Forest Service denies pleas to chainsaw logjams in Pasayten Wilderness

Backlogs of maintenance and routes littered with massive numbers of toppled trees have dramatically decreased trails available for exploring the Pasayten Wilderness in Washington.

Some horsemen say equally impenetrable barriers of bureaucracy are keeping the U.S. Forest Service from addressing the need for emergency use of chainsaws.

They say a one- or two-season blitz with restricted tools would help wilderness managers catch up to the ravages of wildfires.

Trails aren’t just becoming inaccessible, the horsemen say. They’re being lost, maybe forever.

The 1964 Wilderness Act created the National Wilderness Preservation System, which has grown to protect more than 800 wilderness areas totaling 5% of the nation’s land.

The federal law generally prohibits use of motorized or mechanized vehicles and equipment – including chainsaws – within wilderness boundaries.

Advocacy groups have challenged emergency permits to allow motorized equipment in designated wilderness.

In 2019, for example, a coalition of conservation groups sued the Forest Service for authorizing chainsaws to clear obstructed trails in the Weminuche and South San Juan Wilderness of Colorado.

“The concept of wilderness as codified in the Wilderness Act is to restrain the impulse to use our industrial might, to allow wilderness to be left untrammeled by humans and dominated by natural processes,” the group Wilderness Watch said in a news release.

Despite having authorized emergency exceptions in the past for the Pasayten Wilderness, Forest Service officials say they aren’t likely to allow chainsaw use for current situations in which a mile of trail might be clogged by a thousand blowdowns.

“Wilderness is fundamentally different,” said Tracy Calizon, Pacific Northwest Region assistant director for recreation based in Portland. The Forest Service generally lets natural processes prevail after events such as wildfires, she said.

“But portions of the trail system haven’t been logged out for 10 years or more,” said Aaron Burkhart, owner of Early Winters Outfitting based in Mazama, where he’s been packing guests and work crews into the backcountry for 41 years.

“Things are changing. Every year it seems we’re experiencing more and more fires. Really good crews with hand saws can’t catch up,” he said. “We have to respond by changing the way we address what’s going on or we’re going to keep losing trails.”

Asked about the status of trails that are neglected year after year, Calizon said: “Disasters provide an opportunity for reassessment of the trail system on the ground … what trails are the right trails to continue utilizing and maintaining.”

Packers, the workhorses for getting jobs done in the wilderness, bristle at that hint that some trails are being purposely abandoned by neglect.

The Pasayten encompasses more than 531,000 acres flanked on the west by the North Cascades and sweeping east to the more-open plateaus of the Okanogan.

It hugs more than 50 miles of the U.S.-Canada border north of Winthrop.

The wilderness, which is within the 3.8-million-acre Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, includes some 150 peaks higher than 7,500 feet, about 160 bodies of water plus creeks and deep stream basins.

It’s prime habitat for critters including mule deer, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, wolves and bears.

Backcountry travelers also consider it a piece of heaven on earth, but it’s getting harder than hell to penetrate.

In the four decades that Spokane attorney Jed Morris and a group of friends have been joining for annual backcountry trips, their planning has changed.

“We have to do more research to see what’s not on fire as well as what’s open where fires burned in the past,” Morris said. “You can’t just look at a map.”

Last year they had to abandon a Burkhart-supported wilderness backpacking trip.

A trail crew using crosscut saws was stalled and didn’t get the main trail logged out as scheduled, he said.

“It was hard enough for us to get through on foot. The outfitter tried but couldn’t get his pack string up there,” he said. “I certainly understood his frustration.

“When you don’t know if trails are going to be logged out, it’s real hard to book trips. There used to be about 10 packers who worked in the Pasayten. Now there’s only two.”

Fires impact trails

“The state of the Pasayten trail system leaves a lot to be desired,” acknowledged Chris Furr, Methow Valley District ranger. “Large fires over the last 20 years have had a large impact.

“Where we used to go on big loops with one crew to log out now takes us multiple hitches. The scope and scale of our effort has increased over that time and the work has changed.

“Since we primarily must focus on logging out, we can’t do as much work on brush, water bars, tread and bridges. Consequently, the overall condition of the trails is declining.”

During the short summer season, Forest Service crews and a legion of volunteers annually log out about 200 miles of the 650 miles of official trails in the Pasayten.

Much of the log-out occurs on the same main access trails each year while side trails and other main trails deeper in the wilderness get no attention.

Wenatchee-area outfitter Jason Ridlon, crew leader and a packer for a Back Country Horsemen of Washington Hotshot Crew, has been out this season on several hitches to open trails.

First week of June he packed in tools and supplies for a crew out of Billy Goat Corral, the first of 18 to 20 days he’ll devote this summer in coordination with the Forest Service supporting trail work in the Methow Valley District.

