Eugene, Ore. — Talk of logging public forestland near the relatively new Thurston Hills Natural Area sparked — and continues to inflame — controversy last year.
Eugene-based Seneca met since last summer with some of the people who objected to the idea of the company logging on the site, said Casey Roscoe, the company’s senior vice president of public relations. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management then approved a plan for Seneca to cut trees on 92 acres of the 394-acre Pedal Power timber sale area.
“This is kind of the middle ground,” Roscoe said Monday, after the company announced it had signed a $1.09 million contract for the timber sale with the BLM. Roscoe said the harvest would begin in about a year or so.
But Oregon Wild and Cascadia Wildlands, a pair of environmental nonprofit groups in Eugene, still oppose the logging.
“We kind of think that the BLM has gone down the wrong path with this project,” said Doug Heiken, Oregon Wild conservation and restoration coordinator. He added that the group has an appeal pending with a federal board.
Oregon Wild and Cascadia Wildlands still contend that the BLM didn’t consider tree thinning as an option and instead rushed to award logging rights to a timber company.
Under the contract, Seneca will pay the BLM to log public land south of Highway 126 and about eight miles southeast of downtown Springfield. BLM officials expect the harvest to yield about 4 million board feet of timber.
Once logging wraps up in 2021, the BLM, along with Willamalane Park and Recreation District, the Disciples of Dirt Mountain Bike Club and other groups, will extend the existing Thurston Hills trail system onto the timber sale land. Doing so will add more than eight miles of new trails to the current six-mile system.
The agency manages the land for timber production and it was last logged from 2001 to 2005.
The trails will include a mix of intermediate and advanced mountain biking routes, according to the BLM. About two-thirds of the new trails will pass through forest and the other third will be through the harvested woods.
