RSSState set to dedicate Naneum forest
Yakima Herald-Republic
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YAKIMA -- In a little more than a week, the dedication of a new state forest in upper Kittitas County will put the finishing touch on a large land exchange that is only one of several such swaps -- but one that Commissioner of Public Lands Doug Sutherland called "definitely the hub of the wheel."
Sutherland and other public officials will be at Walter Flat in the Naneum Basin at 1 p.m. June 7 to dedicate the new, 71,000-acre Naneum Ridge State Forest.
That area some 20 miles north-northeast of Ellensburg used to be like much of the Cascade foothills -- a patchwork of checkerboard ownership. It was solidified under state ownership by last winter's exchange of more than 100,000 acres between the Department of Natural Resources and an Idaho-based timber and development company called Western Pacific Timber (WPT).
That exchange -- the state's largest-ever such trade of private and state lands -- brought 82,548 acres of WPT land into state ownership, most of it in the Naneum Basin plus some additional parcels in the Wenas and Ahtanum. The timber company received 20,970 acres, some of which was high-development value property along the Interstate 5 corridor.
The swap was all part of an ongoing series of state land exchanges with private entities, most of them timber companies. Another one in 2005 led to the creation of the Ahtanum State Forest.
"This is not the first one, but this is definitely the hub of the wheel," Sutherland said Tuesday. The deal with WPT, he said, "was absolutely critical, because that took off the plate the subdivision of those (Naneum Basin) lands and allowed us to integrate that into what we already had."
Much of the timber land was previously owned by other lumber outfits, including Plum Creek and Boise Cascade, that routinely allowed public access by hunters and other recreationists.
"You and I kind of treated them as quasi-public lands for a long time," said Rance Block of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. "But had Western Pacific sold it to somebody else that wanted to develop the land, overnight we could have lost access to tens of thousands of acres that we considered public land."
That access -- and to see that all that elk and muledeer habitat remained unhindered by development -- was why the elk foundation pledged $200,000 to help pay for the appraisals and thus move the land swap along.
"For a species like elk that is dependent on a wide array of habitat between their summer range and winter range, it's critical to have these intact corridors for these animals to move back and forth," Block said. "If you take those corridors out, it threatens those herds.
"If the DNR had felt compelled to move their equity out of the Cascades and set up that equity elsewhere, it would have had severe impact on 8,000 elk and 12,000 muledeer."
Next on the state's burner are two exchanges, one focused in the northeast corner of the state, and one of which will greatly impact the ownership map of much of the popular hunting-camping-recreation lands northwest of Yakima.
The latter, which Sutherland hopes to see completed by this fall, would shift 117,000 acres of DNR land -- much of it lower-elevation shrub-steppe -- to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. In exchange, 55,000 acres of WDFW land in higher elevations, much of it forest, would go to the DNR.
In terms of public access, very little would change; both state agencies basically have an open door for recreationists, with the occasional closure for wildife protection or an active logging operation. But the trade would essentially remove the checkerboard ownership pattern from the Oak Creek, Wenas and L.T. Murray wildlife areas.
At the very least, maps of those areas will be a lot easier to read.
