Big changes in store for Norbeck preserve

By Bill Harlan, Journal Staff Writer | Friday, September 22, 2006

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Nature and government are poised to alter the landscape of Norbeck Wildlife Preserve.

“Great changes are coming to the Norbeck and to the Black Elk Wilderness Area,” U.S. Forest Service spokesman Frank Carroll said.

Some changes will be controversial, Carroll predicts, and they will affect the appearance of Norbeck for years and maybe decades to come.

“Not only is this one of the most beautiful landscapes in the Black Hills, it’s also one of the most fragile,” Carroll said. “People so love the Norbeck that anything that smacks of change alarms them. It alarms us, too.”

But change is inevitable, say dozens of foresters, biologists and other experts who have studied Norbeck. Decades of fire suppression there have created dense stands of ponderosa pines, and now, red splotches of dead and dying trees warn that the mountain pine beetle has arrived in the Norbeck.

“It’s really going to show up next year,” Carroll said.

Spindly, overly dense timber and dying, bug-infested trees are easy targets for catastrophically hot wildfires that can scorch soils and change a landscape for decades.

“We’ve changed the forest structure,” Carroll said.

Now, he warned, “Bugs are coming to eat, and fires are coming, too.”

The Forest Service, with a new, independent study of the Norbeck in hand, is set to write a long-term management plan to meet those threats.

A complex natural geography

Topography makes the 34,255 acres of the Norbeck Wildlife Preserve a special piece of ground.

The granite giant called Harney Peak — at 7,242 feet the highest point in the Black Hills — is the centerpiece of the preserve.

Harney Peak is surrounded by the Black Elk Wilderness Area, which is contained within the Norbeck. The Black Elk — the only wilderness in the Black Hills — includes granite outcroppings of Cathedral Spires, the Needles and Elkhorn Mountain.

A dozen or more streams drain the central granite core. Pine Creek, Willow Creek, Palmer Creek, Nelson Creek, Grizzly Bear Creek and others cut their way through rocky spires to the valleys and meadows of the Norbeck’s periphery, creating micro-environments found nowhere else in the Black Hills.

Tens of thousands of hikers, horseback riders and rock climbers use more than 30 miles of trails inside the Norbeck each year.

Millions of motorists can drive the periphery of the Norbeck on Needles Highway, Iron Mountain Road, Palmer Gulch Road and other roads on the officially designated Norbeck Scenic Byway.

The Norbeck preserve also includes a chunk of Custer State Park, which in turn includes Sylvan Lake.

And finally, the preserve surrounds Mount Rushmore National Memorial.

A complex political geography

The complicated topography is managed under an even more complex hodgepodge of jurisdictions and rules, including two federal laws that are unique to the Norbeck:

-- The Norbeck Organic Act of 1920, which created the preserve.

-- So-called “Section 706” of a 2004 homeland security law, which mandated two big thinning projects and increased the size of the Black Elk Wilderness. (Also called “the Daschle rider,” after former Sen. Tom Daschle, who helped negotiate it as a compromise with environmental groups to speed thinning projects.)

There are also department and agency regulations. For example:

-- Interior Department rules apply to Mount Rushmore.

-- Agriculture Department rules apply to the Forest Service land.

-- State Game, Fish & Parks rules apply to the state land, and state law applies to the private land.

-- Federal wilderness law takes precedence over the Norbeck Organic Act inside the Black Elk Wilderness.

-- Inside the wilderness, still more federal rules apply to the Pine Creek Natural Area.

-- Federal scenic byway rules apply to some roads in the Norbeck.

And finally, there is a five-page “Memorandum of Understanding” between the Forest Service and the state GF&P Department, setting out rules and guidelines for cooperative management of the Norbeck.

Beetles, fire and landscapes

Rules and regulations, however, haven’t slowed the relentless mountain pine beetle.

Red trees are visible from highways near Hill City, from Palmer Gulch Road, from Needles Highway and many other popular vistas. For example, a scenic turnout on S.D. Highway 244, near Mount Rushmore, offers a dramatic view of George Washington’s head. Turn around and look across the steep canyon on the other side of the road for a view that disturbs Carroll. “That’s some of the most hazardous fire and insect conditions I’ve ever seen,” he said.

The pine beetles are natural in ponderosa forests, but when they attack dense, overgrown stands of timber, these tiny, wood-boring insects can kill vast swaths of pines.

There are many such stands of timber in the Norbeck despite some big thinning and logging projects undertaken under the provisions of the Daschle rider. And some areas are simply too steep and rugged to thin or log, Carroll says.

Steep or not, thinning and logging is prohibited in the Black Elk Wilderness, where pine beetles also are making inroads.

