Inside the Battle Over Old Growth in Montana’s Yaak Valley

Anthony South walks toward Unit 72 of the Black Ram Project, August 1, 2023; Aerial View of Yaak area clearcut from from a flyover with Ecoflight on October 4, 2023. This is from one of the five ongoing/proposed large scale Forest Service logging projects in the Yaak area (O’Brien, Lower Yaak, Sheep Project Area). This photo shows 2 recent clearcuts with older clearcuts above. The thin vertical strips of trees are left to protect the streams that flows through.

(Photos: Forest Woodward)

In Montana, a Threatened Swath of Old Growth Fuels a Longstanding Debate

Published: Oct 3, 2024

In the remote, heavily logged Yaak Valley, an unlikely stand of old growth sits at the center of a debate about what a forest is for—and how best to protect it

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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?

Rick Bass on a forest walk in the Yaak (Photo: RA Beattie)

Rick Bass wasn’t always an environmentalist. Before he moved to the Yaak Valley, he was a geologist. Born and raised in Texas, Bass fell in love with the West when he went to Utah for college. He studied geology and wildlife science, and after graduating in 1979 began working for an independent oil and gas prospector in the southeast, mapping potential drilling sites on private land. He loved that the job required him to become intimately familiar with landscapes, and that he could spend his mornings writing before clocking in for the day.

At 29, a powerful nostalgia drew him back to the mountains. An avid hunter who enjoyed quiet places, he drove north and then west until he found a place with huge swaths of wilderness and very few people. There, in a small writing cabin on a marsh in the Yaak Valley, he launched his prolific writing career. He was called a “literary titan” by The New York Times, and his work, which includes fiction, memoir, and essays, often focuses on his own backyard.

“It’s an incredibly unique landscape, and it really stimulates your mind,” Bass says. “The more you learn of it, the more amazed you are by the elegance and complexity, the story of the ecosystem.” But while his relationship with the land inspired his writing, it also distracted him from it.

When Bass moved to the Yaak in 1987, he quickly realized how aggressively the valley was being logged. Even then, the area felt like “the last of the last,” a fragment of an intact ecosystem. “I thought I just needed to write a couple of essays and this oversight—the lack of any protected areas in the Yaak—would be corrected in short order,” he says. He soon became one of the Yaak’s leading wilderness activists.

In the late eighties, the meetings were toxic, he recalls. People would intentionally intimidate him, and dismiss any ideas that might be considered conservation oriented. But his experience hunting and working in an extractive industry gave him some credibility with the locals, because it placed him outside a recognizable environmentalist box. “There was some value in the fact that it wasn’t just the traditional choir preaching at them,” he says.

In 1987, logging in the U.S. reached its absolute peak on public land. For context, 2.9 billion board feet were harvested in national forests in 2023, the most in 25 years. But in 1987, that number was 12.7 billion board feet, an amount most people, even the Forest Service itself, understood was unsustainable. It was enough lumber to build roughly 800,000 single-family homes.

The year 1987 also saw an increase in public environmental outrage, with numerous tree-sits, blockades, and protests in Washington, , and Oregon. Bass was just beginning his advocacy work, and he was unaware of larger efforts to protect forests and old growth. He was simply one of a handful of people who’d imagined a different future for the Yaak.

During those early years of advocacy, he spent countless hours making phone calls, passing out flyers, writing letters to elected officials, and trying to get even just a couple dozen folks to show up for meetings. He would wake up early to write and then get pulled into activism work. When hunting season came around in the fall, he’d retreat into the woods for a few months in search of personal restoration.

As Bass writes in The Book of Yaak, published in 1996, “There is a rhythm that we must all find, in loving and fighting for a place—the integration of advocacy into your ‘other,’ peaceful life. I do not think it will always seem like a balanced or even pleasant rhythm.”

Thirty-seven years have passed since Bass moved to the Yaak. He’s now executive director of the Yaak Valley Forest Council, a grassroots nonprofit he and a handful of other locals founded in 1997. Since then the YVFC has repaired and restored many critical riparian habitats in the Yaak with its Headwaters Restoration project. Conservation education is a key part of the organization’s work, as well.

“Our real battle has been the slow, intergenerational work of encouraging people to feel comfortable talking about the value of wild country. The Yaak is an incredibly special ecosystem—a place worth protecting not for its recreational or timber values, but for its unique and seething biodiversity,” Bass says.

Perhaps most important, the YVFC has successfully defended, at least for the short term, thousands of acres of forest.

