MOHS SURGERY

 My appointment was at 9 am on Monday to have skin cancer, the size of a dime removed from my lower right leg.  The biopsy, taken a month earlier, showed it to be basal cell cancer.   After checking in at the front desk of the Advanced Skin Center in Roseburg, I was instructed to wait in the second waiting room until my name was called.   Most the patients in the waiting room were old men, some with bandages on their noses, faces, arms and God knows where else.   It looked like a room filled with the walking wounded.   Mohs surgery involves cutting out the tissue with cancer, having it examined by the pathologist and if the edges of the tissue is free of cancer cells they stitch you up.   If it is not clear of cancer cells more cutting is performed until it become clear.  Some people could be in here all day.   I have been through this procedure before and never had to go back for a second cutting.  Medical staff personnel walked through the waiting room carrying towels, garments and other medical supplies.  Soon a young woman, who was a  medical assistant appeared calling out a name.   Not getting a response she yelled out the name and an elderly man responded and off he went following the young woman.   I got the impression some of these gentlemen had a hearing problem in addition to skin cancer.   After waiting a half hour my name Mike was called out, and off I went to an examination room where the medical assistant introduced herself, asked a few question and proceeded to injecting a numbing substance around the area that would be removed.  After a couple minutes she poked around the area asking if I could feel anything?   It was totally numbed and off she went to get the surgeon.   The surgeon looked like a man that had been up most the night, in desperate need of coffee with those big telescope lenses fasten to his glasses, like the ones a dentist wears.   He was a man of few words as he put on rubber gloves, picked up a scalpel and quickly did his business placing the chunk of flesh in a glass container the medical assistant was holding.   As he left the room he told me it would be an hour before he would have the pathology results done.   I asked the medical assistant if he was the pathologist too, and she replied yes.   He was a busy man and no wonder he looked tired.    The medical assistant applied a pressure bandage to my wound after cauterizing it to stop the bleeding and took me back out to the waiting room.  

While sitting in the waiting room for the results, an older couple sat down next to me.  The man told me they had come all way that morning from Port Orford on the Oregon Coast.   We got to talking as he told me they lived up Elk River, which I was very familiar with when I worked for the Forest Service in Gold Beach back in the 1980's.   He mentioned a few names of people that I had known including some loggers.   Soon his name was called and off he went.  Then another man sat next to me asking if he was in the right room.  I asked what he was here for and he did not seem to know.   He had come from Cottage Grove and said he had been here before to have something on his face looked at.   As we were talking I heard a man call out William, my first name which I usually don't respond too.  Everybody looked around as nobody responded, until I asked what is the last name and he said Burke, and off we went to another section of the facility where I was told to my relief the tissue was clear of cancer.  Here I was stitched up and a large compression bandage was applied from my knee down to my foot to keep the leg from swelling.  I was instructed to keep the leg elevated for a few days and not to get the bandage wet for week.   A real challenge for taking a shower.   After going to the front desk for scheduling appointments for the bandage removal in a week and in two weeks for the stitches to be removed, I walked out the front door with a new lease on life or at least until next July, when I'm scheduled for my six month full body exam.   I still wonder if that man from Cottage Grove ever found out what he was there for?     

MY DOG JACK

It was a late November afternoon in 1989 when I was about ready to leave work at the Cottage Grove Ranger District office and go home to a little house I rented on Lynx Hollow Road north of Cottage Grove.   No sooner than I started packing up my things to head out the door when a woman that worked on the road maintenance crew came up to me asking if I would take a puppy they picked up walking along a forest road where it was beginning to snow.   She knew I had just put my old family dog Corky to sleep because of health issues.   She said she could not take the dog because they already had some dogs.    So I went home with the little black puppy that looked more like a cub bear that I named Jack.

