Landowners seek resources for timber work, weed treatments at forest health field day

By Helena Dore, Bozeman Daily Chronicle Staff Writer

Link to Bozeman Daily Chronicle Article

Landowners around the Gallatin Valley are receiving new federal funding to thin trees and treat noxious weeds on their properties, and officials said during an event on Wednesday that more applicants are in the queue.

The Gallatin Watershed Council hosted the Forest Health Field Day on Wednesday evening in the parking lot at the Crosscut Mountain Sports Center, several miles north of the Bridger Foothills fire burn scar.

Two years ago, lightning smoldered in a tree near the “M,” sparking the wildfire in the Bridger Mountains. The fire spread to the east side of the range, growing to more than 8,000 acres. It destroyed 68 structures, including 30 homes.

Local landowners attended Wednesday’s event to learn more about financial and technical resources that are available to help them protect their properties from the impacts of future wildfires and to conduct timber and noxious weed work.

The group of about 25 people heard from staff members with the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Gallatin County Weed District, Gallatin County Emergency Management and Custer Gallatin National Forest.

Chris Mahoney, district conservationist for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, pointed out the Joint Chiefs’ Landscape Restoration Partnership program, which has helped officials to fund the Gallatin Valley Forest Resiliency and Watershed Health project.

This year, the Custer Gallatin National Forest and Natural Resources Conservation Service received close to $900,000 through the program. Between 2022 and 2024, the federal agencies are expecting to receive close to $4.5 million in Joint Chiefs’ funding.

The money is being put toward timber work and noxious weed treatments on both public and private land in the Bridgers, Bangtails and Gallatins. Approximately $500,000 is available for eligible private landowners each year for the next three years, Mahoney said.

Joint Chiefs’ funding gets distributed to landowners in the form of financial incentive payments, and the rates vary, depending on what contractors bid, according to Mahoney. The program is competitive, and officials accept applications year-round.

“We’re trying to get folks enough money to make this worth their while,” he said. “We’ve had more applications than we’ve had money this year. Not all the applications got funded.”

Applications that didn’t receive money this fiscal year were deferred to next year, and while there’s no guarantee that funding will be available for everyone, officials are working to make sure the process is fair.

“Our mission is helping people help the land,” Mahoney said.

Melanie Cota, a natural resource specialist with the Custer Gallatin National Forest, said Joint Chiefs’ funding is also going toward two major vegetation management projects on federal and city of Bozeman land.

That money is paying for helicopter treatments, which are a component of the 4,700 acre Bozeman Municipal Watershed project and the 2,300 acre North Bridger Forest Health project in the Gallatins, Bridgers and Bangtails.

Crews are thinning out small-diameter and large-diameter trees on city land along Bozeman Creek. RY Timber was awarded a contract for the work, and so far they’ve treated about 650 acres, Cota said.

Studies that were conducted about a decade ago indicated that the greatest threat to the city of Bozeman’s municipal water supply was ash and sediment runoff from a large wildfire along the Gallatin front, according to Cota.

The Bozeman Municipal Watershed project was developed to protect the city’s water, which mostly comes from Bozeman and Hyalite creeks. It’s also an attempt to keep the public safe in the event of a wildfire, since there is only one way in and out of Hyalite Canyon, she said.

Crews are plugging away at that project, Cota said, but they are also making progress on the North Bridgers Forest Health project, which was designed to reduce the impacts of insects and disease on trees in the Bridger and Bangtail ranges.

“We started that one last year, and about 690 acres of large-diameter thinning has been completed,” mainly in the Bridgers, she said. Sun Mountain Lumber — the company that was awarded the logging contract — is planning to move into the Bangtails soon.

Once the work is done, crews will return to the sites to remove temporary logging roads and spray for noxious weeds. Prescribed burning is a component of both projects, and officials are looking to start that either this fall or next spring, whenever the conditions are right.

Now the Custer Gallatin National Forest is working on developing another forest management project, which calls for more treatments along U.S. Highway 191, between Bozeman and Big Sky, Cota said.

Lilly McLane, watershed restoration director for the Gallatin Watershed Council, told landowners at Wednesday’s event that wildfire is a normal and natural process, but catastrophic mega-fires are a different story.

“When fire is causing deep, extensive, severe damage to the soil and to the vegetation, it can completely change the way that snowmelt and rainfall moves through the landscape,” McLane said. “It can wreak havoc on water quality, it can cause flash flooding events and it can exacerbate drought conditions.”

Managing the landscape for a healthy forest is managing for healthy water, she said. From a bird’s eye view, one can see that the land around the Gallatin Valley is a patchwork of private ownership, and that is overlaid with several layers of jurisdictional boundaries, McLane said.

“Water, weeds and wildfire don’t play by these rules,” she said. “They don’t care about our privacy — our independence. They move freely across our lines on a map.”