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Activists' appeals put timber sales on hold The Siskiyou National Forest has temporarily withdrawn a timber sale challenged last month by a Williams environmental group. The Siskiyou-Klamath Wildlands Center appealed the Galice replacement volume sale and 17 others, charging that many involved clearcuts of old growth forest in violation of current environmental law. Replacement sales were ordered in 1996 by a federal judge who specified the trees should be "of like kind and value" to trees in previously sold timber sales that were stopped when the marbled murrelet joined the endangered species list. "Meaning big fat forests that the timber industry likes," said Spencer Lennard of the Siskiyou-Klamath center. "They're going in and mining millions of board feet of ancient trees." The Galice sale would generate 2.1 million board feet of timber from 77 acres, said Mary Marrs of the Siskiyou forest. But Galice Ranger Nancy Rose expects to revive the timber sale after new information is added to the environmental assessment, she said. Lennard and other environmentalists are pushing the Forest Service to buy back replacement volume sales to protect the North-west's remaining old growth. "If you consider how much they're costing just to process, and how much we're going to have to fork out for restoring salmon habitat or landslides or road blowouts," he said, "we really encourage them to buy these sales back." The Galice sale includes sites in the Onion, Horse, Picket, Secret and Brush Creek drainages and is owned by Scott Timber, a division of Roseburg Forest Products. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA