Lynn Burditt Oral History Interview, July 31, 2015

SAMUEL SCHMIEDING: Good afternoon, this is Dr. Samuel J. Schmeiding, College of Forestry. It is July 31, 2015. I am here with Lynn Burditt, Area Manager for the Columbia Gorge National Scenic Recreation Area?

LYNN BURDITT: No, just Scenic Area.

SS: Scenic Area, excuse me. And we are at the Ryan Lake, which is part of the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument. We are going to do a little unique approach to this oral history interview today, where we are going to be talking about her experience with Mount St. Helens, and we are going to be doing it at various locations on a certain side of the monument. I want to thank you, Lynn, for being willing to do this today. How are you?

LB: I am doing great today, thank you.

SS: Excellent. So, let me talk about, let's just go real quick-tell me just a little bit about your biography and how you got into your work as a land manager and natural resource manager.

LB: Well, I grew up in Eastern Tennessee near the Smoky Mountains. I have a degree in Outdoor Recreation Resource Management and master's degree in Forestry and a master's degree in Conflict Resolution. As a young person, I don't know how I decided I wanted to be in land management. I know I must have intentionally decided because I started college at the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse University. However, I do not even recall being driven about that. What I remember as a young person was having the great opportunity to be outdoors in a lot of situations. I was a Camp Fire Girl. We had leaders who would take us out on river events on hikes and we were always experiencing the Smokey Mountains. I also grew up during the era of the late 00:02:00'50s, early '60s when a lot of environmental activism was going on. A number of the current laws were passed. I vividly remember the Cuyahoga River catching fire and that getting notice and just having the whole concept of environmental concerns be in the forefront for me.

SS: What was your family like regarding the outdoors, nature, their beliefs and philosophy about the land, nature, etc.?

LB: We would spend time outdoors. We would go to the Smokys. We would actually have picnics and different things. My dad happened to work for the plants at Oak Ridge. He worked for Y-12 and to be honest I had no idea what he did until after he retired. I thought everybody was like that. But my parents were, I consider them pretty environmentally oriented. They also were very open-minded in the 00:03:00idea that as a young woman in that day and time they took the presumption that I could do whatever I wanted to do. They encouraged that. They encouraged those kinds of activities. My sense of them is that they were relatively liberal in their politics. They were both involved with the Democratic program, worked for Al Gore, Sr.'s activities. I don't really recall a lot around the environmental front, other than we all grew up in that kind of arena and valuing these kinds of things.

SS: Do you have a favorite place?

LB: A favorite place.

SS: In nature.

LB: I have many, many, many favorite places. One of the really great things about working for the Forest Service, whenever I get to a place, I love it. I don't like moving. I get settled in, and, if I was to pick one favorite place, 00:04:00well, I'm going to pick two. The Bob Marshall [Wilderness Area] is one of my favorite places over in Montana. I love the Rocky Mountains and the way they just are there and it's a presence that I miss. That said, one of my other favorite places is Mount St. Helens. Just because of having the opportunity to work here shortly after the eruption and being part of that living landscape it viscerally became part of me. So, if I had to narrow down and pick favorite places, those would be two. I just love every place I get the opportunity to be a part of and be in service.

SS: Now, what do you remember about volcanoes and volcanism, let's say from books you read, or a movie, or a piece of art that you saw where it represented a certain vision of what volcanos were represented to be and maybe something 00:05:00that was imparted to you maybe long, obviously, before Mount St. Helens?

LB: That's a great question. As I think back on it, it would probably be those images that you might see more drawn pictures, where somebody would draw a mountain and then show fire and different things. It was sort of that image where say the stories like Bridge of the Gods, those legends. It was things where the gods were fighting, and it was this way of telling a story about whether it's nature or somebody being angry in many ways. Those are probably the bits and pieces I recall.

SS: It was a mythological kind of conception?

LB: Correct. In college I took a geography class and what I remember from that, 00:06:00you'd think you remember things like volcanos. But what I recollect was how it helped me learn that in many ways during the Civil War there was no way the South would ever win the war just based on the way the geography and geology the landscape was. I couldn't tell you today why that was, but I very much remember that take-home message. I don't recall learning a lot. I grew up in the East. I don't recall learning a lot about volcanos. It was really more that ____ [Sam interrupts].

SS: Well, I mean the Appalachians are very old, weathered mountains and if they had an era of volcanism it was 500 million years ago or before Paleozoic or before.

LB: Yeah.

SS: So, we'll just throw in my own perspective for the record. The first one I remembered was a Tarzan movie, a Johnny Weissmuller movie, a black-and-white 00:07:00where they had some corny special effects and lava flowing down and taking away some person that was trying to kill Tarzan. Anyway, I remember that.

