Thinning aimed at protecting Bluewater

By Jim Maniaci
Cibola County Bureau

GRANTS — The forestry community believes six tons of fuel per acre is way too much of a danger not only to humans, but to plants and animals around Bluewater Lake.

That's what exists in the area of almost 50 square-miles known as the Bluewater ecological system management project in the southern section of the Mount Taylor Ranger District. It is located south of Interstate 40 and north of N.M. Route 53

A tree thinning project to protect that part of the Cibola National Forest is the type of effort usually associated with richer metropolitan urban areas, known in government circles as a "wildlife-urban interface." But rural Cibola County has it, with several years effort by many people already devoted to bringing it to reality.

And when the Forest Service can find someone to bid on some trees, the Bluewater project will leap over a major hurdle.

As part of the 1,360 acres to be improved as a wildlife-urban interface protection for the communities at the lake, a 400-foot deep, 10-mile long, firebreak will be cut.

It will be part of the 31,615 acres in the project. This includes 25,365 acres listed as Ponderosa pine restoration, 2,565 acres as pinion or juniper to be controlled, 1,900 acres as upland meadows and 425 acres to be treated to improve the spotted owl's habitat.

The plan calls for the work to be finished by the summer of 2011.

It's all part of putting into effect the Forest Service's modern philosophy of returning the forests to what is known as their pre-European condition when there were fewer big-diameter trees and relatively little crowding with tangles of smaller trees and shrubs. Naturally caused fires are credited with keeping the crowding down.

Usually the blame for the crowded vegetation gets placed on a century's worth of immediately suppressing fires, timber logging a huge industry in the early part of the 20th Century in what would become Cibola County and grazing by cattle and horses.

Today's conditions, Cibola National Forest Timber Management Officer Tom Marks said, include:

• Trees per acre 110-165.
  
  
• Basal area 30-200-plus square-feet per acre. (Basal area is the surface at stump height.)
  
  
• Average tree diameter 5-18 inches.
  
  
• Canopy cover 35-75 percent.
  
  
• Fuel load 6 tons per acre.

These measurements compare to the desired conditions of:

• Trees per acre 20-40.
  
  
• Basal area 30-70 sq.-ft. per acre.
  
  
• Average diameter varies by age category.
  
  
• Canopy cover maximum of 35 percent.
  
  
• Fuel load too small to cause crown fires.

Marks points to the Bluewater effort as an attempt to avoid a catastrophe such as the famed gigantic Rodeo-Chediski fire in neighboring Arizona.

Marks has photos which show how the pre-treatment in that area helped save trees compared to a nearby untreated area which left only blackened skeletons of the larger trees as the classic example of a catastrophic forest fire.

The Bluewater effort uses strategies from the Ecological Restoration Institute to reduce the load and let pines trees grow through removal, either by logging or through controlled burns conducted under strictly prescribed standards, of pinion and other invading timbers. Pines that have invaded conifer territory would receive the same treatment.

A total of 10 authors from a wide variety of interests joined under the guidance of Craig D. Allen to issue the copyrighted article on restoration through the Ecological Society of America.

Key to the whole thing is staying flexible, using 16 principles as guidelines, not as rigid restrictions.

— To contact reporter Jim Maniaci, telephone 285-6184 in Grants or (505) 870-7775 (cellular).