Mike Kerrick Oral History Interview, May 9, 2014

Samuel Schmieding: Hello, this is Dr. Samuel J. Schmieding, Oregon State University College of Forestry, working on a history project involving the Andrews Experimental Forest ecological research and land management issues in general. Today, we are at the home of Michael Kerrick, now retired and U.S. Forest Service Supervisor/Ranger for many years, who has also been involved with the Willamette National Forest, the Andrews Forest, amongst many other things. We going to be doing an oral history interview here today, which is May 9, 2014, in his home in, I won't say, East Springfield. Where are we actually, Dearhorn?

Michael Kerrick: Dearhorn, right. [Unincorporated community in McKenzie River Valley.]

SS: We're in Dearhorn, which is a Springfield address, and we're going to sit here and talk about Mike's life, his career, and focus some on the Andrews Experimental Forest. But we're going to also go more broadly than that. So, good morning, Mike, how are you?

MK: Good, good.

SS: I want to thank you for being willing to do this. I know this is a big time 00:01:00commitment, but I hope that you will enjoy your journey down memory lane and recycling some things from your past. We'll start as basic as you possibly can. Where were you born and raised, or just tell me a biographical sketch on your own terms?

MK: Okay, I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the depth of the Depression. I was a "Depression Baby." And my father was an artist, and you can imagine being a starving artist in the Depression was pretty tough. So, I grew up attending public schools. I did so-so. I did well enough to get into the University of Minnesota. I attended the School of Forestry on the Ag campus beginning in 1950, and I graduated in 1954. I grew up liking or loving the 00:02:00outdoors. Myself and a friend spent three summers canoeing, one when I was 15 down the St. Croix River, from Danbury all the way to Stillwater, which was near our summer home.

SS: Is that in northern Minnesota?

MK: No, it's actually Stillwater, well the St. Croix divides. It is the boundary between Minnesota and Wisconsin. It was about a 100-mile trip, I think.

SS: And how old were you then?

MK: Fifteen.

SS: Okay, right.

MK: And you know, thinking back, wow, my parents had some confidence in me and my buddy. Anyway, we were gone for about a month and had a great trip. And the 00:03:00next year, we went into the boundary waters canoe area and up into the Quetico Provincial Park in Canada, and spent a month there. And then the next year, I was 17, graduated from high school, and we spent five weeks on a canoe trip from Ely-Winton, Minnesota, all the way up to the Canadian National Railway and back, and had a great trip. So, that kind of explains my interest, or at least my thoughts about forestry, a love of the outdoors, and thinking of it.

SS: Do you remember something even more, shall we say, seminal, early-on, a "wow" moment, something that you saw, maybe a book or you heard a story, or you 00:04:00saw a movie, or you even experienced something in the outdoors, maybe as even grade-school age or younger, that really wowed you, really impressed you, and started to draw you toward what you started to develop there in your adolescent years?

MK: No, I can't. You know, I was just bound and determined to go into forestry. I didn't change majors, kind of interesting. Part of that, part of going through college, had I had my druthers, because I had to support myself, my folks just didn't have the wherewithal. In fact, I was part of that generation that was the first to have been to college. My parents, I don't know that my dad graduated from high school. He was an artist. He went, his schooling was in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, New York, and he spent years in Paris. So he had a 00:05:00whole different educational experience. He loved classical music, and he toyed with the piano. He was a remarkable guy. And his background was, you know, he talked about his early days cruising timber and stuff. I don't know if he actually did that, but he might have. He was born in Park Rapids, Minnesota, up in the northern part of Minnesota. So, there probably was some guidance there, too. There was certainly a strong support to go on, continue the education. All of my brothers started at least, and all three of us graduated. And my oldest brother actually got a master's in teaching. So, we all went to college, which 00:06:00was pretty remarkable. And my oldest brother went through the G.I. Bill, and some of the other guys, the other two, were supported. But I supported myself. Gosh, I worked 40 hours a week sometimes. And I managed to matriculate with a B-average after a kind of a dull start as a freshman, which was a crippling year for a lot of folks. And me, too. I was just a little bit above a C. So, I had lots of A's along the way in order to --

SS: Pull it back up?

MK: Pull it back up, right. So, anyways, the other thing that was kind of demanding, if you remember, it was in the early '50s and we had a draft. I had a student deferral. A lot of my buddies stopped school and were drafted. And so, I 00:07:00figured I'll continue on. I did and graduated.

SS: So, there was some motivation in getting the grades up?

MK: Yeah, right.

SS: Like the Korean War, right?

MK: Right, yeah, yeah. And by the time I --

SS: Because there was Korea, right?

MK: Yeah, but by the time I graduated, the Korean War was pretty well over. So, the draft was still on. In fact, I got my draft notice January 1, I think early January of 1956, after I'd married and we had a child on the way. I explained to the draft board that I was hoping I could delay the draft until such time as our child was born and we could get through that. The response was, "Oh, you're 00:08:00going to have a baby? Well, we don't need you." (Laughs)

SS: So, you got out of military service because of your first child. Right?

MK: Yeah. And my three other brothers were all in the service. My brother John, it was kind of interesting. He joined the Wisconsin National Guard to avoid the draft. This was just about the time of the Berlin Crisis, they called up the Wisconsin National Guard, and it was quite a deal. They came by train out to Fort Lewis to do their basic [training]. And they had lots of beer from Wisconsin on the train. Oh, lordy. Anyways, that's my recollection anyways, and I graduated from the university 60 years ago, so the memories are a little faint.

SS: Now, what was the name of your high school, by the way?

MK: West High School in Minneapolis, which is no longer there.

SS: Were there any natural resource or science classes, or something in the educational realm that connected you to what you did later?

MK: No, I don't recall. Not that I took, you know, like a 4-H thing. I was an urban kid, and it was kind of amazing. This urban kid got involved in this natural resource field, which was interesting, as lots of my school mates in college were from farms and had experience in the north woods. But here I was, this urban kid with a burning desire to get into a natural resource field. And I 00:10:00probably didn't really recognize what I was getting into.

SS: Was there anything else, like for instance, during the Roosevelt Administration and afterwards, the New Deal, your father was a WPA artist, you mentioned before the interview.

MK: Right.

SS: But there was a lot of promotion of a lot of agencies that became really big agencies after World War II; the Forest Service, the Park Service, the whole promoting of saving America, seeing America, all that kind of stuff. Do you remember any of those things, or even a hero or a public figure who was in forestry or national parks, making an impact on you?

MK: Well, in college, of course, Gifford Pinchot was, a hero. But that was in college. Yeah, he was certainly a heroic figure, and many of the folks that followed Gifford were heroes in the forestry community. And I started, it's 00:11:00amazing, I came out to Oregon in 1951. We had a summer school, one session in the summer at Lake Itasca [Minnesota], another field research facility. And following that, there were still about seven weeks before school started. So, I and another guy said, "Well, let's head west." We got a ride with another guy that had a job in Missoula [Montana]. Then we hitch-hiked from there and we ended up in, interesting, we ended up in Eugene. We finally had to take the train, from some small town in Montana that we couldn't get out of. We took the train. I got ahold of my grandfather, who I thought might support our way out. 00:12:00And he did, he telegrammed, wired some money out. So, we ended up in Eugene. And we had a friend of a friend of a friend, who thought we could get a job. I can't recall how we got to their house, but 1839 Orchard, you probably know where that is. Orchard Street?

SS: Yeah, it's right by campus [University of Oregon] there.

MK: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we ended up there on the doorstep. Folks by the name of Burchams, and Keo is now 103 years old. And, you know, from that day forward, she was like a grandmother or a mother figure, a grandmother figure to our kids. It was just an amazing --

SS: What's her name again?

MK: Keo Burcham.

SS: That's an old Eugene name, isn't it? Yeah, I believe so.

MK: Yeah. Her husband was Roy Burcham, who ran some restaurants, owned some 00:13:00restaurants downtown on Willamette Street. Ended up in the United Way organization, and I think, retired in the Tri-Cities area. Anyways, Keo and I go back, you know, golly, I guess, well, more than 60 years. He knew a fellow that was an inspector for the Oregon Department of Forestry, and he got us a job.

SS: And that was in 1951, correct?

MK: 1951, yeah.

SS: Before you were just a sophomore, right?

MK: Well, I was between a freshman and sophomore, but it was in-between. So, we ended up at Swisshome, Oregon, down near the coast.

SS: By Deadwood, right? Isn't that by Deadwood?

MK: Well, a little further west from Deadwood, yeah, closer to, well, God, 00:14:00what's the name of that?

SS: Mapleton?

MK: Mapleton, yeah. Anyways, and they had a bunk house there. And so we worked on the road crew running slope stakes and putting the design onto the ground for construction. 1951, this was the year of the big fires. I don't know if you remember, we had a fire here in the Willamette, the Hee-Hee Fire, in June, which is unheard of, I mean it was really dry.

SS: Usually, it's August, September, October in Oregon?

MK: Yeah, right, when these large fuels dry out enough that they become a real threat. So, the Hee-Hee Fire was in June, and the Sardine Creek Fire up at Detroit [Oregon] was also in June. I was on a fire over at Scottsburg, on the 00:15:00highway down towards Coos Bay, my first experience on a wildfire. This is all in 1951. So in 1953, I came back out, no '52, rather, and they had a program called Student Referrals, so that the western schools didn't get dibs on all the jobs out west.

SS: And this has something, in other words, this announcement came through the department you were in at Minnesota. Correct?

MK: Yeah, right, through the school. So, I signed up for that and got a job at the McKenzie Bridge in 1952. And I always talk about that job was the state-of-the-art in remote sensing in those days.

SS: Explain.

MK: I was part of a two-man crew that had, and we called it "double-Abneys." We had an Abney [survey tool] at the bottom and an Abney at the top, and made an 00:16:00average of the readings. And you ran prepared contour maps in a field, in a type map, the "Forest Type Map," and you spent the summer, probably, you got maybe a section-and-a-half done, maybe. And you had controls. You know, you had to go up and back, and closed. Anyway, so you produced a map that the foresters then used for presale, for laying out roads and that sort of thing. I always call it, the state-of-the-art remote sensing. Now, of course, you've got GIS and all kind of -

SS: LIDAR?

MK: Yeah, LIDAR, right.

SS: I mean, that's amazing, that laser thing.

MK: Yeah, gets tree heights and everything else.

SS: Kind of the morphology of almost every needle. Not quite, but -

MK: So, in 1952, we were on the bank of the south fork in McKenzie at Rider 00:17:00Creek, which is now, they call it Terwilliger Hot Springs, you know?

SS: Right, correct.

MK: The infamous. And in those days, of course, it was not known. Although, way back in the early 1900's, that hot springs was known. In fact, there was a fighter that had a training camp near there and he would soak in those pools. So, I guess, you know, they were very primitive back then.

SS: I will merely state that in my high school and shortly thereafter years, some of my friends and I may have visited that location. (Laughter) I will take "The Fifth" beyond that, Mike. [Known "skinny-dipping" locale.]

MK: Yeah, I don't know if we ever went and used the pools, but we were camped at the mouth of Rider Creek right on the south fork. This was before the dam, of course. And then, I became infatuated with Oregon. The huge trees and the forest 00:18:00out here, just pretty amazing to a young, impressionable student looking for a career. In 1953, I came back and did the same job. We were up in Quartz Creek, and the headwaters at Quartz Brook, and before the roads. So we packed in by pack stock and set up camp at Alder Cove, which was just below Wagon Wheel Pass. And the story had it that there was a wagon wheel found up there. I can't imagine how in the world a wagon could get there, I have a little trouble.

SS: Place names have incredibly slippery and interesting juxtapositional stories of this's and that's, and something happened then, and the location shifts conveniently. (Laughs)

MK: Yeah, right. Anyways, the next year I graduated. And they offered me a job 00:19:00out here at Lowell as a JF [Junior Forester]. Well, to begin with, I was a temporary employee.

SS: What they call seasonal now, right?

MK: Yeah, seasonal, awaiting the results of the exam and whether you became hirable. You had to pass. I took the exam, and midway through the summer, I got notice from Region 3 in Albuquerque that I had a job offer. I showed that to the ranger, and he said, "Oh, Mike, I think we can get you on board here. Why don't we go in and talk to the Supervisor's Office." We did, and they said, "Oh yeah, 00:20:00Mike, there's no need for you to go down to Albuquerque. We can get you on." And they were able to get me on. That was the beginning of my professional career, on the Willamette at Lowell, the Lowell Ranger District. The ranger there was Fred Brehm, part of the "old school." I don't think he had a college degree.

SS: What they used to call, the "life of hard knocks," or the "training through hard knocks," or something like that.

MK: Yeah.

SS: That's what they used to call it in the service [military], right?

MK: Yeah, the "School of Hard Knocks."

SS: Versus the educated guys.

MK: Yeah, right. And I'll never forget, here I am, 21 years old, wet behind the ears, and he's calling me, "Mr. Kerrick." Mr. Kerrick, wow! And I'll never forget his wife. Fred worked for a while up on the Olympic [National Forest], 00:21:00and his wife, and I think was from the Olympic area, a neat gal. But she smoked cigarettes. And she would strike them, a farmer's match, you know, sulphur on the shoe, and light up. And I mean, the contrast between the two was pretty amazing. They were both great people. You know, the Forest Service back in those days were more of a family, much, much more of a family than they are now. You know, you lived on remote stations. And a year later, my wife and I were married.

SS: You and -- ?

MK: Sue.

