Lakes Basin Fuels Reduction Project

Lakes Basin Fuels Reduction Project

The Sierra Nevada Conservancy (SNC) would provide funding to the Mammoth Lakes Fire Protection District to work with the Inyo National Forest, Mammoth Ranger District to reduce hazardous fuels on 661 acres of National Forest System lands. The purpose of this project is to reduce potential future wildfire severity and establish wildfire defensible space around developed infrastructure within the wildland-urban interface (WUI) in the Mammoth Lakes Basin. Fuel reduction would occur by thinning standing live and dead trees, and the removal of exiting and created surface fuels during fuels reduction operations. The proposed project includes meadow/aspen restoration, fuels reduction in campgrounds, creation of a fuel break, forest fuels reduction, infrastructure fuels reduction around recreation residences and/or resorts, and roadside fuels reduction. Under the proposed project ground-based equipment and hand labor would be employed to conduct fuels reduction treatments of overstory and understory trees. Ground-based equipment would include typical forestry machinery used for felling and moving and processing timber in the field. This includes rubber-tired and tracked feller buncher style equipment used for felling designated landings. Vegetation management treatments would focus on reducing crown fire potential and creating safer conditions for wildland firefighters to conduct suppression activities. This would be achieved by breaking up continuous horizontal and vertical fuel loads using variable density thinning, which attempts to mimic historic forest conditions present prior to European settlement. In general, the majority of trees to be removed would be small diameter (<10 inches) although larger trees (up to 30 inches diameter at breast height (DBH)) will be removed as well to achieve desired conditions, SNC has reviewed the environmental documentation prepared by the lead agency and independently determined that the project would not result in significant environmental impacts.

Mammoth Lakes

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