ELK RIVER & JIM ROGERS

Some of the steepest ground I ever worked on was in the Elk River drainage on the Powers Ranger District of the Siskiyou National Forest in the 1980s.   The Powers District was the smallest in land size on the Siskiyou but had the largest annual timber cut at 90 million board feet (MMBF) per year.   There were 3 sale administrators on the Powers District with a heavy workload of sales in the Coquille River drainage and Eden Valley.

Since the Elk River drainage was closer to Gold Beach sometimes I was assigned sales there to ease the workload on those 3 administrators.   One summer I was given four sales to administered in Elk River, two were falling operations and two were yarding and hauling logs.   One sale was purchased by Moore Mills out of Bandon, where they were cutting trees on very steep slopes.   This contract required trees to be pulled uphill by lining to minimize breakage and protect streams below the clear-cut units.    On conventional clear-cut units falling of trees starts at the bottom of the unit and progresses uphill.   On tree lining units it is the opposite with starting at the top and working downhill.   The first 100 to 200 feet below the landing trees are cut sidehill and removed in order to start pulling the trees below.   A small yarder is set up on the landing with about 1500 feet of cable on one spool.    The crew consists of a yarder engineer and two or three men cutting and bucking the trees.   One of these men climbs, usually the lead cutter, up the tree about 20 to 30 feet and places a choker around it.   This might involve cutting branches as he climbs up the tree.  Next, an undercut is made facing uphill, then the lead cutter, radios to the engineer to pull the line tight until the lead cutter says stop.    A back cut is made to a certain point and the crew backs away to a safe distance and the lead cutter would tell the engineer to pull the tree.   In most cases, the tree would slide back and be held in place by the stump, other times it might overshoot the stump, and downhill it went.   Bucking these trees into logs was a challenge on these steep slopes.

This was all brought to an end sometime in the late 1980s by Jim Rogers, who had been a forester for U.S. Plywood that use to have a mill on Elk River just outside of Port Orford.   Jim quit his job and became an environmentalist after seeing the damage to the fisheries resource in the Elk River by such intense logging practices.   Jim was responsible for the establishment of the Grassy Knob Wilderness and Copper-Salmon Wilderness Areas and eventually bringing an end to clearcutting in the the Elk River drainage.   Oregon Field Guide on OBP put together a program about Jim a few years ago about his fight to save the Elk River.   It is worth watching.

watch.opb.org/video/oregon-field-guide-jim-rogers/