Chip Dennerlein points out how sunlight is being filtered by standing burned timber in a portion of the Mike’s Gulch salvage sale. He says this is allowing the forest to regenerate by providing shade from the intense heat of summer. (Mail Tribune / Jim Craven)

KERBY — Chip Dennerlein acknowledges that administrative appeals and lawsuits haven't stopped U.S. Forest Service plans to salvage fire-killed timber in the 2002 Biscuit fire's inventoried roadless area.

But the director of the Siskiyou Regional Education Project isn't giving up.

"If information, truth and knowledge count for anything, if modern forestry conservation and biology count for anything, the Forest Service will not sell this sale," he said while visiting the upper portion of Unit 3 in the Mike's Gulch sale on Tuesday.

Mike's Gulch, the first roadless area sale expected to be offered, will be put up for auction in mid-June.

"I can't imagine what real forestry and real forest science would drive this sale," Dennerlein said. "It's a bad idea."

As evidence, he and Siskiyou Project ecologist Rich Nawa pointed to the natural regrowth in the form of young conifers, wildflowers and other plants that are thriving now. Logging, then replanting the area, will only set back Mother Nature's work, they said.

It was four years ago in July that the Biscuit fire burned nearly half a million acres in a mosaic pattern largely in the Siskiyou portion of the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest.

In addition to the Mike's Gulch sale, the agency also plans to offer the larger Blackberry sale in early August. Both are in the Illinois Valley Ranger District west of Kerby.

Although Forest Service officials could not be reached for comment late Tuesday afternoon, an evaluation of the Biscuit fire timber salvage project released last month by the agency has concluded that no significant new information has surfaced in studies criticizing the salvage effort. The evaluation was in response to an environmental group's lawsuit to stop the salvage logging.

"The bottom line for us is that we didn't consider any of it to be new information that would have required us to go back and do a supplemental environmental impact statement," said Rob Shull, the timber and planning staff officer for the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, when the report was released.

He also said the salvage project is $7.6 million in the black, not $14 million in the red as concluded in a financial study by salvage opponents.

Shull observed the agency has only salvaged some 60 million board feet of timber out of the 377 million board feet it had planned to log. Thus far, about 3,600 acres have been harvested, well below the roughly 19,000 acres it had planned to log, he said.

But salvage opponents, who continue to argue the overall salvage project is an ecological mistake and an economical boondoggle, say entering the roadless area is particularly troublesome.

"This is part of the largest roadless forest complex left in the United States," Dennerlein said, referring to the lower 48. "This area should be protected, not destroyed."

Nawa agreed.

"This is an intact roadless area," he said. "We can hike toward the northwest five miles into the Kalmiopsis Wilderness Area. From there, we can go another 20 miles or so without finding a road.

"It's a big, wild area, one of the biggest left in the West," he added. "These roadless areas are the most valuable for human recreation and wildlife habitat. To purposefully fragment this area with clearcuts seems unnecessary."

Until now, the agency has not entered into roadless areas as part of the Biscuit fire salvage project, he noted.

The point, he said, is that human management is not needed in the roadless area.

"We know the forest can restore itself," Nawa said. "Look around. There is tan oak. You see clumps of bear grass all over. You see Douglas fir seedlings with some sugar pine and ponderosa pine, and some white fir.

"These snag forests will stay standing for 50 or 100 more years," he added. "In other words, we have a forest right here. While this snag forest is maintaining some integrity of this area for wildlife, this new forest reaps the benefits of the shade and nutrients as it grows up among these guys. That's the way it's happened in perpetuity."

Leaving the snag forest intact creates a "Venetian blind" effect which protects the young forest, Dennerlein said.

"These snags provide habitat," he added. "They produce filtered light for forest regeneration. They produce bugs. They produce cavities for birds. They put organic material back into those soil. We don't want to take that away."

E-mail:pfattig@mailtribune.com.