July 29, 2003 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: The Alliance for the Wild Rockies—Michael Garrity, 406-459-5936

CONSERVATION GROUP CHALLENGES ROCK CREEK ROADLESS LOGGING

The Alliance for the Wild Rockies announced today that they are asking the Forest Service to reconsider its plan to log 1113 acres in the Lolo National Forest near Rock Creek. On Monday the Alliance for the Wild Rockies submitted their appeal of the Rock Creek logging project to the Forest Service's Regional Office. The timber sale would log 477 acres of Silver King, Welcome Creek, and Quigg Peak roadless lands. The process would kill westslope cutthroat trout and the threatened bull trout by increasing the amount of sediment by 1400% and discharge toxic herbicides into Rock Creek, one of Montana's two blue ribbon trout streams west of the continental divide.

"The Lolo National Forest is under court order in another case to not log in impaired watersheds until a cleanup plan is completed. The same type of environmental damage is at stake here. The State of Montana has found that Rock Creek and its tributaries are not meeting water quality standards do to sediment pollution from logging. Instead of working on cleaning up Rock Creek, the Lolo National Forest wants to spend $1,180,000 to log inventoried roadless areas and dump more sediment into Rock Creek," stated Michael Garrity, Executive Director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies. The Lolo National Forest Environmental Assessment found that the Lolo will lose $1,187,100 logging Rock Creek.

"Instead of subsidizing the timber industry to log roadless areas the federal government should have used some of this money working on developing a cleanup plan or TMDL to restore Rock Creek," Garrity believes. Forest Service studies have shown inventoried roadless areas provide clean drinking water and function as biological strongholds for populations of threatened and endangered species. "Now the Forest Service wants to violate the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act by dumping herbicides and hundreds of tons of sediment from logging into a blue ribbon trout stream," stated Michael Garrity. "This make no sense."