Chaos in the Woods

 In the winter of 1983-84 there was a big wind storm on the Gold Beach Ranger District of the Siskiyou National Forest.   Many leave strips and isolated timber stands were blown down.   There was a big push to get all this timber designated for salvage harvest and made available for sale by the spring of 1984 in order to get it removed before the bugs would start doing damage.   It was done quickly under a Categorical Exclusion that exempted the need for an environmental analysis. 

Most of the small sales were set aside for bidding by small loggers only, a few of the larger areas were made available for the large mills to bid on.    The pre-sale crew ran around the woods like mad men marking trees, posting unit boundaries, cruising and getting the timber appraised for the auction block.   Mistakes were made.   If I remember correctly there was a total of 13 sales put up for bid with units ranging in size from less than 1 acre up to 30 acres with one year contracts to remove the timber.   Depending on the extent of blow down trees, some units had clear-cut boundary posters, other had partial cut boundary posters where trees within the boundary were marked for removal.    These posters had a space where the sale name and unit number could be written in, but usually only the posters near the road or corners of the unit had the sale name and unit number filled in.  Each sale had its own sale area map showing each unit, road system and contractual requirements for each unit.   Sales were sold based on their geographical locations to avoid any overlapping of sale area boundaries.   Number of units per sale ranged from 10 to 20 units, mostly accessible by existing roads.  

The District had three contract administrators to oversee the logging on these sales, plus their assigned standing green sales that were being logged.    At the time I had two large green sales operating and was assigned four of the salvage sales.   I don’t remember the sale names, but do remember the names of the loggers since I had dealt with them before on other sales.   There was Zuber Logging from Port Orford, Ellis Logging from Powers, Keith Smith from Brookings and Westbrook from Coos Bay.   As soon as these sales were awarded cutting started immediately because of the one year contracts.    As soon as units were cut tractors or small yarders were moved in to get the logs to the roads for loading onto to trucks.   Many units required slash cleanup either by machine piling or hand piling, plus erosion control requirements.   Loggers did not want to move equipment, including fire equipment from one unit to the next without getting Forest Service acceptance of work to avoid moving equipment back to complete whatever was not found to be acceptable.   Loggers would call me at home in the evenings, asking if I could be at a unit in the morning to accept cleanup work as they wanted to move to the next unit.   One morning as I was driving from Zuber’s sale to Ellis’s sale when I noticed Zuber’s cutting crew bucking logs in a unit that was part of the sale belonging to Ellis.  I stopped and informed the cutters that was not their unit.  They did not have a sale map and saw no writing on the boundary posters and assumed it was Zuber’s unit.   I drove back to where Zuber was loading logs to inform him.   It was a breach of contract due to poor supervision by Zuber for not directing his cutters to his units or providing them a map.   A meeting took place in the office with the District Ranger to allow his operations to continue.   It was like misbehaving in school and going to the principal’s office.   Ellis had no problem with it and paid Zuber for the cutting expenses. 

In the meantime Westbrook had hauled out more logs than what was covered by his payment bond for that 30 day period and he was late paying for his scaled volume removed from the last 30 days which was another breach of contract, resulting in their shut down until payment was received and payment bond increased.   They hand carried a check to the Supervisor’s Office in Grants Pass and operations were allowed to resume. 

Keith Smith called me at home one evening to see if I could make it the next day to his sale and my wife had answered the phone to tell him I was not available.  Afterwards she told me enough is enough, you have a family to spend time with.  I did make it to his sale a day or two later and he did understand my wife’s concern, enough was enough!