Jefferson County Commissioner Leonard Wortman leans against a stock trailer and laments the state of the timber on the National Forest land that surrounds him, in nearly every direction, on a recent morning. “When I was kid I worked for all the ranchers, and everybody ran cows up in the mountains,” Wortman says. “And we used to go through the trees on a dead run on a horse, chasing them, because they were open. Now you can’t even ride a horse through some of that stuff, where you used to be able to go through it at a dead run. And that’s the way the forest is supposed to be.”
While the national forests of Jefferson County will likely never be the way Wortman remembers them, Dave Sabo, district ranger for the Butte Ranger District of Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, says two projects — one recently completed and one seemingly on the verge of being approved — go some way toward getting things back to how Wortman and others want them.
And the projects — which both relied on the input of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge Working Group, a committee of diverse stakeholders who seek to come to a consensus about Forest Service projects — show the potential for collaboration to help work get done on public land.
Wortman is a member of the BDWG, as is Tony Colter of Deer Lodge’s Sun Mountain Lumber, Nick Gevock of Helena’s Montana Wildlife Federation, Boulder-area rancher John Kountz and Mark Thompson of Butte’s Montana Resources, among others who represent area conservation, timber, wildlife, agricultural, motorized recreation, mining and governmental interests.
The group’s ultimate goal, Colter says, is to get people behind the Forest Service taking action on public lands: “We’re trying to make these projects more palatable to the public.” According to Colter, members of the BDWG were involved in the planning process for both the Boulder Lowlands and the Red Rocks projects, taking field trips to the project areas and offering their input about what they wanted to see the Forest Service accomplish.