Orleans

                                                     Orleans Ranger District

                                              Six Rivers National Forest

                                                           1971-1977

 

Orleans is located along the Klamath River in northwestern California.  In the gold mining days of the 1850’s it was known as Orleans Bar when the only access was by horseback.  Today state highway 96 goes through this small community, and if you don’t have to stop for food, gas or information at the Ranger Station you might not even notice the posted speed limit. 

In the spring of 1971, I accepted a job with the Forest Service as a GS-4 Forestry Aid on the Orleans Ranger District.  Without any knowledge of this community I loaded up my old 1963 Ford pickup and made the big move.   It was an eight hour drive from Stockton, California up through the Klamath Mountains to Orleans.  As I drove up highway 96 the sun was setting.  When I arrived in Orleans it was dark, and I could only see a few lights from houses scattered along both sides of the highway.  I looked for a place to spend the night, like a motel or a side street where I could park and sleep in my truck; there was neither.  I ended up in a campground just outside of town.  The next morning I reported for work thinking there might be temporary space to stay in the bunk house until I found a place to stay permanently.  The bunkhouse was full.  Somebody informed me there was a small house for rent next to the tackle shop.  After work I made contact with the owner, who lived next door to the small house for rent.  Since I quickly saw there was not much to this town, I decided to take it for $70 per month.  Half of this house was an old trailer making up a bedroom and kitchen attached to a wooden structure containing the bathroom and small living room, maybe for a total of 200 square feet of living space all under one roof.  I spent four years living in this place until I was promoted to a position that included a government trailer to live in located in a community trailer park. 

In addition to the Ranger Station, Orleans consisted of two gas stations, two stores, a post office, an elementary school, a veneer mill, three trailer courts, three bars, a hotel and a church.  The population was about 600 people in the summer, including all those that lived within a ten mile radius and a seasonal work force of contractors and their employees.  The Ranger Station was made up of an office, seven homes for the staff, a shop, warehouse, bunk house and a small house for a crew foreman.  There were about 14 permanent people assigned to this station and a seasonal work force of about 20, including a fire crew, a brush disposal crew, a silvicuture and timber crew . 

The local economy was based on logging, road construction, recreation, and the cultivation of marijuana.  It was not uncommon to come across marijuana plantations while working out in the forest or seeing shifty looking characters in town showing off their big rolls of cash.  Social events consisted of floating on inner tubes down the Klamath River, fishing, potluck dinners on the Ranger Station, baseball games with local loggers, drinking beer and fighting.   The nearest law enforcement officer was a deputy sheriff 30 miles away in Hoopa and was never known to patrol after dark in or around Orleans.   There were some citizen deputies appointed to keep a watchful eye on any local mischief, especially at any community functions.  In most cases some of these people were in no better condition than the local Indians in regard to their alcohol consumption

There was an Indian population here that had a hard time controlling their use of alcohol, which usually led to fights in one of the drinking establishments called the Ishi Pishi Bar.  Some of these fights resulted in the death of some people over the years I lived here.  Sometimes it was closed down by the state, but usually opened again in a few weeks.  Seems the windows to this place were always covered with plywood.  Most white people stayed away and gathered at the Orleans Hotel Bar across the highway or the Fisherman’s Inn across the river. 

The first three years of my career here involved doing a little of everything from performing plantation surveys in the spring, timber cruising and mapping in the summer, falling hardwoods and burning logging slash in the fall, planting trees and assisting with timber sale appraisals in the winter.  Within the first year I was promoted to a GS-5 Forestry Technician after becoming a certified timber cruiser and by the end of my second year was promoted to a GS-7 Lead Forestry Technician in charge of timber sale layout.   By the spring of 1975 I was promoted to a GS-9 Forestry Technician doing timber sale administration which became a year-round job.   This District had a hard time recruiting people due to the remote location which made it not that attractive to many professional people with families.  In the six years I worked here I saw three District Rangers come and go.   It was relatively easy to get promotions as a technician, plus it was a good way for management to keep you from looking for transfers in order to get a promotion.   