Bass is fluent in science, policy, and law—languages he and others repeatedly used to try and obtain lasting protection for the Yaak Valley’s forests. When the Black Ram proposal came around, Bass thought that perhaps he should try something different. “I wanted to bring in people who could be moved by beauty, which is everybody,” he says. He’d fight the battle with art. This time, he thought, maybe he could find a way to amplify the voices of the trees themselves.

The Yaak Valley Forest Council office in August, 2023 (Photo: Forest Woodward)

The Black Ram controversy has all the usual suspects of a big environmental dustup: conservationists, Native tribes, an industry with something to gain, local and federal governments, and, importantly, wildlife. In the Yaak, that includes a recovering grizzly population that biologists have been working to stabilize since the 1980s.

Each interest group claims to share the same goal: to protect the forest’s health. They just can’t agree on how to do that. The Forest Service, county commissioners, and the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho—which joined a lawsuit in support of the Forest Service and the Black Ram project—believe this should mean active management. Conservationists, on the other hand, consider the forest a resilient ecosystem best protected from intervention. The grizzlies can’t speak on their own behalf, of course, but Forest Service acknowledge that the project is “likely to adversely affect” them.

The Forest Service’s active management proposal includes prescribed burns, stream restoration, and thinning in areas of the forest choked out from clear-cut regrowth gone wrong. (After a clearcut, trees can grow back all at once and too close together, leading to a crowded forest of stunted trees.) But the Black Ram proposal also includes almost 4,000 acres of commercial harvest, of which 700 to 950 acres are old-growth and mature forest. Half of that area—including Unit 72—is slated to be “clearcut with reserves,” which means that all but approximately 10 to 34 trees per acre would be felled.

Herein lies the Forest Service’s other objective with the Black Ram project. That felled timber, around 57 million board feet, would likely sell for between $40 million and $60 million, at current market prices.

For much of the Forest Service’s history, timber sales have been a significant budgetary source. Since the 1940s, the Forest Service has had strong financial incentives to log, it’s an important part of their business model. Thus, for decades, the agency has managed trees like 40-year crop rotations, favoring board feet sold over other management goals such as biodiversity and wildfire resilience. Now Forest Service deputy chief Chris French says that the agency is shifting its focus from economically driven harvests to reducing wildfire risk and creating long-term resiliency. He also stresses that mitigating wildfires is critical to saving old growth: according to , since 2000, wildfires have decimated 1,076 square miles of old-growth forest nationwide, while logging claimed just under 16 square miles.

The trouble is that wildfire mitigation—which most ecologists agree requires both thinning and prescribed burns—costs money. Protecting forests from fire typically involves pre-commercial thinning, or harvesting smaller trees that generally can’t be sold. But to make money, and replenish their budget, the Forest Service needs to do thinning and logging that have commercial potential, and harvest bigger trees.

“We need to leverage the value that’s in the forest, which reduces the cost [of wildfire mitigation] to the American taxpayer,” says French. He offers an example: If the Forest Service thinned and burned 1,000 acres without obtaining any sort of timber harvest, it might cost $1,000 per acre. But with timber harvesting part of the equation, the cost could go down to $100 per acre—and the Forest Service could thin ten times more acreage.

This makes sense until you consider the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which authorized the Forest Service to spend billions on forest management. But French says that the newly available money has been difficult to manage—the Forest Service now has the money to operate at a larger scale, but doesn’t have the staff, or enough available contractors, to plan and carry out the work they might now be able to afford. Many national forests are still relying on old budget paradigms while they wait for new systems to get up and running.

Additionally, some members of the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho, like its attorney general, William Barquin, believe that the economic health of the community needs to be considered in tandem with the forest. He explained that the local economy depends on forestry. “We have an obligation to not only take care of the ecosystem, but to consider that humans are part of that ecosystem,” he told me.

Tribal vice chairman Gary Aitken Jr. also emphasized this balance. “To repair the forest, the whole habitat, sometimes that puts a little bit of a pinch on different species, but it’s never meant to detriment them,” he told me. (The tribe is not directly involved in the timber industry, and not all Indigenous citizens with ancestral ties to the Yaak agree with that stance. Some have spoken out against the Black Ram project.)

At this point, it’s hard to decipher which economic incentives are winning out. This is where a big management project like Black Ram that combines restoration and commercial logging gets sticky. At best the approach strikes a balance between economic health and the forest’s health. At worst it’s a disingenuous way to continue logging old-growth and mature forests under the guise of mitigation and restoration.