SS: Sue, yeah.

MK: I brought Sue from the prairie land where you could see for miles, miles, and miles, out here to Oregon. Our first home was up Fall Creek, which was at 00:22:00the bottom of the canyon. And if you could see 800 feet, you were probably lucky. Anyways, the reception, you know, the women, the other wives, took her under their wing, and you can imagine, the contrast from the prairie to here, and surviving that, you know, getting through it.

SS: Now, I will return to the culture of the Forest Service a little later.

MK: Okay, right.

SS: But I wanted to address something you mentioned about the size of the trees. I have two questions here. You can go off how you want, and I'll take them one at a time. How do you think the contrast between your home state and the Pacific Northwest affected your views on managing coniferous forests that compose a large percentage of the region? In other words, the size, type of trees, the 00:23:00whole ecological dynamic out here?

MK: Well, I mentioned earlier, when we were visiting at the spring quarter of your senior year, you spent at Cloquet in kind of a practicum, surveying and cruising and doing all those sorts of things. In Minnesota. In the swamps. And of course, the spring quarter would be before the full-blown mosquito season. But it became obvious to me that I'm not sure I want to practice forestry wading through swamps and in the sphagnum all my life.

SS: What they call peat bogs, right?

MK: Yeah, peat bogs.

SS: Right, yeah.

MK: So, I was interested in heading west. What I found out in the West was 00:24:00certainly far more appealing than what I had witnessed or experienced there in the swamps around Cloquet. Now, that doesn't mean or say that (phone ringing) there's not more than just swamps. My experience canoeing, you know, in the back-country canoe waters, you had the pine forest there, and uplands.

(Break in audio)

SS: Continue. We were in the peat bogs or you were segueing to coming here.

MK: Yeah, part of the reason I think for going out west in '51 was to take a look at the rest of the world, or the rest of the forest. And what I found out here was certainly more appealing than the little piece I saw in Minnesota.

SS: Minnesota and Michigan and Wisconsin were the old railroad logging areas 00:25:00where they would build railroads in and just blade everything.

MK: Right, absolutely.

SS: This was one of the sources of what became, shall we say, the intellectual and cultural fermentation of early conservation, because of a lot of the things that happened in that area.

MK: Absolutely, yeah.

SS: Now, what do you remember seeing of what was left of old-growth forests or what had grown back by the time you were in your formative years, from those early, you know, cut-and-run practices, shall we say?

MK: Right. In fact, that was part of the history and part of the interest really in forestry, was to work the 3C activity and what-not, the reforestation, all of that. The canoe country, I guess, some of that had been harvested too, now that 00:26:00I think about it. Splash dams and, you know, part of it anyway.

SS: Are you talking about the canoe trip you took when you were 15 all the way down the --

MK: Well, the second one when I was 16 was up in the Quetico.

SS: Okay. But was that part of your training at Minnesota when, since you were right in that area, and obviously they were teaching conservation practices as they were interpreted at that time. Forestry, through the lens of Gifford Pinchot multiple-use philosophies?

MK: Right.

SS: But did they use the Northern Plains examples as a case study of why we need conservation and sustained-yield models?

MK: Well, I'm sure they did. I don't remember specifically that, but no question that they did. And the Minnesota School of Forestry, I thought, was a really 00:27:00great school. Some great people came out of the university and it had a great multiple-use ethic. And it was the foundation for future learning. The notion was that this isn't it that education continued on, and continuing education was important throughout your career.

SS: Do you remember a particular professor or professors that had an especially strong influence or impact on you in that period of your training in college?

MK: Yeah, some of the younger guys. Earl Meyer, as an example, taught a course in aerial photography. But he was one of the younger ones, and was more of a forward-looking person. Brownie, was the mensurationist guy. And folks made a 00:28:00lot of fun of Brownie. But, you know, he covered the basic measurement principles and math and so on that goes in to that. It was important that we got that. The dean of the school was a very, very key figure in terms of motivation, and another hero figure.

SS: What was his name?

MK: Frank Kaufart. And he was --

SS: How do you spell Kaufart?

MK: K-A-U-F-A-R-T, I think. Kaufart, yeah.

SS: Kaufart.

MK: Yeah, he taught one of the introduction courses of forestry. I don't know if deans do that and if that's the typical place of the dean to do, but he did a great job of it, as I recall. I mean, my God, that was over 60 years ago, but I 00:29:00do remember a fondness for Frank. In fact, when I was on the Coconino [National Forest], you know, many, many, 50 years later, Frank was out, and this was when he was crippled, but they brought him out to NAU as a guest speaker. And I had the opportunity to spend a day with Frank on the "Coc." And one of the early professors at Minnesota spent his early days on the Colorado Plateau and on the Coconino, and always talked about his experiences. So, it was really a special time for me to have Frank, at the end of his career, and probably he didn't last many more years. This would have been in '77-'78, sometime in there. Just a 00:30:00marvelous guy. So, anyways, those were the heroes of my college days. I don't recall mentoring, per se, but some of the folks, there were some guys in pathology that were instrumental, too, inspirational also.

SS: Now going to a more cultural question. Obviously, the trees and the topography are much larger and bigger here. How would you view the inspirational aspect of big geography and big trees that you saw when you came out West, and how you just felt about this place, the actual cultural place of Oregon, or the physical place?

MK: Yeah, well, it was pretty amazing. Those days, this would be in the early 00:31:00'50s, and the Willamette had been, well, you know, going back a little bit. This is the years just after the war.

SS: Correct.

MK: And the need for housing and the need for lumber was very strong. And the national forests had been in a custodial state, you know, in the '30s and, well, pretty much since the inception, with notable exceptions. I mean, there were some early timber sales on the Willamette back in the '20s. They established a mill over at Hines, I mean, at Westfir, you know.

SS: It was a company town? [Just west of Oakridge]

MK: A company town, right, yeah. Anyways, so in the '50s, it was still just 00:32:00emerging as a managed forest. So, there were still vast parts of the forest that were intact. And you know, you looked out on these lands, the incredible scenery and so on. Yeah, I was awestruck. It was pretty amazing. In fact, when you go back, and we had an annual yearbook [reunion], part of it was stories from the year before, from students on student jobs. I was in one of those and I remember relating my experience in the West, you know, what was going on. But we need to 00:33:00step back, and to think about the '50s. It was a period of growth following the war. Putting people back to work. Getting housing, you know.

SS: It's the "Baby Boom" era, too.

MK: Yeah, it was the Baby Boom.

SS: The demographics were exploding also.

MK: So, the national forests were taking on some of that challenge of providing lumber and wood and so on. Congress was very supportive, and generally, the public was supportive of forestry practices then. So, anyways, I guess that kind of describes the cultural scene somewhat. It was a busy, busy, busy time.

SS: But in terms of the aesthetic, I'm using an art term. How did you see the 00:34:00mountains, the forests, the valleys, the rivers at that time, at a time when there were very few of the areas that were clear-cut, or, I mean, there was still a lot of what we'd call old-growth forest out there.

MK: Yeah.

SS: And how did you look at that, just as like a piece of art, an aesthetic?

MK: Yeah, well, beautiful, no question about it. But it was also a commodity, you know, where it was suitable for harvest, a commodity, and the nation needed that wood. I mean, that was kind of the mindset, as I recall.

SS: Now, let's segue to the Andrews because I know you did some early work that 00:35:00had to do with the Andrews. What was your first task that was actually connected to the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest?

MK: I think it was 1953, but we'll have to find out for sure if it was '52. Okay?

SS: I think so, but, yeah.

MK: When the dedication took place, yes? Anyways - [Dedication of the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest was in 1953 to honor Region 6 Forester H.J. Andrews, who died in a 1951 auto accident. From 1948 to 1953, it was called the Blue River Experimental Forest]

SS: We'll have to check.

MK: Yeah.

SS: Mike, you may be right, it might have been 1953.

MK: Whatever year it was, the fiscal year in those years ended June 30. And so when you arrived in mid-June or so, you were put into a lot of different kinds of jobs because the timber funds had probably been pretty well exhausted. The job you came out to do, like in my case, surveying, preparing topo maps and 00:36:00contour maps, they didn't have money until July. So, you did a whole number of different jobs. Picking up rocks behind a patroller, maybe, and so on. Anyways, my first experience at the Andrews was prepping the site for the dedication. We had some flagstones and there was this big rock there that had the dedication monument. I and the headquarters fireman, a guy by the name of Cliff Roberts, went out to prepare the site. We wanted to make it look natural, and we put moss back in between the cracks, and all the landscaping, to get ready for it.

SS: Now, where exactly was that dedication?

MK: Well, it was right at the forks of the road, as I recall. SS: Down below, near the bottom of Lookout Creek. Correct?

MK: Yeah. Just above the bridge.

SS: But below where the campus [HJA headquarters] is today?

MK: Oh, yeah.

SS: Right, okay.

MK: And to the right. It was on the main Lookout Creek Road, just to the right. I think it still is there. Next time you're up, you'll have to take a look.

SS: I believe so.

MK: Anyways, that was the first experience.

SS: Now, did you go to the dedication?

MK: No, gosh, no. I was a little seasonal employee, you know. The other thing we did was part of the layouts for the some of those early sale units [In HJA]. The task for the Andrews at that point-in-time, was how would you organize these 00:38:00old-growth forests in such a way that best facilitated harvest and regeneration. Converting those old-growth forests into young, vigorous stands, which was held up as the model. That was what we wanted to achieve, converting those big, old "biological deserts." Can you imagine, we were calling them "biological deserts" at that time?

SS: I've read the old literature, so yes.

MK: That was the mindset. And so, the Andrews' focus from the inception in '48 up through quite a while later, was that. How it eroded, how would you harvest it, what was the pattern, and so on. And so, out of those studies, some of those early studies, came the staggered setting system that we employed throughout 00:39:00Region 6 and I think probably throughout the West. I know at least my experience in northern California, that same pattern was there. Where you would access, it would maximize the amount of road with the amount of timber, which would gain access for fire protection and for sanitation harvesting, and maintaining a healthy, thrifty forest. Now, the road systems, they tried different patterns and so on. That was part of the research that was going on there.

SS: Did you help survey or put in any of the roads in the Andrews?

MK: I don't recall. I think so. I did do some layout, some strip layouts, and 00:40:00some of those little tiny circular things, some eighth-acre circular clear-cuts that we would call gaps now, I think. But in those days, they were just trying out different kinds of ways of harvesting in order to obtain regeneration, looking at it from a natural standpoint. Natural regeneration, versus planting, and so on. That was the early thrust of the Andrews.

SS: The first surveys of sales would have been Watersheds 1, 2 and 3 or -- ?

MK: Well, no, there was some earlier stuff than that.

SS: Okay.

MK: The 1, 2's and 3's, didn't happen until, oh, the fairly late '50s, early '60s. No, some of the stuff up Lookout Creek on up towards Lookout Ridge were, 00:41:00and some of the main roads up Lookout Creek were in place, but prior to the watershed stuff. Jack Rothacher designed that experiment.

SS: Well, Roy Silen was the first person.

MK: Yeah, Roy was the guy doing the harvest systems and the road layout, that sort of stuff. And then, Jack followed him and was more involved in, okay, let's see what happens. Let's try to measure, measure the impact of harvesting on other systems, on watersheds, on water quality, and that sort of thing. And so, the notion of the three-paired watersheds came into place. Watershed 1, which was to be entirely harvested. Watershed 2 was the control, and Watershed 3 was 00:42:00going to be the staggered-setting system. And I left, well, we've got a period there, missing here. In 1956, I moved from Lowell over to the new, brand-new ranger district, which was just created out of the McKenzie.

SS: Lowell was your first post-graduate professional position. Right?

MK: Yeah, right.

SS: Your seasonal work, '51 to '53.

MK: Yeah.

SS: In there you were doing these different jobs, including the plaque on the rock and the dedication ceremony? [at the H.J. Andrews E.F.]

MK: Right.

SS: Continue.

MK: So, my first professional job was at Lowell as a junior forester in there. 00:43:00The training in those days was, you know, a whole bunch of activities generally related to the timber program, like, the first year there, because I had experience and they needed a type map prepared, my first year was spent, the 1954 summer season, at a mapping camp up out of Fall Creek. And foresters then, you had to go through scaling, so I scaled logs. None of this sounds real professional to me now, but it was part of the training. And sale layouts, going 00:44:00out with experienced foresters and learning how to prepare timber sales and locate boundaries and that sort of thing.

SS: It was definitely utilitarian, economic-centered at that time.

MK: Yeah, right, right.

SS: Which is typical of the Forest Service at that time.

MK: Yep. And so, an opportunity became available in 1956. In those days, you've got to remember that the selection process was a big mystery. They maintained rosters, and you had folks who were kind of keeping track of what your next career step ought to be, and so on. At the time, there was the fire staff, a guy name of Jack Smith, who is still alive, and he's in his, I think he's 100-and-some [age] now. Thought that it would be good to get professional 00:45:00foresters involved in the fire business.

SS: Fighting fires?

MK: But in fire management, the whole being part of the leadership in that area, the area of fire. And so, these jobs had traditionally been open to technicians, non-professional types. He created about three, he got approval from the rangers, and it was agreed to place, I think there were three of us in the Forest [Willamette] at that time, Bud Baumgartner, Lloyd Soule, and myself, into 00:46:00these DA jobs, the district assistant, which was the old kind of master of all kinds of jobs. The job I had; we had trail maintenance, road maintenance, and recreation. Because I was a forester, I also had reforestation, as well as the fire control aspects. Back in those days, it was fire control. You know, the objective was to jump on the fires and get them under control before 10 a.m. the next morning.

