The Swan View Coalition and Friends of the Wild Swan last month filed an intent to sue  the Forest Service and Trump Administration over a timber and road building project on the West Side of the Hungry Horse Reservoir, claiming the project fails to consider impacts to threatened bull trout and grizzly bears.

The project, which was OK’d by the Forest Service in March, includes about 2,000 acres of various degrees of logging, including 321 acres of “seed tree” harvest, where just a few “seed” trees are left per acre.

It also includes a significant amount of white bark pine restoration, about 873 acres, which is done by hand and 4,654 acres of prescribed burns.

It’s expected to yield about 6.25 million board feet of timber over several years.

All of the work is planned for the west side of the Hungry Horse Reservoir, with most of the cutting units right along the road itself or the bays of the reservoir.

All told, the plan is for 1.6 miles of roads using historic road beds and another 3.1 miles of new roads. All will be closed to motorized use after the timber harvest. The new roads are also close to the West Side Reservoir Road.

The Forest Service said the idea of the project is to reduce wildlife risk near the Heinrude community near Wounded Buck, Alice, Forest and Aeneas Creeks.

The plan is also to replace four culverts that are restricting  fish migration into spawning streams.

But the environmental groups have argued successfully in court in the past that the Forest Service’s road calculations are flawed, as the agency claims it can build new roads, use them, and then make them impassable to motor vehicles when they’re done, usually by gating them or using deep ditches colloquially known as “tank traps.”

Evidence suggests otherwise, however, as many motorized vehicles are still able to get around gates or barriers long after a road is closed.

The groups have made this argument twice in the federal courts before and twice they have prevailed.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wrote a new biological opinion on the subject in September for the Flathead National Forest Plan, which the groups, again, say is flawed, thus the suit.

“Despite these harms from roads and motorized use for grizzly bears —harms illustrated by the best available science — the Revised Biological Opinion overlooked and irrationally evaluated the Revised Forest Plan’s weakening of protections for grizzly bears in several ways,” the groups claim in a letter to Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials on Oct. 23.

The groups continue to claim that even with the revised biological opinions, the Flathead National Forest’s road management strategy is flawed and contrary to numerous scientific studies of both grizzly bears and bull trout.

Roads, among other things, they claim, allow poachers a greater ability to kill grizzly bears and from a fish standpoint, runoff from roads can put more silt into bull trout spawning streams.

But loggers need roads to economically harvest wood and keep local mills running and people employed.

The battle over roads is nothing new. The Flathead National Forest closed about 700 miles of roads to meet what was known as Amendment 19 of the 1986 Flathead National Forest plan. That amendment set standards for road densities in core grizzly bear habitat.

In the 2018 the Flathead Forest revised its road rules and went toward a more lenient structure, which allowed for new road building, as long as they were made impassable when a project was completed.

That has resulted in years of litigation and with this latest filing, promises more court battles ahead.