III. 



Affected Environment 



A. Background 



The Gladstone Creek, proposals include forest management and 

 harvesting actions in several forest stands on the state owned 

 portions of Sections 23, 26, 28 & 34, T15N, R5W. In addition, road 

 access on state and/or private lands would occur in Sections 14, 24, 

 25, 27, 33 and/or 35, depending upon which alternative is selected. 



This project area is in rugged mountainous terrain approximately 4-5 

 miles east of the Continental Divide, and approximately 6 miles W-NW 

 from the town of Wolf Creek, MT . The project area includes the 

 Gladstone Creek (third order) and French Creek (second order) 

 drainages. These streams are tributary to Wolf Creek, which joins 

 Little Prickly Pear Creek, which is tributary to the Missouri River. 



This project area is a small subset of the climatic zone M332D, 

 described in the February 1997 Losensky Report, prepared for the 

 DNRC . In this report, Losensky analyzed historic data on age and 

 species distributions. Table 4 shows the historic age/size class 

 distributions for the 3 main species in this climatic zone. 



TABLE 5 

 Historic Stand Structures (- 



of spp . area) 



The Gladstone Creek project area was evaluated for old growth and 

 biodiversity in a landscape analysis. The initial analysis was 

 completed 3/3/97 by the DNRC, with some table revisions on 10/16/98. 

 (This report is attached as Appendix B.) The project area includes 

 a gross area, private and state, of 5638 acres. The state owns 2413 

 acres (42.8%) of the project area. All state lands included in this 

 project are "classified forest" lands by the DNRC. The state lands 

 are 98.2% forested. 



Most of the operable terrain in the analysis area was logged at the 

 turn of the century, mostly prior to state acquisition. Since that 

 time, regeneration and stand growth has increased overall tree 

 density . 



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