There was a storage room in the back of the house where I left Jack during the day with food, water and a partially opened window as I went off to work.   When I came home at night I let Jack out in the back yard and he had free range in the house at night.   One wall of the storage room had unpacked boxes of items from the house I sold in Gold Beach in 1988.   After a few weeks I noticed Jack was in a corner of the storage room as if something had been bothering him during the day.  One day I saw a wild cat jump in through the opened window and discovered she had a litter of kittens in one of the boxes.   Jack had become accustomed to this wild cat coming and going as she raised her kittens.   Later I discovered the after birth in the box where she had the litter.   The wild cat and her kittens left the house to live in the barn behind the house and roam the nearby fields for rats or other small varmints.   In 1991 I bought a house in south Eugene in order to allow my two children to live with me on a part-time basis while they were in high school and their mother was considering moving out of the area.   Jack was two years old and I constructed a fenced yard with a dog house where he stayed when I was working in Cottage Grove.  Over the next few years Jack went on many hikes, backpacking trips and in the Fall of 1997 went on a  cross country car trip with me to visit a sister living in Indiana.    When Celia and I bought a house in Cottage Grove and got married in 2000 Jack became part of the family.   Jack was susceptible to seizures and in 2005 we had to send him over the Rainbow Bridge due to failing health.  

      

THE END OF A LONG WINTER

Yesterday I made the drive to Eugene to close Celia's credit union account and distribute the remaining funds to her two daughters.   On my return trip I left the freeway at Creswell and drove east on Cloverdale Road, then turned south onto to Sears Road which goes along the eastside of the Coast Fork of the Willamette River all the way to the Row River Road east of Cottage Grove.    There was only one other car on the road during my drive.   It was the first real spring-like day this year with green fields, cattle grazing in lush pastures, old logging equipment in a field now overgrown with blackberries, the old Hemmenway Dairy now with vacant barns and the other scattered farms along this 12 mile route.  Driving this route was like going back 30 years when I worked for the Forest Service on the Cottage Grove Ranger District with all the log truck traffic delivering their loads to all the mills in the vicinity that are gone now, the smell of the manure from the dairy, and the many Sunday drives that Celia and I made on this road when we lived in Cottage Grove, especially to the Cloverdale Chapel on October 7, 2000 to get married.  Yesterday was a good day and I do believe this long winter is over. 

NEIGHBORLY ADVICE

While living on the Gold Beach Ranger Station in 1980, the neighbor's wife living in the house below us asked me to take a look at the engine in their car to see if she had put water in the radiator correctly.   She showed me where she had filled what she thought was the radiator to the top.  In shock I saw she had put water where the oil went.   She had completely filled the engine crankcase with water.   I advised her not to start the engine and  have it drained and flushed out with oil and replace the oil filter a couple of times.   Later her husband returned home and was not pleased.   He apologized to me and was thankful I advised his wife not to start the engine.  

CABIN FEVER

It is now the first of March of 2023 and we all have had our fair share of winter weather and confinement to the house due to snow and icy roads, better known as cabin fever.   This got me thinking back on my younger days when I worked for the Forest Service in Orleans, California living in a small house that was half trailer comprising of the bedroom and kitchen all attached to a wooden structure that made up the bathroom and a small living room.  I guess you could call it a shack, all for $70 a month.   I was a full-time employee and I think the only single employee working on the Orleans Ranger District, except for most the seasonal employees that had 180 day appointments or about six months of work before being laid off.   The winter months of 1971 to 1974 could be lonely with no seasonal employees to hang out with after work, no woman in my life while most the other permanent employees were married and had families.   The days of winter were short, the weather could be dismal and Orleans did not offer much entertainment or social events, except sitting in one of the three taverns drinking beer with the local Indian population that were not too friendly when they had a belly full of beer.   This led me to drinking at home in the evenings and usually consuming poor quality cheap wine, the kind that had no cork in the bottle.  Having consumed a good portion of this stuff sleep was not a problem.  My reading material consisted of monthly subscriptions to Mother Earth News, The Alaska magazine and a few others.   On weekends outdoor activities such as fishing or hiking were limited due to the rain and snow at the higher elevations.  I did have a dog for company by the name of Herman, a black mutt male that I found as a puppy wandering lost along the highway one weekend.   Sometimes after heavy rain storms the highway out of town would be closed due to landslides up to a week or more.  This would prevent the delivery of the basic essentials to the local market, including beer and wine.  Sometimes panic would set in after going to the market and seeing very little available on the shelves, especially beer and that cheap wine.  

By spring time it was a relief to see some of the seasonal employees return, people to go to the tavern with or into Eureka or Arcata on the weekends.  In  January of 1975 a new receptionist was hired by the name of Christine, we were married in August of 1975 bringing an end to those lonely winters.

