It was hard to finish a rant by Keith Hammer in the local papers recently about Stoltze Land and Lumber logging in the South Fork drainage.

Stoltze, like so many timber companies in western Montana, is struggling to bring in enough logs to employ their workers. Recent layoffs announced by both Plum Creek and Stoltze attest to the stranglehold on logging by extremists.

We hired Stoltze to log our property up the North Fork a few years ago and couldn’t have asked for a more professional crew. They cleaned out the mess of trees for enhanced wildlife habitat and recognized the need to keep diversity on our property, from young trees to old and multiple species.

State forests have been managed in similar ways for years, much better than surrounding federal lands. History shows these end up burning and provide nothing but a load of carbon to our atmosphere and burnt snags on the ground. It’s time to get back to the notion that our forests are there to used, cleaned out and provide a healthy diversity.

It’s a good thing Mr. Hammer didn’t talk with Whitefish city officials before they made a deal with Stoltze to protect the city’s watershed, mostly land in the Stoltze family holdings. Stoltze has been a willing partner with the city and will be logging the watershed land using best practices into the future. The same needs to be done in all the drainages of the Flathead.

— Dee Brown, of Hungry Horse, represent SD 2