In the summer of 2002, dry lightning touched off several fires in the middle of the Siskiyou Wildlands. One point of ignition was a pillow of uplifted peridotite rock that the early miners had named Biscuit Mountain for its shape. Those fellows must have had breakfast on their minds - Sourdough camp is nearby.

It was mid July and hot. The call went out for air tankers to get a jump on the situation, but none were to be had. A strong, hot wind rose up from the east. The fire blew up and local residents saw a pillar of smoke that turned into a mushroom cloud as the fire roared through the steep Siskiyou canyons. Nothing could put this fire out but Nature herself.

When the rains finally arrived in October, the fire perimeter had grown to 500,000 acres. Not all inside was burned. Many areas were still green or only lightly burned. Still, it was the biggest fire the area had seen for more than a century, and they called it the Biscuit Fire.

At that time, I was still working for a local environmental group, the Siskiyou Regional Education Project. The Siskiyou Wildlands were our central concern. I had directed a campaign which began in the late 1990's to convince President Clinton to declare the area a National Monument. We came very close to achieving our goal, but in the end, on the advice of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, Clinton declined.

Our allies in Washington told us that if Gore had won, we would have gotten our monument, but with Bush promising to review and perhaps undo Clinton's new monuments, they were worried that our monument would not have enough public support to withstand the Bush assaults.

Ironically, one of the obstacles to gaining protection for this last, biggest wild place is the fact that it is so remote from population centers. The Siskiyou has never had an elected official to act as its champion. As a result, it has often served as a political football for the timber industry and Republican operatives.

We experienced this first hand in 2000 as our monument campaign led up to the presidential elections. So-called "Wise Use" organizers came into our community and drummed up hatred and fear. A lynch mob started meeting in town where they passed around names and addresses of environmentalists. We started receiving death threats. Crazy rumors spread around Cave Junction that the Siskiyou National Forest was being turned over to the UN and people's private property would be taken from them. The election came and Bush-Cheney won southern Oregon.

Two years later, after the Biscuit Fire, we knew that the Siskiyou was about to get kicked around some more. Given the political situation, it was inevitable that the Forest Service would propose a large salvage logging operation on the Siskiyou.

Ever since the 1996 Salvage Rider legislation opened up thousands of acres of old growth forests to logging, Republicans have seized on the idea that salvage logging burned or bug infested timber is a winning message. "Salvage" sounds a lot like "saving," and they could log anything if they just convinced enough people that it was actually good for the forest.

But timber people and even professional foresters are not ecologists. Uniformly, the message from academic forest ecologists is that salvage logging of burned trees is harmful and will set back forest recovery.

Ecology is complex, but here is one example: standing dead trees provide nesting habitat for woodpeckers. Woodpeckers eat bark beetles and keep infestations from spreading. Right now there is a population explosion of woodpeckers in the Biscuit fire. Take away the dead trees, and you take away the woodpeckers.

The dead trees also provide shade for young seedlings. When they fall over and rot, they build up the soil for the new forest. Salvage logging isn't new and we have side-by-side examples from the Silver Fire of 1987 of areas that were salvage logged next to areas that were left to recover naturally. Naturally recovered areas have healthier and more diverse vegetation and they are less vulnerable to future fires than logged and replanted areas.

Dr. Jerry Franklin of the University of Washington is the world's foremost expert on northwest ancient forests and the spotted owl. Here is his last word on salvage logging: "In summary, general salvage of large snags and logs is absolutely antithetical to rapid recovery of late-successional forest habitat."

Despite the clear scientific consensus, the Forest Service began preparing a salvage logging timber sale of 96 million board feet. Knowing that the political pressure would be virtually unstoppable, many environmentalists decided that as long as the logging was kept out of the late-successional reserves (late-successional is the same as old growth) and the roadless areas, they would not oppose it.

The timber sale planning was almost complete by the spring of 2003, when the Forest Service put it on hold for some new information. The new information was a study by forest engineers at Oregon State University.