Another wrinkle: in certain cases, fuel-reduction projects are given less rigorous, quicker environmental review by the Forest Service. Sometimes this expedited approval is necessary—like when fires threatened dry old-growth sequoias in California. But some environmental groups worry that the Forest Service the more lenient review to log mature and old-growth forests. In the case of Black Ram and many other large logging projects, the Forest Service was able to skirt the standard in-depth “environmental impact statement” and instead use a less rigorous “environmental assessment” when it approved the project.

While the Yaak Valley Forest Council, the organization that Bass directs, agrees that a few aspects of the Black Ram project might be helpful, such as prescribed burns, it believes that the logging of old-growth and mature forests, along with road building in grizzly habitat, outweigh the theoretical benefits. Beginning in 2022, five groups filed a series of lawsuits against the KNF arguing that the project would threaten the vulnerable population of grizzly bears and release significant amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

More scenes from the Yaak Valley Forest Council office (Photo: Forest Woodward)

Rick Bass, director of the Yaak Valley Forest Council (Photo: RA Beattie)

Anthony South stops mid-sentence and tilts his head to listen to a bird call. A pileated woodpecker, perhaps? The ground absorbs the sound of his footsteps as he moves gently over decaying trees covered in moss. South, who grew up in the area, is the headwaters director of the Yaak Valley Forest Council, where he has worked for the past decade. He has lived in the Yaak for most of those ten years, largely without electricity or running water, and every drainage, mountain, creek, and road is mapped in his mind.

When he resumes talking, he explains that Unit 72 isn’t designated as old growth by the Forest Service. Standing there, dwarfed by the towering trees, I find this hard to believe. But the KNF has its own definition of old growth. The wording is laid out in a complicated that has received few updates since 1992. Under its guidelines, which considers factors including tree size, number of large trees per acre, forest structure, minimum age of trees, and more, the Forest Service says Unit 72 doesn’t qualify. Yet, two independent forest ecology experts disagree. Herb Hammond of Silva Ecosystem Consultants and Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at the Earth Island Institute’s Wild Heritage Project have concluded in separate reports that Unit 72 has significant old growth characteristics. DellaSala called it a “no-brainer” that Unit 72 should be classified as old growth.

A critical part of our inability to protect old growth is our inability to define it; no two ecosystems are the same, so there’s no single definition that works for all of them. Additionally, what constitutes an old tree varies drastically among species: bristlecone pines can live 5,000 years, while cottonwoods usually make it just past 100. Some definitions of old growth emphasize lack of disturbance by humans, while others specify minimum age or size, soil moisture, tree density, understory complexity, or slope aspect. Most definitions agree that old-growth forests are structurally advanced and have exceptional levels of biodiversity compared with logged forests.

In 2022, President Biden issued an executive order tasking the forest service and the Bureau of Land Management with establishing standardized definitions for old-growth and mature forests, and conducting a nationwide inventory. He also proposed prohibiting commercial logging of old-growth forests in all 128 of the U.S.’s national forests.

South drops to the ground to admire a feathery lichen the size of his head. He explains that the forest is full of shade-and-water-loving cedar, hemlock, and Engelmann spruce, along with species more tolerant to drought, heat, and sunlight like western larch and western white pine. The Black Ram Project plans to repopulate Unit 72 with only the latter, and other drought-tolerant species like ponderosa. The hope is that the new forest will be more resilient to wildfire and climate change.

But as the independent reports from DellaSala and Hammond point out, the existing forest is moisture-laden, diverse, and old—and as a result is to fire. Additionally, many scientists argue that mature and old-growth forests are a critical refuge in a changing climate. A conducted in Oregon found that old growth creates cooler microclimates, which can help local flora and fauna cope with rising temperatures. Furthermore, there’s a growing body of evidence that older forests store more carbon than young forests do and play a crucial role in staving off climate swings.

The Biden administration’s unprecedented efforts to protect old growth from logging appeased neither side. , called old-growth logging a “negligible threat” and claimed that the Biden administration’s efforts were a distraction from the “wildfire and forest health crisis” and would further complicate forest management. Meanwhile, environmental groups pointed out that the proposed rules don’t protect mature forests—future old growth.

An area that has been “clearcut with reserves” in the Spread Creek drainage in the Yaak. This is the same management prescription proposed for Unit 72. (Photo: Forest Woodward)

Anthony South, Headwaters Director for YVFCl, points out the Black Ram project area on a map. (Photo: Forest Woodward)

As national dialogue whipsawed between opposing views about old growth and wildfire, back in the Yaak a federal judge made a precedent-setting decision about the Black Ram project. In August 2023, Judge Donald W. Molloy found that the KNF did not accurately account for the cumulative effects of the project, specifically with regard to grizzlies and carbon emissions. In a strongly worded decision, the judge pointed out that the KNF was improperly comparing the environmental impact of Black Ram with the massive carbon stocks stored in entire national forests—a comparison that made the significant carbon footprint of Black Ram only seem “infinitesimal,” as KNF put it. He also concluded that the prevailing logic of most Forest Service logging projects—that young trees will eventually grow to store the same amount of carbon once stored in the felled trees—is no longer sufficient. In his ruling, Molloy said, “Logging causes immediate carbon losses, while re-sequestration happens slowly over time, time that the planet may not have.”