 

THE TALE OF TWO LOOKOUTS

 A young husband and wife were hired one summer to be fire lookouts, while I was working on the Orleans Ranger District of the Six Rivers National Forest from 1971 to 1977.   In order to make more money they both volunteered to work in two separate lookouts.   The wife worked on the Orleans Mountain Lookout and the husband worked on the Offield Mountain Lookout on the Ukonom District of the Klamath National Forest.   Both lookouts were in sight of each other with a distance of maybe less than five miles the way the crow flies.   By road it was close to a two hour drive.   After work hours lookouts were allowed to use the radio system to talk to each other socially, since they were isolated and life could be lonely.  The rumor has it the wife on Orleans Mountain one clear night with the lights on in her lookout, called to her husband to look in her direction with his high powered binoculars and to let her know if he would be interested in driving over for a visit.   It was said that she was standing out on the open deck of the lookout wearing very little, if anything and rumor has it that he did make the drive in less than two hours for the visit and made it back for work the next day at his lookout. 

WORKING IN THE POISON OAK

In the summer of 1972 the seasonal fire crew of four people were put to work clearing the roadside brush leading into the Bluff Creek Guard Station on the Orleans Ranger District of the Six Rivers National Forest.   This work was done with hand tools and the brush was piled in a Forest Service pickup to be hauled off to a burn pile.   Most of the brush was blackberries mixed with poison oak.    Nobody on the crew was familiar with poison oak.    It was a hot day and some members of the crew had taken their shirts off as they gathered up the brush and put in the bed of the truck stomping it down.   The next day these people were human blisters in need of medical attention.  

HOOPA BLUFFS

 Of all the highways and roads I have traveled the most dangerous I can recall is California State Highway 96 between Hoopa Valley and Weitchpec, where the Trinity River meets the Klamath River.   A section of this portion is called the Hoopa Bluffs where there is a vertical rock face above the highway and a vertical drop of a few hundred feet straight down to the Trinity River.  There was a series of curves through this section with a few guard rails in some spots.   Beyond the guard rails it was straight down to the river.

When I lived and worked for Forest Service in Orleans between 1971 to 1977 it was necessary to travel this highway to seek medical attention at a clinic in Hoopa Valley or do serious shopping in the big cities of Arcata and Eureka, or just to get away to enjoy the civilized world.   On many return trips it was dark and without knowledge of this section could prove to be fatal.   If you missed a curve here there was no time for prayer as you plunged toward the river below.  

DANGERIOUS WILDLIFE ENCOUNTERS

My only encounter with any dangerous wildlife in the years I worked for the Forest Service was my first summer of 1969 on the Modoc National Forest.    A badger ran along side my pickup truck trying to bite the front tire as I was driving slowly on a forest road.   In all my remaining years until my retirement in 1995 nothing, not even with the bears of Alaska.   

Since living on this forested property for the last 16 years, I've had a close encounter with a cougar and a mad mother hen turkey.   

Sep 22, 2022

THE JET BOAT EXPERIENCE

 This story was told to me by a contract timber faller by the name of Lester (Les) Olson.   Les had been a contract faller for South Coast Lumber Company (SCL) out of Brookings that purchased many timber sales on the Gold Beach Ranger District.    Les and his crew had been responsible for cutting many of the clearcut units on the District over many years from the 1970's through the 80's that had been sold to SCL.

As a timber sale contract administrator on the District from 1979-88, I got to know Les and his crew.  While inspecting his operation for required fire equipment and falling practices Les told me about his recent jet boat trip up the Rogue River with his elderly parents.   He said his dad had a hard time of hearing and spoke loudly, especially in the jet boat with the roar of the engine.    There were very few visible clear cut units from the river, except in certain side drainages where you could look up and see a distant unit ranging in size from 20 to 40 acres.    The jet boats could carry up 20 to 30 people, mostly tourists that had very little knowledge of clearcutting on National Forests at the time.    In one of these side drainages Lester's dad yelled out, "Les did you cut that unit!?" pointing up the hill.    Les looked at his dad in shock placing his index finger over his mouth in hopes his dad would be quiet as many of the people on the boat turned to look at Les in disbelief.    Les said his dad got the message after that, seeing all the heads turning.  

THE MENDOCINO NATIONAL FOREST

This is the only national forest in California without a major paved road entering it and no year-around highway crossing over it.   There is Forest Highway 7, a Forest Service gravel road crossing over Mendocino Pass from east to west, but is not open in the winter due to snow.   This road connects state Highway 162 from Willows to Highway 162 in Covelo, a two and half hour drive over 85 miles.   Willows is the Forest Headquarters and known as the Gateway to the Mendocino National Forest.   Hard to believe when Willows is located in the Sacramento Valley with only a view of the Coast Range Mountain to the west some 40 miles away.    One of the most tragic incidents was the loss of 15 firefighters on the Rattlesnake Wildfire in July of 1953 in Grindstone Canyon.  The scar on the landscape from that fire was visible from Willows.   

