YALE — PacifiCorp has bought almost 1,000 acres of elk habitat from Longview Fibre southwest of Mount St. Helens area as part of its licensing requirement for the dams on the North Fork of the Lewis River.
Each parcel is slightly less than 500 acres. Total cost of the property was $5,225,000.
The Skamania County parcel is 480 acres costing $625,000 north of Swift Reservoir and west of Marble Mountain, adjoining the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.
In Cowlitz County, the utility bought 490 acres at Saddle Mountain just west of Yale Dam for $4.6 million.
The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, a Montana-based conservation organization, identified the lands and negotiated the purchase. The transaction closed in late December.
Both parcels are near residental and recreational development, but will remain open.
PacifiCorp will manage the lands in a partnership with the elk foundation. The goal will be increased forage for elk, deer, bear and cougars. Eagles, bats, salamander and turtles also live on the lands.
“Conserving and managing this habitat on the southwest slopes of Mount St. Helens, where elk are threatened by forage loss from forest succession and habitat loss to development, is a major accomplishment,” said Bill Richardson, lands program manager for the elk foundation in Washington and Oregon.
The Saddle Mountain tract is mostly second-growth timber, adjacent to a heavily used elk foraging area, said Kirk Naylor, a wildlife scientist for PacifiCorp.
“Had these 490 acres been developed or even logged aggressively as private timber land can some times be, it would have been a loss to a far greater area,” Naylor said.
Richardson said the Saddle Mountain parcel is an important migration corridor for elk to move to other PacfiCorp wildlife lands in the North Lewis valley.
The Saddle Mountain piece contains 30-acre Frasier pond.
“It was created by beaver dams and has been stabilized with gabions (wire baskets filled with rocks),” Richardson said. “It’s created amazing snag habitat for cavity-nesting wildlife.”
The Swift parcel is recently logged land, “but that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Richardson said.
With so much of the land south of Mount St. Helens being part of the federal national volcanic monument, there’s a lack of logging that results in forage needed by deer and elk, he said.
“PacifiCorp will enhance this,” Richardson said. “They’ll put in understory grass and forbs and create openings and thinnings to keep the forage available and usable.”
The Swift property includes about 30 acres of wet meadows,.
The utility company does “the best job on the West Coast” of managing its wildlife lands, he said.
PacifiCorp and foundation also worked together in 2009 to acquire 52 acres in Yale valley, said Ray Croswell of Washougal, a consultant for the Elk Foundation. The land is meadow that also helps support elk from the Mount St. Helens herd.
PacifiCorp received a 50-year license renewal for the Lewis River dams in 2008.
