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Work is under way to decommission one-third of those road miles and bring the others up to new forestry standards that reduce runoff harmful to water quality and fish.
Legacy Roads and Trails, a federal program launched by Congress in 2008, has kick-started that work in the Pacific Northwest and across the nation.
More than $6 million of the $180 million to tackle the backlog of U.S. Forest Service road work in the past three years has been directed to Olympic National Forest, most of that in the heavily logged Skokomish River Watershed.
During a project tour Tuesday, the sound of heavy machinery echoed through the immature forests in the South Fork Skokomish as construction crews put an old 6.35-mile logging road along Brown Creek to rest and refitted another 5 miles of logging road with 20 new culverts.
“I’m up here decommissioning and maintaining roads my dad built,” noted Dusty Watz, owner of JZ Construction in Union.
Watz said the legacy roads program has allowed him to keep eight employees busy who otherwise might be out of work.
“It’s either feast or famine in this business,” the burly, bearded road builder said. “I’d rather feast.”
Twenty-five years ago, and before the old-growth habitat of the northern spotted owl was protected from logging, the annual timber harvest in Olympic National Forest reached 250 million board feet or more. The timber revenues helped pay for road building and maintenance.
Today the harvest chugs along at no more than 15 million board feet, primarily thinning operations to improve habitat, said Olympic National Forest district ranger Dean Yoshina. The Forest Service road maintenance budget is almost nonexistent without special funding.
All that historic logging required building roads that deteriorate on the rainy Olympic Peninsula in a few short years. Lack of maintenance and the ravages of winter storms have shed tons of sediment from those roads, which often are on steep slopes next to streams.
The sediment smothers gravel and fills pools of water that salmon, steelhead and native trout need to spawn, rest and feed, said Shelley Spaulding of the Olympic Forest Coalition.
Pollution runoff from higher-elevation logging roads in the national forests also threatens habitat restoration work in the river valleys and estuaries below.
“We want to make sure the Forest Service roads aren’t contributing to water-quality problems downstream,” said Steve Bernath, who works on forestry issues for the state Department of Ecology.
In 2007, a coalition of state agencies, tribes and conservation groups formed the Washington Watershed Restoration Initiative and began searching for federal funding to tackle what they identified as a $300 million problem in national forests in the region.
They turned to Congressman Norm Dicks, D-Wash., the vice chairman of the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee. By making the program national instead of regional, Dicks was able to secure funding for the Legacy Roads and Trails Program.
“The Olympic National Forest is getting more money than any other national forest in the country, and it should – it has serious problems,” Dicks said during a tour of Skokomish River watershed restoration projects Tuesday. “That’s why we are up here – to keep the dirt out of the water.”
“The Legacy Roads and Trails program is essential,” said Mike Anderson, a senior resource analyst with the Wilderness Society and a member of the Skokomish Watershed Action Team. “We needed it to stop the landslides and runoff from the roads.”
To decommission a road, crews often have to haul away thousands of cubic yards of road-bed material, recontour steep slopes, and reseed and replant the old road bed.
When the work is next to a stream, it’s tricky, said habitat restoration specialist Ron Gold, a Skokomish Valley resident and Olympic National Forest contractor.
“We’re trying to protect the trees and vegetation in the riparian zone, so it’s kind of a balancing act,” he said.
Gold’s projects in Olympic National Forest are keeping 10 people employed this summer. The watershed coalition estimates that every $1 million of Legacy Roads and Trails funding creates 24 direct and indirect jobs.
About 10 percent of the roads removed in Olympic National Forest have been turned into trails, Olympic National Forest hydrologist Robin Stoddard said.