“This is the first time a court has asked the Forest Service, in the context of a timber sale, to take a hard look at the carbon effects of logging projects,” says Kristine Akland, northern Rockies director and senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the conservation groups that sued the Forest Service over the Black Ram project.

The Yaak Valley Forest Council took the court decision as a win, but it was short-lived. In March 2024, the Forest Service appealed the case on process around grizzly bear issues, not on the climate arguments.

“The Kootenai National Forest’s appeal on Black Ram is unsurprising from an agency so feckless with its drive to meet board-foot targets rather than conserve biodiversity,” says Bass. “The KNF continues to be in full flight from best available science on both grizzly bears and the vital importance of old and mature forests in slowing the rate of climate change. It’s clear in their rejection of the Biden administration’s executive order to protect old and mature forests that the agency is racing to clear-cut Black Ram in the Yaak before the project can be discovered.”

Notably, Black Ram is only one of five adjacent logging projects in the Yaak, collectively totaling more than 300,000 acres, an area slightly larger than the city of Los Angeles. Three of the projects are already underway, while the Black Ram and Knotty Pine projects remain tied up in court.

Black Ram presents a false dichotomy. Bass believes that if the Forest Service did its job well, we wouldn’t have to choose between logging and grizzlies, or old-growth protection and wildfire mitigation. So what’s his proposed solution?

Rick Bass playing the Black Ram guitar (Photo: RA Beattie)

Seven years after it was first proposed that the Black Ram forest be clear-cut, Bass’s anger has subsided. While he doesn’t agree with or trust the Forest Service, he also has some gratitude for them. They were the ones who first alerted him to the forest in Unit 72, after all. While he’s currently spending more of his time on activism than on writing, he no longer sees art and activism as opposing forces. He has the calm assuredness of someone who’s integrated disparate parts of himself.

The day I met Bass, he hadn’’t slept much—he’d been up late the night before, getting a guitar lesson from Jeff Bridges (yes, the Dude). Bass’s instrument of choice is dark amber, emblazoned with grizzly prints that saunter up its neck. He had it made with wood from one of the fallen spruces at the edge of the Unit 72 firebreak. It’s breathtaking, both visually and acoustically. “It’s fast, light, hot, bright, yet also deeply rich and low,” says Bass. He calls it the Black Ram guitar.

The instrument is now on its own national tour, and has been played by local and famous musicians alike, including the singer Maggie Rogers, who call attention to the Yaak—and the pressures it faces—when they perform. Bridges has become an ambassador for the forest and is helping create an additional line of Black Ram guitars and also travel the country.

The project is part of Bass’s attempt to accomplish conservation through cultural change. Instead of simply shaking their fingers, the YVFC wants to cultivate celebration and creation. “We’re making a compelling and beautiful case—our best case about why this forest is worth preserving and learning from.”

To achieve this goal, the YVFC began crafting a proposal to create the nation’s first Climate Refuge, which would include Unit 72 but expand well beyond it, too. The Kootenai National Forest, which makes up just over 2 percent of Montana’s land base, holds 25 percent of its listed sensitive species. “How can you not use the word refuge?” Bass asks.

The YVFC has begun community outreach about what this first Climate Refuge could look like, consulting residents, scientists, educators, land managers, and the , a group dedicated to accelerating science and management of climate change refugia.

In the long term, Bass envisions designating and protecting more old and mature forests as refuges along the Canadian border, stringing together a necklace of living, porous, protected areas managed specifically for biodiversity, carbon storage, and animal migration.

While the group doesn’t yet know what management will look like, it does know one thing—there would be no commercial logging. It also firmly believes the refuge should harmonize science and policy with art and education. It has already brought artists into the area, including , who wrote a poem about Unit 72 after visiting the area and learning about the Black Ram proposal.

For Bass, the key to a better future is imagination, not just human ingenuity. “These ideas, do they come from us? Do they come from the landscape? Do they come from a relationship between us and the landscape? I would suggest the latter,” he says. “It’s not just this person’s or this person’s idea. It’s a relationship between species.”

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In Montana, a Threatened Swath of Old Growth Fuels a Longstanding Debate

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