Four environmental groups are protesting the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's plan to harvest about 2.5 million board feet of timber from the slopes of Grizzly Peak and throughout the Little Butte Creek watershed.

Their primary concerns with the Rio Climax timber sales are the construction of new roads and harvesting of some trees larger than 30 inches in diameter, said George Sexton, conservation director for the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center.

"Eighty percent of the plan, everyone sees eye-to-eye on," said Sexton. "We can live with some of the small-diameter thinning, but not with the 30 inches in diameter. We asked them to back off that, and the BLM couldn't even come that far."

KS Wild and Rogue Riverkeeper, both of Ashland, and Cascadia Wildlands and Oregon Wild, both of Eugene, filed an administrative protest against the Rio Climax Forest Management Project and the BLM's findings that no significant environmental impact would arise from the logging.

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