The U.S. Forest Service’s Northern Regional office in Missoula has released an eight-page emergency logging plan covering more than 5 million acres across Montana and the Idaho Panhandle, responding to widespread wind damage that struck the region in December 2025 and April 2026.

Scope of the Project

The plan targets forest land across a broad stretch of both states. In Montana, the project covers portions of Lincoln, Flathead, Sanders, Mineral, Missoula, Ravalli, and Powell counties. On the Idaho side, affected counties include Boundary, Bonner, Kootenai, Benewah, Shoshone, Latah, Idaho, and Clearwater.

The Forest Service says the effort is designed to address timber damage left behind by two separate high-wind events — one in December 2025 and another in April 2026. Agency officials expect the salvage and recovery work to span three to five years.

As part of the project, the Forest Service may construct new temporary roads or perform maintenance on existing roads to move harvested timber. Designated wilderness areas are excluded from any removal activity under the plan.

Expedited Process Draws Scrutiny

The emergency designation allows the project to move forward without a formal environmental assessment or a finding of no significant environmental impact — steps that would ordinarily be required before such a large-scale operation begins. The plan is also not subject to the pre-decisional objection review process that normally allows stakeholders to formally challenge agency decisions before they take effect.

Critics have raised concerns about the compressed timeline and reduced procedural requirements. Kristine Akland, Northern Rockies director for the Center for Biological Diversity, called the project a symptom of a larger pattern. “This is exactly the kind of environmental plundering we feared when the Trump administration started dismantling our national bedrock environmental laws,” she said.

Proponents of expedited salvage logging generally argue that removing wind-damaged timber reduces wildfire fuel loads, limits the spread of bark beetles and other pests, and allows for faster forest regeneration. The Forest Service framed the action as a necessary response to storm damage at a scale that warrants emergency authority.

Public Comment Window Is Brief

The agency opened a public comment period on June 22 and set a closing deadline of June 29 — a window of just one week for a project touching millions of acres across two states. The short timeline reflects the emergency nature of the designation, which grants agencies broader authority to act quickly when forest conditions are deemed to require immediate response.

Residents, county officials, and other interested parties in the affected Idaho counties have until the end of June to submit input before the agency moves toward implementation.

Federal Timber Policy in the West

The announcement fits within a broader federal push under the Trump administration to accelerate timber harvesting on public lands, reduce litigation risk on forest management actions, and clear backlogs of fire- and storm-damaged timber. Salvage operations of this size are relatively rare and typically require emergency justification to bypass standard environmental review requirements.

For Idaho’s Panhandle counties — several of which have economies historically tied to the timber industry — the project could represent significant economic activity over the next several years, though the scale and pace of actual harvest will depend on implementation details that have not yet been finalized.

The Northern Region of the Forest Service manages roughly 25 million acres across several northern Rocky Mountain states, making it one of the larger regional offices in the agency’s national system. The eight-page emergency plan does not represent a final decision document but sets the framework under which individual harvest projects will be authorized across the affected area.

Whether the expedited approval process withstands potential legal challenges from conservation groups remains an open question as the comment period closes and the agency moves toward formally authorizing work on the ground.