When Marty Stromberg first started managing her 160-acre tract that locals call Jack Pine Flats, she could turn a little profit from the trees that went to the nearby mill.
Back in the 1980s, she did most of her logging with help from her big team of horses. By the mid-1990s, the prices for lumber had dipped far enough that she lost money every time she went to thin her forest just west of Conner. “My goal was always to have a nice looking forest here,” she said. “I kept waiting for the log market to come back up, but it never has.”
In the interim, the massive fires of 2000 burned through thousands of acres all around her, which, of course, heightened her concern over fire. And then the bark beetles arrived and many of her trees turned red. “I didn’t want to lose my forest,” Stromberg said. “The only way to fight the beetles was to open the forest up enough so the remaining trees could get enough moisture and the air flow improved.”
And so she – like hundreds of other small private landowners – turned to the Montana Department of Natural Resources fuel reduction grant program, which offers a 50-percent cost-share to landowners wanting to make their forested lands more fire resistant and healthier. On Wednesday, Stromberg took a group of local, state and federal officials on a tour of a 25 acre parcel that was thinned last year.
Beetles had been taking a few trees a year in the recent past, but things changed quickly when the Douglas fir bark beetle arrived on her land. “Over the last two years, their numbers grew expeditiously,” she said. “It was pretty shocking. We had to act fast.”
From the Ravalli Republic: https://ravallirepublic.com/news/local/article_889e7ffc-0025-11e5-ac13-df83ab3b888f.html