Avey to retire as supervisor of Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest

“After much thought, prayer, reflection and family discussion, I believe it is time for me to focus the time I have left in this temporal gift of life on my wife and our adventures together (and for clarity, I believe in the COVID vaccine and am fully vaccinated),” he said in an email. “I leave the Forest Service with a strong sense of gratitude and thankfulness.”

Avey, 61, said officials are seeking his replacement and plan to have someone in place soon after the start of the new year.

Avey’s announcement comes about two weeks after a new management plan (https://bit.ly/3oDvr4m) was unveiled for the 2.8 million-acre Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest. The plan was seven years in the making and will help with management for the next 15 years. 

“I think like anything else we do, there’s parts of it that people are going to like and parts some won’t because you don’t please everyone,” Avey recently told the Montana State News Bureau. “But this plan reflects what we heard from the public, it follows the laws on how we’re to manage the forest and provides our staff’s best scientific perspectives.”

The plan recommends adding four recommended wilderness areas (RWA), bringing the total on the forest to seven and total acres from about 34,000 to more than 153,000. The plan also recommends protections for 45 rivers or streams as wild and scenic, which if designated by Congress would come with regulations aimed at maintaining those qualities.

The Helena National Forest and Lewis and Clark National Forest combined in 2015. The agency then began to update 1986 forest plans that were considered outdated.

Avey said in a telephone interview Tuesday that he was excited about the $1 trillion bipartisan federal infrastructure bill that was passed. He said some of those funds would be coming to the U.S. Forest Service for fuels treatment.

He told members of Hometown Helena in October the Forest Service has a 10-year strategy that’s been accepted by the administration and Congress that is a plan for managing resilient forests.

“That’s really our path ahead,” Avey said. “We have to get ahead of this and we have to treat fuels in the right place, the right measure at the right time … which means more prescribed fire. … Without doing that we will be in this increasingly destructive and untenable cycle."

“Our current situation across the country, across all jurisdictions, is simply not ecologically, politically or socially sustainable,” he said.

Avey said Deputy Forest Supervisor Sara Mayben, whom he described as “my valued partner in leadership,” plans to help transition the new forest supervisor and will then consider her future plans next spring.

“My 40 years with this outfit have been both challenging and rewarding in ways I never would have imagined, and that is due to the cherished co-workers I have been honored to work with other the years,” he wrote.

He thanked those he sent the email to for their “diligence, passion, humor, leadership and devotion to the land and the people we serve.”

“The work of the Forest Service is truly very noble, doing the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number in the long run,” Avey wrote. “Thank you all for being a part of that, and know that your hard work has and will continue to make a big difference for good.”

Included in his email are quotes he said have given him encouragement.

“You have enemies, good. That means you stood up for something.” Winston S. Churchill.

Michael Garrity, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, a nonprofit environmental organization, has often sued the Forest Service over decisions made regarding the forest. This includes a lawsuit to halt non-commercial logging and/or burning 10,331 acres in the Elk and Smith Creek drainages and halting the Castle Mountains logging and burning project.

He offered comment about Avey’s announcement.

“He’s always been polite and professional to me and I wish him well in retirement,” Garrity said. “We have sued over a lot of the decisions he signed, but we still always had a professional relationship.”

Avey just returned to his Montana post, after having served from June to October as the national director of fire and aviation management for the U.S. Forest Service.

Avey was the forest supervisor on the Lewis and Clark National Forest since 2011 and became the new Helena National Forest supervisor in early 2014.

Avey at one time served as the deputy director of fire, aviation and air for the northern region, which includes Montana, northern Idaho, North Dakota and parts of South Dakota. Prior to that, he was a district ranger on the Gallatin National Forest.

He started with the Forest Service in 1981 as a forestry technician, firefighter and timber cruiser on the Big Horn National Forest in Wyoming. He then worked on forests in Utah and on the Beaverhead/Deerlodge Forest in Montana. He holds a forestry degree from the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point.

Avey said he and wife Crystal Coffey-Avey plan to stay in Helena and do some traveling. He said they have children in Bozeman and Idaho.

“I’m very bittersweet about it,” he said about his pending retirement. “I love the Forest Service and love the work the agency does for the American public.”

“I will miss doing the work,” Avey said. “But life is full of phases and it’s time for the next phase.”