This District had an annual timber cut of 80 million board feet, mostly in the form of clearcuts.  Most timber sales were purchased by Fortuna Veneer that had the mill in Orleans, Humboldt Fir Lumber Company in Hoopa or Sierra-Pacific Lumber Company in Arcata.  Many of the logging and road construction contractors came from out of the area, such as Willow Creek, Hoopa or Happy Camp and one as far away as Medford, Oregon.  The three trailer courts in Orleans were filled in the summer where many of the employees of these contractors took up residence.   After the first fall rains District personnel, except the clerical staff were divided into two slash burning teams.  One team was assigned all completed logging units south of the river and the other everything north of the river, about 800 acres for each team to burn.  It usually took a week of 12 to 14 hour days until the job was done in preparation for tree planting contractors to begin their work on the many clearcuts ranging in size from 10 to 80 acres.   

The biggest project on the District was the construction of the Gasquet-Orleans Road, better known as the G-O Road that was to open up the timber supply in the Klamath River to mills in Crescent City where much of their timber supply was cut off by the formation of the Redwood National Park in the 1960’s.  The G-O Road was designed as a two-lane paved highway from Orleans up over the summit of the Siskiyou Mountains and down into the Smith River to state highway 199.  Much of this road was financed by timber sales along the proposed route.   In addition to construction from Orleans toward the summit road construction was also in progress from the Gasquet District up the south fork of the Smith River toward the summit. 

The local Indians protested the proposed route through their sacred grounds near a high peak called Doctor Rock located along the summit ridge.  Because of the concerns of the Indians, environmental groups and a ruling by the Supreme Court the G-O Road was never completed.  Today parts of the uncompleted road is included within the Siskiyou Wilderness Area as a very expensive walking trail. 

In the winter of 1975 a young woman by the name of Christine was hired on as a receptionist.  One thing I had learned in my four years before she appeared on the scene was there was a definite shortage of single women here and a man had to move quickly because of the many available bachelors.   By August of that year we were married and in October of 1976 our son Jason was born in Eureka, the largest city, a two hour drive from Orleans.  We lived a small cabin that we rented a few miles out of town until we moved.

It was common to look at the Forest Service vacancy notices posted in the main office from time to time and dream of working in a location that was a little more civilized, and not so steep and brushy.  In the spring of 1977, I applied for two job vacancies that I qualified for, one in Prairie City, Oregon the other was in Greenville, California.   After visiting Prairie City and scoping out that community Christine was not too excited about moving there, so we agreed on Greenville.   The Orleans District Ranger informed me he did not want me to transfer due to the heavy work load.  About a week later, after much thought and a few personal tragedies, like my dog getting run over, I confronted the Ranger one Saturday morning in front of his residence on this issue.   Without me getting too confrontational, he could tell I wanted this transfer and agreed to it. 

After living in Orleans for six years, I learned the following—there were no ugly women here, all the local natives were related to one way or another, so if you had a disagreement with one you better be ready to deal with the others and the end of the world was not far away. 

Today the Orleans Ranger Station is combined with the Ukonom Ranger Station which is a district on the Klamath National Forest to the east of the Orleans District.  There is much less logging now, the veneer mill is gone and the Ishi Pishi Bar has passed into history liked many of us who worked there.   

Laird Logging

                                                     Gold Beach Ranger District

                                                        Siskiyou National Forest

 

During the 1970’s and into the 1980’s Laird Logging was the second largest logging company in Oregon after Huffman and Wright Logging based in Canyonville.   Laird was based in Gold Beach and was the principal logger for Champion International Corporation, which had a large plywood mill there along with extensive timber lands.   Laird had his shop, equipment yard, and fleet of yellow log trucks on property owned by Champion next to the mill.  In addition to his fleet of trucks, he had three yarders, logging tractors, mostly Cats, road construction equipment and a helicopter with a pilot.   

 Laird’s first name was Shirley.  He had been raised in the Coquille Valley, south of Coos Bay.  His dad had been a logger and Shirley spent many years working for him and eventually inherited the logging company.  Shirley had a rough voice and reminded me of a drill sergeant I encountered when I went through basic training in the Army.  Shirley’s voice was always noticeable while talking over the Curry County radio system, which most loggers as well as Forest Service personnel had while dealing with timber sales.  He would not hesitate to chew out one of his own employees over the radio, which we could all hear.  It was never pleasant.  Shirley had been a Marine during the Korean War and in many ways was still fighting the war.  He carried a hand gun in his pickup because as he once told me he did not trust some of his employees.  Due to a labor shortage in the area some of his employees were inmates from the local county jail under a work and release program, where they were picked up in the early morning and returned to jail after a hard day’s work in the woods.   Shirley usually kept one yarder and some tractors busy logging on Champion’s land.   His other two yarders were used on Forest Service timber sales purchased by Champion on the three Westside Ranger Districts of the Siskiyou National Forest, including Powers, Gold Beach and the Chetco Districts.  When Champion did not keep him busy he would bid on jobs for South Coast Lumber Company with a mill in Brookings.  His equipment was good-- you seldom saw any broken-down piece of machinery in the woods with Shirley Laird’s name on it.  Even his fire trucks were top notch, in contrast to some loggers who put these on the bottom of their maintenance list.   