SS: But, the fire management, did it include thinning? Did it include thinning certain stands, because they were too bunched together, and obviously, a hot fire could get flared up?

MK: No, that whole notion came beyond, much later. Well, not much later, but later. I can talk about some of the real basics of doing that on a forest-wide 00:47:00scale on the Coc. [Coconino N.F.] But anyway, no, it was basically fire, and we had lookouts. I had five lookouts at Blue River. They had an experiment going on called the "Increased Manning Experiment," where the thought was, if we increased surveillance and suppression forces, the increased investment would pay off in smaller costs in terms of fire control. The Willamette had instigated that. We ended up with five lookouts, all supplied by pack stock. It was 00:48:00interesting. That was part of my job, maintaining the lookouts. I had a radio and a No. 9 telephone line right into my house, so I was available 24/7. It was an interesting period.

My next-door neighbor in 1956 when we moved to Blue River, was Jack Rothacher, who was the scientist there assigned to the Andrews. We became friends with him and his wife. And we did a number of social things together. One project we did, well, we did a couple of projects. One, in the control Watershed 2, we 00:49:00contracted with the research folks to build a trail system down through, so they had access by trail for various instruments and that sort of thing, throughout the watershed. We brought in a couple of old loggers that could do wonders with power saws and so on, and built that trail. The other thing Jack and I did was, the hydro-seeding on some of the cut-banks. You know, and here again, this was in the early days of trying to stabilize those banks with seed and straw.

SS: Was this the road cuts?

MK: Yeah, road cuts, and trying various combinations of seed and mulch and that 00:50:00sort of thing. That was more, I guess, involved in the experimental business. But beyond, as that watershed research continued on, when I came back as ranger, they had, oh, gosh, I can't remember, I think they were up into the teens, like Watershed 10, Watersheds 12, 13 [likely 9-10]. And they were looking at different aspects of monitoring and effects of timber management, and a very silvicultural-like spring, that sort of thing. One was called a "Chem-Shed" where they tried to monitor the effects of use of chemicals and so on.

SS: Herbicides?

MK: Yeah, herbicides. Well, I'm kind of getting off the track.

SS: No, that's fine. This is how this goes. It doesn't have to be strictly 00:51:00linear and chronological. However the memories are connected together, is often the best way to do these things, Mike.

MK: When I left Blue River in 1959, that was about the time they were to begin harvesting and designing the experiments in Watershed 1 and Watershed 3. So, I missed that whole thing. There was a 10-year period when I left and went up to northern Washington in the Mount Baker [National Forest] as assistant ranger, and did a variety of things up there.

SS: Tell me a little bit more about Jack Rothacher?

MK: Jack was a neat guy. I think he, you know, I don't what his educational background was, what kind of a degree he had. But I think he came out of the 00:52:00NFS, the National Forest System. I think he was a ranger down in the Umpqua [National Forest], and came to the job as this early scientist on the Andrews. He must have had some background in watersheds, because that was his interest. But he and his wife were both avid conservationists. They were hikers, and I think belonged to the Mazamas. I remember once joining them years later when I was at the Mount Baker, and we skied together on Mount Baker, and we stayed in the Mazama Lodge up there as a result of their being Mazama members. An 00:53:00intellectual guy, a keen interest in this watershed stuff. I guess, that's about all I can remember.

SS: What do you remember about Roy Silen, other than what you already said?

MK: Yeah.

SS: By the way, he was the first permanent staff at what was originally the Blue River Experimental Forest.

MK: Blue River, yeah.

SS: Which you mentioned, the H.J. Andrews dedication, in commemoration of H.J. Andrews, who died in a tragic car accident in Washington, D.C.

MK: Yeah, old "Hoss" Andrews. He probably would have been Chief [U.S. Forest Service] at some point.

SS: Well, I've heard different stories that when he was back there looking for a house in Washington when the accident occurred.

MK: Oh, okay.

SS: And that he was being considered either for one of the senior research, the top research position, or even chief. [Being groomed for top position].

MK: Oh, really?

SS: Or one leading to the other, and I've heard both stories.

MK: Yeah, and I didn't know the guy, so --

SS: Yeah, well, but just --

(Break in audio)

SS: We're back on. And we're continuing about Roy Silen.

MK: Yeah, I met Roy a number of times. I really didn't know Roy that well, but I know of the work that he did. And that's about all I can remember.

SS: Well, he left being in the field in '54, about the time when Jack Rothacher took over.

MK: Okay, yeah.

SS: He met a woman in Corvallis and married her. And decided he didn't want to live out there anymore.

MK: Oh.

SS: At least, that's the story I've been told.

MK: Well, did he continue with the Station? [PNW]

SS: Yeah, he worked there for many years. I think he was more lab-based, or over out of whatever the Forest Service Center for Research was called in Corvallis at that time [Willamette Research Center], and that became the PNW Station 00:55:00Forest Lab that we have there now.

MK: So, I went up to the Mount Baker for seven years. And after being there for a while, I thought, "My gosh, I'm not progressing!" (Laughs)

SS: Now, you left the McKenzie in what year?

MK: Blue River.

SS: Blue River, right.

MK: Yeah, in 1959.

SS: Okay, so you were here from 1956 to '59. Correct?

MK: Right, right.

SS: And then you went to Mount Baker?

MK: Yeah.

SS: So, what did you learn up there that was added to what you had learned in your early career down here? How was the forest, the management and just the overall dynamic, different up there? MK: Well, I was on the Monte Cristo Ranger District at Verlot. And it was a hemlock forest, a climax forest with a few 00:56:00remnant old-growth Douglas-fir. But basically, fire had been excluded, you know, over time, that the forest had progressed towards a climax of hemlock which came up underneath the forest, and cedar. Very, very little fire history, at least on the south end of the forest that I was on. We averaged, gosh, the first year we were there, we had 166 inches of rain, that's 14 feet of rain. (Laughs) We vied with the Olympic Peninsula with the amount of rain.

SS: Now, was that close to, Monte Cristo is just south of Glacier Peak. Right?

MK: Yeah, the little town of Monte Cristo.

SS: Right.

MK: The ranger station was at Verlot, but the namesake for the ranger district was Monte Cristo.

SS: But were you close to what became the Glacier Peak Wilderness, or -- ?

MK: No, we were west of it.

SS: West, okay, right.

MK: Yeah. We were due east of Everett. And if you remember the geology of northern Washington, and the Straits of Juan de Fuca, that flat place there, storms would come through and we were on the storm track. And as the storm climbs the mountain, of course, the rain comes. As you approach Verlot, which was a little village with a ranger station, there was like a rain cloud or a rain sheet crossed old Turlo Creek, and from non-rain into a rain. I mean, it was just amazing.

SS: The snowpack must have been incredible?

MK: Yeah, it was. In the early '60s, we were kind of in that, near the end of that little interglacial period, you know, where the temperature was cool. And they actually developed a ski area, the base was at 3,000 feet, if you can imagine that.

SS: That's quite low.

MK: Yeah, pretty low. And there was a chair-lift and so on. It was on state park land. As the climate warmed into the '70s, they took the chair-lift down and that was it. So, anyways, the learning period there was how well we were converting those hemlock stands. We were planting Douglas-fir back in. But it 00:59:00was a whole different kind of ecosystem. More rain. You've read here in the news here recently that the big slide at Oso? Terrible. And that glacial phenomena permeated all of that country.

In other words, as the glaciers retreated, smeared clay onto the slopes, and so you had to during road construction, get up through that layer of clay as quickly as you could, in order to prevent landslides, that sort of thing. Then you got into sand, and the best way to deal with sand is to make it as vertical. You laid it back, and it would erode like crazy. So, as vertical as you could, 01:00:00was the way. We had a road locator at the time, a guy by the name Ted Turner, who was a technical guy, but knew the country. And it was cliffy country. He felt the best locations, most permanent location for a road, was to locate it at, through the cliff, somehow. And Lord, that was a different experience, too. In fact, the whole challenge of roading in an unstable environment was the challenge there. And while I was there, we had a Wyssen operation, which was the system that was used.

SS: Which is the skyline? [Wyssen Skyline - Swiss method.]

MK: Yeah, the skyline with the yarder up on top, and you lowered the logs down through gravity, and then brought the hooks back up. And I'll never forget that, the American Gyppo, which was a slang word for loggers, took this finally-tooled Swiss machine, you know, and just would work the heck out of it, and load it up with far more than it should have handled.

SS: Because the Wyssen was developed by the Swiss. Correct?

MK: Yeah, it was a very, very delicate kind of thing, one of the early full suspension things. We were attracted because of being able to fly the logs without the scarifying the soil and so on. That was the way to do it. Anyways, 01:02:00these guys would load the thing and break the machine down.

SS: Now, just a quick segue to the situation up north, since you mentioned it. Was the Oso landslide, in your opinion, caused by land management practices, or just bad planning in where you put houses in a small town?

MK: A little of each, I think.

SS: Do you think so?

MK: That whole country is landslide prone. If you saw the photographs, it was classic, you know, just one of these rotational slides. You've got enough water and pressure, and "whoom," down it came, and it turned to liquid. Probably harvesting, who knows, it probably had some connection.

SS: Where the root system hadn't, there was no longer a root system up high, to hold in, shall we say, the top part of the weight of that hill? Yeah, I looked at the pictures. That's why I was asking you.

MK: Yeah. But in landslide areas, I worked for a period down on the Six Rivers [National Forest - California] too, which that whole country is ancient landslide. And that country up there, too. If you look at, if you were a geo-, whatever they call it, geotechnical guy, one who looked at landslide topography, you know, that was classic landslide topography. Some of it is stable in-between movements, but eventually that stuff is going to move. And so, placement of homes and the whole notion of zoning is important, especially in that kind of 01:04:00country. Wow.

SS: Going back, you'd been around the Andrews. You knew what they were doing at that point. Well, how did your understanding of experimental forests and research natural areas evolve over the course of your career? I mean, there's the Wind River up in Washington. There's the Entiat as well and several others that developed, and the idea of the research natural area kind of came during the course of your career. What was your understanding of experimental forests and research natural areas, and how did you see that fit into what you were doing in the Forest Service?

MK: Well, I don't know if there was a clear connection. I think we had a natural area, too, the Long Creek Natural Area on the Monte Cristo District. And there just wasn't any activity going on, on that particular natural area. Although 01:05:00they had, there were some long-term progeny tests that at one point in the early '60s, they tried to reconstruct those, and if I remember, hunting for the aluminum tags and what-not. It was a big sleuthing project. Yeah, as far as the experimental work, we continued, some of the stuff we learned on the Andrews from the seeding the cut-banks, we continued up there. And that spread throughout the region, too.

SS: And overall, what was your relationship like with the managers and researchers. You were in the management arm with the science people and the 01:06:00researchers. How did that change over time, especially as land management laws changed?

MK: Yeah.

SS: During your career, you went through the post-World War II age to right into the environmental age?

MK: Yeah, right. Well, that whole era of the '70s where we had NEPA and ESA, the Endangered Species Act, and Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, all of those environmental acts, certainly had an impact, an incredible impact, on how you documented your work, the analysis, and the science behind it, obviously. And the Andrews of course, played a big role. And I haven't got back to where I was 01:07:00ranger there, but when I was leaving in 1970, going on down to the Six Rivers National Forest, the Western Coniferous Biome was being established there on the Andrews. And that was where a lot of the basic information was being developed, you know, up into the canopies. Gosh, we hadn't even thought about canopies until some of the work there. And the discoveries of all of that stuff culminated in the LTER, you know, the Long-Term Ecological Research, which grew out of the Biome [IBP] program.

SS: Exactly.

MK: And into the late '70s and into the '80s. Yeah, so that I'm sure the 01:08:00environmental laws drove the budget and drove the money to go into those long-term research things, which turned out to be very beneficial. At the time, you wondered, what in the world are these guys doing? This is not very helpful to us in the field, you know, crawling around there.

SS: So, at first, a lot of the management types, you and your colleagues, were looking at the research saying, "Hmm, why do we need to know that, or that's just going to make our life more complicated," or any number of thoughts along that front?

MK: Maybe I had more empathy for that than others. You know, I could see down the road, just because of the tie to the Andrews that probably it was going to be beneficial. But at the time, we had other needs too, you know, that were unmet and you wondered about putting all that focus into that. Yeah. So, I 01:09:00don't, you know, I came back as ranger in 1968.

SS: To the Blue River?

MK: To the Blue River, right. And those were the days when Dick Fredriksen and, my God, who were some of the other guys there?

SS: Ross Mersereau?

MK: Well, yeah, Ross Mersereau was a neighbor. You know, Ross, had nine children, if you can imagine. And we had seven.

SS: Did you guys ever have picnics together? (Laughs) You need a lot of hamburgers for that.

MK: Oh, my gosh! We were next-door neighbors up on the tier above the highway 01:10:00there. We were both on septic systems, and Lord...ay-yay-yay.

SS: And Jerry Franklin was there, of course? MK: Yeah, I don't know where. Jerry was probably up in the trailers, I would guess. I think he probably had a residence, maybe in Corvallis, but would spend, you know, the field time there. There were a group of trailers up on, above there, that the district [Blue River] had and the station [PNW] had, too. And I'm sure Jerry was probably up there, yeah. Anyways, that was another interesting period of development, and my interest in research really grew during that period with a close relationship.

