TAMING A WILD FOREST

JOHN R. BRUCKART.

The Douglas-fir region in the western part of Oregon and Washington covers some 55,000 square miles. Five-sixths of it is forest land and one-sixth is farm land. On the forest land stands one-third of the saw timber remaining in the United States. Two-fifths of that saw timber is in the national forests, which make up 16,000 square miles of the most isolated forest land in western Oregon and Washington. The saw timber is mainly Douglas-fir, with some hemlock, cedar, and true firs.

The Willamette National Forest, in west-central Oregon, is one of these Douglas-fir forests. Forest management on the Willamette has several unique aspects, but otherwise it typifies forest management on the other national forests of the Douglas-fir region.

In 1893, when President Grover Cleveland established the 4,883,000-acre Cascade Range Forest Reserve, he included within its boundaries the 1,819,483 acres that are now the Willamette National Forest. The forest was created in its present form in 1933, when the Santiam National Forest (created in 1911) and the Cascade National Forest (created as such in 1908) were combined.

At the time of President Cleveland's proclamation, and for 20 years thereafter, the territory was the real untamed, wild, virgin forest practically as untouched by man as it had been in 1804 when Lewis and Clark first explored the Oregon country. Indeed, practically the only change had been the one inflicted by fires. Trees that had sprouted from seed at the time of William the Conqueror still flourished as primeval giants in the humid valleys and canyons; deer wandered over trails that Indians had always used for hunting and fishing; the white man's only marks on the wilderness were three wagon trails through Cascade Mountain passes and three small settlements.

As in the rest of the Douglas-fir region, the forest reached mile on mile across mountains and canyons. The mantle of trees was unbroken but for the ghosts of past fires. The stately Douglas-fir was king, and the king's girth was so large that a 10-foot measure would not cover the distance across a fallen giant's stump. Many of the trees were clear of branches to 150 feet above the ground. As the timber approached higher elevations at the Cascade summit, the Douglas-fir grew smaller in size and gradually merged with upper-slope and subalpine types mountain hemlock, alpine and silver fir, and Engelmann spruce, which now are valuable chiefly for watershed protection and recreation and as a reservoir of pulp for the future.

So vast was the forest that the first national forest administrators themselves did not know how much resource had been put in their custody or what the growth habits of the trees were. Whatever was known in those days of the art of forest management could hardly apply to those forests. The techniques and doctrines of forest management had been devised for European forests, and seemingly no common de-nominator, whether economic or physical, was at hand for managing forests that differed as much as these did from European forests. The only logical thing that the early rangers and supervisors could do was to use their own judgment, and to wait and see what would happen.

Things did begin to happen. Timber claims and homestead entries brought people to the more accessible parts of the forest. Their activities and the dry summers and the lightning storms soon made it apparent that something would have to be done about forest fires or there would be no forest left to administer. It was apparent also that the bulk of the forest land was valuable principally for protecting the watersheds and for growing timber, but that streams and lakes should be preserved for fishing and recreation and the alpine meadows near the summit could be used for grazing cattle and sheep.

THE FIRST MANAGEMENT PROCEDURES developed on the Willamette National Forest were for fire protection. The reason was simple : If fire were not kept out of the forest, there would be no need to devise complicated sustained-yield plans. Fires here were endemic a recurring phenomenon. Since the beginning of time, lightning had struck the high ridges and fires had burned unchecked until autumn rains put them out. In wet years, the fires were small. In dry years, the fires were catastrophic. In the high country, when fires did not occur naturally, the Indians set their own fires once in a while in the belief that old burns made the best grounds for hunting and huckleberry picking. Even the early miners and settlers considered it proper to touch off a few thousand acres of forest land if they thought any personal advantage would accrue.

In 1902 Forest Examiner Fred G. Plummer looked over the part of the reserve that is now the Willamette National Forest and said : "From all points on the . . . divide the views are grand. On a clear day the panorama extends from Mount St. Helens, in Washington, to Diamond Peak, and includes 10 snow-capped mountains, with hundreds of lesser peaks. The middle ground is of lakes, meadows, cinder cones, and rivers of lava, and the foreground would be in perfect keeping with the picture if it were not too frequently an unsightly burn."

He estimated that 10 percent of the area was covered by new burns and that probably 90 percent of the entire forest at some remote period had suffered from fires, of which traces still remained.

