In their opinion dated Aug. 19, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies attempts to deceive the reader by misrepresenting the Payette National Forest’s Lost Creek Boulder Creek project as a “timber sale” and a “massive logging project.”

In fact, the project was carefully designed with the close involvement of a diverse group of forest stakeholders, including environmental groups, to restore the forest’s natural resilience to wildfire and improve watershed health by better managing roads and trails.

The Alliance made the claim that the project would “bulldoze 25 miles of new road,” when in fact, the project will decommission 158 miles of existing road and constructs only 1.5 miles of new road to reroute from an existing, poorly designed road that would then be obliterated.

While it’s true that commercial removal of trees is part of this restoration project, the value of the trees, which are being removed to provide the proper spacing that would have occurred naturally if fire had not been removed from the ecosystem over 100 years ago, are being plowed back into the project area to remove non-commercial trees and brush, install fish-passable culverts in existing roads, eliminate roads that bleed sediment into streams and are no longer needed to manage these forests.

The Alliance also takes issue with the cost of the project, which is estimated to be around $277 per acre. However, a 2004 study showed the cost of suppressing wildfires in the Intermountain Region was $897 per acre.

A 2012 wildfire in this area cost $987 per acre to suppress. But studies have shown the true overall cost of wildfire to be 2 to 30 times the suppression cost alone. Being proactive in managing the vegetation on our public lands makes sense and is cost effective in the long run.

Rick Tholen,

Eagle, Idaho