A new lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service starts with a straightforward claim: A proposed project to help whitebark pine trees near Yellowstone National Park will actually hurt them.
But as the 39-page complaint unspools, nearly every major controversy involving the Forest Service comes up, from wildfire strategies to Endangered Species Act responsibilities to Roadless Rule suspensions. The lawsuit pits the Gallatin Wildlife Association, Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Native Ecosystems Council against Gardiner District Ranger Clint Kolarich and the Custer Gallatin National Forest. On March 4, the plaintiffs sent a 60-day notice of intent to sue unless the Forest Service accepts their objections.
The Cooke City Fuels and Forest Health Project would strengthen Cooke City and Silver Gate against wildfire, according to its Finding Of No Significant Impact, or FONSI notice. Concerns about fire risk to those communities date back at least to the wild summer of 1988, when nearly half of Yellowstone’s 2 million acres burned and two incidents almost engulfed both communities.
Forest Service project manager Abigail Hauch listed multiple justifications in the FONSI for the activity, including reducing fire intensity around the towns, keeping fire out of the wildland-urban interface, boosting the probability of fire control success, and improving safety of the one road, Highway 212, going in and out of the area. Its last reason was “improving the health and condition of the forest ecosystem, including whitebark pine.”
The Forest Service did not respond to Mountain Journal’s request for comment on the lawsuit or Hauch’s findings.
While the Gardiner Ranger District project concentrates activity in a landscape largely visible from Cooke City’s main drag, it also collides with several new national priorities buffeting the Forest Service as a whole, including President Donald Trump’s executive orders to increase timber production, override Endangered Species Act regulations, transform wildfire response, undo National Environmental Policy Act restrictions, and dismantle the Roadless Rule.
“This is just a mish-mash of management objectives,” said Jesse Logan, a retired Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station scientist and one of the lawsuit plaintiffs. “It involves the whole shift in direction for the agency.”
In the early 2000s, Logan helped develop the whitebark pine research plots around Cooke City targeted in the new project. The Cooke City winter resident acknowledged his community had legitimate fears of another wildfire like the catastrophes which nearly burned it to the ground in 1988. But Logan said the new project overlays ideas for increasing tree growth for commercial purposes on a high-elevation landscape where little commercial timber exists. That potentially violates the Roadless Rule while failing to meet Trump’s timber-harvest objectives. He detailed his concerns in a 54-page objection letter.
“This is an expensive management project with ambiguous results and assured negative impacts,” Logan told Mountain Journal. “It’s a timber objective in a forest that has never had productive timber. The Forest Service is proposing these treatments in one of the healthiest whitebark forests in the whole Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. What’s the rationale for doing that? That’s a healthy forest that’s been there for 400 years or more.”
The Beartooth Plateau and parts of the Wind River Range in Wyoming are among the last strongholds of whitebark pine, after mountain pine beetles and blister rust fungus disease killed more than 80 percent of the rest of the population in Greater Yellowstone in the early 2000s. It was listed as a threatened species under the ESA in 2022.
The Beartooth Plateau and parts of the Wind River Range in Wyoming are among the last strongholds of whitebark pine, after mountain pine beetles and blister rust fungus disease killed more than 80 percent of the rest of the population in Greater Yellowstone in the early 2000s.
Whitebark pines grow at high elevations and can live for hundreds of years, but are not considered valuable for timber. Instead, their high-protein seeds are a major food source for wildlife. Loss of whitebark pine seeds was one of the major factors a federal judge cited in blocking a move to delist Yellowstone grizzly bears from the Endangered Species Act in 2007.
The project claims whitebark stands would benefit through a process called “daylight thinning.” That means removing any competing non-whitebark tree within a 30-foot-diameter circle around an individual whitebark tree. The project would directly affect 3,218 acres of whitebark habitat scattered across a total range of 19,221 acres on the hillsides surrounding Cooke City and Silver Gate. Daylight thinning would take place on 2,014 acres. About 1,000 acres would see noncommercial tree cutting and fuels reduction, while 241.5 acres would be logged for commercial timber.
In their introduction, the lawsuit plaintiffs claim the Forest Service “fails to quantify or even qualify the degree of [whitebark] damage or mortality” from the daylight thinning. On the contrary, it quotes the FONSI’s observation “acknowledging the Project activities will cause damage or mortality to whitebark pine seedlings, saplings and mature trees.”
“It’s one of the healthiest whitebark colonies in the state, with 40 years’ worth of genetic diversity and recruitment,” plaintiff Sara Johnson, director of the Native Ecosystems Council, said in an interview. “They lose all that with their logging and burning. Why would you kill all that? It’s devastating to whitebark pine, and they’re calling it restoration.”
Tangled inside lurk some bigger federal policy moves. One is a reduction of critical lynx habitat by 26 percent, which opens thousands of acres to treatment without ESA scrutiny. Critical habitat designations are a core feature of the ESA, and activities affecting them require consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to gauge the impact on listed species. The plaintiffs allege not only that the lynx impacts demand study, but that the Forest Service gave no basis for how it reduced the critical habitat acreage to avoid the consultation.
Another is the use of wildland-urban interface designations surrounding Cooke City to justify a categorical exclusion skipping over potential lynx impacts on another 682 acres. In addition to the lynx impacts, the plaintiffs claim the WUI designation is based on a Park County Community Wildfire Plan that arbitrarily includes “all nonfederal land in Park County is in the WUI” along with a buffer extending four miles inside adjacent federal land. Using such an “over-inclusive” definition of at-risk landscapes to justify timber cutting and habitat harm violates the National Forest Management Act, they said.
The proposal trips over several aspects of the Endangered Species Act, according to Michael Garrity of Alliance for the Wild Rockies, overlooking grizzly bear impacts as well as lynx.
“We sued the Forest Service and won last year, stopping the South Plateau logging, burning, and road-building project on the western border of Yellowstone National Park,” Garrity told Mountain Journal. “One of the issues on which we prevailed was the agency’s attempt to shrink the definition of secure habitat for grizzlies from 2,500 acres to 10 acres, which is ridiculous for these wide-ranging bears.”
Garrity also questioned the project’s cost, estimated at $2.8 million.
“The national debt is at a record $38.8 trillion,” he said. “There is simply no reason the Forest Service should be spending $2.8 million for an illegal logging project on the border of Yellowstone National Park.”
The proposal uses daylight thinning as justification for activity in inventoried roadless areas around Cooke City. However, the lawsuit claims many of the acres involved don’t actually hold whitebark pine. It also relies on the necessity of wildfire protection to justify categorical exclusions from deeper environmental impact statement review of its logging and fuels reduction work along powerline and road corridors.
“This omission is especially problematic given the uncertainty of the effectiveness of daylight thinning,” the plaintiffs wrote. “None of the project documents analyze how climate change would affect whitebark pine viability in the project area, nor the effects of climate change on Clark’s nutcracker and the resulting effects on whitebark pine.”
Altogether, the projects violate a long list of federal public land management laws, the plaintiffs allege. Those include the National Environmental Policy Act, Administrative Procedures Act, Endangered Species Act, Roadless Rule and National Forest Management Act.
“There is something drastically wrong with the premise that we must further manipulate our forests in order to protect them,” plaintiff Clint Nagel, President of co-plaintiff Gallatin Wildlife Association said in an email to Mountain Journal. “It is those very same natural systems and processes that attract man to that landscape to begin with. To now say those natural landscapes pose a threat to our society is hypocritical and counterproductive. It’s time to let our forest be a forest.”