SS: After you came back?

MK: Yeah.

SS: In '68 to -- ?

MK: To '70, yeah. I left in October of 1970, and got on to Eureka and the Six Rivers National Forest as timber staff. That was still in the days when, you got a notice that, here's your next job assignment, Mike, you know?

SS: Like the military, right?

MK: Yeah, right. (Laughs)

SS: Time to go overseas, right?

MK: That didn't change until I went from the Six Rivers back up to, as deputy, on the Mount Hood. Still never putting in a vacancy notice, but getting a job offer, you know, and you're expected to take it.

SS: How did that work with so many children in schools?

MK: Well, it was a challenge, yeah. I mean, it was a challenge. The kids had to 01:12:00move, they were upset, but then they made friends, and what-not. When I went down to the Coc, I was selected the same way. At that level, you had to have support from the chief's [Forest Service] office and so on. And so, it's interesting. It was only my last job when I went back to the Willamette as supervisor that I actually put in a vacancy announcement. So, in the '70s sometime, in the late '70s, they changed that whole process, to where you put up vacancy notices, and if you wanted a job, you put in for it and so on. And in some cases, if you didn't want the job, they'd put you, they had a....What was the term? They selected to be sure that some sort of an executive deal where you 01:13:00were required to put in whether you wanted to or not. (Laughs) I had to do one of those for a time or two.

SS: Some other early folks, Forest Service people, were Bob Auferheide?

MK: Oh, yeah, yeah. SS: Phil Briglieb.

MK: Yeah.

SS: Dave Gibney?

MK: Yeah.

SS: These are some of the other mentors of yours, I believe. Correct?

MK: Yeah, Dave was a mentor. You know, in those days, mentoring was kind of a..... I didn't realize Dave was a mentor, but he obviously was. He wasn't somebody that sat down with you and said, "I'm your mentor," or anything, you know, but --

SS: But this developed naturally?

MK: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He selected me as district ranger at Blue River, and you 01:14:00know, he really wanted me to go there.

SS: This was in '68?

MK: Yeah, '68.

SS: Now, did you meet Dave before when you were here?

MK: No, I didn't. I left. Dave came to the forest [Willamette] about the time I was departing. He arrived, I think, in 1959.

SS: Now, Bob Auferheide, was he the district's --?

MK: No, he was the forest supervisor [Willamette NF].

SS: Forest supervisor. But he passed away when he was fairly young, if I read right. Is that correct?

MK: Yeah, he had cancer. And, let's see now, wait a minute. Who was, did Gibney follow after? I guess he must have. Yes, he did, he followed.

SS: Who was the boss up on the Blue River when you were there in the '50s?

MK: Ed Anderson.

SS: Ed Anderson.

MK: He was the district ranger, and he was a mentor of sorts, too. I learned a 01:15:00lot from Ed. Some things not to do. He didn't delegate very well. But I learned, if you're going to develop a team, you had to delegate, and let folks do, what they knew how to do best, and get the hell out of their way.

SS: Now, what do you remember about the development of, let's say, this portion of the Willamette from when you first came, until, let's say, '70, before you came back again.

MK: Yeah.

SS: What do you remember about how many timber sales were going on? Well, there was obviously the Army Corps of Engineers dam projects.

MK: Yeah.

SS: I mean, the face of the land changed dramatically.

MK: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

SS: Do you want to encompass that, encapsulate that a little bit?

MK: Well, Cougar [Reservoir], when I left in '59, Cougar was being cleared. But the construction of the dam itself hadn't started, so all that happened. Blue 01:16:00River Reservoir was being developed while I was on as ranger. And they had an elaborate system to control the turbidity up there. They were excavating material from behind the dam.

SS: Right.

MK: And screening it for placement in the dam, you know, and you can imagine the turbidity there. So, they had seven ponds. I forget what the number, the turbidity number, that they couldn't release it until it cleared to that particular number, which was still pretty murky.

SS: Is that because it would have an effect on the McKenzie?

MK: Oh, yeah.

SS: The fish and all that?

MK: Yeah, yeah. But it was still pretty murky. I remember the Blue River, when 01:17:00we were there in the '50s, the swimming hole and a beautiful, gorgeous, river, or small stream, with some great swimming holes. When I came back in the late '60s during the building of the dam, it had turned into kind of a murky, milky-looking, like a glacial stream almost. And when the dam was constructed, of course, it was ice-cold because they took the water off the bottom. So, yeah, big changes. And other changes. Roading continued so that a lot of the district was accessible. In fact, but there was still road construction going on. One of my first jobs when I came back as ranger was to deal with the French Pete timber sale.

SS: I was going to ask you about the whole French Pete-Olallie Ridge controversy. Why don't you use this an opportunity to go into that story?

MK: Yeah, in those days, we pre-added sales. You know, we were going to offer it in the spring, but you couldn't access the area in the spring because of snow. So, we'd pre-add them, add them in the fall, putting the various bidders on notice that we were going to offer this in, let's say, April or May. Here's an opportunity to go in, and take a look at your site and make your decisions. We hadn't appraised it yet, and so on. So, anyways, that had been pre-added and the 01:19:00Sierra Club, a local chapter of the Sierra Club, appealed the ad, and that was an open winter, very little snow. And so, one of my jobs was to go in on snowshoe and take a look at what it looked like. And I did. I and the TMA [Timber Management Assistant] at the time went in, we were able to get into the units and take a look. I was a little concerned, well, I was very concerned that since we had had an appeal, that we ought to be sure that we the correct layout, 01:20:00had met the standards of the time. And then, to my horror, I found that the streamside strips weren't to the standard that we had established. The units had been laid out, I guess, several years before.

SS: In the '50s probably.

MK: Yeah, well, maybe. At least, if not '50s, at least the early '60s. And the roads came right up to the bottom of the creek. Some concerns were there for landslides and that sort of thing, and the impacts on the stream. So, I told Dave, "Dave, since we've been notified that folks have concerns, I think we probably ought to pull the ad and start over." And he had enough confidence in me, I guess, to say okay.

SS: And you must have had enough sense that the growing environmental movement, the ethos was changing, the culture was changing, and you could sense that?

MK: Right, yeah. Oh, yeah.

SS: Right.

MK: In fact, which gets us back into the mid-'50s when that whole, the Three Sisters Primitive Area, this is before the Wilderness Act, was being studied and looked at. In fact, there was a thrust throughout the country to reclassify all the primitive areas into the more stringent wilderness category under the secretary's [Agriculture] regulations. And so, there was several different boundaries. The one that the secretary chose was on Horse Creek, which released 01:22:00about 42,000 acres, more or less, on the western portion of the wilderness area of the perimeter, into management, released it into management.

SS: That was the site of the controversy?

MK: Yeah, right. And the Sierra Club never gave up. I mean, they were not, they did not like that decision.

SS: This started back when David Brower was leader of the Sierra Club. Right?

MK: Yeah, probably. Anyways, so immediately on that, the district moved to, the road punched up East Fork, and then, one came up along Horse Creek. Well, by the time the '60s rolled around, the Sierra Club had had enough, they decided enough 01:23:00is enough, and they were going to take some action.

SS: There were also some local groups based in Eugene, if I remember right. Correct?

MK: Yeah, well, it was the McKenzie Guardians, up on the McKenzie, part of that. But yeah, Karl Unthank and Dick Noyes, they were all Sierra Club folks. I think the local chapter of the Sierra Club was the focal point.

SS: And Unthank was a professor at the University of Oregon, correct?

MK: Yeah, and so was Dick Noyes. And well, they may have been Obsidians [hiking, climbing, outdoor group] too. I don't know.

SS: Now, and I haven't been up there since I was in Boy Scouts, this reminds me what would have been in question. Were they in what you'd call the view-shed of 01:24:00the Three Sisters, or was it more in a slightly lower valley?

MK: Yeah, it was west of the Three Sisters.

SS: But I mean, was the area of the cuts within the view-shed?

MK: From the --

SS: Were you able to see from either place where the cuts would happen?

MK: Probably not, not from the Three Sisters Wilderness, per se. But they would have been, and Dick Noyes and Unthank came up with their own name, they called it an "intermediate recreation area," where it would be more of a primitive, not a wilderness experience, but they would allow tent camping and that sort of stuff.

SS: Right.

MK: And we countered with, we developed our own plan. And you know, oh, dear, 01:25:00relocated the road up where it would be far more benign, more environmentally safe. It came up through the top of the valley and down. Anyways, when I left in '70, it was still contentious, and it didn't resolve itself, until I think Hatfield put it into, added it to the Three Sisters Wilderness, or his proposal cleared the Senate and became law. So, it was a period there during my stay from '68, '69, '70, wow, countless tours into that area and all kinds of activities. It was a growing period for me in terms of dealing with the public and so on.

SS: So, how did you first of all, deal with the changing culture base where you 01:26:00had to be more than a manager, even a politician, as the environmental age came of age, the new laws came into effect with their own mandates, but then you also had the grass-roots activism which raised its profile and broadened its appeal? How do you remember you adapted to that, struggled to adapt, and even some of your colleagues, especially some of the older-school guys, and how they dealt with that new thing where the old "get-out-the-cut," the old multiple-use calibration was different or had to be looked as a different political and cultural dynamic?

MK: Yeah, in the '60s, I don't think we'd woken up to that. I think we were still struggling with that. And the worry then is, you had this land base that 01:27:00the harvest schedule is based on, and yet you were prohibited from entering some of those areas, but it was still in the land base, so the cut didn't go down. I mean, that was a terrible place to be in. And that lasted for, boy, it lasted for a decade, even longer, until you resolved some of those, resettled the base, that you're operating under. When you talk about sustained-yield, it's based on an acre-volume harvest. In other words, if you've got 1,000 acres and your rotation age is, say, 100 [years], from an acreage standpoint, you would 01:28:00probably be able to do 100 acres a year. By the time you got to the 100th year, you're back to where you, you know, blah, blah, blah. That's the classic way.

SS: So, the original cut was 100 years ago, and it's not old growth, but it's pretty big.

MK: Yeah. So, anyways, that was a challenge. And that was a struggle. You had on one hand, this need, you had these targets to be met, and you had a shrinking land base to get them off. You know, it was just a frustrating, frustrating thing. It was a tough time to manage is all I can say. SS: How do you remember dealing with the new political calculus, and not just that, but the new time and 01:29:00labor management calculus, where you no longer focused just on the economics of the old way of doing business, but there was all this other stuff that came into your purvey? Do you remember how you had to deal with that?

MK: Well, it wasn't easy. I think some of experiences with that started when I came back as forest supervisor in the '80s. That's when my sense was that this really was culminating. We did all kinds of things. We formed, were developing the forest plan [Willamette NF]. So you had an opportunity to be able to make some changes, you know, in this forest plan.

SS: Are you talking about the Northwest Forest Plan?

MK: No.

SS: Or the one even before that?

MK: Yeah.

SS: The one in '82, right, wasn't it?

MK: Well, no, we finally got it in 1990. But there were a series of forest plans. There was one they adopted in 1974 which was based on the 1960 Multi-Use Act, which required each forest, well, ranger districts, to develop multi-use plans. The Willamette evolved that into a forest plan that was completed in 1974 when Zane Smith was supervisor. And it was viewed as kind of the model of that period that addressed at least to a modicum, the old-growth issue. They'd set aside old-growth groves, and blah, blah, blah. The passage of the NFMA, the 01:31:00National Forest Management Act of 1976, promulgated a whole new approach to forest planning.

SS: And that also included the roadless survey provisions, too?

MK: Well, yeah, gosh, this whole thing gets complicated.

SS: RARE I, RARE II?

MK: RARE I was back in the early '70s following passage of the Wilderness Act, the requirement to go take a look, and that didn't pass muster. So then, in the '70s, we did RARE II. I was on detail as kind of the executive officer at the 01:32:00chief's [Wash. D.C.] level, a long detail. And I'm helping guide this national effort to be looking at things from the RARE II perspective, which looked at, RARE I. We made judgments, you know, if the road was there, you kind of came into a finger, and, well, you'd whack that off, and RARE II -- SS: You couldn't whack things off?

MK: No, you couldn't whack things off. You had to do everything, even though it didn't make any sense to us. So, that was the RARE II. And it was different. It was separate from the NFMA [National Forest Management Act of 1976], because the NFMA regs, I don't think came out until probably '78 or '79. So, the regs that 01:33:00were promulgated under the National Forest Management Act, they were developed by the infamous Committee of Science, so it was science-driven. That's what we were trying to implement in the '80s. And frankly, the Willamette was not too excited. We had a '74 plan. We weren't too excited about getting into, you know, that's a pilot forest that we're trying to get things out, kind of be the model on how to do it. We said, "Nah, nah, we're comfortable with being the last one." But it took a decade to get this dumb thing done. And during that whole process, getting back to your question on how you're dealing with the politics and so on, some of the initial things that I did, we formed consensus groups and had a consensus weekend. We'd bring, the environmental activists and the timber 01:34:00industry, and the recreationists, and whatever, "General Joe Blow," into a week-long team-building session. An intensive kind of formation of a group that could work together, not as well as a well-functioning team, but at least have the basics of understanding one another, you know, to work as a group, to look at how they would want to develop the forest into various land use divisions.