LB: I may have watched that movie.

SS: Then there was Parícutin in Mexico. I remember that and then the Hawaii volcanoes. That was my image of a volcano, which was not what you see what happened here.

LB: Correct.

SS: The conception of volcanos was simplistic, just like a lot of people have a very corny view of what a tsunami is. It's not like a big wave, like a 100-ft bonsai pipeline wave. It's a series of surges, but we've been taught through images and obviously, interesting enough, the first image I saw was an artist's rendition in a book for children of Krakatoa's eruption produced 100-ft tsunamis.

LB: Right.

SS: But the pictures they showed was a bunch of scared, native peoples running from the tsunami, but it looked like a gigantic breaker that you'd see on Hawaii's north shore, rather than what it probably actually was.

LB: That's how we translate things.

SS: Right, exactly. Now, Mount St. Helens-where were you when it started to get angry in March 1980.

LB: At that time, I was in graduate school at Oregon State University. I was a Forest Service employee doing an advanced technical training program. Actually, in March I may have been on a detail. As part of that program I got to do one-month details to various places in the country. I'm not totally sure that I was in Corvallis in March, but that's where my assignment was.

SS: What do you remember about [what] you said, oh my goodness, this thing is starting to wake up!

LB: You know, the interesting piece with that is, I probably was aware of it, noticing it, definitely the politics of it whereas more and more interest came in. I remember Dixie Lee Ray was the governor and the challenges as they started limiting who can be in various places and just Dixie Lee Ray, as the type of governor who she was, was sort of one of the interesting pieces of memory for me as I probably remember more about her than I do about the evolution of the volcano.

SS: Describe that.

LB: It's far enough away now that some of my memories are vague. But it was during the time when there was a lot of effort around the idea of putting in 00:10:00nuclear energy, the Trojan Nuclear Power Plant. She was a big leader in that and pushing it. There were a lot of concerns and issues around that. Just the way in which she was choosing to be governor and choosing to put forward her vision was really a present thing for me, and then, of course, the idea of, as a volcano's awakening and you have nuclear power plants, or the concept of them, nearby, there was just an interesting juxtaposition.

SS: Interesting.

LB: She was kind of a brash person.

SS: She was a former academic.

LB: Yeah.

SS: With a Ph.D. in engineering.

LB: Something like that.

SS: Something like that, yeah. I think so. Now, it erupts. The big one: May 18, 00:11:001980. Where were you when it erupted?

LB: I was at my apartment in Corvallis. I lived in a duplex on 15th Avenue, somewhere northwest. I have to admit that I was asleep, and it woke me up.

SS: I mean, what woke you up? What did you hear?

LB: What I recollect waking up on, I have this vague image that it threw me out of bed or something, which is not true, but it was like a giant sonic boom. I didn't know what had actually occurred. It sort of was what I recollect, and I could be making this up, as that effect of a sonic boom, but that it actually shook. More than just sound was movement.

SS: Well, the sound waves apparently bounced off the stratosphere, jumped 00:12:00Portland, but hit the middle and southern Willamette Valley, so we heard it in Eugene also. Now, but how long did it take you to find out what happened?

LB: It was later that morning. I wasn't a big TV watcher and it didn't strike me. I think it didn't occur to me that it would be connected to Mount St. Helens. I kind of was just going about my day and it was probably later I'm not sure if a friend called me or if I turned on the news or what-not, but it was definitely later in the day when I learned what had actually occurred.

SS: What do you remember seeing on the news and the images?

LB: Part of what I recollect on all of that is, one, is I had previously worked for the Forest Service on the Clearwater National Forest out of Potlatch, Idaho. I had lived over in western Idaho, eastern Washington and I had a number of 00:13:00friends who were still there, and ash was going there, and they experienced that midnight [during the day] kind of a factor.

SS: They got dumped really heavy.

LB: They got seriously dumped.

SS: Like Ritzville, I remember reading they got 7 in. of ash and 2, 3, 4 in. in other places.

LB: It was that fine ash as you got further east where it was very, very fine and if it got wet it would create all kinds of muck on things and people were shoveling it out. I remember on the news where they were showing, probably eastern Washington the darkness there, showing people with little filter masks on, people trying to shovel out. Then, some of the images of the flow going down the Toutle River and then things being backed up on the bridges. That was one 00:14:00that was, I think, a fairly popular one because TV likes to show devastation in humans, and the bridges you had all the river, you had things being taken out.

SS: It was very dramatic.