“Getting through the wilderness is impossible,” he said, repeating an observation he’s been making for years. “Too many places are impassible.”

The Hotshots’ first mission this year was to log out the popular trail to Hidden Lakes, an area severely impacted by the 2017 Diamond Creek Fire.

“What we ran into is pretty typical,” Ridlon said. “We got over Lucky Pass and along 8 miles from the trailhead, but there were too many trees down to make it all the way. In 4 miles you can have 600 trees to deal with. It’s slow going.”

One or more crews from different volunteer groups will have to follow up.

Last year, following a crew that had cleared several hundred downed trees from the first few miles, the Washington Trail Association’s Lost Trails Found Crew also targeted Hidden Lakes.

In a grueling eight-day hitch they reported removal of 1,601 blowdowns from just over a mile of trail.

Funding slashed

Forest Service funding for recreation and trail maintenance nationwide began a substantial decline in the 1990s, but the trail situation in the Pasayten really went up in smoke in years after the lightning-caused 2003 Farewell Fire (81,400 acres), which torched the popular Chewuch River Trail.

That was followed in 2006 by the lightning-caused Tripod Complex Fire (175,184 acres) and Tatoosh Complex Fire (51,671 acres).

In 2017, the human-caused Diamond Creek Fire (128,272 acres) carried on the trend of megafires that blackened the landscape.

Last year, six lightning-caused fires collectively called the Northwest Pasayten Wilderness Complex Fires burned 18,000 acres.

“Those fires leave a lot of trees that keep coming down for years,” said Landon Decker, Methow Valley District trails manager.

The Pasayten has been known to be home for the largest population of Canada lynx in the lower 48 states. But researchers say that may be changing as wildfires take a mounting toll on the landscape.

Horse packers feel like their livelihood is being torched, too.

“We’ve lost hundreds of miles of trails to backlogged maintenance, and we’re losing more every year,” said Jess Darwood of Darwood Outfitters, a third-generation packer.

“It’s not just about the number of fires, but about the increased severity of the fires over the past 20 years,” Decker said.

This leaves the landscape more vulnerable to rain washing out trails in the erosive soils and steep terrain, the trails manager said.

“We maintain a lot of trails outside of wilderness, too,” said Decker, noting that Pasayten trails account for about half the 1,121 miles of trails on the Methow Valley District.

“Volunteers do 50% of maintenance on the forest and about 40% on the district,” Furr said.

“Still,” Decker said, “there’s more work than we have time or people to do.”

Wilderness rules

Use of chainsaws would help the Forest Service catch up, horsemen said, but officials are standing firm.

“Maintenance of recreation trails is a priority for the Forest Service and clearing them after these fires and events is important,” Calizon said, “but it does not qualify as emergency per the laws.”

Okanogan-Wenatchee Forest Supervisor Kristin Bail would have to give the nod to any emergency exemptions. A request to interview her for this story was denied.

Instead, public affairs officer Victoria Wilkins said by email that a forest supervisor has limited authority to authorize use of motorized or mechanized equipment in wilderness “in emergencies where the situation involves an inescapable urgency and temporary need for speed beyond that available by primitive means.

“Categories include fire suppression, health and safety, law enforcement involving serious crime or fugitive pursuit, removal of deceased persons, and aircraft accident investigations’ as well as certain other exceptions.”

Outfitters and other horsemen say health and safety and temporary need for speed applies to the Pasayten.

Ridlon cited a hitch last year when his 12 Hotshots using high-lift jacks and crosscut saws needed two days to work their way through what he called “a 1-mile nightmare of blowdowns like jackstraw piled 10 feet high.

Some of these logjams would be not only faster but safer to cut out with chainsaws,” he said.

That opinion was echoed in 2017 by Meg Trebon, the Methow Valley Ranger District special uses and minerals administrator.

At that time, she listed several reasons why the district was authorizing emergency use of chainsaws for a logjam on Andrews Creek Trail.

“Using a chainsaw allows crews to make multiple cuts to relieve tension in trees that are jackstrawed all over the place,” she told the Methow Valley News. “It minimizes the exposure to people.”

Another safety factor stems from the reduced options to link trails into longer routes, Darwood said.

“Fewer routes mean fewer options for firefighting, for one thing,” he said. “And with so many trails blocked, it’s hard enough to keep a main trail cleared much less link to side trails. This concentrates use on a few trails creating more visitor interactions.”

“Use of wild places in Washington is increasing,” Ridlon said. “If more trails are open, people disperse and they find more of what wilderness is all about – seclusion.”

Ridlon said it’s a safety issue having so many cases of only one way in and the same way out of the wilderness.

“There’s often no alternate route out in case of storm, landslide or fire,” he said.

Burkhart said other factors may be in play.

“I get the feeling there’s an undercurrent to shut down access to portions of the wilderness,” Burkhart said. “In effect, that’s what’s happening.”