Historic Logging Shaped These Woods

Logging profoundly shaped this landscape. The first large-scale logging in Montana occurred on the Blackfoot River corridor in 1885. From 1885-1900, loggers used oxen to skid logs off snowy hillsides to the river ice, and when the ice thawed, masses of logs rushed downstream to a sawmill at the confluence of the Blackfoot and Clark Fork rivers. By the early 1900s, a narrow gauge railroad crossed the Potomac Valley and replaced the oxen’s work, and by the mid-1920s, a standard-gauge railroad ran up the valley carrying logs to the Anaconda Copper Mining Company’s lumber mill in Bonner. After Anaconda’s last period of logging in 1937, the company gave 19,000 acres to the School of Forestry at the University of Montana. Today, Lubrecht Experimental Forest is devoted to natural resource experimentation, demonstration, and education, with foresters studying tree harvest, growth, timber practices that better match natural processes, and the effects of recreation on the Blackfoot River.

Montana · United States