COTTAGE GROVE RD

                                             Cottage Grove Ranger District

                                                  Umpqua National Forest

                                                               1988-1995

In the spring of 1988 I took a transfer to Cottage Grove to be closer to my children, who were living with their mother in University of Oregon housing in Eugene.   This transfer came about by an agreement between the District Ranger of Gold Beach and the District Ranger of the Cottage Grove District.  It is a transfer I will always be grateful for.   The previous sale administrator was burned out on doing sale administration work and was given a job in silviculture doing mapping under the geographic information system (GIS) and his position of lead sale administrator was given to me.  

During the first month I lived in motels until a lady in the office informed me of a small house for rent on Lynx Hollow Road, north of Cottage Grove.   I lived there for three years until I bought a house in Eugene, where my children could live with me part-time.    In some ways I was hoping to get back together with my wife after moving to Cottage Grove, but it did not happen and we mutually agreed to divorce in 1990.  

All District personnel were in one big office building east of Cottage Grove, whereas in Gold Beach people were in four different buildings.  It was the smallest District I had worked on and seem to have the most people, maybe 30 to 40 permanent positions.   It was one big happy family under one roof.   There were seven or eight permanent people in the timber department and all under the supervision of Wayne, the Timber Management Assistant (TMA),  he was also the Forest Service Representative (FSR) for timber sale contracts.   We had the biggest room on the south end of the building with its own door by my desk, where loggers could enter the building without going through the front office.   The annual timber cut (ASQ) was about 40 million board feet, I think, much smaller than other Districts I had worked on.   There was another contract administrator, by the name of Jerry, who was financed part-time in sale administration and sale planning.    The District takes in the Layng Creek and Brice Creek watersheds that are part of the Coast Fork of the Willamette River system.    The south end of the District includes the Bohemia Mining District, where much mining took place in the 1860's to the early 1900's.   The only access was by trail to the mining town of Bohemia City at over 5000 feet in elevation, where an estimated 10,000 people lived at one time, and survive the cold winters.   

For the most part timber operations functioned like a well-oiled machine with presale and sale administration in the same department.    There were more commercial thinning sales here than what I experienced on other Districts.   A portion of the north end of the District had been logged in the early 1900's using a railroad system up Prather Creek and much of this area was ready for thinning.   Now roads replaced the the old train system.  When I arrived on the District there were three commercial thinning sales in progress up Prather Creek.   Much of my time was spent on these sales agreeing to tractor skid trails, skyline corridors, landings and spur roads.   Most logging south of Prather Creek was clearcut logging.  The biggest clearcut sale I remember was the Jumbo Sale with an estimated 12 million board feet of timber on the Noon Day Road in the Brice Creek drainage.    The Noon Day Road is located near what was the trail to Bohemia City.   The Jumbo Sale was purchased by the Bohemia Lumber Company, that had a large mill at Culp Creek, a saw mill at Saginaw with a laminated beam plant adjacent to it.   Bohemia was sold to Willamette Industries, which was bought out by the Weyerhaeuser Company.   The Bohemia mills are gone now.  The only remaining mills are the Starfire Mill in Cottage Grove and the large Weyerhaeuser Mill south of Cottage Grove.  

The listing of the Northern Spotted Owl in 1990 put the brakes on future timber sale planning on National Forests in the Pacific Northwest, especially west of the Cascades.   By 1994 the Forest Service started offering buy-outs in order to downsize personnel, especially road engineers, foresters and technicians that were working in the timber management program.   In March of 1995 I took a buyout after 27 years with the Forest Service.

Today the Cottage Grove District office is located in the Dorena Tree Improvement Center with a skeleton crew compared to what it used to be..   There is no longer any timber people on the District