Most of the forest burned in the Lolo Creek Complex fire belonged to Plum Creek Timber Co., which hopes to recover what it can of the blackened trees this fall.
“Of the almost 11,000 acres involved, we have just over 7,000 acres within the boundary of that fire,” Plum Creek Northwest regional vice president Tom Ray said. “We will be down there next week to take a look and see what’s salvageable. The company had periodically been harvesting on those lands over the past decade, and we had future harvest planned there. That’s going to change.”
Plum Creek owns land on both sides of Highway 12 where the fire burned, although its largest holdings are on the north side of the corridor. That remains the most active section of the fire, where steep terrain around Woodman Creek west of Lolo has hindered firefighters’ efforts.
The fire also burned 1,947 acres of U.S. Forest Service land and about 2,000 acres of other private property.
Ray said Plum Creek personnel worked with the incident command team during the fire’s early days, providing maps and local knowledge of the landscape and road network. Plum Creek also pays an annual firefighting fee assessment of about 25 cents an acre to the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation that works like insurance on all its approximately 900,000 acres of property in the state.
From The Missoulian: https://missoulian.com/news/local/plum-creek-to-salvage-acres-burned-by-lolo-complex-fire/article_e4bb3cc8-137b-11e3-b4af-001a4bcf887a.html