Environmentalists are opposing logging on 600 acres of the Bybee timber sale. It's just outside the national park boundary. They say some of the trees in those stands are over 300 years old.
credit:
Environment Oregon
Environmental groups are asking want the Forest Service to reconsider a proposed timber sale just outside the western boundary west of Crater Lake National Park.
Most of the proposed Bybee timber sale isn’t controversial stuff. The Forest Service wants to thin stands of trees in a part of the Siskiyou National Forest that it logged in the sixties and seventies.
George Sexton is with the Klamath Siskiyou Wildlands Center. He says the problem is 600 acres the Forest Service wants to log more intensively, just outside the national park boundary. He says some of the trees in those stands are over 300 years old.
“There are little fingers of ancient forest that come out of the park, and this proposal would build new logging roads right up to the edge of the park to access those last unlogged wild lands.”
The Forest Service says the logging would occur in small patches that visitors to Crater Lake National Park probably won’t notice. And it says removing some older trees is necessary, because they are infected with mistletoe and root rot.
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