As a kid I spent many hours looking west at these mountains from our house west of town and wondering what it would be like to see what is over that ridge or up that canyon.   The Willows Ranger District winter office was up stairs in the Willows Post Office, where I got my first  Forest Service map dated 1956.    The District had a summer ranger station at Alder Springs about 45 miles up in the mountains from Willows.    I studied that map until I almost had it memorized.  There were place names on the map that I wanted to explore--Hokey Pokey Ridge, Snow Mountain, Hays Place, Plaskett Meadows, Keller Lake, Jenks Place, Log Springs Guard Station and many more.  

As teenagers a friend and I drove around the Forest in one of my dad's farm pickups exploring different places on that forest map.    We spent 3 or 4 days driving around on forest roads with a 50 gallon barrel of gas with a pump in the pick up bed to keep us going, along with camping gear.   I don't recall seeing many other vehicles, except a Forest Service employee checking camp fires in a campground.   We went as far west as Mendocino Pass and drove more roads than I can remember.    In the summer of 1962 we backpacked four days through the Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Wilderness Area after my dad dropped us off at a trailhead at a place called Brown's Camp.   From there we hiked to a small lake near South Yolla Bolly Mountain.   The second night was with the fire lookout on Hammerhorn Mountain, and from there down to Elk Lake for a night before hiking out of the wilderness to a Forest Service road where we caught a ride with a Forest Service road engineer to a logging camp where we spent a night.  The next day we caught a ride on a logging truck to Paskenta where one of our parents picked us up.  

Over the last few years most of this Forest has been destroyed from catastrophic wildfires, including summer home tracks, campgrounds, Forest Service guard stations, many road signs and other improvements.  The Willows Ranger District no longer exist and was combined with two other Districts of the five original Districts over the years.   Today there is only three ranger districts and the Forest I once was familiar with is gone, except for the memories.    

CABIN ON WOOLEY CREEK

A co-worker and I came across this cabin while backpacking the Wooley Creek trail into the Marble Mountain Wilderness Area in 1972.   We looked inside the cabin as it was not locked and saw beds with blankets on them and dishes in the kitchen.  It was one big room.   We assumed it was being used by a Forest Service trial crew.    Most Forest Service cabins in wilderness areas are not locked and can be used by the public in the event of foul weather or an emergency.   President Hoover was known to have fished Wooley Creek and may have stayed in this cabin.   With all the fires over the decades since 1972, I'm not sure if this cabin is still there.   Many cabins in the wilderness areas have come to disrepair, vandalism or burned down either by wildfires or the Forest Service due to liability problems or to keep squatters from taking them over.  

MY DOG HERMAN

 This was my dog Herman when I lived in Orleans from 1971-77.    He was part Chow and not sure what else, mostly All-American mutt.   I found him as a puppy walking along Highway 96 near Somes Bar.   Later I was told he my have come from a litter of dogs belonging to an Indian family living in that area.   Herman would go to work with me up until the Forest Service put an end to dogs going to work with employees, maybe in 1973-74.  When Christine and I married in 1975, Herman join the family, along with Christine's two dogs.   Herman went with me on many backpacking trips and always in my pickup on road trips.  He became a bad influence on Christine's dogs at times leading them in to trouble now and then.  

On one of our monthly shopping trips to Eureka we left the dogs in the back of the pickup, which had a camper shell on it with open screen windows.   The store we were shopping at was called Bazar's, a large department store with groceries, clothing, hardware and sporting equipment.   While we were in the center of the store we could hear people laughing and gasping as all three of our dogs were coming toward us in the aisle we were in.   The dogs had ripped open one of the screen windows, got scent of our trail, somehow entered through automatic sliding door into the store and followed our scent to the aisle we were in.   It was Herman leading the way as all three dogs were happy to have found us.    

