MISSOULA — Marshall Canyon is a small drainage that can be out-of-sight, out-of-mind for most Missoulians. But for the past year or so, it’s been a-buzz with chainsaws and machinery as the U.S. Forest Service, the state and Missoula city and county have worked to log, thin and burn the canyon’s wildland-urban interface.
Thursday’s late afternoon sun helped the yellows of the larch and cottonwood trees pop out from the greens of the surrounding pines and also highlighted a yellow bus as it climbed the logging road along the west slope of Marshall Canyon. Inside the bus, around three dozen people listened to a handful of speakers who were part of the Missoula Chamber of Commerce's Forest Resources Committee tour of the forestry work being carried out in Marshall Canyon.
The bus rolled through stands that have recently been thinned as part of the Forest Service’s Marshall Woods Project before stopping at a high point directly across from the Marshall Mountain Park, which Missoula County has owned since 2024. There, Missoula County Park Ranger Silas Phillips was able to give the tour attendees a bird’s-eye view of all the thinning work that occurred this year on Marshall Mountain as part of its Winter Recreation Forest Management Project.
“This was the final piece of the puzzle in the canyon as far as public land acquisition,” Phillips said. “Then I came on in December and started looking around and was like, ‘Wow, there are a lot of baby trees growing up on this mountain.’”
Concerned about how those trees might encourage wildfire in such a high-use area, Phillips and other county employees applied for some funding from the state Forest Action Plan to do forestry work on about 75 acres in and around the old ski runs. They also received funding from the Forest Service’s Community Forest Program. Then they developed a plan that focused on tasks that would improve recreation values, forest health and wildfire resilience.
Since the ski hill closed in 2003, the ski runs have largely been replaced by a myriad of mountain bike trails, which required money to engineer and build. Phillips said it would be costly if a wildfire burned through, so the county wanted to protect the investment and maintain the recreational value. In addition, backcountry skiers still use the area during the winter, so now the runs are more open again, but enough trees remain for tree-skiing, Phillips said. To help with wildfire resistance, they cut a wide swath along the main ski run from the top to the bottom of the mountain that can act as a fire break.
Zack Bashoor, Montana Forest Consultants CEO, said the county hired his company to come up with a master plan for the 440-acre Marshall Mountain property. This was the first three of 10 management areas to be treated and the company worked with the county, the Backcountry Ski Alliance and the Missoula Mountain Bike Association to figure out what to do to best accentuate the recreational use.
The tracks of a logging machine are evident on about 39 acres of the project area, where a feller-buncher cuts trees and grinds them up with a shredder head that can shoot wood chips hundreds of feet away. Hand-thinning and piling were used on another 36 acres, and Missoula County will burn the hand piles. The work ended up costing around $100,000, Bashoor said.
“We had a very large piece of machinery working in here,” Bashoor said. “Trying to balance having this machinery around all the recreation was challenging.”
With that, the bus and its passengers descended back down into the canyon. As it neared the lowest switchback before reaching the Marshall Canyon Road, it left Forest Service property and entered land belonging to the City of Missoula, where a team of workers was doing some hand thinning. There, Jeff Gicklhorn, Missoula City Conservation Lands program manager, highlighted the work the city is doing with the 250-acre Mount Jumbo Marshall Grade project.
Last fall, the city started thinning work on the upper slope where it abuts Forest Service, state and private land and continued the work this summer. Crews will be working a little more this fall and next spring to wrap up the work that currently has funding. However, Gicklhorn said the city still has 100 acres of work on the lower slope that isn’t funded yet.
“We’re trying to match our neighbors. So this prescription that the Forest Service implemented, we’re using that as a guide on city property. We’re trying to have consistency across boundaries,” Gicklhorn said. “We’re a small team. But we’ve been able to keep our seasonal staff longer to focus this type of work. That allows us to have more folks on the ground to do the work to a higher quality and faster to have less impact on public use of these properties.”
Gicklhorn said the city didn’t do a lot of public engagement on the forestry work, but the city posted information signs at the gate to the road that goes up to the Jumbo Saddle. That has helped alleviate a lot of the questions from people who hike and bike the road, Gicklhorn said.
Nate Scully, Missoula County wildfire mitigation specialist, said the Marshall Woods Project has a goal of using prescribed fire from the top of the ridge that faces Marshall Mountain all the way down to the Marshall Canyon Road. The burn needs to happen all at once, since it’s challenging to stop a fire midway down a slope. So all the different landowners — federal, county and private — have to work together to prepare the forest for fire. But one or two of the private landowners don’t want to participate in management activities.
“That’s going to cause some complications, if and when this gets done. It’s kind of a pipe dream,” Scully said.
Scully said a plan for broadcast burning on the slope hasn’t been developed yet. Gicklhorn said the city of Missoula, the Forest Service and Fish, Wildlife & Parks have a cooperative agreement to allow broadcast burning to leave Forest Service land and move naturally onto Mount Jumbo to serve ecological purposes.
“There’s still more cutting to do, but that cross-boundary burning is the big picture long-term vision,” Gicklhorn said. “It’s something that every agency is invested in.”
Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.
