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SHOSHONE NATIONAL FOREST Forest Service agrees with challenge to timber sale By MICHAEL MILSTEIN Gazette Wyoming Bureau CODY, Wyo. - Three environmental groups that appealed the Shoshone National Forest's planned Ellsbury Timber Sale northwest of Cody were right when they argued that the forest's environmental analysis and decision to offer the sale was faulty, the U.S. Forest Service's regional office has ruled. In a decision issued May 27, Deputy Regional Forester Tom Thompson said his office had found "several deficiencies" in the Shoshone Forest's environmental assessment and decision notice for the sale and said the documents must be revised and then reissued to the public. "No implementation associated with the Ellsbury Timber Sale is to take place pending issuance of a new analysis and decision document," Thompson wrote. The environmental groups American Wildlands, the Wyoming Outdoor Council and the Alliance for the Wild Rockies appealed District Ranger Brent Larson's decision to authorize the timber sale encompassing 1.3 million board feet of timber above the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone River. The groups said the logging on 140 acres would damage wildlife habitat and threaten the quality of the Clarks Fork, a national wild and scenic river. They argued that the logging would disturb habitat for the same rare plants that dwell in the national forest's Swamp Lake Botanical Area, would impact a known elk travel corridor and would eliminate habitat for threatened, endangered and sensitive species such as the lynx, grizzly bear, fisher and spotted frog. Forest Service officials had said the timber sale would help control the spread of bark beetles that have burrowed into and damaged some trees in the area and would support the forest's mandate to provide reasonable amounts of commercial timber. Steve Jones of the Wyoming Outdoor Council said the groups were pleased with Thompson's ruling because the timber sale is planned for an area that has already endured logging and forest fires. "This whole idea of logging the forest back to health is a pretty suspicious concept," he said. Thompson's decision upheld the arguments of the environmental groups on four main points and ordered forest officials to revise those points of their analysis.
"Because these four requirements and any additional analysis that the district wishes to include could alter the public's comments or invite new ones important for the decision-maker to consider, a new 30-day comment period on the revised EA is necessary," Thompson wrote. "Any new decision which may be issued regarding the Ellsbury Timber Sale will be subject to appeal." Forest Service officials said earlier that they had not fully evaluated a "no-action" alternative because they understood that such an alternative did not have to be fully analyzed in an environmental assessment as it would in a full-scale environmental impact statement. Shoshone National Forest Supervisor Rebecca Aus said on Friday that she planned to look into that question more carefully but said she was confident that her staff could revise their analysis of the Ellsbury Timber Sale in accordance with Thompson's direction. "There are some things we need to fix and I believe they will be fairly easy to fix," she said.
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