VERNONIA, OREGON - June 02, 2011 - "Ridge 77" in the Clatsop State Forest is a good example that shows various aspects of forestry within framework of a single timber sale. Many trees were left standing in this thinning operation above private property where a spring acts as household drinking water.
Thomas Boyd/The Oregonian New Timber Management gallery (17 photos)
Thomas Boyd/The Oregonian New Timber Management gallery (17 photos)
But after long years of environmental, economic and political paralysis, the logjam may be breaking. The recession and decimation of Oregon's rural communities produce a clamor for more logging, jobs and revenue for schools and counties. Biologists, conservation groups, government regulators and timber owners increasingly collaborate on habitat and stream protection plans that allow timber harvests, even clear-cuts. Most recognize the need to thin thick forests to dampen the threat of catastrophic wildfires.
Forty years of evolving forest management season the search for balance. As Oregon and the nation continue to grapple with natural resource policy, the future of forestry may be taking root in places like Ridge 77.
The land
Ridge 77 is one of those ripples in the landscape that make up the Oregon Coast Range. Volcanic action formed these hills and ridges, but 60 million years weathered them to nubbins.
Erosion flushed minerals from the basalt into soil that is deep and rich. Today the ridge is classic western Oregon timber country, damp and dense, with moderate temperatures and a long growing season.
From Mist to Jewel, on ridges above the Nehalem River, the trees grow big quickly. Western red cedar, hemlock, big leaf maple and alder, of course. But mostly tall, ramrod-straight Douglas fir, prized for lumber.
"Some of the best in the world," agrees Ron Zilli, an assistant district forester for the Clatsop State Forest.
"Once they get going, it's game on -- a race for the light."
The sale
The state selected Ridge 77 for sale after a series of screenings including stand age, geography and projected revenue. The area was surveyed for threatened northern spotted owls in 2007, 2008 and 2009. None was seen or heard.
Ridge 77 was put out for sealed bid in July 2009. Fifty acres of thinning and 41 acres of modified clear-cut, which would leave trees strategically scattered. The sale was expected to produce about 2.8 million board feet, almost all of it 66- to 68-year-old Douglas fir. The average fir would be 83 feet tall and a diameter of 25 inches at breast height.
The 80-page sale contract spelled out everything from how logs would be removed -- yarded by cable, with one end lifted off the ground to avoid gouging the soil -- to how they would be marked. At least one end of each log was hammered with a state-issued brand and painted with a minimum 2-inch diameter spot of orange paint.
The contract dictated where cable systems were deployed, ordered vegetation buffers along four seasonal streams, directed how roads and culverts were maintained and how much debris was left on site. It stipulated trees could not be felled across draws, roads or on top of already downed trees. "Maximum stump height shall be 12 inches or 60 percent of stump diameter, whichever is greater," the contract ordered.
The timing wasn't great, with the housing market and the demand for lumber at rock bottom. The state didn't expect to get much out of the sale, so set the minimum price low -- about $139 per 1,000 board feet.
Planners drew the name from the gravel Clatsop County Road that traces the southern, bottom edge of the sale: Old 77 Vesper Lane.
Perspective
Zilli, the assistant district forester, found a handwritten, hand-illustrated 1913 timber cruiser's report that said the ridge had burned in the 1890s. Department records show it was clear-cut in 1945 to answer the postwar building boom call for 2-by-4s and sheets of plywood.
Then, there must have seemed no end to the timber. Nearly every little town had a mill, and jobs in the woods were passed from father to son in "Sometimes a Great Notion" style.
They clear-cut the big trees, burned the slash, replanted in mono-culture. Stream banks, roadless areas and wildlife were an afterthought.
The ridge was privately owned until the late 1940s, when Clatsop County took it over in lieu of unpaid property taxes. The county deeded it to the state Board of Forestry, and it became part of the Clatsop State Forest.
