“Damned if you do and damned if you don’t” should have been the headline for the story in Sunday’s Herald instead of “State sued over timber sale near Wallace Falls State Park.”
All of the legal processes have been done on the 191-acre site prior to the timber sale, when at the last minute a 25-acre chunk was removed to make it nicer for the Wallace Falls State Park. People worked hard at getting a solution, a compromise was arrived at, and the sale went on. But now we have some environmental hardliners crying foul because the timber sale is different than approved, it is smaller!
I’ve been on the trails at Wallace Falls State Park, and I enjoy the logging road trail on the return as fully as the trip up the walking trail. A mixed use forest is fun to walk through especially since the use of mother trees for replanting. There will be more wildlife to view since the feed changes with the forest growth. The state forest are harvested for our benefit, and that benefit is reduced whenever we pay the legal expense of the objector and reduce the harvest of trees.
The state Department of Natural Resources is opening more of its properties to trails for the public by financing the trail and/or trailhead parking. If this interferes with timber harvest, this program may change. I don’t want to see that. Will the environmental groups allow all state residents a use of the land, including those of us who drive more than we can walk and the fellows who work in those mills?
Chuck Best
Duvall
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