USFS closes area to public
By Jeff Barnard
ASSOCIATED PRESS

2:27 p.m. March 14, 2005

GRANTS PASS, Ore. - After a third day of arrests, the Siskiyou National Forest closed public access Monday to an area where protesters have been blocking loggers from harvesting trees in an old growth forest reserve burned by the 2002 Biscuit fire.

The order from forest Supervisor Scott Conroy came after U.S. Forest Service law enforcement agents and Josephine County sheriff's deputies arrested 16 women at the Green Bridge over the Illinois River, located about 25 miles southwest of Grants Pass and just north of the California border.

"Conflicts at this fire salvage timber sale have resulted in a public safety hazard for timber workers, visitors and protesters and this road needs to be closed to protect the health and safety of people near the area," Conroy said in a statement.

The closure order runs through July 1 and covers the 700 acres of the Fiddler timber sale, plus three Forest Service roads leading to it.

Protesters have been trying to prevent a crew of timber fallers from going to work on the Fiddler timber sale in an old growth forest reserve bordering the Kalmiopsis Wilderness since a federal court injunction was lifted March 7. Eleven people were arrested March 7 and 11 more last Wednesday.

Protesters want to stop any logging before rulings are made in two federal lawsuits challenging the logging, Laurel Sutherlin, a spokesman for the Oxygen Collective, said from the protest site.

"We have seen so many egregious violations of the public trust surrounding this project and have every reason to believe that will continue," he said of the closure order. "The citizens have every need and right to be actively monitoring this project."

A hearing is scheduled for March 22 in U.S District Court in Medford on the merits of a lawsuit challenging the Forest Service decision to log inside an old growth forest reserve burned by the 2002 Biscuit fire, the biggest in the nation that year at 500,000 acres.

A 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals injunction linked to that case had stopped the logging, but was lifted March 7.

A federal judge in Eugene has yet to rule on a request for a temporary restraining order from a separate case.

John West, president of Silver Creek Logging Co., said it is time for people to let him get to work.

"They might slow us down, but we're still winning the war," West told the Grants Pass Daily Courier.

A total of about 75 people protesting the logging were at the Green Bridge before dawn, including a group of women who sat down in the roadway, witnesses said.

By midmorning, law enforcement officers took into custody 18 people, all women. Two women, one due to give birth this week, and her birth assistant, were released at the scene. Sixteen others were taken to the Josephine County Jail in Grants Pass.

By about 12:30 p.m., a network of ropes blocking the bridge and connected to a woman suspended over the water were cleared so loggers could drive by, but they were stopped again up the road by a barricade of rocks and logs and three women locked together in the road, Sutherlin said.

Another protester was on a platform suspended in a green tree on one of the logging units, Sutherlin added.

Among those arrested was Joan Norman, 72, of Cave Junction, who was arrested March 7 while blocking the bridge in a metal lawn chair, said Sutherlin.

"I don't know what else to do to stop this destruction to our forests, so I'm going to sit down in front of the trucks again," Norman said in a statement.

The Siskiyou National Forest drew up plans to sell a total of 370 million board feet of timber on about 20,000 acres of the Biscuit fire, 4 percent of the overall burn area, but is unlikely to come anywhere close to that goal, Forest Service spokesman Tom Lavagnino said.

Forest Service officials say logging will speed the restoration of old growth forest by removing dead trees that will fall to the ground and burn in the future and generating revenue to pay for planting young trees and controlling brush.

Environmentalists counter that the logging will choke salmon streams with erosion and the dead timber has rotted so much over three years it will fall far short of producing enough money to pay for restoration work. They argue that the big trees that will be taken out are the building blocks of a new forest.

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