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Mr, Snyder. In many aspects, I think creation of large old- 

 growth reserves would be detrimental to protection of old-growth 

 habitats and large trees on the landscape. Given our climate, which 

 is a Mediterranean climate, it means we have a long, dry summer 

 period, and also our past history of management in these areas 

 where we have had a long history of fire suppression, a lot of the 

 larger old-growth stands that were here that are remnant to the 

 Sierras have a well-established understory, a ladder of fuels which 

 carries fuels and causes fires to burn in intensity that are great 

 enough to kill these old-growth trees. So I think a large old-growth 

 reserve system would actually be detrimental without some form of 

 management of the fuels in the trees within those reserves to en- 

 sure that the fire regime and the loss to fire are minimized in 

 terms of risks. 



I think we have all seen fires. We had a 150,000-acre fire on the 

 Stanislaus National Forest that had no respect for old growth, 

 young growth, brush or any of these types of things. I don't think 

 we want to have a repetition of that throughout the Sierra land- 

 scape. 



Mr. Herger. What you are commenting has also been my experi- 

 ence. I have seen some areas, such as the Cottonwood fire just 

 north of Lake Tahoe which threatened to burn the Town of 

 Loyalton a few years ago. It was in the news for two or three weeks 

 as the fire raged. 



That fire was so intense that it not only burned all the trees but 

 it seared the ground to an extent where nothing can grow there for 

 several years. So it seems to me that what we are doing is the op- 

 posite. If we were to create old-growth reserves, we would, in es- 

 sences be destroying that which we are saying we are trying to pre- 

 serve. 



Let me ask another question. The company that you work for has 

 owned and managed, I understand, 126,000 acres of land in the Si- 

 erra Nevada for over 100 years. Mr. Snyder, how healthy are these 

 private forests, in your opinion, and how fire resistant are they? Do 

 they support populations of California spotted owls and other wild- 

 life that are normally associated with old-growth forests? 



Mr. Snyder. To answer the last part of the question first, yes we 

 do. The densities of owls that we are finding on our managed sec- 

 ond-growth forests appear to be at levels that are on comparable 

 to Forest Service lands. In other words, if you put all the dots on 

 the map, you would notice little or no difference in density of owls 

 between the managed timberlands which we have under our own- 

 ership and the Federal lands which are adjacent to us. 



The lands we manage are growing probably at a rate that is 50 

 percent higher on a board foot basis, on the average, for the stock- 

 ing that we have than on adjacent Federal lands. 



The fire resistance question is difficult even for us. The markets 

 for the smaller material are starting to dry up a bit and we are 

 concerned about that. We have to have some way to utilize this ma- 

 terial and I imagine your constituents in the northern part of the 

 State are suffering the same problems we are in terms of oper- 

 ationally how to deal with the material. 



From an infrastructure standpoint, the industry in California is 

 well-established and is positioned well to utilize these small trees 