THE TRINITY ALPS

With all the grim news lately I have resorted to getting lost in some old books I  have on places we backpacked into many years ago.   One place that stands out is the Trinity Alps Wilderness Area in northern California.   A hiking and backpacking guide book titled,  "The Trinity Alps" by Luther Linkhart describes 29 trips in to this wilderness area.   In the beginning of his book he describes the natural history and the human history of the Trinity Alps.  He gives directions from state highways to Forest Service Roads to trial heads, land marks to look for, how trails follow streams, ridges, what lakes are accessible from what trials and where side trails go.   He tells of old mining claims, provides pictures of mining equipment and cabins that remain from the gold mining days going back to the 1850's.    There is a story about George Jorstad, who built a cabin in 1937 on his claim and remained there until 1983 when he was over 80 years of age.   The cabin still remains, along with few other others.   During the 1970's the northwestern portion the wilderness area was under the control of marijuana growers that threaten hikers and Forest Service personnel.   The public was advised to stay out that area as many growers were armed and dangerous.   In the 1980's law enforcement agencies went in to clear out many of the growers.  

It is interesting to retrace my travels to some of these places, some places I remember and others that don't come to mind.    Some of my early trips were on weekends when I lived and worked for the Forest Service in Orleans.    On a Friday night after work I would pack a canteen of water, sleeping bag, a cooking pot, some utensils, trail food in a pack and off we went, me and my dog, Herman.    Herman was a puppy, mostly of the mutt variety when I found him walking along Highway 96 near Somes Bar in 1971.    Herman accompanied me on many hikes both to the Trinity Alps and the Marble Mountains.  In 1993 family members and myself backpacked in from the Coffee Creek Road on the eastside of the Trinity Alps for three days.   

Many of these areas have changed due to wild fires, road closures due to a lack of maintenance and deterioration of trails over the last three decades, but I'm sure glad to have these books to escape into during the harsh reality of what is happening in our world.  

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

GOLD BEACH RANGER DISTRICT

 

                                                GOLD BEACH RANGER DISTRICT

                                                          Siskiyou National Forest

                                                                     1979-1988

In the spring of 1979, we traveled from Greenville, in northern California to Gold Beach, on the southern Oregon coast for a job interview.   I had applied for a vacant position here in timber sale administration.  It would be a lateral transfer at my present grade of  GS-9.   The interview was with the acting District Ranger and the Timber Management Staff Assistant (TMA) by the name of Bill, who would be my supervisor.    During the interview, they informed me of two recent personnel changes involving the removal of the last District Ranger, who had been here 16 years, and my predecessor, who was transferred to a remote duty station in eastern Oregon, at Heppner, I think.   I could sense some serious management problems but did accept the job right after it was offered to me at the end of the interview.   Later I learned nobody else had applied for the job and I could see why.   It would be the greatest challenge of my career with the Forest Service.   There was a government house available with the job, where a monthly amount was deducted from my pay for rent.  I don't remember the amount.  My wife and I, with our two young children, lived in this house until 1981 when we purchased our first home south of town on two acres next to Hunter Creek.  (There is a separate story titled Living on Hunter Creek about life there) 

Most of the buildings on the ranger station were originally constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930's and the station is recognized as a historical site.   There are two large warehouses, three office buildings, and five houses.    There was a permanent staff of about 25 people with an additional seasonal workforce of 15 to 20 more people.  North of Gold Beach was the Zone II Westside Engineering office that served all three of the westside ranger districts, including Gold Beach, Powers, and the Chetco District in Brookings.   There must have been 40 to 50 people working in this office doing road survey and design, road construction administration, and road maintenance.   The Zone I Engineering office was in Grants Pass serving the Galice District and Illinois Valley District.

At the time Gold Beach had a population of about 1500 people and Highway 101 is the main street through town with motels, gas stations, and restaurants all catering mostly to tourists, that come to fish or take the jet boats up the Rogue River into the Scenic Rogue River Wilderness Area.   Compared to Orleans and Greenville, Gold Beach was a big city to us.   There was even a grocery store within walking distance of the ranger station and the ocean was just across Highway 101 from the station. 

My desk was located next to another sale administrator, by the name of Clay on the ground floor of a two-story office building.   Two ladies, the resource clerk, and a log scale clerk had their desks nearby.  They were all smokers and it was another year before smoking was not allowed in the office.   In an adjacent room was Bill, the TMA, our supervisor.   Upstairs was the presale crew of eight people, including a planning forester, a timber appraiser, NEPA coordinator, logging engineer, and three field technicians under the supervision of a lead presale technician, and it was all under the supervision of Bill, the TMA. 

