Nearly a century of change has created a more flammable forest

Nearly a century of change has created a more flammable forest
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1909	1948

1958	1968

1979	1989

-Photos courtesy of U.S. Forest Service

In 1909, the U.S. Forest Service sent a photographer from its Washington, D.C., office to document the Lick Creek timber sale outside Hamilton. It was the federal government's first large timber sale (2,135 acres) in a low-elevation ponderosa pine forest. And the Big Blackfoot Milling Co., a subsidiary of the Anaconda Co., was angry because it had been outbid by an Idaho outfit. "The Company" wasn't accustomed to losing local timber.

Forest Service photographer K.D. Swan returned to the site in 1925, hoping to document the after-effects of the logging. He repeated the process in 1925, 1927, 1937 and 1938. Then others took over the task, returning time and again to the same photo point.

The Lick Creek photographs now show how logging and the exclusion of fire changed one Bitterroot Valley forest over the past 91 years.

Once a moderately spaced, fire-resistant forest of uneven-aged ponderosa pines, Lick Creek became a fire-prone thicket where the pines competed with shade-tolerant Douglas and grand fir for nutrition and moisture. Neither the pines nor the firs fared well; the forest became sickly.

Prior to the advent of wildland firefighting in the early 1900s, surface fires burned through the lower elevation forests of the Bitterroot Valley at intervals of between three and 30 years, killing the smallest trees but causing little damage (other than fire scars) to the larger pines.

At Lick Creek, one pine stump showed 16 fire scars between 1600 and 1895, an average fire interval of seven years. Scientists and land managers now believe that both the start-of-the-century timber sale and the subsequent lack of fire contributed to the changes at Lick Creek. Logging scraped off the surface vegetation and pine needle litter, exposing mineral soil. Several of the large pines left after logging died from windthrow or from mountain pine beetle attacks. The most heavily logged stands eventually grew thick with tall shrubs and Douglas firs - not with their original pines. (The large pine in the center of the 1948 photo was cut; its stump remains in the 1958 photo.)

Lick Creek is not an anomaly. There are 40 million acres of ailing ponderosa pine forests in the western United States. The Lick Creek photo point is 13 air miles southwest of Hamilton, in the Bitterroot National Forest.

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