- CIBECUE - The forests above
this creekside village on the Fort Apache Reservation buzz with industry
this winter as the White Mountain Apaches try to salvage a century's worth
of burned timber in six months.
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- The attempt has already killed two men. Logger Rex L.
Hendren, 42, of Kooskia, Idaho, died Dec. 11 when a tree he felled knocked
him 70 feet down a slope.
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- An Apache man, Rothwell Gooday, 21, of Carrizo, died
the next day when his vehicle collided with a logging truck.
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- Authorities urge caution this winter on reservation roads
and state highways in the White Mountains. Logging trucks, 60,000 pounds
of steel and timber each, will make more than 100 runs a day to railheads
in Globe and Snowflake, adding to traffic flowing to Apache mills at Cibecue
and Whiteriver.
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- The recent accidents add to the Apaches' profound sense
of loss at the death of a third of their forest in this summer's Rodeo-Chediski
fire.
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- The fire, largest in Arizona's history, began a few miles
from here June 18. Fire burned 276,507 acres of Apache land, 462,606 acres
in all.
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- Just north of the reservation, in the Mogollon Rim and
White Mountains tourist towns, the fire destroyed 500 buildings. And less
than a month before, the 30,563-acre Bullock Fire threatened hundreds of
homes on Tucson's Mount Lemmon.
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- Even as they're busy harvesting trees on the reservation,
or rebuilding second homes in nearby Overgaard, or marveling at how close
the flames came to Summerhaven, people across Arizona's high country are
looking ahead in fear.
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- They're using this winter lull between the annual fire
seasons to dig out and prepare, knowing that 80 years of fire suppression
- coupled with extended drought - means the chance for another conflagration
is just a few months away.
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- At Cibecue on the reservation, where 100 percent of the
people still speak Apache and remain connected to the old ways, the loss
so far is much more than economic, say its two tribal councilmen, Ronnie
Lupe and Jacob Henry.
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- The fire, kept west of Arizona 60 by a massive effort
to protect the towns of the White Mountains, burned most of the Cibecue
district, home to the tribe's most remote and most traditional villages.
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- Lupe, 72, points to his head. "The word we have
for our mental process, n,, is the same as the word we have for land. We
cannot be separated from our land."
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- Lupe grew up in Cibecue, now a 20-mile drive on a paved
road from Arizona 60, but much more isolated then.
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- This fire, blamed by authorities on an Apache arsonist
and a lost woman's signal fire, destroyed more than valuable timber. "It
burned our living room, destroyed our swimming holes, our sacred places,"
Lupe said.
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- "If you look at the burned areas, that is where
I live. It was wonderful to walk in any direction, the mountains, the canyons,
and just soak in the solitude and communicate with the land itself.
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- "I'll give you an example," he said. "There
is a place called White Springs. When you walk up to that, you hear it.
When no soul is there, the spring is quiet. We say, 'That's the water people
telling the forest we have company.' "
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- Springs were fouled and creeks clogged when flood followed
fire in the tribe's watercourses. This summer's monsoon rainfall was below
average, but the rain that fell on the moonscape of charred trees and ash-covered
ground ran off quickly. The perennial streams - Cibecue, Carrizo and Canyon
creeks - overflowed their banks, ripping out vegetation and creating wide,
silt-covered, barren flood plains.
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- The watershed will repair itself in time, said Bureau
of Indian Affairs forester Frederick von Bonin, but for the next five to
10 years, further flooding is a danger.
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- Repair of the forest will take much longer. For each
of the next 10 years, the tribe plans to plant 1.2 million seedlings to
reforest an estimated 73,000 acres that have been severely burned.
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- The damaged timber, 95 percent of it ponderosa pine,
is being offered at fire-sale prices. The tribe hopes to collect about
$5 million from its outside contracts. The value of its lost lumber is
estimated at $152 million.
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- When this emergency harvest is completed, timber operations,
the tribe's economic mainstay, will be severely limited for the next century.
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- It's a blow to an area that is already economically devastated.
Timber is one of the few year-round enterprises, employing up to 350 Apaches
on a reservation where the family poverty rate is more than four times
that of Pima County and the median household income, $18,903, is about
half Pima County's $36,758, according to the 2000 U.S. Census.
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- The White Mountain Apache Tribe took the rare step of
seeking outside help in salvaging the burned trees. When a helicopter logging
operation on the reservation hits its peak next month, it will fill 120
logging loads a day.