The study showed that forest engineers could feasibly pull much more wood out of the burned areas than 96 million board feet. It recommended taking twenty times more. But there was not a stick of reliable information about the ecological impact of that much logging.

A few weeks after the report was released, the wife of Columbia Helicopter's chairman Wes Lematta made a gracious gift of $1 million to the forest engineering department of Oregon State University for the endowment of a professorship in Forest Engineering specifically dealing in logging methodology. Columbia helicopter, the world's largest aerial logging operation, is likely to be one of the greatest beneficiaries of the taxpayer subsidized Biscuit logging proposal.

The Forest Service released its revised draft proposal in the fall of 2003 to accommodate the "new information" and upped the cut to 518 million board feet.

At a public hearing following the release, 95 out of 100 people spoke passionately against this huge timber sale, the largest in history, in one of the most ecologically valuable wild forests on earth.

Even a Forest Service employee got up to testify that the plan was extreme and given the downsizing of the work force, impossible to manage effectively.

Then the public comments came rolling in. More than 23,000 letters, 95% opposed to salvage logging. The EPA and the US Fish and Wildlife Service filed unprecedented objections to the plan, based on what massive soil erosion from logging and roads would do to salmon-bearing streams and the impact on spotted owls.

When the Forest Service released their final plan this spring, they reduced it to 372 million board feet. Still the largest timber sale in history, it would fill 70,000 log trucks and cost taxpayers more than $40 million.

Environmentalists went to court and won a brief injunction in August because the understaffed Forest Service was going to allow the loggers to select and mark the trees themselves. The judge called foul. The Forest Service went out and marked the trees in a few of the logging units and the judge lifted the injunction.

Then, on September 7th, the Ninth Circuit Court stopped logging on the Late Successional Reserve portion of the sale until the legality of the logging can be decided in court.

Siskiyou lovers were exhilarated until the news this week that Oregon's Senator Gordon Smith was introducing legislation to exempt the entire Biscuit logging plan from all judicial review. It was the dreaded Salvage Rider all over again.

A rider is a piece of unpopular or controversial legislation that is tacked onto another unrelated piece of legislation, usually a "must pass" bill like the appropriations bills that fund the government. Smith's proposal won't likely pass as a stand-alone bill and will have to look for a free ride on other legislation.

Todd True, attorney for EarthJustice, called Smith's legislation anti-democratic. "It has no place in a democracy where the court is supposed to decide what the law is," he said.

Smith may be doing this on his own initiative. He has been a consistent friend to the timber industry. But from the very beginning, environmentalists have seen the hand of the Bush administration in the Biscuit issue.

Mark Rey is the Bush undersecretary in charge of the Forest Service and he has been intimately involved in the Biscuit plan from day one. Rey is also the former timber industry lobbyist who wrote the 1996 Salvage Rider.

Environmentalists speculate that the Bush plan is to duplicate conditions in 2000. In addition to the National Monument controversy, there was a major conflict between farmers and Native Americans over water rights in the Klamath Basin that erupted into violence. The Bush operatives are trying to provoke fear and hatred again in southern Oregon to energize the base of people who still feel that the real endangered species is the logger.

Unfortunately for them, it won't work. Too many Oregonians are wise to the trick. Too many care deeply about their last wild places.

In fact it is a risky strategy. The Bush administration has already pulled back on their mission of wiping out the popular national roadless area protections. Their new roadless rule guts the protections, only allowing them if state governors get down on their knees and beg. More than a million people have sent opposition comments to the Forest Service since the rule change was announced in July.

The original timetable would have completed the change before the elections, but they just extended the comment period to November 15th. "I think this is about ducking for cover," said Sen. Maria Cantwell, (D-WA) at a rally in support of roadless protection in DC this week.

The massive logging of roadless areas and old growth reserves in the Biscuit Fire will be just as unpopular as scrapping the national roadless rule protections. Still, unless there is a public outcry, Smith's rider has a good chance of passing. Whether that will help or hurt Bush-Cheney's re-election campaign is another story.

Biscuit could bite back.