We did that in the south end and we had one up in the north end. We had, I'll never forget, we had one of Hatfield's aides, a red-haired guy, I can't think of his name now. But we were roommates. That's about as close as I ever got to a 01:35:00politician, you know. Anyways, we formed one up there. And they were successful to some degree. In fact, my bargain was that whatever you guys come up with, whatever you come up with, I don't care how far off the damn wall it is, we'll put it in the forest plan. Now, I won't guarantee it's going to survive the process, but it'll go in the draft. It'll be an alternative. That's' my bargain with you. And in most cases, they survived all the way through that whole process. So that was at the beginning. Then, we had a stall. The timber industry just didn't like what was going on. And this is the Reagan years, and they had enough power to suspend. They suspended the planning process until, in their 01:36:00judgment, there was enough technical information to move forward. So, there was a pause, a planning pause, in the mid-'80s. Once we got going back again, we still had this confrontational thing, you know, I mean, it was still there. So, I put together a group called "The Fruitful Discussion Group."

SS: That was the name, "The Fruitful Discussion Group?"

MK: Yeah, fruitful. God, I don't know, it was fruitful something or another. Again, it was made up of the segments of the warring factions, and yeah, it was an interesting time. Here again, my hope was that they would help design some of the standards and guidelines they were going to implement. You know, this is 01:37:00beyond the land-use decisions, this is now into the standards and guidelines we're going to drive how we operate under the forest plan. It was pretty amazing. The first meeting was going around the room talking about yourself and introducing yourself to the rest of the audience. There were probably fifteen, I think, probably something in that order, people from all different persuasions, and they had to face one another. They couldn't talk. You had to listen what this one person was doing. He talked about his life, his likes and dislikes, and his desires, all those things that made him or her tick. Because we had men and women, it was an amazing thing. That whole process continued two or three years 01:38:00as we were hammering out these standards and guidelines. So, that was my approach. And we had different forests that did different things. But I tried to bring the public together, and it was frustrating. Because in the room, people were nice and decent and respectful of one another. Outside the room, they would just go hammer and tong.

SS: It's hard to name-call when you're sitting at a table with somebody.

MK: Yeah, it is. That was, I think, a learning process for the folks at the table. And I think both sides gained some understanding. Then, we finally 01:39:00delivered the plan in 1990. And then, of course, it was short-lived.

SS: The Clinton Forest Initiative? [1993, led to Northwest Forest Plan]

MK: Yeah, the Forest Plan.

SS: That whole thing.

MK: The Northwest Forest Plan.

SS: Now, I'm going to segue from this question into where we just went from. What were your first impressions of the McKenzie River Valley and the surrounding region, and how did that contrast with locations, other ones that you were located at? And then, getting back to maybe the culture and the region of this place and how it's adapted to these things that we were just talking about? And you said you lived up by Jack Rothacher at the very beginning, for instance?

MK: Well, yeah. Those were the early days, you know, in the '50s. I don't think 01:40:00there was an as contentious an environment as developed later.

SS: What were the demographics up here? Who lived in the McKenzie River Valley that you remember?

MK: Oh, wildlife. (Laughs)

SS: Wildlife, yeah. That wasn't the Cougar Room, Mike. (Laughter)

MK: Yeah.

SS: Sorry.

MK: Well, yeah, there were a lot of loggers and people who worked in the woods. And yeah, there was that kind of an atmosphere.

SS: The river guides, too. Right?

MK: Oh, sure, river guides. Yeah, they were the river guides, they were a little contentious, and that whole thing grew, too. And as the environmental movement, you know, from the '50s to the '70s, it was a humongous change. The McKenzie 01:41:00Guardians were a force in the '60s. They were appealing sales and concerned about this and that, and so on.

SS: When do you remember seeing the shift between when the Forest Service was "our friend," meaning the local, traditional land users, and "suspect at best," if not their enemy. How do you remember seeing that transition?

MK: Well, somewhere in the '60s, I think. As the various laws became on the books and more publicity about this, and clean water, and blah, blah, blah, blah, I think that shift started. Well, that was in the '70s, I guess. Yes. But it was beginning in the late '60s when I was ranger at Blue River.

SS: How do you remember the difference between then and when you were a 01:42:00supervisor in the '80s and early '90s until you retired, in terms of how the local folks look at you guys?

MK: Well, the thing that's amazing, is, well, each new ranger that came on with Randy Dunbar back in the early '80s, a big hoorah, that was always the new guy on the block, that big controversy. In Randy's day, it was some salvage or danger trees at the falls, at Sahalie Falls, that in his judgment, had to be 01:43:00removed. Well, my Lord.

SS: Is that because they might have endangered the people on the trail?

MK: Yeah, absolutely. Or, well, this is at the viewing site. And so, he survived that. The latest one of our current rangers, his first year, the world came unglued on this timber sale that the focus was on trying to fireproof the neighbors, trying to do something so that they'd be in a more fire-safe situation, which blew up, and my Lord! By now you have social media. This became world-wide. It had comments from South Africa and Australia and all around the 01:44:00world. Anyways, the ranger stepped up to bat, had some meetings and so on, and this year, he was voted as the Man-of-the-Year. Can you imagine that? A Forest Service Man-of-the-Year. Unbelievable. So, anyways, here's one guy that was able to turn that whole thing on its head, but is still, appealing sales and into lawsuits and all the rest of the stuff. It's just become a contentious thing.

SS: Compare the Willamette to the Coconino? Obviously, vastly different ecologies. But just for an obvious comparison, how would you compare them, management-wise, ecologically, however you would want to describe that?

MK: Well, politically and from a social standpoint, some of those same things are going on there for different reasons. When I first arrived, there was a project that, timber activity had gone on for years on the "Coc.," and there were old stumps out there. Somebody came up with an idea, a scheme, to salvage those old stumps and turn them into naval stores, turpentine and what-not. Well, when I arrived, that whole thing was down the road. It was about to be awarded. And suddenly, up sprang a concern, and the group, called themselves SOS, Save 01:46:00Our Stumps. (Laughs)

SS: Were they Flagstaff-based?

MK: Yeah, I think they were. Well, you know, I don't know where they were. But in the end, the whole project went down.

SS: And where were these stumps in relation to the forest there? l MK: Yeah, they scattered throughout the whole Colorado Plateau.

SS: Oh, so it was wide. Okay.

MK: Yeah, and a pretty benign sort of thing, or at least, it was flat ground and from an environmental standpoint, it was not a big deal. But these folks got the Native Americans involved, and, you know, the stumps suddenly became sacred, and ay-yay-yay. I don't know if you were down in Arizona in the mid-, well, late-'70s?

SS: No, I had not arrived yet.

MK: Okay. But the local ski areas had been there for 40 years.

SS: But I've studied the whole Snow Bowl controversy.

MK: The Snow Bowl? Yeah.

SS: It was a small part of a chapter in my dissertation, so I know the story.

MK: Oh my, doing public involvement with that.

SS: Kachina Peaks.

MK: Oh, Lord. I and the ranger would go out to the Hopis, and put out a public notice, and these medicine men, all gnarled up, with arthritis, hanging onto a staff and pointing their fingers, and Lord, that was their sacred peaks. You know?

SS: Well, if I recall right, the compromise was that they had to stop so far from the top of Mount Agassiz. [2nd highest of San Francisco Peaks.]

MK: Well, no, we never went out.

SS: Wasn't that the compromise?

MK: No, we never went outside of the perimeter. It was additional lifts within the permit area. But anyways, the same people were upset. Ay-yay-yay. And the public meetings, I was a hearing officer at one of the public meetings. And, oh Lord! Some woman was putting on a slideshow, and a guy from the audience came over and slammed his fist down on the carousel, and said, "Those are my slides. You can't use those." (Laughter) We had a rupture right there. Oh, Lord. So, for different reasons, but controversy nonetheless, on how people view managing 01:49:00their lands. And you know, let's face it, these are their lands.

SS: Why, thank you (to Mike's wife Sue for snacks and beverages).

MK: Yeah.

SS: Mike's wife, Sue, is bringing over some crackers and cheese, so we're going to take a nibble break here for a second. Eating these crackers will come off on these microphones.

(Break in audio)

SS: Mike, how did you initially define the multiple-use concept that has always been central to the National Forest Service mission, and how has that changed over the course of your career, in terms of how you calibrate that, not only philosophically looking at things, but actually managing things on the ground?

MK: We talked about that earlier. The multiple-use had a distinct timber 01:50:00component initially, as we were developing the forests. Of course that has changed over time. And I'm not sure today exactly what's guiding the whole notion, other than there's no question that water quality has become a big component. The Endangered Species Act changed a lot of things, for good or bad. So, it certainly has evolved over time. There certainly was more focus on the environment, although initially, we thought we were doing good things on the national forests. We were far, far superior to what was happening in the private 01:51:00sector, at least we thought so. But that whole notion is, the emphasis on timber has certainly changed.

SS: Now, kind of adding into this train of thought, what role did science initially play in management for you, and as you became a more mature land manager with more experience and more knowledgeable of science, even though that wasn't your training, how did you fit science into your management decisions and how you saw things going forward?

MK: I think I can give you a couple examples, one from the early days. Some of the things that came out of the Andrews had to do with the boundary- location of sales to minimize the effect of blow-down. As an example, those things were helpful. As we were developing, and I'll skip forward 30 years, as we were 01:52:00developing the Forest Plan, we actually contracted with the Andrews folks on developing the standards and guidelines on hydrology and on standards for water quality, that sort of thing. So, the focus changed. Riparian standards, those things were developed by-and-large from the group of scientists [led by Stan Gregory] at the Andrews, directly for the Willamette National Forest. There were some spinoffs, I'm sure, region-wide as well. We hosted a regional team, leadership team, all of the forest supervisors and the directors in the regional office, on the Andrews in the mid-'80s, as a way of interacting with the 01:53:00scientists. It was those sorts of activities that really changed, I think, over time. And you know, I've kind of lost contact. Well, I have lost contact. I'm not sure what's going on now. But when I was supervisor, we established a position that John Cissel had, you know, as a liaison [U.S. Forest Service] with the Andrews. And now, Cheryl Friesen has that job.

SS: And why is that an important position in your view?

MK: Well, it's handing off technology, developing ways at getting it in at the management stream much, much quicker, than waiting for other ways of doing it. 01:54:00And probably more effective since you've got a management person, you know, interacting physically with scientists. I think that technology transfer probably is a little easier than not having that.

SS: And somebody like Cheryl or John before her can also distill and clarify complex scientific ideas to the manager. Correct?

MK: Probably, yeah, a little easier. We also established a silvicultural position at Blue River that was directly connected to the Andrews in terms of some of these things going on there, the levels of growing stock studies, thinning studies done in the late '80s and '90s.

SS: Now, Vince Puleo, wasn't he a person in that position?

MK: Yeah. Well, he might have been. Yeah, maybe he was. You know, Vince had some 01:55:00communication problems. The guy that I'm thinking of was Jim Mayo, who was pretty effective in that position.

SS: How would you describe the facilities, or lack thereof, at the Andrews, when you arrived? And just how did you see that evolve over the course of your experience, even though you were obviously back-and-forth from different stations. But you were here a lot, and saw the scope of that development.

MK: Yeah, back in the early '80s, they coined the term the "Ghetto in the Meadow" (laughs) which you probably heard.

SS: Many times.

MK: We had offered and I think they accepted some surplus trailers to our needs, 01:56:00for their use. Obviously, they needed more facilities. So, I had Hatfield [Senator Mark Hatfield] on-site one time and they talked about the "Ghetto in the Meadow," and he caught up on that idea. They got some funding and really, today, it's amazing, you know, the difference between what it was and what it is currently.

SS: And I believe, Les AuCoin [Oregon Congressman] was the one that really got the money. [U.S. House controls the budget]

MK: Oh, really?

SS: Yeah, from the congressional side of it. I think Hatfield had something to do with it, but Les AuCoin was the driving force behind the major funding needed to build the campus they have now. [Earmark on bill]

MK: Yeah, great.

SS: What was it like when you first got here? Where did people live? There was 01:57:00housing in Blue River and a ranger station.

MK: Yeah.

SS: Was there a trailer up there? MK: Yeah, there were trailers. When I was ranger, there were trailers, they were at a trailer court in the late '60s. I don't think there was anything other than Jack Rothacher's house, initially in the '50s, I can remember.

SS: There was a warehouse up there at one time, too, I think, before there was housing? [Early 1970s]

MK: Up on, at Blue River or --?

SS: Up at the Andrews.

MK: Well, yeah, there probably was.

SS: But eventually, they developed a small lab facility down at the Blue River [Near Blue River District Ranger Station, in town of Blue River]. Correct?

MK: Yeah, they did, right.

SS: That's what I thought.

MK: Yeah.

SS: Now, you already talked about it a little bit, but what were some of the important scientific discoveries at the Andrews that you knew of or found out 01:58:00about during the course of your management, that you had to incorporate into what you were doing?

MK: One of the examples I've given lots of times, and others have, too, is that in the '80s, the findings about the need for large woody debris, not only terrestrially, but also within the aquatic ecosystem. Almost overnight, we changed standards on the forest. Up until that time, we were "yumming and pumming," which was yarding unutilized material into piles, and if the market 01:59:00was up, it would get utilized. If the market wasn't, they'd burn it.

SS: You'd burn it?

MK: Yeah. And which was a cost. And so, you eliminated that cost and there was an environmental reason for doing it, too, it was a win-win deal.

SS: So, you were aware of when Mark Harmon's work started on cutting the logs down to see what happen over time?

MK: Yeah.

