Officials at the Swan River State Forest are pulling together a rapid effort to salvage timber that was blown down in a severe storm June 26.

The project is expected to recover up to 1.5 million board feet of varying species of trees, most of which were blown down in the area of the state’s already completed White Porcupine forest management project.

Swan State Forest Manager Dan Roberson said the storm came over the Mission Mountains and moved straight north, an unusual storm track for the Swan Valley.

“There were very high surface winds with it,” Roberson said. “There were severe downdrafts in some areas ... With the wet spring we had, the soils were saturated so that made trees come out of the ground a little easier.”

The project is mostly focused on trees that were totally or partially blown down, but it would also involve removing some standing trees in a project area covering 1,930 acres.

State officials are pushing for harvest to start in August and continue through October. Most of the targeted harvest areas would be accessible from existing roads used for the White Porcupine project. No new roads would need to built.

Roberson said there is urgency to the project.

“What we want to do is be able to salvage before the snow gets too deep up there,” he said. “When it’s all blown down like that it’s all jack-strawed and it gets dangerous for the loggers.”

There is another catch: the project is an area governed by a Grizzly Bear Conservation Agreement that applies a rotational schedule for forest management activities on state, federal and private forest lands.

Because the project area went out of rotation last March, meaning forest management activities are temporarily prohibited, the state is seeking an exception from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that would allow salvage logging to occur.

“We have to seek an exception to the agreement to even be up there in the fall period,” Roberson said. “That’s another reason we’re in a hurry.”

If the state doesn’t get an exception to the agreement, Roberson said, “we’re not going to be able to go very far with this thing. It will be substantially deteriorated by next year.”