mountain-biking, climbing, hunting, and fishing industries, all of which feed mountain towns’ tourism economies, have remained mostly white while the face of America becomes increasingly diverse.

Geographically isolated mountain communities once thought exclusionary practices could insulate them from modern and urban hardships—this is clearly no longer the case. Safety nets that previously held communities together are being stretched thin and tearing as wealth pours in and inequitable practices endure. Gonzales stresses that we cannot use old solutions for new problems, and that these communities have the power to level the playing field. She believes that bringing people to the table “not because they think like you or look like you, but because they are different” is key to the survival of mountain towns. “We are in this mess together,” she says. “Let’s work together, so we can learn and build together.”

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In March, as spring-break travel and the coronavirus outbreak��were simultaneously ramping up across the United States, thousands of visitors flocked to mountain towns��across the West. As a result, rural areas like Sun Valley, Idaho;��Park City, Utah;��and Crested Butte, Colorado, soon became early COVID-19 hot spots. By the end of that��month, 17,000-person Gunnison County, home to Crested Butte Mountain Resort, had the highest coronavirus infection rate per capita in the state��and the .

But unlike many early rural hot spots that shakily weighed difficult decisions between a few positive coronavirus cases and spring-break income, residents in��Gunnison Valley—a string of small communities nestled between the Elk, West Elk, and Sawatch Ranges in west-central Colorado—knew exactly what to do. Despite a lack of guidance from state and federal governments, a sparsity of data, and insufficient testing, county officials swiftly imposed some of the strictest public-health measures in the nation, banning short-term rentals, closing nonessential businesses, prohibiting visitors by law,��and cutting off public-land access to nonresidents. Anyone caught breaking the rules was subject to up to . Many locals attribute the fast action to the community’s collective memory of another deadly pandemic.

In the fall of 1918, the Spanish flu was ��faster than wildfire. The virus killed up to 10 percent of the population in many cities in the state��and eventually took the lives of nearly ��worldwide.

But Gunnison Valley managed to almost completely elude the deadliest pandemic in recent history by mandating what the ��at the time��a “quarantine against all the world.”

Before the valley had even a single case of the Spanish flu, the board of health closed all schools and churches and barred gatherings of more than four people. Barricades and fences went up on the main highways. Lanterns and signs warned motorists to drive straight through, and train passengers who stepped foot onto the platform were forced to quarantine for up to five days or risk jail time.��

When Colorado leadership succumbed to political pressures to reopen businesses less than two months after the initial lockdown, causing a major spike in illnesses and deaths, Gunnison remained quarantined for four months. As a result, it��saw , while nearly 8,000 died elsewhere across the state.��

Fast-forward 101 springs. On March 12, the county confirmed three positive coronavirus cases. Within the week, hundreds of valley residents reported��that they had symptoms. Large signs along Highway 135 read ��and “No Tourist Gunnison COVID-19.” Notices posted on the doors of the Gunnison airport read:��“Visitors to Gunnison County are directed to return home immediately.”

By the time Colorado governor Jared Polis issued a statewide stay-at-home order two weeks later, on March 25, his regulations almost matched Gunnison’s restrictions. Joni Reynolds, Gunnison County’s health and human services director, says state and other��county��officials have been reaching out to them for guidance.

“Gunnison’s response to the Spanish flu has been infamous throughout my career in public health,” says Reynolds. “It helped remind me of the rugged community, the communal spirit, and the expectations that we will pull together to navigate this event.”

On April 3, as wealthy urbanites across the country , Gunnison took the even bolder step of barring the��county’s second homeowners from traveling to their properties. Non-full-time residents were required to return to primary residences elsewhere.��

“There are approximately 4,000 second-home units in the valley,” , “and if each became occupied with two people, it would add 50 percent to the county’s current population.”(County officials have made some exceptions for non-primary residents who were already present before the pandemic began.)��

“Every hunk of bread means something to us,” says��CJ Malcolm, chief of emergency services at Gunnison Valley Hospital. The county has a seasonal economy, and many local businesses make most of their money for the year during a few key months, March being one of them.��

Despite the tough restrictions, Malcolm��says��that “there’s been very little grumbling” and that “the support, even from small businesses, is unbelievable.” He moved to the valley almost five years ago and is still struck by the community’s connective tissue.

Local businesses have been offering free lunches to EMS��providers, first responders, and the emergency-operation center. A rum distillery adapted its��operation��to make sanitizing products. Almost 600 people have volunteered to take phone calls, monitor patients, and deliver food and medicine. Residents��and frequent visitors alike are supporting businesses online by buying gift certificates and donating to the “CB Tip Jar,”��which has raised almost $50,000 for restaurant service workers.��

Walking through the streets of Crested Butte and Gunnison, people stand awkwardly far from each other while chatting near the post office. Parents on bikes tow their kids on sleds through slushy snow. In the middle of Elk Avenue, Crested Butte’s main street, which would normally be crowded with cars and people, a woman throws a Frisbee to her dog. A couple of blocks down, two men play hockey from opposite sides of the street. The marquee at the closed movie theater reads��“You Are Essential.”

While Gunnison Valley has remained fairly tame, tensions between locals and part-timers are being exacerbated. Some full-time residents with out-of-town license plates have been verbally harassed by people who think they’re visitors. Others have reported their neighbors to the police if they suspect they’re breaking public-health orders. So far��the cops have given warnings��but no citations.

While some second homeowners are empathetic to the plight of their small mountain getaway, others find it an overreach and a breach of property rights. One anonymous second homeowner��told the editor of the Crested Butte News that he “will sue and never come back.”��

Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, recently ��to the Gunnison Department of Health and Human Services, stating, “The banishment of nonresident Texas homeowners is entirely unconstitutional and unacceptable….��We would appreciate confirmation that you will modify your order to protect the rights of non-resident homeowners.”��

Mathew Hoyt, Gunnison’s deputy county attorney,����that the county’s orders are authorized by Colorado and federal law. In a , Colorado attorney general Phil Weiser backed Gunnison’s decision: “Don’t mess with Colorado…. The��Gunnison County public health order is constitutional and calls for collaborative problem solving.”��

Gunnison County’s��Reynolds��believes the public-health orders are working and that the community has done a good job managing and limiting the spread of the coronavirus—numbers of COVID-19 patients being admitted to the hospital are leveling off, and the number of people reporting��symptoms has sharply declined. As of April 27, there were 105 confirmed cases, 1,260 people who had reported themselves as symptomatic, and 32 hospitalizations.��

“For a community like ours, it reinforces the idea of, when there is an all-hands-on-deck moment, you show up and you take care of things because your community needs you to, not necessarily because it only impacts you personally,”��says��Gunnison County commissioner Jonathan Houck.

But Reynolds warns that it’s��not over yet. She says the county is most likely on a “narrow plateau” and that stricter public-health orders must be maintained to ensure that the county doesn’t��see another surge in cases.

Gunnison Valley has never been an easy place to live. Its lowest elevation is 7,700 feet. It’s consistently one of the coldest places in the nation. Its economy has always reckoned with uncontrollable factors, like harsh winters lasting up to eight months.

Bound by topography and forged by cold,��residents embody��different types of grit. Commissioner Houck believes that community members will continue to do what is needed to avoid a resurgence of cases,��even if restrictions remain in effect longer than other places.��“We did it in 1918,” he says, “and from the ground up, folks here are able to say, ‘Yeah, this is who we are.’”

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