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- Half will head south on Arizona 60, through the Salt
River Canyon, to the railhead at Globe. The other half will go north to
another railhead at Snowflake.
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- The lumber is bound for two California sawmills operated
by Sierra Pacific, which bought the rights to 194.7 million board feet
of the Apaches' timber. If all of it is harvested, Sierra will pay the
tribe more than $3.8 million.
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- Another 44.7 million board feet went to TCB Construction
of Mississippi for a bid price of $1.15 million.
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- The Fort Apache Timber Co. has the rights to another
123 million board feet, which it will haul to its mills at Cibecue and
Whiteriver.
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- In a normal year, Fort Apache is the only lumber company
working these forests and averages about 40 million board feet.
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- While this massive salvage effort represents full employment
for loggers and mill operators in the White Mountains, it is a one-shot
deal.
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- Future timber sales will be small. "We are looking
at 150 years to go back to the same kind of commerce," said Ben H.
Nuvamsa, superintendent of the Fort Apache Agency of the Bureau of Indian
Affairs. "The west end has basically been taken out of operability."
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- Nuvamsa, whose agency manages the forest in trust for
the White Mountain Apache Tribe, said he doubts the tribe will be able
to keep its Cibecue mill operating after the salvage is completed.
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- Because timber must be harvested before burned trees
succumb to insects and fungus that reduce its value to nothing, it is being
sold, for the first time in half a century, to outside contractors.
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- Sierra Pacific hired Columbia Helicopters Inc. to do
its logging. Columbia is deploying 57 loggers and four Boeing Vertol 107
helicopters in the high slopes above Cibecue, said Gary Hammitt, Columbia's
on-site project manager. The operation was going full- bore before last
week's snowstorms grounded the helicopters and kept the trucks off the
web of forest roads.
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- Von Bonin said crews from the Bureau of Indian Affairs
and the tribe are working ahead of the cutters. Normally, they identify
cutting areas. For this effort, they found it easier to simply flag areas
that can't be cut.
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- They include stands with less than 25 percent mortality
where forest critters most likely took refuge after the fire, and buffer
zones 400 feet from perennial streams or 200 feet from intermittent ones.
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- They've identified "owl areas," potential mating
sites for the endangered spotted owl where 25 to 75 percent of the trees
are dead. They must be worked first, so that loggers are out of them before
the spring mating season.
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- Within the allowed areas, trees with 15 percent of their
crowns still green must be spared.
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- The tribe's foresters have met with the loggers to instruct
them on identifying the doomed trees. On a tour of the area Dec. 19, von
Bonin found those decisions easy to make. There were plenty of tall trees
with no crown left.
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- Downed, charred trees 80 to 110 feet tall, littered the
steep slopes of Cibecue Canyon. The trees had been growing for 90 to 220
years, von Bonin said.
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- Logs cut from the trees weigh up to 5,000 pounds. The
helicopter, trailing a 200-foot cable, lifts them one or two at a time
and drops them near the road where they are stacked and loaded onto trucks
by giant bulldozer-like "grabbers."
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- A few of the stacked logs already showed signs of "bluing,"
or decay.
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- Beetles, loopers and aphids were already attacking as
the state's prolonged drought limited the trees' ability to "pitch-out"
and create a natural bug repellent, said von Bonin.
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- The beetles introduce a fungus that turns the wood blue,
reducing its value within the first year. There is a market for this "blue
pine" as paneling, but it's a small one. Within two years, said von
Bonin, further insect damage will reduce the trees' value to zero.
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- That pushed the BIA to develop a plan for harvesting
the timber in four months. It usually takes two years to prepare a timber
sale, said Nuvamsa.
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- The tribe hired a private contractor to do an environmental
assessment because the overtaxed BIA, which has detoured resources away
from other areas and spent about $8 million on the fire and its aftermath,
could not have done it on time.
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- The logging, however, is not being done in haste, said
Hammitt, of Columbia Helicopters. Idaho logger Hendren was an experienced
hand who didn't rush his cuts, Hammitt said. "That's one of the worst
parts about this job," he said. "It can happen to anyone, any
time."
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- Loggers are 27 times more likely to be killed than the
average for workers in all other jobs, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics.
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- As devastating as the fire was, firefighting officials
were always proud of the fact that it produced no casualties. But the final
toll of the Rodeo-Chediski fire has yet to be recorded.
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