During my first morning on the job, Clay went over a list of sales that had been assigned to my predecessor and now were mine.   As he went down the list of about 10 or 12 sales, he informed me of those sales that were active and those that were not active.   On some of the non-active sales, he would say to me," you will have problems with that one" and later he was right as some required contract modifications mostly for inadequate protection of fish-bearing streams.   Clay was pushing 60 years of age and was going to retire within a year after 20 years of service.  He had started work with the Forest Service as a log scaler at the age of 40 and before that had been a timber faller.   For the first week, I rode around the District with Clay learning the road system and location of some of my active sales that Clay had been watching over, in addition to his own sales.   This would be the biggest District I would work on during my career with the Forest Service.    Due to the steep terrain, most logging was done with big yarders using long-span skyline systems and there were a few sales requiring helicopters.  It was all clear-cut logging with a few salvage sales of mostly windthrown trees using small yarders.       

While driving around with Clay in his Forest Service pickup, he would spend a good amount of time on the two-way radio talking to loggers about work needing to be done, non-compliance with branding of logs or how soon somebody would be moving to a new landing, and when he would be able to meet with a logger on a sale to inspect this or that.   This was the first District I worked on where administrators had multi-channel radios to communicate with loggers and other sub-contractors doing slash work, road maintenance, or constructing hand fire lines around clear-cut units.  During my travels with Clay, he filled me in on what happened to my predecessor and how the former ranger of 16 years was told to retire or be fired.  It had something to do with a timber trespass by a timber operator and how the ranger had tried to cover it up.   Clay confided in me that he had a problem with the lead presale technician telling me he would do as he pleased with getting all the timber he could get into a unit when locating cutting boundaries on the ground, especially in riparian areas that should not have been included, which I experienced later.    Clay said Bill did not spend enough time supervising the presale crew and spent more time in the sale administration end of the business.   

By my second week on the job, I was on my own without getting lost too much.   Over the next few years, there were times I was assigned sales in the Elk River drainage of the Powers Districts since this was closer to Gold Beach than to Powers.  Some days I spent more time driving from sale to sale on both Districts than being on the ground inspecting operations.  The workload was too much at times and upper management was made aware of the problems, including the presale layout problems.

By the end of my first year Clay retired, Bill resigned by request from upper management for poor supervision of the presale crew and a new District Ranger took over leadership of the District.   The presale crew was made a separate department under the supervision of a new TMA and sale administration became a separate department under the supervision of a sale administrator from the Chetco District, by the name of Earl, who was promoted to the GS-11 grade and given the authority of Forest Service Representative (FSR) under the timber sale contract.   This authority was usually held by the District Ranger.   Another sale administrator was hired to replace Clay and a year later a third administrator was brought in to help handle the workload.  In 1985 Earl had to transfer to Grants Pass in order to be closer to Medford where his wife could get treatment for cancer.    The District Ranger temporarily promoted me to acting FSR at the GS-11 grade for 90 days until the position could be filled permanently.   The ranger asked me to apply for the job, but the Regional Office in Portland filled the position with an unfunded person from a Forest in Washington.  After that, I was moved into the presale department as lead technician at the GS-9 grade to supervise the field crew.    In August of 1986, my wife and two children moved to Eugene where she was going to attend the University of Oregon.    In the spring of 1988, I was given a transfer to the Cottage Ranger District on the Umpqua National Forest to be closer to my family and our house on Hunter Creek was sold a few months later. 

Today the Siskiyou Forest is combined with the Rogue River National Forest and the Chetco and Gold Beach Districts are under one District Ranger.    There is no zone engineering offices anymore since there is very little new road construction anymore due to very little harvesting of timber.  

PS:   The following stories are included in this blog that go into more details about specific events while working on the Gold Beach District:

The Logging Fire,  Laird Logging,  Chaos in the Woods,  Turn Back Timber Sales,  The Christmas Party of 1981,  Mountain Fir Lumber Company,  The Silver Fire,  Paper Work and Living on Hunter Creek. 

MY FIRST TIMBER SALE ADMINISTRATION ASSIGNMENT

With all the rainy days ahead I'm planning on working on a few writings that have been in drafts for some time waiting to be revised or condensed.   Many are about my career with the Forest Service, including the years I worked on the Gold Beach Ranger District from 1979-88 and Cottage Grove from 1988-95.    Just revised this one, finally!  With Celia gone, I have to do self editing--Have Mercy!

