The blue mountains: forest out of control - La Grande, Oregon - includes related articles

American Forests, Sept-Oct, 1992 by Herbert E. McLean

I never saw anything more beautiful, the river winding about rough the ravines, the forests so different. The country all rough is burnt over so often there is not the least underbrush, but the grass grows thick and beautiful.

So recorded Rebecca Ketcham in 1853 as she camped in a stand of ponderosa pines on the Oregon Trail. She was one of 300,000 or more pioneers who, with "blood, sweat and muscle," trekked 2,000 miles from Missouri to Oregon's Willamette Valley.

What a land it was, especially around today's La Grande, Oregon (pop. 11,350). The Grande Ronde, a breathtaking mountain valley, was the quintessential capsule of contentment: streams cold and pure. Billowing grass six feet high. In the surrounding mountains, stalwart western larches and thick-butted ponderosas 200 feet tall in this rain-shy land. And fire.

Regularly set by both Indians and lightning, fire was the forest's friend. It scoured the understory, removed brush and competing firs and spruces, and promoted that deep grass (which acted to evenly distribute the next ground fires) and thus protected those magnificent ponderosas.

My trek this spring day was considerably easier than Rebecca's had been. My wife and I were hurtling northwestward on Interstate 84 from Baker City, Oregon, she at the wheel of our Nissan pickup, I matching Oregon Trail maps with contemporary photos in a fine new book, Powerful Rockey. Occasionally we could spot original, bonafide covered-wagon tracks coming straight down a grassy hill.

La Grande, we found, is still mighty visual. It's a fish-eye panorama of pea-green pastureland, brown hills, and greenish-blue timber serrating the bold skyline. The forested gorge that swallowed Rebecca Ketcham just west of La Grande? It's still here. 1-84 swirls right up it.

Sad to say, La Grande is also where you come to learn about a forest tragedy of immense proportions. Four Oregon national forests--the Malheur, Umatilla, Wallowa-Whitman, and Ochoco--and adjacent privately owned forestlands are reeling from a combined invasion of somewhere between three and 6.5 million acres by western spruce budworms, tussock moths, pine bark beetles, root diseases, and nutrient-sapping mistletoes.

This debilitating scourge sprawls alarmingly across a 250-mile-long swath as the region enters its seventh straight year of tree-weakening drought.

"The worst I've seen it in 70 years," a local logger told me.

"Massively destructive," admits the Forest Service.

"Some people feel the ecosystem has collapsed," says the Oregon Department of Forestry.

Timber and lumbering jobs are at stake. Indians are clamoring for cool (meaning unlogged) streams for salmon. The Forest Service is "a football being kicked all over the country, its hands politically tied," as a cattleman put it. Why? A seemingly endless stream of required analyses, appeals, and lawsuits delay urgent dead-tree-removal sales for months, even years, as that fire fuel sits there.

Private forestland owners meanwhile are "looking at their options," and aggressively cutting timber before their lands are locked up by endangered-species protection plans, like those western Oregon has experienced with the spotted owl. Some privately call that logging a "feeding frenzy."

"If they don't get out the timber, it's their kids' college education that may get cut," confided a pioneer's great-granddaughter.

At the Blue Mountains Natural Resources Institute in La Grande, leaders representing a broad cross-section of interests are diligently, if not desperately, working to achieve common understanding on what, if anything, can be done to gain control at this point.

U.S. Forest Service officials are cautiously using relatively small prescribed burns to clear some of the fuel on national forests, remembering the perils of runaway wildfire at Yellowstone four years ago. And they're trying--with opposition from some environmentalists--to spray for budworms to slow the spread of the pestilence.

"I GET SO MAD..."

Arleigh Isley, a peppery Extension agent in little Joseph in the northeast corner of the state, scowls about the Forest Service's slowness in meeting the crisis.

"I'm bitter," he says. "The [forest-related] bureaucrats suffer from policy paralysis. They can't do anything within a reasonable time. Sometimes I get so mad I just go out and dig postholes, chop firewood, and break wild horses to get rid of my frustration."

Despite continuing heavy pressure by the forest industry and Congress to get out the cut, managers on these national forests now acknowledge that a broader approach--not commodity production--is the long-term answer to forest health.

As the Forest Servic's Debbie Croswell says, "The forest-health problems are not simple, and they can't be solved rapidly. But slowly, with an ecosystem approach, long-term forest health will be achieved."

Earle Rother, public-affairs officer on the Urnattila National Forest, adds, "We're reidentifying strategies, relooking at all projects." Meanwhile, huge quantities of bugkilled timber, which must be harvested within a year or two before they decay, are torches waiting to burn.