Boy Scouts plan to log camp near Pulali Point

Despite concerns from Hood Canal landowners that wildlife and private property will be harmed, the Seattle area's Boy Scouts council said yesterday it will move ahead with plans to log a forest in one of the oldest Scout camps in the United States.

A state permit application to log about 80 acres in Camp Parsons near Brinnon will be filed "by next week at the latest," said Mark Hunter, administrations director for the Chief Seattle Council-Boy Scouts of America.

Project opponents -- including about 40 landowners whose properties surround the camp and the adjoining Pulali Point Wilderness -- vowed to continue fighting.

"If the Boy Scouts think we're just going to give up, they're mistaken," said Mark Rose, a Pulali Point resident. "They're not going to log Pulali Point."

Since last year, local Boy Scouts officials have planned what Hunter calls "traditional prescribed thinning" of forests at Camp Parsons, which held its first Scout summer camp in 1919, nine years after the national organization was chartered.

Much of the camp's adjoining forest land on Pulali Point -- a wildlife-rich peninsula facing Jackson Cove on the west and Dabob Bay on the east -- was bequeathed to the Scouts by a Tacoma dentist, Harold Johnson, in 1995.

Johnson, a former Scout who worked at Camp Parsons, gave the property to enhance the camp through wildlife education.

Scout officials say logging is necessary to ensure safety for Scouts using the camp. They say that about 40 acres of the forests have root rot, making trees unstable, and that thinning will allow creation of a nature learning center for Scouts.

The logging will occur across about 105 acres, but "30 percent of that won't be touched," Hunter said, adding the Boy Scouts "have no intent to sell any timber."

But Rose and other opponents, who include longtime residents and former Scouts with long ties to Camp Parsons, remain skeptical.

"What they say just isn't true," Rose said. "This will be a major logging operation, and it's a moneymaking deal."

Opponents fear the logging will "destroy a sensitive ecosystem" that includes habitat for osprey, marbled murrelets, pygmy owls and other wildlife, Rose said. Runoff caused by the logging will also sully residential wells and damage private property, Rose said.

They point to a logging project at the camp in the 1980s that Scout officials promised would result in mere tree thinning but ended up a wide-scale clearcut. Opponents also have hired foresters and scientists to survey the wilderness and found no signs of root rot, Rose said.

"This project doesn't even live up (to) the Boy Scouts own credo: 'Leave the land better than how you found it,' " Rose said.

Scout officials dispute that.

"All of what we're doing is good stewardship of the property," Hunter said.

Once the application is filed, the state Department of Natural Resources will review it for approval.

On the Web: Opponents of the logging of Boy Scouts land at Pulali Point lay out their arguments at www.savepulali.org

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P-I reporter Lewis Kamb

can be reached at 206-448-8336

or lewiskamb@seattlepi.com

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