                        MY FIRST TIMBER SALE ADMINISTRATION ASSIGNMENT

The Maple Timber Sale was a joint sale between the Klamath and Six Rivers National Forests.  It originally included an estimated 50 million board feet of timber on both the Orleans and Ukonom Ranger Districts, and helped finance the construction of the Gasquet-Orleans Road, better known as the G-O Road.   This road was planned to connect the Klamath River to the Smith River drainage on Highway 199, and allow access for a timber supply to mills in Crescent City.   It was designed to be a two lane paved road.   It was never completed due to a law suit by the Indians, who were against the proposed road going through their sacred lands near the summit between both drainages.  

This sale was sold to Fortuna Plywood some time in the 1960's, which had a veneer mill in Orleans, where most the logs were hauled to and scaled by the Forest Service.   Administration of the sale  alternated every year or two between the two Ranger Districts.   In 1974 the Orleans District took over the administration of the Maple Sale.    I was asked if I would want to work in sale administration as a timber sale officer (TSO) at the GS-7 grade, under the supervision of the timber sale administrator, who answered to the District Ranger.   After agreeing to this job transfer from sale preparation, where I was a GS-7 lead forestry technician to sale administration, I was given a Forest Service handbook on the duties of working in sale administration, and asked to take it home and study it.   I don't recall much studying as it was very technical and not the most interesting reading after work hours.   I was assigned a desk next to another TSO in an office, along with the sale administrator and a log accountability clerk.  I was given the field folder for the Maple Sale, which must have been 6 inches thick, containing the contract, contract modifications, inspection reports, minor change agreements and other documentation, much of it was beyond my comprehension at the time.   The sale area map was the most important document, showing the road system, protected stream courses, some 50+ harvest units, and specific requirements for each unit.    Many of the units had been logged, there may have been 10 remaining units to be completed.  In addition, the sale administrator gave me a letter designating me as TSO with one sentence, " you will assist me in obtaining contract compliance."  A copy of this letter was sent to the Purchaser of the sale and the Forest Supervisor.  

The sale administrator drove me up to the Maple Sale where the contract logger, by the name of Johnson was logging with two highlead yarders on clear cut units and some tractors working in a overstory removal unit.  I was introduced to the brother of the contract logger, who was operating one of the yarders and was suppose to be the logging supervisor.   The sale administrator pointed out some uncompleted work that needed to be done and told me to meet a tractor operator with a bull dozer the next day on a completed tractor clearcut unit, where water bars needed to be constructed, and some landings were in need of clean up.    Basically I ended up showing the operator where to construct water bars on skid trails, spur roads and to slope the landings for drainage.  

Once a week the contract logger would meet with me and we would drive around the sale area as he would ask me what was required in the various units where logging had been completed.     He had been working on this sale longer than I had been working for the Forest Service, so I suspected he was testing my knowledge of the contract.   With logging in the overstory unit almost completed he asked what he had to do with the slash.    On the sale area map for this unit, it indicated all slash had to be cut or reduced to 30 inches of the ground, which I pointed out to him.    He had a copy of the map, but would never acknowledge what he knew, which was probably more than what I had knowledge of.  

At times I had approached his brother about some contractual items needing attention, but his usual comment was, "I can't leave the yarder, so can you to take care of it?", which meant me doing his job of supervising their operation.   It was only a 10 mile log haul downhill from the sale area to the mill in Orleans and most the truckers were wrapping their log loads with just one binder.    After bringing this to the attention of the sale administrator, he contacted the mill representative and informed him this was a safety concern to the public and at least two binders needed to be applied to all loads or hauling would be suspended.   This definitely corrected the situation.    As summer progressed, so did the fire danger and a one o'clock shutdown was implemented for all operations where the relative humidity was below 30%.    On one afternoon all logging operations were shutdown by the logger, meeting this contractual requirement, but I could hear chain saws operating off in the distance.   After driving down a road, I met with two timber fallers, who had no idea of the 1 pm closure.    In fact I had no idea anybody was cutting this unit, including the sale administrator, who never pointed it out to me.   There may have been 6 to 8 sales operating on the District at the time.   It was more than this one sale administrator could oversee, plus supervising three log scalers.   A year later the other TSO and I were promoted to sale administrators at the GS-9 grade with full authority as field representatives for the Forest Service.  

