Make Bagby your valentine and celebrate 2,300 acres protected!

Dear Barker,

We just learned that Bark protected over 2,300 acres of Mt. Hood’s eastern pine forests! The Bear Springs and Cascade Crest Timber Sales proposed to log nearly four square miles from the White River to Olallie Lake – home to black bear, deer, elk, and some of Mt. Hood’s best secret campgrounds. Please support this great work with a tax-deductible donation. To learn more about how Bark groundtruthers secured this victory, read the Bark Tales feature below.

Sincerely,
Alex P Brown, Executive Director

PS- More good news! Clatsop County is reconsidering Oregon LNG's permits. Put the March 9th hearing on your calendar now.

Bark-Out: Submit your comments on privatizing Bagby & 27 campgrounds before February 14th
Bark-About: Three in one! Hike through No Gin, No Whisky & Airstrip Timber Sales
Giving Tree: Don’t throw those printed drafts in the recycler… give them to us!
Bark Tales: When I grow up I want to be like Candace
Bark Bites: The Collawash Watershed is a special place


Bark-Out
Submit comments to the Forest Service on privatizing management of Bagby Hot Springs and 27 campgrounds by Valentine’s Day!
 
Love is in the air and Valentine’s Day comes just in time for us to let the Forest Service know how much we love Bagby Hot Springs and our publicly managed campgrounds. If you love Bagby and want to stop the last publicly managed campgrounds in Mt. Hood National Forest from becoming profit centers for private companies, then this will be the most important Valentine you send this year. Submit your comments today!


Bark-About
Three timber sales in La Dee Flats
Sunday, February 13th, 9am-5pm

Join Bark as we visit three timber sales in the La Dee Flats area near the Clackamas River. The Forest Service has already logged the No Whisky Timber Sale, and plans to log the No Gin Timber Sale directly adjacent to it. Meanwhile, just 100 yards down the same road the Bureau of Land Management is planning the Airstrip Timber Sale. Nathaniel Talbot, amateur botanist and experienced hike leader, will lead us through three separate logging projects discussing the effects of logging, demonstrating how the ecosystem responds, and identifying plants along the way.

Come prepared to walk up to three miles off trail in dense forest. Please bring lunch, water, and sturdy boots. The weather is very unpredictable this time of year, so don't forget extra layers of clothes and water resistant gear. Dogs are welcome on this month's hike.

Bark-Abouts are led on the second Sunday of every month and are free to the public. Click here for more information about this Sunday’s hike.


Giving Tree
Bark needs your one-sided paper and/or handywoman skills!

When you donate dollars to Bark, your money supports grassroots activism that saves beautiful forests from short-sighted proposals like the Bear Springs Timber Sale (see below). Donations of time and materials make this possible. If you have any of the items or skills, below, reply to this email or call Olivia at (503) 331-0374.

One-sided paper (printed on one side only)
Cordless drill
Hammer
Flat-screen LCD monitors
Headphones
Printer (b&w commercial-grade)
Ergonomic keyboards
Multi-line telephones
Office desk (locking drawers and not wider than 5’)
Handyperson to install movie screen from ceiling
Handyperson to seal our historic (and drafty!) windows
Light fixture (large globe or shade style for hanging from ceiling)
Tapestry to hang over our cleaning closet


Bark Tales
Groundtruthers like Candace made the Bear Springs victory possible

Ever wonder why Bark is so awesome? The answer is simple: We have the most amazing volunteers around. Candace Larson is case in point. Candace has been a Bark groundtruther for four years and her efforts, in collaboration with our crew of dedicated groundtruthers, exposed the truth about the Bear Springs Timber Sale that ultimately stopped 1,664 acres of logging in a 62-mile project area.

How’d we do it? Candace led a Bark-About to the Bear Springs Timber Sale and joined other trained groundtruthers to reach remote forest targeted by the sale. As a result, we found major discrepancies between the Forest Service’s description of the sale and what was actually happening on the ground. Things like “hey there’s a ditch, stream and wetland here that aren’t on the timber sale maps” or “gosh, the Forest Service thinks there’s a road here, but there isn’t” and “Woah! There’s a bear over there!” All of these observations helped us to make comments and legal claims to the Forest Service that ultimately resulted in the withdrawal of the timber sale.

You can help make more victories like this one possible by becoming a groundtruther too! Click here to learn about upcoming groundtruthing trainings and RSVP to learn the skills that make Candace so awesome.


Bark Bites
What makes the Collawash Watershed so special?

A watershed is an area of land in which rain collects and drains into the same creek or river. In Mt. Hood National Forest there are 15 major watersheds, all with unique characteristics. One watershed that is special to us is the Collawash. If you’ve ever been to Bagby Hot Springs, then you’ve been in the Collawash Watershed, but Bagby is just one of the features that make this watershed so special.

The Collawash Watershed is formed by steep slopes of lava rock, that are resistant to weathering, with a top layer of mineral clay soils that easily erode. As a result, this watershed contains some of the most geologically unstable terrain in the Mt. Hood National Forest. Now consider the 423 miles of roads and the proposed 2,000-acre Jazz Timber Sale in the watershed and think about how these human-made features interact with steep slopes, unstable soil deposits and important water drainages. The Collawash Watershed is a beautiful area, but if logging continues to take precedence over watershed health how long will that beauty last?

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