SS: Do you remember making that or providing bureaucratic support for that decision? MK: I told him, you ought to have some kids, some boys that would continue on. Yeah, a 200-year study. That's a little aggressive. But it's still going on as far as I know.

SS: But in terms of Harmon's studies, and the idea of woody debris and even 02:00:00going back to something you started the interview with, where you mentioned how we saw the old-growth forest as "biological deserts."

MK: Yeah.

SS: To where the real, the whole ecosystem chemistry over time dynamic, wasn't understood by a lot of people, even scientists.

MK: Yeah, right.

SS: But certainly, by land managers, you just didn't see it that way?

MK: No, right. And now with the whole onset of climate warming and carbon sinks, that sort of thing, it's taken on a whole new role. Very positive.

SS: So, you obviously became more familiar with the Andrews and the Andrews science as it became much more sophisticated and moved to the IBP and the LTER programs, which were 34 years [1970] to now, how often did you see their studies 02:01:00having utilitarian uses for you, the manager, and how many times was it just science to do science? Or did you ever have a reflection on that about what was useful?

MK: Well, I don't know. I can't comment on that, I don't think. Some of it was science just for science. But, who knows what can come out of that?

SS: Now, what do you think the partnership with land managers gave the H.J. Andrews research community? In other words, looking at it the other way?

MK: Hopefully, it gave them some pride that their information was being handed off and used. I relate back when I was on the Coconino. We had the Beaver Creek 02:02:00project there which dated quite a ways back, again, into the '50s. And the focus there was watershed, but a little different twist, you know, in the arid Southwest. It was how can we produce more water off these lands, you know? And so, cutting the timber to produce more water was --

SS: So, in other words, speed the runoff up, right?

MK: Yeah.

SS: Exactly.

MK: Was the notion. But those guys produced very little. You know, they collected data and collected data and collected data. And so, it's not very useful if you can't turn that data into something that either guides or supports what you're doing, or suggests that you change. So, science for science's sake, 02:03:00I don't know. It's got to have some utilitarian value. And it probably will. I mean, basic science certainly has proven beneficial.

SS: Now, regarding the Andrews, OSU and the Forest Service, do you think the local citizens saw these institutions, especially later in your career, as kind of representatives of the urban educated elite that maybe was not in tune with their needs, or do you think they came around to understanding that? And I understand there's a diversity within the local community, especially in later years.

MK: You know, I don't know. I saw that question and I don't have a reaction.

SS: I mean, you live here in the McKenzie River valley, you're still a ways below the Andrews, but, you know, going up the valley, how have you seen the demographics and the society change over the years?

MK: Well, it's become older, you know, the high schools have shrunk in size and population. Our church community has grown older with bluer hair, you know? (Laughs)

SS: Right.

MK: So, that's kind of been the demographics. It turned into more and more and more a retirement community. Not totally, but I mean, compared to what it was, that demographic has certainly changed. And how that impacts the Andrews, I really don't know. I would guess if you asked most people on the street if they 02:05:00knew about the Andrews, they'd say, no.

SS: That's my perception, you know, is that they're the nerdy scientists up on the hill. I don't know what they think, or they don't even know about it at all. Because back in the day, obviously going way back, people like Jack [Rothacher] and other people, even into the '60s and probably '70s, they lived in Blue River or close to, and there was more of an interface. Now, I don't think anybody lives in, well, maybe, actually, some of their daily, they're what you call classified staff, the administrative staff, a couple of them live down in the community around that area.

MK: Yeah, Keable [Kathy, H.J. Andrews administrative staff].

SS: Yeah, Kathy Keable and her assistant. But it's not quite like before. In 02:06:00your opinion, what are the responsibilities of the land managers as they relate to important scientific findings, even if they result in difficult management challenges and political problems? The obvious example would be the spotted owl, but you know, the whole old-growth dynamic which is closely related to that?

MK: Yeah, what was the lead-in again on that?

SS: I'll read it again for the record here. What are or were the responsibilities of the land manager as they relate to important scientific findings, even if they could result in difficult management challenges and political problems, the spotted owl being the most obvious?

MK: Well, I can relate a little, you know, the progression over time. I was on the Mount Hood when, this would be in '74 or '75, and at that point in time, 02:07:00each spotted owl nest was allocated, say, 50 acres. And reaction was, wow, 50 acres for an owl! So, anyways, progress from that to 300 acres to whole huge conservation areas that encompassed, well, like Lowell, 50 percent of the district was wrapped up in a spotted owl area. Yeah, those were difficult times, I think, there to rationalize. They kind of eased into it from 50 to 300, suddenly, with the Northwest Forest Plan.

SS: Aren't there like 500 or 1,000 now? [acre-size for spotted owl reserves]

MK: Well, more than that. I mean, there's some. I think the Northwest Forest Plan varies, but on this forest, there were very, very large areas.

SS: So, Judge Dwyer's decision came down about the moratorium on timber sales on logging when you were at the end of your supervisor stint. Right?

MK: Well, I think I was already gone.

SS: You were?

MK: I think, yeah. I forget what year that was, probably '92.

SS: '91.

MK: Was it in '91?

SS: That's why I asked. I knew you retired in '91.

MK: Well, I retired in January of '91, so I think it was after that, which really put the crunch on.

SS: So, you know your friends and colleagues, how have they dealt with that issue since you retired?

MK: Well, the Northwest Forest Plan kind of took care of that, I think, didn't it?

SS: Yeah.

MK: But, you had a question about the Northwest Forest Plan. Here we are 20 years later, the spotted owl populations are down, it's not habitat-driven, it's the barred owl. And what surprises me is that somebody didn't see that issue. I mean, the barred owl has made its way out here as early as the late '50s, I think. So, by the '90s, it seems to me that there could have been somebody wondering, well, what's going to happen here. But it never came up, as far as I 02:10:00know. So, here we are 20 years later.

SS: How do you feel about the progress, the performance, of the Northwest Forest Plan?

MK: Not very good. You know, the timber targets were never met. The environmental folks never went away. What, I'm trying to think, was the special areas set aside? One just here adjacent to the Andrews, where they were to experiment with different uses. There was a name for that and category of land [Adaptive Management Area]. The other were the matrix lands that were open to timber sales and that sort of thing. And the environmental community never stopped appealing or going to court. So, after a while, the Forest Service just gave up. The folks in charge of the budget said, "Why should we send you money, 02:11:00you can't produce?" Yeah, I don't think it's been a success at all in terms of meeting the goals that were established. I don't know what if any of the goals were met.

SS: Do you think the Willamette National Forest is any different than any other forest in the Northwest or it's pretty much the same formula?

MK: In terms of?

SS: Dealing with the [Northwest] Forest Plan and what you're saying.

MK: I have no idea. But, what I'm saying is that the "guaranteed" timber outputs were never met, and the recovery of the spotted owl certainly hasn't been achieved. It's not habitat, it has to do with this competitive cousin, the barred owl. I don't know, here we've got the Fish and Wildlife Service playing 02:12:00God [by listing species under ESA]. They're going to kill off the owl, the barred owl. To me, that's what's wrong with the Environmental Species Act, too. It's so single species.

SS: You mean, the Endangered Species Act? MK: Endangered Species, yeah, Endangered Species.

SS: Right, right.

MK: Single species, so you sacrifice one for the other. Good Lord, I don't know, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. But there it is. And it's been argued and argued and argued, and it hasn't changed, what, in 40 years?

SS: Continue, Mike.

MK: Well, we talked about NEPA, and NEPA is a good law and I would agree with that. You know, we should be transparent with the decisions, but over time the 02:13:00bureaucracy creep is just incredible. I mean, I don't know how many times we have to reinvent the analysis, after a thousand projects, let's say, that are very similar, and you still have to go through the same rigorous process, which had turned out to be initially maybe a 10-page thing, has turned into a 50-page thing.

SS: To a 500-page thing?

MK: All about a similar project, and I don't think the project has improved. That's the problem, the project still gets done, maybe, and the consequences are the same, whether it's a 10-pager or a 500-pager, but the cost to the taxpayer is incredible over time. And I don't know how in the world they deal with that.

SS: How much time, approximately, would you guess was spent by you and your 02:14:00staff, and not just at the Willamette, but in the 20 years since NEPA was passed until you retired, went into dealing with all of that stuff?

MK: Yeah.

SS: And what was the calculus, how much time did it increase the burden on your staff over time?

MK: Oh, you know, I don't have.

SS: Well, just generalize about the dynamic.

MK: Well, it doubled, I'm sure, maybe tripled. Well, infinitely, I guess, back in the days when we didn't do anything, just went out and did it. And the consequences, I don't know, well, if they are any better. But I don't know exponentially whether they're that much better.

SS: Do you have some memorable public hearings or not memorable, shall we say? Where you had to before the public in one of these Q&A's based on what you were 02:15:00doing or either to answer to the public comments?

MK: One that I remember very, very vividly is one, probably in the late '80s sometime. I was invited down to be queried by a couple of folks in one of those yurts or tents on the plaza there at the old federal building [Eugene]. This was a natural spot for protestors. So, I went in there and the first question asked was, "Well, when you retire, who are you going to work for?" You know, number one, I had no idea, no intention of retiring for many, many years. And I had no idea that I was going to work for anyone, you know. But that was the revolving 02:16:00door question that --

SS: Like, are you going to be lobbyist for the timber industry?

MK: Yeah, right, absolutely. That's what they were hoping to hear, you know.

SS: Oh, really? Yeah.

MK: Well, I would guess, ridiculous. Yeah, well, that was kind of the bottom.

SS: Now, going to, shall we say, progressive forestry, however you want to describe that. Of course, Jerry Franklin, being the most famous scientist coming out of the Andrews, what do you think about what is called New Forestry, of which he's one of the more well-known proponents and some might even say, the creator of that new model or paradigm?

MK: Well, I have some trouble with it. He subscribes to the need, and I certainly support that for early seral development. In other words, we need to 02:17:00have a young forest out there. Not for owls, but for other creatures, you know, deer and elk and that sort of thing. And birds, a lot of birds require that early seral-brush combination. Now, my concept of that would be to act quickly as possible, get that back into the forest. But that's not his. He thinks that the longer you can keep it, well, not longer, but I mean, let natural things happen, and I have some concerns about that. And I guess the balance is economics, and what the forests are to be used for. But we talked about, at one 02:18:00of the sessions I was at where he was explaining this New Forestry, he said he had to compromise somewhat with the BLM, because they just couldn't go with this 20 or 30-year period of letting it evolve. And so, he kind of compromised his views into allowing for a shorter period. But anyways, I think, there's lots of ways to skin the cat. And I don't know if there's a perfect answer in any of it, and I don't know if we're smart enough to know, for sure, what's the best way.

SS: One thing I notice, just since I've gotten into this project, and I keep an 02:19:00eye on the different clear-cuts and different areas that have been cut up around this area; what is the reasoning when an area doesn't get replanted and it's still obviously just barren, after gosh, who knows how many years? Why would that be?

MK: They're violating the law, you know.

SS: That's what I thought.

MK: If that's the answer, they're violating the law and they should be prosecuted.

SS: But who is violating the law?

MK: Well, the landowner. The landowner is, by law.

SS: You're talking about private land?

MK: Yeah, private land.

SS: I'm talking about Forest Service.

MK: Oh, well.

SS: I see a lot of them that aren't replanted for a long time.

MK: Really?

SS: Yes.

MK: Well, it takes a while, you know, to seed these.

SS: Is that because on certain northern or southern slopes or grades, they have trouble stocking growable seedlings, and making that system return?

MK: Well --

SS: Or is there neglect in terms of companies that were supposed to replant areas that were harvested, not following through on their end of the contract?

MK: Well, from the private standpoint, I mean, if it were private land, you are violating a state law.

SS: Right.

MK: But on National Forest land, you know, go way back into the early '50s, again, we had some trouble understanding exactly what it took to regenerate, and we had some failures.

SS: Which is going back to the Andrews' original mission, regeneration studies was one of their charges.

MK: Yeah.

SS: Right, seeing what --

MK: But this had more to do with nursery practices.

SS: Right.

MK: And the care you took of seedlings. Once it's lifted and shifted, and once it got to the national forest, how it was stored and then put into the ground. 02:21:00And we solved that. By the time I came back on the [Willamette] forest in 1980, we were having 90 percent success, 95 percent success, every generation. So, I don't know, if they lost something since then.

SS: How did you try to match a particular hillside, like right here, this. How old are these trees above your house here, about -- ?

MK: About 35 years.

SS: Thirty-five years, and those are almost all Doug Fir, aren't they?

MK: Yeah, I'm sure probably, the big bulk. There are some hardwoods in there, and there's some hemlock, but mostly Douglas-fir.

SS: And how would you match when you're doing a replant, how would you match that area based on elevation, with like trees around it? Would you mix up the seedlings, or did you monoculture it or did that change over the time of your career? MK: Well, it's changed. I mean, the stuff that's happening now, or at 02:22:00least when we were still doing active logging, and I have no idea what's going on now. But yeah, the standard had changed where you were mixing hemlock and fir. And in fact going in with some of the precommercial thinning, you know, opening up the stand and planting some hemlock scattered throughout, to more duplicate what was in the natural stand.

SS: So, don't monoculture it?

MK: Yeah.

SS: Because, you would agree that monoculture would be more prone to disease, right, or -- ?

MK: Yeah. Or, if you didn't pay attention to where the planting stock was coming from, the progeny, all of those things, were important. You know, some of the early progeny studies back in the '20s indicated, you couldn't move the stock 02:23:00from very far, laterally or longitudinally, or elevation-wise. You had to stay within limits and that's pretty well-settled science, I think, since the '60s. You try to put the trees back that were close to the site. But I can't respond to your question about national forest land.