LB: It was dramatic.

SS: Good TV.

LB: Yeah.

SS: In the month, two months since it woke up until it blew its top, did you have any inkling? You're not a volcanologist but still-the bulge that kept going out, I remember as a very unsophisticated young person, I'm saying that sounds really dangerous. I just remember hearing that. Did you have any of that inkling too as you read about this thing bulging out?

LB: You know, I think where my inkling might have come from was some of the news stories as they tried to get a sense and as the folks with USGS would be trying to tell the stories of what might happen. That concept of a bulge, if you think 00:15:00about it as human health, you go if your body bulges out at some point something icky happens. Yeah, it seemed like that kind of thing. As you mentioned earlier about the Hawaii volcanoes, I don't think I really thought a whole lot about what kind of eruption might occur. I probably didn't have in my mind, which is odd thinking back, you'd think well I would've been more sophisticated about this, but I probably didn't have a picture in my mind. It would have been more like the notion of the Hawaii volcanoes and a lava flow and that kind of image.

SS: Hot, orange lava, runny, real picturesque kind of stuff.

LB: That you might be able to run away from or something, even though I knew that wasn't what they were expecting. I didn't have another context.

SS: What, obviously, you weren't involved with the management of this area yet, 00:16:00but in retrospect looking back at the challenges that the governor and the local sheriffs and the state police had in terms of controlling this situation, curiosity seekers, adventure seekers, etc., just talk a little about what the challenge you thought they had and how they handled it, how you maybe thought they could have done better (the red zone, the blue zone), all that dynamic. What would you have liked to have seen done? This is kind of your chance to rewrite history, but just say a little bit about that.

LB: You know, it's an interesting question because as a long-term Forest Service employee I've been in what we call a line-officer position, which is a decision-maker role, either as a district ranger, deputy forest supervisor, forest supervisor, area manager, since 1987. So, for a long time. I have to say that one of the things that, I think as I look back is that, I am really amazed 00:17:00with what they did accomplish. I think about that day and time and the resources we had and the kinds of things we had dealt with in this country, and I'm fairly impressed with what occurred. All my knowledge of the red zone, the blue zone, those kinds of things is more superficial in that I didn't work in this area, although I did start working here May 18 of 1981 on the recovery projects and actually experienced that version of it. The thing that I reflect on as I think about that, is you're always torn as a manager between providing people access and then managing the danger that might occur, whether it's with something like the eruption or with fire or with even a natural location, where there might be danger. You have to find that balance. In this setting, where there was so much 00:18:00unknown, one of the corollaries I take to it is when I worked in Montana in the late '80s and there was a lot of fire going on and it was a lot of intensity and a lot of the fires that occur it's very difficult to manage any public access. I remember one year the governor was not running for reelection and he made the very difficult decision to close the state to public access, in essence, close public lands.

SS: Because of the dryness.

LB: Because of the dryness. Because of the number of fires we had going. Because of the inability to help people if they were in these dangerous situations. That was just before hunting season. Not a really popular decision.

SS: No.

LB: I think about how difficult that choice was. Then I think about this situation where you have this bulge and you have scientists who are telling you 00:19:00something is going to happen, but we don't really know what and here's the different things and knowing how many people loved this place and they felt connected to it and they felt that it was their right to be here, plus all the lookie-loos who want to come near. I think the concept of how they developed those zones is a good principle. How you would identify where they should be, you know, is an amazing thought. I don't really have a lot of judgment. I think you could have made the zone where people couldn't be bigger, and you would have had a lot of political fallout. That said, if the eruption had happened the next day, on Monday, I think the judgments that existed even with the location would have been phenomenal, because on the next day you would have had hundreds of 00:20:00people in the impacted area.

SS: Meaning more forest-?

LB: Primarily forestry work on the private lands-

SS: [Talking over LB] And the Weyerhaeuser lands.

LB: The Weyerhaeuser lands. Having this occur on a Sunday early in the day mitigated the loss of life.

SS: Although, if it had happened the day before when they let all the people go into their cabins.

LB: [Talks over SS] And to access things.

SS: And the lodges to pick stuff up, you probably would have lost about 100 more people, probably.

LB: Yes.

SS: Including a lot of the state troopers that were taking them in there.

