In the remote, highly diverse backcountry of the Clearwater National Forest in Idaho, Pot Mountain Roadless Area contains rare coastal disjunct plant communities, such as western red cedars-remnants of vegetation that thrived far inland from the Pacific Coast until the rise of the Cascade Mountains millions of years ago changed weather patterns and the composition of plant communities.
This roadless area is an important link in the chain of forested habitats that stretches from Yellowstone to the Yukon, anchored by the northern spine of the Rocky Mountains. For its part, Pot Mountain connects central Idaho's renowned wilderness complex with a large core of wildlands in Montana. Maintaining this connectivity could well be crucial to populations of many wildlife species. Pot Mountain's low-elevation ponderosa pine and Douglas fir and higher elevation subalpine forests support species such as the bull trout (listed as threatened by the federal government) and other rare forms of wildlife-among them, the wolverine, fisher, marten, lynx and northern goshawk.
The Middle-Black Project threatens the precious resources of Pot Mountain, including older forest stands that cover a small portion of the roadless area. The Forest Service claims the project's timber sales are necessary to reduce fuel loads and thus the risk of cataclysmic fire. But the area's fire history argues differently. Recent fires have not been catastrophic. In fact, given the area's elevation and species composition, fires have burned as expected for the most part. Even in 2000, a "bad" fire year, more than three-fourths of the area burned in Pot Mountain resulted from low-intensity fires.
The Roadless Rule made it clear that inventoried roadless areas should not be targeted for timber sales aimed at reducing the fuel load. Yet fuel-load reduction is one of the reasons given by the Forest Service for its active pursuit of timber sales in Pot Mountain.