SS: I see hillsides, national forest hillsides, that just appear to not be getting replanted in a timely fashion. And that's what I'm asking you about. What would be a reason for that not happening?

MK: I have no idea, yeah. In fact, I don't know.

SS: I'm not saying that this happened.

MK: The only thing that I could say is that's been a frequent criticism, but basically, it's that people haven't gotten on the ground and taken a look. Some of these little seedlings, it takes a while for them to show up.

SS: Right.

MK: But after several years, I mean, you should be able to see it.

SS: That's what I'm asking. I'm trying to become more educated about that myself. That interests me greatly. Mainly from the erosion control and runoff perspectives, as well as aesthetics and appearance. Because most people, you see carved-up hillsides, it doesn't really look that good. That's not really my question.

MK: One stand down here, I notice is mostly hardwoods. And I don't understand, somebody dropped the ball on that one, too, it seemed to me because that's not a hardwood stand, It'll eventually come back into hardwoods. No, I mean, into conifers at some point.

SS: We didn't talk about the early loggers met when you were up there. I know you and Ed Anderson in part of a previous interview that led into your solo 02:25:00interview [both by historian Max Geier], you talked about some characters you met. Going back to the beginning chronologically, do you want to mention a few things about some of those folks?

MK: Yeah, Mike Savelich is one we talked about. Mike was a Croatian, and he brought in a crew of Croatians. And he did some good work up on the Andrews. He did a lot of the early salvage logging, primarily, and some in a lot of the scientific, some of the unusual, those little round units and so on. He was the successful bidder on those. The other guy we talked about was, oh, God, what was his name?

SS: Balsiger?

MK: Yeah, Balsiger.

SS: Balsinger.

MK: Yeah, George. And he was a guy that, although I wasn't around, I know he was 02:26:00the guy that successfully got the large Watershed 1 sale, and he ran the Wyssen system. I knew him before that and he was a character as well.

SS: Now, although you've been out of the game right now for a while, how do you see the logging and timber industry having changed culturally and economically?

MK: Well, in spite of all the stuff that the environmentalists talk about, they've totally changed, almost totally changed from large-sized timber to, their focus now is on the second growth, on the stands that are available to them. In fact, there's only two or three mills around that I'm aware of, Starfire and Zippo and Holtup, up in your area up towards Corvallis, that are 02:27:00able to take on huge old growth. You know, so it's pretty limited to industry. Certainly, if they aren't getting it they're going to have to change or die, and they've changed pretty quickly. They've changed drastically to their sawmill practices. Seneca, which I'm sure you are aware of.

SS: Yeah, Aaron Jones' operation?

MK: They've switched over to nothing but smaller logs. And that's their kind of, that's the standard.

SS: And they still use that for building timber, right?

MK: Oh, yeah, yeah.

SS: They just cut it differently, right?

MK: Yeah.

SS: And what about the wood products industry? I remember when I was young, one of the fathers of my Boy Scout compadres, worked for, was it Georgia Pacific or 02:28:00-- ? Anyway, one of the companies. And he was talking about the wood products industry, meaning everything else that could be made out of wood that wasn't big sheets of lumber, not big planks of lumber. And how did that relate to the changing forest practices during your career in terms of using all of the forest, even relating to what you were talking about removing what later became ecologically unacceptable to do? Do you understand what I'm saying?

MK: Yeah. Well, things change, over time. Now, I think the term is "other forest products." Chinquapin, the ferns, the salal brush, all these other things that are, in fact, even mushrooms, there's a market for mushrooms the Forest Service 02:29:00issues permits for. So, there's always firewood, there's a whole host of --

SS: But I'm talking about the industrial forest products which were pressed board and some of the weird pressboard tiles, and God only knows, and of course, even pulp because you can use many parts of a tree for pulp, right?

MK: Yeah.

SS: That's what I'm talking about, adaptation in that area, but then how it also faced a certain wall when it no longer became okay to take all the slash off it and turn it into whatever forest product you could; you get my drift?

MK: Yeah. Well, there's still chips involved, the residue that is being used for a lot of things. The whole area of, oh dear, how would I say? Engineered forest products like manufactured trusses, like this laminated beam that supports the 02:30:00ceiling, the roof, here. That's all made up of young forest. They're glued and pressed together. They're now even making --

SS: It's actually stronger, isn't it?

MK: Yeah, it is. And there's a whole new field of that. And there's another science element, the Forest Products Lab. I don't know if you're familiar with the Forest Products Lab.

SS: At Corvallis?

MK: No, well, there is one in Corvallis.

SS: There's one in Corvallis, yeah.

MK: Yeah, but the Forest Service one is in Madison, Wisconsin.

SS: Oh, right, the biggest one in the country.

MK: Yeah, been the leader in doing all kinds of engineering stuff. Now, they're making skyscrapers out of wood, I guess, out of rising concrete and steel prices, using wood for several-story, not skyscrapers, but several-stories.

SS: Pretty big. Yeah, well, they're finding that wood is more flexible in 02:31:00certain contexts.

(Break in audio)

SS: One of the longest-term person at the Andrews with maybe the exception of Fred Swanson, was Art McKee, the [HJA] Forest Director for 30 years.

MK: Yeah.

SS: Tell me about your relationship with Art and how you saw what he did up there?

MK: Well, Art was an interesting guy. Actually, you know, Rolf [Rolf Anderson, U.S. Forest Service] might be a better guy to talk to. Art and Rolf had more of a relationship. He was my representative on this, you know, you mentioned a tripartite, OSU, the National Forest and the PNW. He was my guy on the contacts there, so he would have a better feeling for Art, I'm sure. But I thought Art did a great job, and I don't know, if he parted on the best of terms, frankly. I 02:32:00don't know.

SS: Let's talk about Fred Swanson. And Fred is, as you know, now he's retired, an emeritus Forest Service scientist, but he's not really retired.

MK: Yeah.

SS: He's a slightly milder version of Jerry Franklin in terms of intensity.

MK: Right.

SS: But he has almost became kind of the father figure for the legacy of the Andrews. I mean, he came up there in 1972 as a post-doc, I believe, and he went through all the evolutions and he's still there, even though he's not "officially" still there. So, tell me about Fred.

MK: Well, I've thought a lot about Fred. He's a good hand and a good tech 02:33:00transfer kind of guy, you know, I think.

SS: How would you explain tech transfer?

MK: Well, transferring the science knowledge into some practical hands-on stuff for managers. I think that was Fred's, one of Fred's purviews. And he's certainly was high in my esteem in that regard, and still is.

SS: I have the feeling that Fred, especially when he was the PI at the Andrews when he would be the official face, but just in general, that he would have been a relatively easy guy to work with?

MK: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, good.

SS: Okay. Zane Smith, you haven't said too much about Zane.

MK: Yeah, I don't know. You know, I was gone. There again, I left just about the time Zane came to the Forest in 1970. But I know Zane as a friend and a colleague, but I have no idea about his relationship to the Andrews, I would guess it was a positive one.

SS: What was your relationship with him and what did he do in his career that related to what you did?

MK: Well, I worked for Zane on a detail. You know, I talked about RARE II. I was for a few months, his executive officer, kind of, and guiding the RARE II program, near its end. And yeah, he was a pretty intense guy. He had a mission 02:35:00to get that job done, and by golly, it was going to get done. You know, a pretty effective person and a gentleman.

SS: What kind of issues have you dealt with in this area, and you can even relate to your other areas, but specifically to the Willamette that have to do with squatters, illegal mines, or even sticky political situations connected to legitimate mining claims based back to the Mining Act of 1872?

MK: Well, the most famous one is Opal Creek. We decided to take on the Atiyeh Group at Jawbone Flat. They had unpatented mining claims which we felt, I 02:36:00certainly felt, but more importantly, the mining folks felt, were not legitimate. So, we took them on, and to my surprise, and I guess it shows the weakness of the 1872 law, they won. To my horror, they won. And the land became patented and they kind of thumbed their nose at us which was --

SS: Where is that exactly?

MK: On the Detroit District.

SS: Right, way up north. Okay.

MK: In the northern [portion of Willamette NF] Forest, Opal Creek, which also became a very controversial thing which ended up in a wilderness, a kind of postage stamp wilderness up there. But Atiyeh, you know, he was the Governor's --

SS: Brother, right?

MK: Nephew, I think. Yeah, nephew. He was something else. And over time, that whole episode, I mean, it lasted 30 or 40 years. At some point, it was dangerous to be up there. I mean, the relationship soured, improved, and soured, and then improved over time. And finally we took them on and by golly, they won, which still, I can't believe. But I guess, it shows the weakness of that law.

SS: Or the strength of the law, depending on how you want to --

MK: Yeah, right.

SS: Depending on the user perspective, it's the law that nobody can get rid of, or can't get rid of people on the land, so at least that's what they say.

MK: That's the only one, you know, the Willamette was blessed with pretty solid ownership. We didn't have a whole lot, well, there were some mining claims, I guess, they went on, too. But primarily that was not a big issue on the Willamette.

SS: If you were going to give an overview of the Willamette National Forest by district, how would you give a thumbnail sketch -- of district, district, district -- if you were going to do that? You know, the Blue River, the McKenzie, the Lowell, the Detroit, how would you describe them? Their differences or challenges, if you were going to give a short public talk, a paragraph per district?

MK: Well, I don't know. That whole north Santiam country which is Detroit, has a unique, or did have, unique relationship. The set of timber industry folks up 02:39:00there were, you know, we took them on as being collusive at one time. And I don't know that we ever got that addressed.

SS: Are you talking about the actual district management?

MK: No, no, no, no. The industry themselves.

SS: Oh, okay.

MK: Kind of banded together and colluded on contracts and that sort of thing. I'm not sure that we made that thing stick, but we took them on. And so, Detroit and Sweet Home were part of the Santiam National Forest. You know, you put organizations together and they still felt they weren't, in my judgment anyways, felt they weren't entirely part of the Willamette. And this is after 40, I don't 02:40:00know, 60-70, well, 1933 [founding date of Willamette National Forest], so it'd be 80 years.

SS: It's a tribal thing. (Laughs)

MK: And it may have just been the ranger that was up there when I was the supervisor, too. He was a pretty independent guy. But they tended to have, you know, the Santiam sort of thing. Detroit, more than Sweet Home. Sweet Home is kind an interesting district. It used to be the Cascadia District, way back when. And they moved the town down to Sweet Home and the name changed, long before I became supervisor. The McKenzie, you know, was McKenzie to begin with, the McKenzie Bridge Ranger District. And I knew all of the rangers from, oh dear, now I can't think of his name, one of the early guys. (Laughs)

SS: Brieglieb or -?

MK: No, no, this is the district ranger at McKenzie. Wow, is it raining?

SS: It is raining. I think the mikes are probably picking up on it.

MK: Anyways, I knew all of those guys personally which dates back almost 100 years. And it's where I started out, so I have a fond feeling for that area. The Blue River, of course, was split off. There was an era where we thought smaller districts, and there's still a lot of folks that think, we can improve management by getting it closer to the ground. We've just gone through all these, in my judgment, terrible consolidations, in order to save money, and I 02:42:00mean, the budget was driving those decisions. But in the process, you've removed yourself from the community you are serving.

SS: The Siuslaw will be a classic example of that, right? Where Siuslaw is out of Corvallis now, right?

MK: Yeah.

SS: The headquarters.

MK: Yeah, and I think they're down to two districts? I think there's only two districts.

SS: In the Siuslaw?

MK: There's the Coastal and then there's Hebo, which is pretty amazing. Anyways, the Blue River District, of course, has a ranger there, so I have a fond memory of it. Lowell, where I started, is our most productive district, the lowest elevation, the deepest soil. And it's mostly, all of its high-productive land, is now in a spotted owl reserve, which is interesting. (Laughs) I knew Oakridge 02:43:00as Oakridge, and Oakridge is a wonderful, balanced district. It had, you know, a tremendous amount of recreation. High elevation, it had very productive forests. It was a very, very, very well-balanced district on its own. And the Middle Fork, I mean, the Rigdon District, was another fairly good-sized district. Now, they've put all three of those districts together and into the Middle Fork.

SS: So, the Lowell, Oakridge and the Middle Fork are all one?

MK: Yeah. At one time, those three districts probably had close to 400 million board-feet coming off of them, you know. Now, I don't know, if it's I think at 40, it'd be a miracle. (Laughs) Not that 400 was good, but I mean, they were 02:44:00very productive, lots of activity going on, lots of people. And now it's shrunk down to what it is.

SS: Mike's going to segue into sustainable forestry.

MK: Yeah. Back in the '50s, the law didn't require what it does now with wildlife and so on. And so, we were practicing a form of sustainable harvest, at least in my judgment. But when I was here, we had a harvest level of, sustainable level of 800 million board-feet, which is guts, feathers and all, and that's coal, material and everything. When we looked hard at the requirements, the NFMA and what we thought we knew about the ESA [Endangered Species Act], and the water and air laws, that came down to less than, well, a 02:45:00little over 500 million feet. So, depending on what the constraints are, but given what we know now, certainly, the 800 million, you couldn't sustain that and the other things that you're supposed to be doing also. So, it changes over time. But certainly, I would think, I don't know what the Forest would do now. I think whatever the quantity that they coined in the Northwest Forest Plan was something in the order of 200 million, I think. They haven't come anywhere near that.