In my years working as a timber sale contract administrator on the Gold Beach District from 1979 to 1988 I had four timber sales for which Shirley Laird was the contract logger.   The first was the McLobster Sale, purchased by Champion with 12 million board feet of timber consisting of five clearcut units ranging in size from 20 to 60 acres in the head waters of Lobster Creek, a fish-bearing stream that drained into the Rogue River about 10 miles up from Gold Beach.   Some of the riparian buffers along the stream below these units were inadequate because they did not provide the necessary protection required by the stream protection provision of the contract.   There were slopes exceeding 100% or greater than a 45 degree angle and many of the large trees on these slopes would have ended up in the stream after being felled.   By contract modification, requiring agreement by both Champion and the Forest Service, these buffer areas were extended upslope from the stream by 100 to 200 feet depending on the terrain.   This deleted an estimated amount of timber from the original sale volume which had to be made up by adding an additional 20 acre unit on the sale area under the modification agreement.   

Laird logged with two yarders, one being a 110-foot tower on a Skagit yarder reaching out 2500 to 3000 feet with the skyline cable to achieve the necessary log suspension for soil and stream protection.   A motorized carriage was used to yard one to four logs at a time depending on the weight of the logs.  This system employed four men on the landing, a yarder engineer, a log loader operator and two men, called chasers, that released chokers, cut limbs off logs, branded and painted log ends.   Usually six men worked in the brush on the rigging crew, including a rigging slinger supervising 3 or 4 choker setters and the man in charge of the entire operation, called the hook tender, whose name was Jack.   He was a tough supervisor and it was common to hear him yelling at the rigging crew from the landing.   If a man got fired or quit on the job he had to ride in a logging truck back to town.  It was very dangerous work and accidents were frequent, sometimes fatal.  There were incidents when Laird’s helicopter was used to move injured people from the woods to the hospital in Gold Beach. The helicopter also was used at times to fly cable from the yarder to the other slope beyond the clearcut unit to save time of rigging cables on the ground by hand.   There was a water bucket available for fire suppression if needed.   Also, the helicopter was made available to the entire community for emergencies.  

Laird use to employ a cage that would hook to the carriage to transport the rigging crew out of the unit at the end of the day.  This practice stopped after a near-fatal accident where the yarder engineer was not paying attention and the cage flipped over the skyline.   This practice was not looked upon highly by the state health and safety people either, and after that one incident the crew preferred to walk out at the end of the day, for their own survival.

The other yarder Laird used was a 50-foot swing boom using a running skyline system reaching out 800 feet to complete logging out the upper corners of the units.  The hook tender for this operation was Pete, a quiet man, who seem to be suspicious of his crew and kept a low profile.

Like most loggers Laird’s priority was to get as many loads a day off the landings as possible; any other work requirements were secondary.   In order to keep up with erosion control and slash piling requirements it was customary to allow the logger no more than three landings pending completion of cleanup work before moving to a new landing.  Laird had pushed the limit as he was moving to his fourth landing leaving three with uncompleted work.  The logging manager for Champion had been notified of this non-compliance.  The remedy was simple; the logging manger took away the log branding hammers for both yarders and told Laird he could have them back when the Forest Service was happy again.  After two days of no hauling while doing the required work Laird went back to logging.

All logs required a brand, assigned by the purchaser on each log end to identify them as to what sale they were from for log scaling and payment purposes; also, loggers and sub-contractors were paid according to the log scale.  A spot of yellow paint was also required on one log end for export control since no National Forest logs were allowed to be exported, except for Port Orford cedar which did not have a domestic market at the time.

