WASHINGTON, June 8 — A legal struggle over logging in two roadless tracts of a national forest in Oregon ravaged by fire four years ago is coming to a conclusion as logging rights on more than 400 acres will be auctioned off by the Forest Service on Friday.

A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that the sale could proceed. The timber sales, on two small tracts inside 500,000 fire-blighted acres, would not usually attract much attention — and indeed, it is unclear how much demand there will be for the timber, most of which has been dead and prey to insects and rot for four years.

But Oregon has long been the central battleground for environmental groups opposed to any logging anywhere on the 500,000 acres.

The objection is that logging could set back the regeneration of the forest by damaging fragile new growth, and that it would set a precedent for logging in an area that, under the currently approved plan for the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, was supposed to remain roadless.

Opening a roadless area at a time when governors are still drawing up proposals to indicate their preferences for where roads should and should not be built in the federal forests, drew the governors of Oregon, Washington, California and New Mexico to oppose these two sales. One tract is more than 200 acres called Mike’s Gulch, about 30 miles inland, and the other is called Blackberry, which covers slightly less than 200 acres along the Pacific coast.

Patty Burel, a Forest Service spokeswoman, said the years of litigation had prevented the government from acting quickly on the sale proposals, and reduced the number of trees that remain economically desirable.

The logging rights to be auctioned, she added, come with a stipulation that no roads be built to take the logs out; removal must be done by helicopter.

Michael Carrier, the natural resources policy director for Gov. Theodore R. Kulongoski of Oregon, who opposes the sale, asked in a telephone interview: “Is it largely a symbolic gesture? And what are they messaging? Are they signaling industry that they’re serious? Are they sending a shot across the bow of Governor Kulongoski?”

The purpose of the sale, Ms. Burel countered, was “for economic recovery to the community and the local economy.”

She added, “We will reforest successfully after this is completed.”