 This sale was a learning process for me, and mostly by the trial and error method.   For the next 20 years I worked in sale administration on four National Forests, until I retired from the Forest Service as lead sale administrator at the GS-10 grade on the Cottage Grove Ranger District of the Umpqua National Forest in 1995.  

A MYSTICAL MEMORY

Being isolated and trying to maintain some sense of sanity these days, my memory drifts back in time to places and people that I have known.   One such individual was an old hippie man living south of Orleans on a small farm along Red Cap Road.   I can not remember his name and never personally knew him.   He was probably in his 50's or 60's, had long gray hair, a long beard, wore an old dress coat and a hat that made him look like a wizard.   He would always wave at us when driving by his place on our way to work on the south end of the District.   What really caught our eye was the young hippie girls that would be helping him tend his crops.   There would be 3 or 4 of them hoeing between the rows and wearing only enough clothing to cover the bare essentials.  Sometimes the driver of the work truck we were in almost drove off the road with his eyes more focused on the young lovelies than the road.   After getting beyond the farm we would have tormented discussions on what was that old man's relationship with those young girls, was it fatherly or something else?   There were little cabins painted with all kinds of bright colors back along the forest on the edge of the fields.   This place was totally off the grid and nobody ever talked about being in compliance with building codes in and around Orleans.  From experience, I saw other dwellings in the community where you could see chickens grazing under a house with no foundations and water draining on the ground from some pipe coming from inside the house.   One unusual structure on the farm was an outhouse perched on stilts about 10 feet off  Red Cap Road.  It was 4 or 6 feet above the ground on the slope below the road.  There was a ramp leading to the door from the road with a sign over it that said, "Avoid Stress".  I'm not sure if it was really used as an outhouse or just put there to annoy all those that drove by.   In many ways this place was mystical and added to the culture of the community.  It sure enhanced many of our conversations on our way to work.  

Turn Back Timber Sales (TB)

The attached is a short narrative of the TB sales caused by speculative bidding in the 1980's.    During my career with the Forest Service, this was very prevalent on both the Gold Beach and Cottage Grove Districts where I worked.   

How many of you know about this?

THE GOVERNMENT BAIL-OUT OF THE TIMBER INDUSTRY

 

In the 1980’s there had been much speculative bidding on National Forest timber sales.  Most of the large timber sales had a five-year contract period depending on how much volume (board feet of timber) on each sale.    Bidding on these sales was very competitive because of the number of mills dependent on government timber to stay in business.   Many purchasers acquired these sales by biding more than what they could get for the price of their finished products but were hoping that the market would go up during the contract period.   The first couple of years they would construct the roads on these high-priced sales, deck the right-of-way timber for later removal and utilize the earned road credits for payment of timber removed on other cheaper sales.  

Over the next three or four years the housing market went down and many purchasers were sitting on timber sales they could not afford to log with only a year left to complete their contracts.  Some purchasers requested contract term extensions, but did not qualify under terms of the contract. 

They lobbied their Congressional representatives for the government to buy back these sales.    The government agreed under certain conditions.   First, the right-of-way log decks would be put up for sale and any defect caused by delay in their removal would be paid for by the original purchaser.   The original sale volume was reappraised and put up for a second bid and called “turn back volume” (TBV).   This “turn back volume” would count toward that District’s annual allowable cut again, which the timber industry strongly disagreed with, but to no avail, keeping the Forest Service from putting up additional new sales to meet their allowable cuts.   Plus it cost the Forest Service money and time to reappraise, modify and prepare these “turn back” sales for auction again.  

Many of these “turn back” (TB) sales were purchased a second time at a lower bid rate by the original purchasers.  To prevent speculative bidding in the future the Forest Service allowed only a two year contract period for most sales.      

Wentworth Springs

 Have any of you folks from California ever been to Wentworth Springs on the El Dorado National Forest?  It was my first camping trip in the 1950's with my dad and another family from Willows.   We drove to Georgetown then followed a single lane dirt road to the end, where there was a building that may have been a store and maybe a hotel.  We camped along a stream, sleeping on old bed springs, no tents, some picnic tables and wooden boxes nailed on trees for storing dishes and food.    We spent a day hiking to Loon Lake where I remember a dam constructed out of blocks of granite with many leaks.   Somebody said it had been built by the Chinese.  The landscape was mostly granite with scattered trees.  I have tried to follow it on Google Earth and don't see what I remember.   Funny what we think about in our old age.