Forestry land donated to Wenatchee National Forest

Sun | Local

SEATTLE - Two land deeds turned over to the Wenatchee National Forest represent an unusual partnership between environmentalists and timber companies to save old-growth forests.

The donation of about 3-square miles of forest in the Cascade Range is an alternative to land exchanges between the government and timber companies that environmentalists have opposed.

"It's a model for the whole United States," U.S. Rep. Jennifer Dunn, R-Wash., said "It brings together constituencies that don't usually work together."

The two parcels turned over were Negro Creek, 1,241 acres near Wenatchee, and Jim Creek, a 1-square-mile parcel south of Cle Elum. Both contain old-growth trees, spotted owls and other animals that need old-growth habitat.

Sizable privately financed land donations to the Forest Service have been rare in Washington state. Except for the land donated Wednesday and earlier this year by the Cascades Conservation Partnership, you'd have to go back to the 1930s to find a similar event, said Fred Munson, partnership executive director. That gift involved a man strapped by the Depression who gave up his land because he couldn't pay the property taxes.

The partnership purchased Negro Creek for about $1.5 million from Longview Fibre Co., and Jim Creek for $1.28 million from Plum Creek Timber.

The partnership wants to raise $25 million in private donations and so far has come up with $11 million. Using that money and another $100 million it hopes is allocated by Congress, it wants to buy about 75,000 acres linking the Alpine Lakes Wilderness north of Interstate 90 with the Mount Rainier area.

Several years ago, the federal government tried exchanging land near Mount St. Helens for timberland around I-90, but environmentalists protested. The deal was scaled back considerably, and environmentalists and timber interests agreed to collaborate to get both government and private money to buy the land from timber companies.