ROAD BRUSHING

The road maintenance engineer at the Zone 2 Engineering office, north of Gold Beach was responsible for the maintenance of all Forest Service roads on the Gold Beach, Powers and Chetco Ranger Districts of the Siskiyou National Forest.   Road maintenance included grading of roads for proper drainage, cleaning and replacing culverts, upkeep of road signs, surface replacement and the brushing of roads for visibility.   Money for doing all this work was generated from road maintenance deposits from timber sales, allocated funds from Congress or from fees collected from special use permits.   There was a road maintenance crew including a foreman and a crew of 5 or 6 people that could operate graders, backhoes, dump trucks and a machine that looked like a grader, but was giant brush hog.  On the side of this machine there was a hydraulic arm with an enclosed metal blade that was powered by a hydraulic motor that would pulverize all vegetation as it was raised and lowered along the side of roads.   Most the vegetation cut along these roads was Red Alder, which grew like a weed in the coastal forests.    After a road had been brushed by this machine there were chunks of limbs scattered all along the sides of these roads, it was not a pretty pictures.   With the listing of the spotted owl in 1990 timber harvest declined sharply and so did the maintenance money for Forest roads.   Many secondary roads have been taken over by encroaching vegetation.  Some of these roads are hard to find on Google Maps as I have tried to find my way on roads from days gone by.    The canopy of the Red Alder have totally grown over many of these roads over the last 30 plus years.  Today if you were to depend on road signs for directions you might get lost, since many have disappeared by overgrown vegetation, been used for target practice or damaged by animals,