LB: Right. So, when you think about all the lessons we've had about the ecology and the different things about the event and the time and where snow was and where the animals were, the human dimension is very similar. You could, should this eruption have happened later in the day, a different day, pick any day, the human ecology of what occurred and the judgments around the loss of life and 00:21:00allowing people in or not letting them in would have been very different. So, it's one of the ah-has for me about that is you can never put in fail-safes. You do the best that you can in trying to mitigate risk and yet provide opportunity and no matter what happens there will always be judgments and, as a decision-maker, whether you're the forest supervisor or the governor, whoever's making those decisions, one of the things that you have to do is take the best information you can get, weigh it out, and then make that determination using that information and then feel comfortable with the choices that you make because there will always be second guessing. There always is going to be, assuming that these events occur, there will be choices where you can look back 00:22:00and go would-a, could-a, should-a. That doesn't help you. You can feel regret. You can feel wishing and hoping, but the reality is what you need to do is take that lesson and move forward into the future. How do you help teach other people? The interesting thing: when the volcano started waking up again in 2004, I was the deputy for a supervisor on the forest.

SS: For the Gifford Pinchot?

LB: For the Gifford Pinchot. We knew some things were going. There was harmonic tremor occurring and there were these different pieces happening and we had to make this decision of what do we do? One of the choices that we made on one of the mornings was to evacuate Johnston Ridge Observatory. But we made some interesting choices about that because we didn't know quite what was going on. We didn't have an understanding. We forgot to involve the State Patrol. Here we were, we were deciding to evacuate people out of Johnston Ridge.

SS: How many people did that involve?

LB: There was a lot of people there that morning.

SS: You're talking about the visitors?

LB: We're talking about the visitors.

SS: Right, okay.

LB: That was kind of a full train of cars going down and during that process as we got things stood up to do our incident command piece around that, that was another example of learning is we made a good decision and we needed to make sure we had in place all those partners for how to manage that and so we kind of quickly moved to that. That's kind of not the red zone/blue zone, but it's that piece of getting the best information you can, getting it from the sources who have a best understanding and knowing back in the 1980, there was lots of different advice. You had advice from the volcanologist, advice from State 00:24:00Patrol, you probably had the governor getting advice from all different kinds of people.

SS: Weyerhaeuser.

LB: A lot of pressure around access to private lands and economic issues. Somehow, she had to weigh all that out and so I tend not to second-guess those.

SS: Could have been a lot worse than 58 people died.

LB: Fifty-eight people died.

SS: Yeah. I mean it could have been much, much, much worse.

LB: It could have been much worse. As we mentioned on any different day there would have likely been more deaths. Some of the deaths were outside of the area that were predicted to be and some of the deaths were people who were in areas they weren't supposed to be.

SS: How do you think the location of your formative years affected your views on ecology science and a career in forestry and land management?

LB: I think it affected me a lot. I try to think back, and pinpoint was it there? What I remember is a collection of memories. One of the growing up in the '60s during the Civil Rights Era, during a lot of the transitions of environmental laws, really had a big effect on me. I loved growing up in Eastern Tennessee. I spent most of my time outdoors. Some intriguing memories that I have is actually living in a neighborhood where they were growing the neighborhood and I actually remember running through some of the big sewer pipes before they closed them off and thinking of that as an outdoor adventure. Growing up in Oak Ridge, which was you know created as one of the cities that helped provide the materials for the atomic bomb, there was a lot of interesting 00:26:00history. I got an amazing education at the time. There were, and I don't know whether this was true, I remember hearing this, more Ph.Ds. per capita than anywhere else in the country. They invested in education.

SS: So, it was a smart town.

LB: It was a town that valued education. I believe that because of that I got exposed to a lot of different things. I was your normal kid. I was in the marching band. I actually, my high school had a young women's basketball team. That was before Title IX, before the _____ [Sam interrupts].

SS: Long before Title IX, yes.

LB: I got to play on that team. I remember we got the boy's hand-me-down jerseys. I loved growing up in that era where a lot of things were changing, and you were on the cusp of things. One of my memories around thinking about how it influenced my views on environmental things is there was a private timber 00:27:00company named Bowater, and I think they had this awareness that to survive in the coming days you really had to be able to help educate the public about what your purpose was and what you were doing. They would create these things called pocket wilderness areas and what they really were the areas they probably going to be able to manage for economic value, but they tended to have great viewpoints. They would be rocky areas and they would have riparian experiences and they would create trails. Then they would have these openings for the trails, and I remember the parents would take you and they'd stand there and eat donuts and drink coffee while all of us kids would do the trail. The interesting thing was we would try to do it as fast as we could. Most of us weren't out there scoping out what insects were, we'd just try to get around the trail. Then 00:28:00you would get a patch and you could collect the patches. That is one of my vivid memories as a young person other than canoeing the rivers and being out there. What's interesting to me is it embedded the concept of the idea of wilderness for me, so the Wilderness Act was in 1964 and here I was on these ideas of pocket wildernesses and much of Eastern Tennessee, once you get away from the Smoky Mountain National Park, is private land.

