By Chiggers Stokes
Special to Forks Forum
When I arrived in the Forks area in August of 1977, she was a tree felling, timber milling, rough-and-tumble little town. The Soleduck District of Olympic National Forest was among the highest stumpage output of any USFS district in the lower 48. Crown Zellerbach, Rayonier Timberlands, Green Crow and many other tree farms and logging enterprises were going like gangbusters. Visionary logging entrepreneurs such as Dean Hurn spread investment across the timber and mill industries (Hoh River and Sol Duc Shake). Allen’s Mill on the Hoh was a big employer, operating a cedar veneer plant, over-head carriage 2×4 mill, and a wood chip export business. Shake and shingle mills were everywhere with a particular concentration on Russell Road.
How we look at what happened to the timber industry in and around Forks – The Logging Capital of the World – depends largely on what puts food on our table. If it’s the timber industry which supports your household, clear-cuts are a more obvious choice of timber management. If harvesting and growing wood are your objectives, clear-cuts lead to reproduction units that grow wood faster than many other logging alternatives. Our ancient forests rot as fast as they grow wood. Besides the fact that old-growth lumber is superior than wood from a tree farm, there is little incentive to manage for old-growth. It takes millennia.
If it’s conservation that puts food on your table, which was the case for my household, it’s easier to see virtues and a deep aesthetic in old growth. Franklin D. Roosevelt made the case for establishing a million-acre Park when he came to the Olympic Peninsula in 1937 to sell the idea. Not only does it provide recreational and spiritual value for those robust enough to get out in it, but it provides environmental services in the way of clean air and the cycle of water. And there is the notion that Nature has a right to be in her own right. Along the way, I may have made some arguments that lacked scientific basis. But most merchants in Forks would agree that there is a certain advantage to living next to a National Park and the enduring return of eco-tourism.
As far as consuming wood products, I did my share to set the stage for the timber famine of the ’90s. I was a frequent flier at many of the local mills. Rosmond Brothers built and operated a cedar mill by the head of the La Push Road. There was a FREE bin of planer ends mostly used for kindling. I kept on bothering one brother with small retail purchases. He had me copy down his price list and told me to just take my purchases off the green chain. “Just put the cash in and envelope in our mailbox out front if we are closed,” he invited. This worked out great for about six months, until I bumped into a Rosemond with a clipboard. He almost called the cops when he saw me loading boards into my pickup. He held up his clip board and proclaimed quite accurately, “We are sending our product all over the world! We are not set up to sell a board here and a board there.” The rest of the world was buying all the cedar they could get for $1 a board foot. Mills like the Rosmond’s had made the case that sending cedar abroad was sending jobs abroad, so the law became that a cedar log was ripped on four sides to produce a cant. It was these cants that the Japanese were buying and preserving by burying them in their harbors.
Eventually, two partners would buy the enterprise from the Rosmond’s. “Carwin Lumber” would hire my friend Bill Brager, and I would negotiate a purchase of over 10,000 board feet of inventory from a seldom visited cedar stockpile. I would consummate the same kind of clearance sales from Larry McClanahan’s on the upper Bogachiel.
In 1977, after I acquired a piece of the historic Flying S Ranch on the upper Bogachiel, my wife and I threw our collective effort into building a 672 square foot cabin. I bought cedar peeler cores from Allen’s Mill for the foundation. We used a pickup load of 2 by 6 for joists and kept the span to less than 6 feet to keep from falling through the floor. My friend, Bob Zornes, who owned and operated Forks R.V., sold us 5 thousand board feet of 2×4’s for $200, and we used that for the subfloors. And first four vertical feel of wall.
Since I was nervous about our collective skill at frame construction we used those 2×4’s like long wooden bricks. We bought a couple of kegs of 12-penny nails at Thrifty Mart. When we ran out, we went back to Allen’s Mill for 2×4 dunnage which was purchased for $80 a ton. When we nailed together enough 2×4 bricks to make walls, we purchased some rough-cut rafters from McClanahan’s. We got a deal on nice 1×4 tongue and groove from Rosmond’s and used number 4 shake (the next step up from cedar kindling) to hold down the tar paper. Then we sided it with free planer ends from Rosmonds. A little over $800 and we were living in our own little place.
In 1983, when our daughter came into the world, I rambled on another 350 feet so we were a family living in a little over a thousand square feet. Actually, I continued to ramble our living space upward for the next two decades but never had more than $5,000 in the place. Thirty-five years later I recovered that investment in renting out the cabin through Air BnB.
Whether or not one considers themselves an environmentalist, we should be able to agree that if we value wood products and want to use them – from building our homes to wiping our rear ends – some trees are going to have to be knocked down. How this is done; whether or not it is uglier than a forest fire; avalanche, or landslide, whether or not it is sustainable…these are questions over which we may argue. But, if we want to temper our arguments with the armor of science, forest research is conducted here at the Olympic Natural Resource Center. Whether a clear-cut is an environmental abomination or responsible timber management is an issue that science cannot answer if aesthetics get in the way.
Living in this timber community for four decades changed my view. My fingers ran over thousands and thousands of board feet. If one does not like the view of a clear-cut, how is it logical to blame the logger who works to satisfy a market demand and not hold the consumer responsible?