In the beginning men were lacking to do the job. Among the first supervisors were men like Cy Bingham, a westerner who combined the positions of county judge and sheriff with his Government work, and Tom Sherrard, a young easterner who had studied forestry in Europe. Each field man had about 500,000 acres to protect from fire or trespass. On such large areas one man could do little in serious fire situations except to put out small fires and report the acreage burned over by the larger fires.

The forests in the Douglas-fir region always have been uniquely susceptible to bad fires. The dry summers, the predominance of resinous trees, and the great volume of inflammable material on the ground create an acute hazard all through the summer. The increasing use of the forest by travelers, vacationers, loggers, and settlers has increased the chances of man-caused fires. Lightning storms can easily ignite the material; in critical fire weather, a spark from a logging donkey, a burning match, or the cigarette of a passerby can set off a conflagration.

Several bad fire years have occurred on the Willamette National Forest since it was created. One of the worst was in 1919, when several fires burned over about 31,000 acres.

Through the years a systematic fire-protection organization has been developed. The number of smokechasers was increased. Lookout cabins were built. The back country was made more accessible by new trails and roads. New fire-fighting tools were developed. Portable pumps and hose that could be carried by men or pack animals were used. Dropping men and supplies from airplanes was then tried. Agreements were made with hundreds of experienced loggers, sawmill workers, and other local cooperators for getting trained fire fighters in a hurry.

The effect of the organization is evident from the record for the 5 years from 1943 to 1948. During the period (when, it is true, the weather was favorable for fire fighting) , 391 fires were started on the forest, practically all by lightning, but the area burned averaged only 139 acres each year.

Another step came in the techniques of burning logging slash. Fire experts agree that slash from logging is the most dangerous type of fuel. As a result of a series of large fires in slash, for many years the controlled burning of the slash was considered necessary. The early logger was not particularly skillful in his burning techniques, however; it was not unusual for a slash-burning fire to get out of control. Through experience, men learned that in this region slash could be burned safely only at certain periods of the year usually after the first heavy fall rains and then only by using careful burning procedures. It has become standard practice to postpone burning until fuel under the green timber is wet (usually after 2 1/2 to 5 inches of rainfall) ; to start burning in the afternoons so that fires will die down during the night; to burn downhill on steep slopes. Thus fire hazard is reduced with a minimum of damage to the forest. Recently improved cutting practices, such as partial cutting or area selection, have tended to simplify the slash-burning problem by breaking up slash areas into small segments.

THE HEADWATERS of the Middle Fork Willamette, McKenzie, and Santiam Rivers are within the Willamette forest. All are major contributors to the flow of the Willamette River, whose waters are important to agriculture and industry in Oregon.

The management of the national forest is planned to safeguard the water yields, through maintenance of an adequate forest cover. Protection from fire, regulation of timber harvesting, and control of grazing help to maintain and improve watershed conditions.

THE SELLING of timber to private logging operators and sawmills started early in the history of the Willamette National Forest. The first sale was one for 14 million board feet to J. B. Hills of Oakridge, in 1905. Between 1905 and 1940 the timber business increased at a comparatively modest rate. Recreation and fire protection were still the main items of business. The average cut on the entire forest for the 35 years was about 33 million board feet a year, and was mostly on the accessible Oakridge-Westfir area on the southern end of the forest and on the Detroit-North Santiam area at the northern end of the forest. The first timber sales on three of the six ranger districts on the forest were not made until after 1940.

In the Willamette Valley logging has changed from a primitive form to a highly mechanized operation within the span of a single generation. Early-day bull teams gave way to steam donkey logging; steam donkeys, in turn, were supplanted by trucks and tractors. Old-timers now high in lumbering circles, like Faye Abrams of Springfield and H. J. Cox of Eugene, can remember when they logged with bull teams and horse teams and how they later switched to steam donkey, chutes, and skid roads.

Early logging in the Douglas-fir region was primitive. Bull teams, made famous by the legends of Paul Bunyan's Blue Ox, were the primary logging machines until nearly 1900. The early 1900's saw the coming of power logging the emergence of the steam donkey as the principal logging machine. Several years later, high-lead logging was developed. In high-lead logging, a lumberjack had to cut off the top of a tall tree, called a spar tree. Logs were hauled to the landing by a long cable rigged to the top of the spar tree. By hauling in the cable, the donkey engine dragged the largest logs to a common pile, sometimes called a "cold deck," from which point the logs were skidded by another machine along a chute or a skid road to be loaded on the railroad or dumped into the river. River driving was common on the Willamette and McKenzie Rivers in the early 1900's.