A proposed timber harvest of 591 acres in the Bridger-Teton National Forest's Greys River Ranger District is remarkably similar to a 1998 proposal, and Wyoming conservationists still say it is a bad idea.

"You'd think the Forest Service would have gotten the picture a decade ago when this project was shut down," said Jonathan Ratner of Western Watersheds Project. "We had hoped that a stake had been driven through the heart of this destructive project, but it is rising from the grave. It was a bad project then, and it is a bad project now."

In the first go-around, the Greys River project was opposed by the Wyoming Outdoor Council, the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Wyoming Wildlife Federation, American Wildlands, Biodiversity Conservation Alliance, Forest Guardians and the Sierra Club.

Bridger-Teton officials call it a vegetative management project, and note that about 1,327 acres of timber harvest has occurred in the last 50 years. This includes 1,056 acres of clearcutting and 271 acres of partial-removal cuts.

According to District Ranger Jay Dunbar, no harvest has occurred within the last 15 years. These clearcut areas are currently 30 to 40 years old and are in various stages of regrowth. Most previously cut areas have sufficiently regenerated and are considered wildlife cover.

The proposed project would also remove dead and dying trees, low-vigor trees or small groups of trees on 155 acres of the project area, while retaining 40 to 70 percent of healthy trees in the stand.

These treatments would provide commercial utilization of wood in the form of house logs, saw timber, posts and biomass derived through implementation of the stand treatments. About 4.5 million board feet of forest products could be provided by these treatments, say forest officials.

Dunbar said about 70 percent of the project area is forested and 30 percent is covered with sagebrush/grasslands. The main tree species is lodgepole pine, with significant amounts of subalpine fir, limber pine and Engelmann spruce and minor amounts of Douglas fir, whitebark pine and aspen. Stands proposed for treatment in this project exceed 160 years old.

The Upper Greys River analysis area is about 20 miles southeast of Afton on the west slope of the Wyoming Range, just east of Wyoming Peak.

Specifically, Forest Service officials maintain that the purpose of the project is to "attain desired vegetative conditions, including increased diversity of tree age and size classes."

Ratner countered that the real purpose is to cut the buffer strips left between clearcuts in the 1970s.

"This project will log the remnant old-growth forest in the project area and leave stumps and a monoculture (of) lodgepole pine saplings," he said. "It will do nothing but reduce diversity - not increase it."

Lloyd Dorsey, of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, said modern science has demolished "the myth that you can log forests into better health." Dorsey said the project was bad a decade ago, "and is bad now."

Ratner said the proposed site for the project has severe problems, including high erosion and soil compaction ratings, severe limitations on revegetation and the fact that 25 percent of the proposed clearcuts would be on steep slopes of 30 degrees.

Some of the issues to be explored by forest officials include:

* The effects of timber harvest on lynx habitat, security cover for elk and other habitat, including Colorado cutthroat trout habitat.

* The effects of vegetative treatment on forest health, specifically the high proportion of older age class conifer stands and declining tree condition, resulting from dwarf mistletoe infection levels in lodgepole pine.

* The effects of vegetative treatment on fuel loading. High fuel loads exist in dead and down material, as well as from recent losses due to mountain pine beetle and long-term site productivity.

* The effects of roads and harvest activities on water quality.

Mary Cernicek, public affairs officer for the forest, said no prospective sawmill customers have been identified as of yet. The earliest that any timber could be put up for sale would be 2008.