At least once a week log trucks were inspected as they left the sale area for branding, painting and load receipts.  If loads were found to be in non-compliance they were parked until the situation was corrected.  This usually involved a person leaving the landing with a branding hammer and can of yellow paint.  This definitely slowed down production and got the logger’s attention quickly.   Laird could hear the truck driver call back to the landing over the radio for someone to come and brand and paint logs.  Laird would enter the conversation with his rough voice in frustration with it all.   It would not take him long to be on the job giving some people on the landing his advice on what they should be doing or else, and it was never a friendly exchange.   

One of my most memorable encounters with Laird was on the Camp Victoria sale where he was logging for South Coast Lumber.   The crew operating the 110- foot tower had completed yarding operations on one unit and moved to another unit leaving a mountain of slash on the landing.  Pete, the hook tender of the swing boom yarder, was ready to move on to this landing to complete yarding the upper corners of the unit.  He called me on the radio telling me he could not operate with all the slash piled on the landing and was going to push it over the side into the unit with a bulldozer.  I arrived on the landing and said he could not do that. At the moment we both looked down the hill to see a cloud of dust behind Shirley’s pickup truck coming toward us.  Pete replied to me, “Well, let’s see what Laird has to say about it.” Shirley jumped out of his truck and wanted to know what the holdup was.  Pete told him the situation with the slash and Shirley said to push it over the side.  Pete replied that the Forest Service wouldn’t allow that.  Laird turned to me and barked, “Then what should I do with it?”  I told him if he pushed it over the side he would have to yard it back up and pile it again or he could burn it under a permit.  Laird elected to burn it, so I requested a burning permit over the radio from the District fire management people which they granted with the condition that Laird provide two fire trucks on the job with a hose lay around the pile.   He agreed, got two fire trucks and put his crew to work laying out fire hose and wetting down the area around the pile as it started to burn.   About an hour into the job one of the pumper engines ran out of gas.  Since all the crew was busy I took it upon myself to fill the tank from the five gallon gas can provided on the fire truck.  Just as I was getting ready to pour the gas into the tank Laird came up from below the landing yelling, “Don’t do that!” He told me he had put sugar in all the extra gas tanks because he thought employees were stealing gas from him.  He had some good gas in his pickup that was used and in the end all that slash went up in smoke with no spot fires. 

The big Skagit yarder was moved to a long clearcut unit and after yarding the first sky line road reaching out 3000 feet Jack, the hook tender said he could not find any more adequate tail hold trees on the far slope across the stream below to anchor the skyline to.   After looking into this I agreed and permitted him to use the north bend system which involved leaving the skyline in place on the first road and highlead yard to it.  When I returned to my pickup to write up the agreement for this change in yarding systems I went to place a copy in Jack’s company pickup.  Upon opening the door I noticed somebody had left a BM on the driver’s seat!  I did not hang around to see what was said at the end of that day.    

By 1984-85 Champion had cut all the mature timber on their lands and could not compete with other purchasers for National Forest timber sales under a declining lumber market and the mill was closed.   Laird was out of a job and had to close up shop and move.   He moved his entire operation to Lakeside, north of Coos Bay where he went to work for International Paper Company until they closed down a few years later.   Laird retired after that, sold most of his equipment, laid off his permanent employees and moved back to Gold Beach.

By the end of the 1980’s other mills were closing due to an inadequate log supply, conflicts with labor unions or the decision by corporate boards to move operations to southern forests in the U.S. where there were second growth plantations ready to harvest.   It was the mill and logging employees that got the short end of the stick with no pensions and no other jobs to go to in their small communities.   Some relocated to other areas for work, some qualified for job training programs at local community colleges and some could not cope with the change, like Pete the hook tender, who committed suicide.

  Laird died in 2002 at the age of 72 and was buried with full military honors as a Marine Corp staff sergeant.  

Today the only remaining mill on the south coast that I know of is South Coast Lumber. All the others are gone, including Champion, Moore Mills, Rogge Lumber, Westbrook, and Georgia-Pacific.   The Siskiyou National Forest is now combined with the Rogue River National Forest and the Chetco Ranger District has been consolidated with the Gold Beach District.   The timber management and engineering staff now is only a small fraction of what it was in the 1970’s until the 1990’s.  For example, there was a Westside Engineering office north of Gold Beach which closed sometime in the l990’s. It had 50 to 60 permanent and seasonal employees serving the three westside Districts doing road surveys, design work, construction inspection and road maintenance consisting of graders, dump trucks, backhoes and other equipment.

It is all history now.