Suislaw forest offers rich history

A look at the 100-year history of the Siuslaw National Forest.

Shel Silverstein’s epic 1964 children’s book “The Giving Tree” tells the story of a leafy giant that provides branches to swing from, shade to sit beneath, apples to snack on and wood to build a house. The tree gives and gives and gives, until the boy is an old man and his resource is reduced to a stump.

The Siuslaw National Forest is much like Silverstein’s giving tree, except for the stump part, as it turned 100 years old this week. This is, by most accounts, a happy birthday. After a gut-wrenching transformation brought about by the Northwest Forest Plan in 1992, the forest is now hailed as a model for its balanced nurturing of habitat restoration, tree farming and public play areas.

The Siuslaw’s centennial is a chance to consider the evolving story of a 630,000-acre forest that, like Silverstein’s single tree, has given myriad gifts to the residents of the eight counties its sprawling reaches span.

To Johnny Sundstrom, chair of the Siuslaw Soil and Water Conservation District and coordinator of the Siuslaw Institute, a nonprofit group that coordinates education efforts and government programs in the region, it’s a story told in the trophy case at Mapleton High School. The school’s football players once grew bulging muscles during their summer jobs at the five area mills, all of which are now shuttered. Mapleton High is now half the size it was before logging was sharply curtailed in the forest in the 1990s, the trophies mirroring the decline.

“We had to go from 11-man to (eight)-man football,” Sundstrom said. “They were pulling greenchain and getting strong. Now they’re lucky if they can get a job pulling milkshakes at the McDonald’s in Florence.”

To Gus Gates, it’s a story of nourishment. As the forest transitioned from what was effectively an industrial tree farm, Gates found an apprenticeship in high school with the forest that put him to work restoring fish habitat via tree planting and brush removal. The job taught him the value of conservation work and led to his current job, as an advocate with the nonprofit Our Ocean.

“They took me under their wing,” Gates said of the Forest Service employees who mentored him. “For a young guy growing up in the local community and not seeing many opportunities, that was huge. It set a foundation for the rest of my career.”

To Phyllis Steeves, the forest’s archaeologist, it’s an American story, one that recalls the railroad built to ferry Sitka spruce trees to U.S. Army contractors who valued the lightness and strength of the wood for fighter planes during World War I; the massive harvests that took place here after World War II, when veterans with low-interest loans from the G.I. Bill and booming families bought houses by the hundreds of thousands.

“Because it’s a temperate rainforest in a mild climate, everything grows incredibly fast,” Steeves said. “It’s the best tree-growing area in the world.”

To logging magnate Kay King, it’s a sad story, told in the loss of family-wage jobs in small communities along the coast and the ripple effect of lost revenues to counties that could once rely on receipts from timber sales to bolster their budgets, counties that now must beg for money from Congress for subsidies. The forest should be managed differently, she maintains — especially on the ocean side of the Coast Range mountains.

“There is a lot of waste. So much underbrush, biomass for fires,” King said. “I just can’t help but feel we’ve lost our common sense when it comes to being able to manage the forest for product. On the west slopes, you still have to go in and clear cut. Fir trees don’t grow in the shade. They have to have open light to be replanted and to grow.”

It’s also a story rich in history and impressive statistics. Before Teddy Roosevelt declared it a national forest on July 1, 1908, the Siuslaw was a coastal Indian reservation, with lands that stretched from Tillamook County in the north to Douglas County in the south, and as far inland as Corvallis. It’s one of only two national forests in the lower 48 states bordering the ocean, and its elevation ranges from sea level to 4,000 feet. There are 26 species of amphibians and reptiles, 235 species of birds, more than 200 kinds of fish and 69 different mammals in the forest; there’s Douglas fir, Western hemlock, Western red cedar, Sitka spruce, red alder and big leaf maple. The Siuslaw forest is 135 miles long, 27 miles wide and home to 30 natural lakes and 1,200 miles of fish-bearing streams.

It once was the second-most productive forest in the United States, in terms of timber production. The federal government sold two billion board feet of timber between the years of 1960 to 1990, much of it oldgrowth giants that today are a rare find.

“You used to see three logs on a truck; they were that big,” Sundstrom said. “Now it takes 20 or 30 of these smaller trees to fill a truck.”

Timber production has changed massively since then. With the addition of the spotted owl and marbled murrelet to the endangered species list, came President Bill Clinton’s Northwest Forest Plan, which knocked the annual timber harvest from as much as 370 million board feet of timber in 1991 to 10 million a single year later. The Siuslaw’s budget dropped from $27 million to a low of $12 million, and its staffing level dropped from 330 to 120.

“There was some blood­letting,” said Mary Zuschlag, natural resource staff officer with the forest. “We had to kind of reinvent ourselves.”

Creeks devoid of brush and trees now saw limbs deliberately placed in them, to cool waters for spawning fish. Hillsides stripped of vegetation were replanted. This forest is one of the only in the country to operate in the black, thanks to the valuable thinning that has taken the place of clear cuts. What mills survived have retooled their operations to handle smaller trees. It’s been a decade since the Forest Service was sued for an action in the Siuslaw. And while loggers such as King continue to lament the meager timber harvest, conservationists such as Oregon Wild’s Chandra LeGue call the forest a model. She’s bold enough, even, to make this statement:“The days of controversy in the Siuslaw are pretty much over.”

If that’s true, this is a happy birthday indeed, and Silverstein would be proud.