The Oregon Department of Forestry manages about 818,000 acres, only about 3 percent of the state's forestland, but accounted for 9 percent of Oregon's 2010 timber harvest. The U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service own about 57 percent of Oregon's forests, but federal land has been so clamped by conflict that state land nearly matches it in timber production.
The department's 2010 management plan is deeply detailed and intended to result over the decades in forest structures that are a complex, healthy and productive mix of age, canopy and understory. You don't do that by running roughshod over old trees, wildlife and streams. Or people, either.
The pressure is on to free up more timber. The Board of Forestry directed the department to increase annual revenue by 5 to 15 percent above the 2002-06 average.
It's a balancing act. Done right, it completes what foresters call the triangle of "greatest permanent value" -- social, economic and environmental benefit for the people of Oregon.
The logger
Harve Dethlefs, president of Bighorn Logging Inc. in Banks, grew up in a logging family. His oldest son, Dwayne, was one of the colorful loggers in TVs reality show "Ax Men." Harve thought the show was nonsense and didn't want any part of it. He has a solid reputation; in 2008 the Oregon Department of Forestry named his company one of its "Forest Practices Operators of the Year" for building a berm to steer debris away from homes near a landslide-prone logging site.
Dethlefs left logging at one point and worked 20 years as a warehouse manager for Tektronix, the pioneering Oregon high-tech company. He came back to the woods in the early 1980s and started his own company. Until Ridge 77, Bighorn was a contract logging outfit, cutting and hauling for the mills and bigger companies that could afford to buy timber sales.
But he was intrigued by the low minimum price for Ridge 77. He bid $570,438 or $205.86 per thousand board feet and dropped off the required deposit at the Clatsop State Forest's district office in Astoria. His bid was well above the state's minimum and a gamble, but he figured the market might recover by the time he logged it. Still, he didn't expect to win.
"I told the gal, 'Well, we'll come back this afternoon to pick our bid deposit,'" he says.
When he returned, the woman said he couldn't have his check back -- he'd won.
"Holy mackerel," Dethlefs exclaimed. "Now what do we do?"
The neighbor
Ken Enneberg got a letter saying the ridge above his home would be clear-cut. He was familiar with the process. He was a fifth-generation logger -- at one point he worked for Dethlefs -- but got out of the woods 25 years ago.
Now, he's an electrician at Georgia Pacific's Wauna Paper Mill in Clatskanie.
"I miss the work, the being outside and not having someone looking over your shoulder," he says of logging. "But it was going to make an old man out of me."
Enneberg's well and a spring he uses to water livestock are charged by drainage off Ridge 77. He worried that heavy equipment might compact the soil or leak fuel or hydraulic fluid, possibly contaminating his water. "I wanted them to be a little more careful," he says.
In response, ODF revised the contract to require hauling logs off by cable rather than by machines on the ground, which pleased Enneberg.
"It would have been ideal to have that nice stand of timber across from my house, but that's not reality," he says.
"My house is made of wood, I burn wood for heat and I work at a pulp and paper mill."
Jobs
Dean Bernardi of Vernonia was out of work when Bighorn Logging hired him. Bernardi and his partner finished the job in 60 days, thinning slightly more than half the sale and clear-cutting most of the rest.
Bernardi, short, stocky and bearded, has been falling trees for 30 years and lived to tell about it. "So far," he says with a grin. "A few bumps, bruises and stitches."
Dethlefs, the company owner, waited as long as he could to log, watching the stumpage price rise and keeping an eye on the calendar. By contract, he had to finish by Oct. 31.
Seven others worked on the site in addition to the fallers. By the time the crew finished hauling logs off the site this spring, mills were paying $400 to $450 per thousand board feet -- double what Dethlefs paid. "It worked out pretty good for us," Dethlefs says mildly. "Pretty good margin."