SS: Because there's so many road blocks, politically and otherwise. Correct?

MK: Yeah.

SS: One thing I didn't address earlier; there was a land exchange with the 02:46:00Giustina Brothers at the Blue River Reservoir. Was that before or after you got here at the very beginning of your career? Do you remember?

MK: Well, I know early on, we had a big Giustina land exchange, but it was further downriver, I think. And it probably involved some of that stuff near the Blue River Reservoir, too. Kent Mays was involved in cruising that land exchange. I wasn't involved particularly. Well, I wasn't involved at all. But there was, and that was in where we were trying to consolidate lands in terms of management effectiveness and that sort of thing.

SS: What was your favorite posting? Do you have a favorite posting or would it change for different reasons?

MK: Oh, it changes for different reasons. In Eureka, we had this wonderful 02:47:00three-story redwood Victorian, which was amazing. But the weather, you know, foggy on the foggy coast, it wasn't the best weather in the world. I enjoyed the job, but I loved that old, wonderful Victorian home.

SS: That, you mean, your headquarters?

MK: No, it was our --

SS: Your actual home?

MK: Home, yeah. We had one of those. You know, if you've been to Eureka, it's just full of those old Victorian homes, and we bought it for 25,000 bucks. That thing now is probably worth ten times that, I would guess, if not more.

SS: We didn't really talk about that, but since you were down in the redwoods area, how did that management challenge compare to up here? I mean, where the old-growth remnants of the redwoods became the conglomerate of parks, state and 02:48:00national, Redwoods State and National Parks, how would you compare that management challenge with up here? And let's just stay with the Willamette or even the Mount Baker, maybe?

MK: Well, I remember a guy saying at the time when I arrived, it was 1970 and the park had just been established. And the grand bargain was that they, the National Park Service, was also going to take over the state parks, which never happened. I don't know what happened there. But the Six Rivers, thank goodness, didn't have any redwoods. You know, there was the Redwood National --

SS: You mean, Six Rivers National Forest had no redwoods?

MK: No.

SS: Oh, okay.

MK: It was inland.

SS: My mistake then, okay.

MK: But there was a Redwood Experimental Forest, which, kind of in a sense, was irrelevant to our needs. If it was supplying any needs, it was to maybe the Park Service [National], because their whole thrust was managing for old growth, which was fine, but we didn't have any.

SS: Okay, my bad there.

MK: But, it was, wow, it was a gut-wrenching deal there. You know, the park takeover and the feelings of the people down there. The loggers and so on, it was a tough thing for them.

SS: Yeah, I never realized until I studied the subject, what a tiny percentage of the original redwood groves are left.

MK: Yeah.

SS: Especially considering the challenges with harvesting trees that big.

MK: Oh, I know.

SS: Although it's interesting that people, most people, don't know, but really-big, old-growth Douglas-firs, can come pretty close to the size of redwoods. Correct?

MK: Yeah, nine, 10 feet, yeah.

SS: And even 300 feet high?

MK: Yeah.

SS: Or even 100-foot.

MK: Yeah, in fact, we've got one on the Forest [Willamette] that's 300 feet high, I think.

SS: Yeah, so it's tough.

MK: I went out on a site once with a group, I think probably it was the Society of American Foresters group while I was down there. And I just came away from there saying, "Thank God, we don't have to manage this stuff." I mean, if you go out on the site, it's a horrendous look. These smashed up, downed, you know, they gouge benched ones in a way so that they don't break, because they're pretty brittle. And it's a pretty disturbing, you know, ground-disturbing operation.

SS: Yeah, I believe that.

MK: And they kind of, you know, industry kind of poked their nose right in. They did this stuff right in front of the public, too, which kind of heightened, I think, the demise of the whole thing.

SS: A couple other names. I think you were searching for a couple of names, so I'm going to read a couple off this list. Jeff Sirmon? MK: Yeah, Jeff was regional forester in Six [Region 6], sometime in the early '80s. He followed Dick Worthington, I think.

SS: At the Willamette, or Region [6]?

MK: No, in the region. He was at the regional forest level, yeah. An engineer from Utah. Good guy.

SS: In terms of the people that staff most of the forests around here now, are they still coming out of forestry schools?

MK: You know, I have no idea.

SS: You don't know? Okay.

MK: I don't know. Forestry schools themselves have changed, incredibly.

SS: They're more natural resource management than just forestry. So, I probably should have qualified that. But another name.

MK: But a whole different science. I mean, a whole different range of sciences, from watershed to soil, to all these various disciplines, are now a bigger part of the staff.

SS: Now, did you ever get a master's?

MK: No.

SS: So, today, you almost have to go and get a master's. Right?

MK: Oh, I know.

SS: Isn't that kind of almost the bar, although different for entry, depending on what you're doing?

MK: Well, I don't know. I know in my kids, you know, it's certainly true there.

SS: Another name, Ted Dyrness. Do you remember Ted?

MK: I do.

SS: He's one of the Andrews people we didn't mention. You were searching for a 02:53:00name earlier, I thought I'd bring that up, too.

MK: Yeah, I knew Dick Fredriksen better. But Ted was a soils guy, I think?

SS: Well, some vegetation, too.

MK: Oh, vegetation. Okay.

SS: Vegetation. He wrote that book with Jerry Franklin on the vegetation of the Northwest, which is still considered the "bible" on the subject.

MK: Yeah. Dick, I knew. He was a winemaker. Fredriksen. And I was a winemaker.

SS: Aha.

MK: And still am a winemaker.

SS: You are?

MK: Yeah.

SS: Ah, here's one. How do you differentiate between these two terms, conservationism and environmentalism?

MK: Hmm. I don't know. I guess, you take environmentalism, maybe would be the more activist end of the conservation spectrum, the more maybe radical, and the 02:54:00"stop the world" sort of thing. Whereas a conservationist, on that spectrum, is maybe a little more balanced between use and conserving resources. That's how I'd view it anyway.

SS: Now, the Oregon Natural Resources Council, that was one of the groups that was involved during the French Pete era. Am I correct?

MK: I get those confused. Is that the one that turned into Oregon Wild?

SS: I think so, but I'm not sure. I think so, yes.

MK: Yeah. They may have been involved. But I think in those days, I think that the point people were from the Sierra Club, but I might be wrong.

SS: John Ray Bruckart.

MK: Yeah, John was --

SS: That's another name we didn't mention.

MK: John was forest supervisor [Willamette NF] when I first came in 1954.

SS: Okay, good. I'm glad I brought that up.

MK: Yeah, and the "old guard," you know, he, J.R. is that, J.R. Bruckart.

SS: Was he a tough-old boy?

MK: Well, yeah. At that point, I was a 21-year-old. It was hard for me to make a judgment, but he seemed to be a pretty stiff-laced guy. Probably of the era where, they had staff cars with flags and he could have been part of that era back into the '30s. He also came from the Olympic National Forest, and he bitterly opposed the carving of the Olympic National Park out of it. That may have been one of the reasons, I mean, I've heard that as one of the reasons, he was moved down here.

SS: When they tried to expand the park into a couple of areas?

MK: Well, no, when they created the park.

SS: Created the park, right, in '48, I believe.

MK: You know, it ended up being a donut around a park. They took the center of the forest out.

SS: Perry Thompson?

MK: Well, I don't know Perry, but he was an old, a supervisor back in the '30s.

SS: So, tell me about the selection of rangers, about that process?

MK: Yeah, well, the first opportunity I had was when Jim Caswell left the Deputy [supervisor] job over on the Boise [National Forest], and Jim was an effective person, I thought, with the Andrews in terms, but I wanted to be sure that his successor really had the, well, the mindset, I guess, to be able to work with 02:57:00scientists and to become a partner in that whole thing.

SS: Right.

MK: And so, we did interview. I can't remember all the folks in the interview. But the one that stood out and the one we selected was Steve Eubanks, who turned out to be an outstanding selection in terms of having a bent towards science and the whole inquiring mind, and who established a great partnership with the Andrews.

SS: And that was before you had a full-time science liaison officer, too, so he would have been a perfect transition person there, right?

MK: That's true, yeah. So, anyways, Jim eventually left, or I mean, Steve, and so, we had the chance to pick another one. And here again, we interviewed a 02:58:00number of candidates, and of that bunch, Lynn Burditt, I thought, would follow maybe not in the same footsteps as Steve, because Steve was a pretty remarkable guy. In fact, following his career, he ended up as supervisor down on the Tahoe. And I think he, I don't know if he was successful, but he was pushing for establishing an experimental forest on the Tahoe National Forest. And I don't know if that happened or not. But he was an interesting guy. But Lynn had a little, you know, she was a different person, but I think still established a good relationship with the Andrews. But I guess, the point I'm making is that we made a point of selecting somebody and with a heads-up in the interview that 02:59:00this is what's important for this position to do, and that's to work with scientists.

SS: Would you say, in terms of the different districts of the Willamette, if you were going to pick somebody with more a science bent or interest, it would probably be for that district, just because of the Andrews being there?

MK: Yeah, at that point in time, it was, certainly. I mean, that was the whole, one of the key steps, right.

SS: Within the Forest Service, how would you characterize the reputation of the Andrews beyond just you guys that knew them because you were here close? Because a lot of its findings, from the Andrews, they're everywhere now, the science.

MK: Yeah.

SS: So, how would you characterize the reputation of the Andrews?

MK: Well, I think pretty solid, but I don't know. I was here, close, and I think 03:00:00the region [6] felt good about it. You know, we hosted that leadership team meeting on the Andrews in the '80s, and I think it was a good feeling about what was going on there. I hope it was positive. SS: Speaking of something more humorous, were you there when there was a supposed issue between either the district ranger or maybe the forest supervisor, and the Andrews staff skinny-dipping in places that were possibly visible by the public and families?

MK: No.

SS: You never remember that?

MK: No.

SS: No, but that did happen very early on.

MK: Really? Where, in Lookout Creek or -- ?

SS: It might have been Lookout or somewhere else. But, you know, they'd be up there working all day and they'd go out and just jump in, you know, no swimming suits needed. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. But that did happen, I 03:01:00just don't know if you knew anything about that.

MK: No.

SS: What do you believe is the ethical responsibility of the land manager in the American context, specifically the Forest Service, but you can even say the BLM. I mean, what is ethical responsibility of the land manager for what they do and what they are managing?

MK: Well, I would say, to hand it off to the next generation in a better condition than you found it, if that's possible. That would be the ethical context that I, personally believe in. And I've heard it form a lot of other folks, too, that that's how most folks felt.

SS: OSU and U.S. Forest Service co-administration of the Andrews can be today held up as a model for effective inter-institutional management and science. How 03:02:00would you characterize that relationship and its evolution?

MK: Well, I would hold it up as a model also. You know, on the Coc, we had the Long Valley Experimental Forest, and the relationship, and we had NAU [Northern Az. Univ.], and it would have been great to have a relationship or a contract or whatever document that was similar to that.

SS: But there wasn't an MOU and there wasn't that triad?

MK: Not that I know, certainly, there couldn't have been. In fact, it was a "we/they" sort of thing, you know, if anything, with the rangers and so on.

SS: Where was Long Valley [see below] located compared to where?

MK: Where, near Hart Prairie [west of San Francisco Peaks].

SS: It was right there. Okay, got you.

MK: Yeah, kind of in that area. And it's the oldest, I think it's the oldest experimental forest in the nation.

SS: Isn't that also called Fort Valley or -- ?

MK: Yeah, Fort Valley, isn't that what I said?

SS: No, you said Long Valley.

MK: Oh, Fort Valley.

SS: No, Long Valley's a different one.

MK: Well, no, Long Valley's a ranger district.

SS: Oh, right, right.

MK: Yeah, Fort Valley, that's what I meant, yeah.

SS: No, Fort Valley, right. So, but there wasn't that tight meshing of mission purpose velocity and exchange of science and ideas and management?

MK: No, there certainly wasn't.

SS: Because that's my impression is that, though I'm sure there's been rough patches, but it's a really tightly-woven thing that seems to have found a good comfort zone?

MK: The one that exists here?

SS: Here, yes.

MK: Yeah, there was nothing like that down there. And then could have used it, I mean, we could have directed. You know, the scientists were off doing their thing and managers were out, and nary the two would meet. I've only seen it here in the Andrews. And it's too bad.

SS: Okay, so you know of no other place even nationally where there's been something that well woven together?

MK: I can't speak for that, but I'm not aware of it, no. But I'm sure there must be somewhere.

SS: Well, back East, the Coweeta.

MK: Coweeta, I was going to say.

SS: Which is another LTER, I think there's probably similar dynamics involving the University of Georgia. But I can't speak from first-hand experience. If you wanted to make a kind of a capstone statement to this interview, your career, the Andrews, what would you want it to be, Mike, I'll give you the floor?

MK: Well, I don't know. We've talked an awful lot. I think we've captured a lot of what I had to say. But, you know, when I was supervisor, a group of supervisors, in fact, the national leadership team got together, and they coined a phrase that I think really captures the essence of what the National Forest System is all about. And it became the motto, and hopefully it's still the 03:05:00motto, and that is, "Caring for the Land and Serving People." Those two things are what I think the national forests are all about. Now, it's a national forest system. The science side of it certainly has a part in that. And how can we do that better? How can we serve people better? How can we care for the land better than we are now? Good.

SS: It sounds like a fantastic finish. Thank you, sir.

MK: Okay.

SS: All right.

MK: All right.