The result, Carroll said, is a landscape primed for a major natural adjustment.

A study by outside experts

A 12-member Forest Service “interdisciplinary team” began meeting in April to begin mapping out a new management plan for the Norbeck.

“The challenge is going to be to take whatever management action we can take so that what we have left over is a living, sustainable forest,” Carroll said.

The so-called “ID team” also is using a 122-page study completed in June by a team of outside experts with an unwieldy name: the “Continuing Education in Ecosystem Management” or “CEEM” team. (Pronounced “Seem.”)

Team programs provide mid-career training for environment and natural-resource specialists from many different federal agencies. Team members get six weeks of training, then tackle specific problems, such as what to do with the Norbeck.

The CEEM team here produced a document titled “Norbeck Wildlife Preserve Landscape Assessment.” The report highlights a major problem in the Norbeck Wildlife Preserve and a major stumbling block preventing its correction.

What are ‘game animals and birds’?

The Norbeck Organic Act of 1920 established the wildlife preserve “for the protection of game animals and birds and to be recognized as a breeding place thereof.”

However, the CEEM study noted that the Norbeck isn’t really a game “sanctuary” anymore, in part because “there are abundant game populations in the adjacent Custer State Park and surrounding National Forest lands.”

The CEEM also reported what wildlife biologists here have said for years: That the Norbeck provides “marginal habitat for the game species and most birds it was meant to benefit.”

This condition is unlikely to change, the study concludes, because the overgrown forests in the Black Elk Wilderness cannot be thinned or logged.

Still, areas outside the Black Elk can be managed, but that is where the other stumbling block arises: No one has ever clarified the meaning of “game animals and birds.”

The CEEM study recommended that the Forest Service and the state Game, Fish & Parks Department create a specific list of species and habitats to be protected.

Finally, the study also urged creating a single “integrated” management plan “across the entire Norbeck Wildlife Preserve.” In other words, avoid managing the preserve piece by piece, a thinning project here, a trail closure there.

A new Norbeck plan coming

Forester Pat Hudson of the Black Hills National Forest is leading the ID team that is working on the new Norbeck plan. She agrees with the CEEM team recommendations — especially the one about developing a list of game animals, birds and habitats. “There’s never been an official definition of what ‘game animals and birds’ means,” she said. “We’re making some assumptions about what they meant in 1920, but we weren’t there.”

Hudson also said that the Norbeck preserve has lost meadows to encroaching ponderosa pines, and that the preserve also has lost aspens and hardwoods, which in turn has diminished habitats for some species.

“Management” in the outer ring of Norbeck could mean thinning or logging, but that isn’t allowed in the wilderness area, where options are limited. Still, Hudson believes there might be other ways to improve habitats in the Black Elk. “At this point, I don’t want to rule out the possibility that we might be able to do something,” she said.

One technique might be to let nature take its course, in a limited way. “Insects and fire don’t destroy habit. They change it.” Forest Service wildlife biologist Kerry Burns said. In fact, fire and bugs can open up dense forests to allow a more diverse habitat. “If it’s not too big it can be a good thing, but at some point, it becomes too much of a good thing,” Burns said.

The Black Elk Wilderness, however, is much smaller than most true wilderness areas, and it’s much closer to homes and other buildings. That makes fire a difficult and dangerous management tool.

The CEEM study also concluded that “the most valuable habitat that exists within the Norbeck today is the large contiguous block of late-seral forest with rare large old-legacy trees from the pre-Euro- American settlement period.”

These so-called “old growth” trees are also found inside the boundaries of Mount Rushmore National Memorial, and Carroll said that trees 300 to 400 years old near Sylvan Lake are threatened by bugs and fire from dense stands of forest nearby.

As usual in the Norbeck, this conclusion is controversial. Old-growth timber does not provide habitat for the “game animals” of the 1920 Norbeck Organic Act. The new management plan — and the new list of species and habitats — will have to juggle those apparent contradictions.

State Game, Fish & Parks wildlife biologist Shelley Deisch, the state representative on the ID team, says the Norbeck Organic Act should be clarified. “It’s really incredibly vague,” she said.

What’s next?

A new Norbeck plan won’t come quickly.

The ID team plans to hold public meetings this fall — maybe as soon as October. There might be public field trips, as well.

The formal process of creating a plan will be under rules set by the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA — a complicated process involving formal public hearings that won’t begin until January at the earliest and could take a year or more to complete.

The mountain pine beetles, however, are not bound by NEPA — either by paperwork or by hearings. And as Hudson pointed out, “Bugs can take out entire landscapes.”

Contact Bill Harlan at 394-8424 or bill.harlan@rapidcityjournal.com