Logs from state forests cannot be exported. The timber from Ridge 77 went to RSG's Olympic Forest Products mill outside of Mist. The mill was closed much of the spring, but managers decided recently that market conditions had improved and reopened it. Log buyer Kirk Harrison estimated 30 people would set to work. It will take them about a month, he said, to saw the Ridge 77 timber into 2-by-4 and 2-by-6 boards.
The school One-third of the money from state forest timber sales goes to ODF; counties and school districts get the rest. In the Clatsop State Forest, that has made the Jewel School District, with 148 students K-12, perhaps the richest district per capita in Oregon.
Of 42 timber sales planned in the Clatsop State Forest this fiscal year, Jewel was in line to receive a projected $2.5 million from 28 of them -- $36,223 from Ridge 77.
"Lucky geography," says Superintendent Brian Gander.
Timber sale money built a new $18 million school in 2007, paid in cash.
The district offers a forestry class and maintains a plot for students to tend, but timber's influence in the community -- beyond money -- is muted.
"They're proud of our heritage but they say they don't want our kids to do what we do," Gander says.
Some students ride the bus an hour to school. The school struggles to field an eight-man football team and borrows seventh- and eighth-graders to fill out the high school band, but does all right academically.
"We don't struggle with technology at all," Gander says. "We probably have more computers than is educationally necessary." Gander keeps that to himself when he meets with other superintendents.
"When they talk budgets, I sit back," he says. "I don't want to make a spectacle of our fortune."
Regrowth
Even loggers don't like the look of a clear-cut. The thinned area looks healthy, but half of Ridge 77 is a jumble of stumps, limbs and a few logs that shattered when they hit the ground. In a contract directive that reflects the latest forestry techniques, the loggers left some trees in the clear-cut. Among them are snags -- dead, standing trees that support the links of life. Wood-boring insects, followed by birds that feed upon them, followed by squirrels and voles, followed by predators.
Ridge 77 will be replanted in February or March. Depending on management policy, and barring fire, storm or disease, it will be ready for harvest again in 35 to 70 years.
The replacement seedlings, now a couple of inches tall, are growing in peat-filled containers at Pacific Regeneration Technologies in Hubbard. The nursery grows millions of trees each year for government and private forests.
On average, the Clatsop State Forest plants 600,000 to 750,000 trees a year. The planting usually is 60 percent Douglas fir, 30 percent hemlock, and a 10 percent mix of noble fir, grand fir, cedar and alder. Ridge 77, because it is prime timber ground, will get 70 percent Douglas fir and the rest hemlock.
They'll be planted 350 trees to the acre. About 90 percent will survive.
And begin the race for the light.
--Eric Mortenson
From Bob Zybach
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting way to get at least some active forest management back into western Oregon. It looks like the logger is doing
an excellent job, given the political constraints this plan was created under. However, many of the posters are correct -- most of the leave trees and artificial snags won't last five years, creating evenmore of a fire hazard than all the unnecessary dead material left on the ground does now. Spraying with herbicides and growing another closed-canopy crop will only make it worse.
I am not too sure about the reforestation plan on this, either. While it is true that this portion of the Coast Range is almost 100% Douglas-
fir -- and hardly needs the nitrogen-fixing capacities of red alder for those that continue to believe in forest succession -- it is also
true that containerized seedlings, such as those pictured, have been a proven failure on many coastal tree planting projects. Better seedlings at a wider spacing with good site preparation is one sure way of saving money and better ensuring successful regeneration.
This land could be logged much cheaper and reforested much better if actual historical precedents (including "landscape scale") were used
as guidelines in the management plan rather than the "new forestry" clearcuts and paint-by-numbers reforestation generated by computer models.
What were the stem counts (and of what species) in 1800 and in 1900? Were "natural" openings and trails present? If so, where? What plants
grew along the openings and trails (especially riparian meadows and ridgelines)? And what age is the current stand, how was it
established, and what age and species are the understory plants?
Answering these types of questions first and making plans second would have likely put an entirely different spin on this article and this
discussion.