SS: So, pocket wilderness is really what you have to live with. You're not going to have big wilderness that you have in the west or in Alaska.

LB: In the eastern states, much of our thinking evolved as you go out west. Much of the east was cut over, either for firewood to build fences, to grow food, and so as you moved your way west, we were having a huge impact back in the 17, 00:29:001800s on the landscape. The experiences that you have in the east, you know, no national forest could be created until after the Weeks Act of 1911 and that allowed the government to buy back land. It was through that awareness and transition that many of the reserves and the public lands that were dedicated to this huge legacy we have in the west; it was through learning the impacts in the east. Having grown up in the east and spending time in the Smokys and spending a lot of time outdoors, although we didn't have large landscapes, we did have these amazing forests. One of the things I love about the east is the number of hardwood species we had and the diversity of forest. I would roam those hills and I remember hearing the term "ecology."

I think in college for a while I still had George [Eugene?] Odum's ecology book, 00:30:00which was sort of this "new" idea. Those things really framed for me-one of the pieces in my growing up, I finished college at Iowa State University and, as I mentioned, I got a degree in Outdoor Recreation Resource Management. The way that they had structured their program, I also took such a diversity of coursework in forestry and a while variety of other things that I qualified under the government system for a while variety of programs and what I loved about going to school there was they gave you the big picture view. You had the opportunity-you know, a lot of people go, "You went to Forestry School in Iowa?" you know? And what they don't realize is the woodlands and the riparian forests 00:31:00of Iowa. I didn't want to go to University of Tennessee because there you'd learn, my perception was, you'd learn about southern pines and at Oregon State you learned about Douglas-fir forestry in the West. At Iowa State, they just integrated all the different things.

SS: Interesting.

LB: Yet, my piece was how do you connect people to nature? It was really that piece about I think experiencing that as a young person being so affected and having those events. One of my first recollections was being in the Smoky Mountains, and I don't know if I actually made this up. Sometimes you create your own memories.

SS: Yeah, because it sounds good and you've repeated it enough times.

LB: Yeah, but the story I tell is that my parents had taken us for a picnic, and we were having the picnic down by the stream. We'd taken our little picnic, and I think I even remember the little picnic basket like Yogi Bear or something. 00:32:00One of my recollections is my brother had fallen in the creek and his pants got wet and they were hanging on a branch and my mom had made us sandwiches with white bread, mayonnaise, and cheese, none of which did I like, but we were supposed to eat our food, so I had taken it back up to the parking lot, but I was only about 5 and I couldn't get the bear-proof lid off the garbage can, so I put the sandwich on top of the garbage can. Then a bear came and ate the sandwich and then came looking for more food and we were all kind of running around and we got to our cars. I was sitting in the car and some man was standing on his car blowing the horn at the bears trying to scare it away and the park ranger came and was trying to settle that guy down and had this exasperated look on his face. I say, I'm not totally sure that's a true story, but it's a memory I have.

The memory of it was there has to be a better way of connecting people and so 00:33:00that's a foundational piece for me as that I really believe in wilderness, I really believe in the integrated nature of the system. I also know that as a society we are an integral part of that system. Either connecting people with place for recreation experiences or recognizing that there are parts of the system that we use for all the different things we want, whether it's wood for houses, whether it's, you know, special minerals and different things that we put in all the electronics we use today: we are integrated with that. We need to learn to use those resources nature provides us in a way that mitigates the impacts that we're having. But the reality is, as a society, we, at least in 00:34:00this country, many of us want enough of those goods that we are going to be extracting things and, so, how do you do that in the most respectful way possible with the least impact?

SS: How do you think the contrast between your home state and region deciduous-dominated forest affect your view of the northwest, the west, coniferous forest, and how you would eventually conceptualize and then actually carry out your management when you actually became a professional?

LB: Interesting. That's a great question. One of the pieces growing up is, I grew up in Tennessee and yet, with the work that my dad did, we would wind up moving to different spots-so we were in Boston for a few months. We moved out to Livermore, California, for a bit. We always went back to Tennessee. One of the 00:35:00things I really appreciate about my parents is that they gave us experiences on those trips where we saw things. When we moved to Livermore for a time period, we went and visited the Grand Canyon. We went to Disneyland, too. We went to the Redwoods and we experienced those. So, I got exposed to other parts of the country. What I loved about the Smokys growing up, you know the old part of it, the rich soils, the-one of the things I loved about the Smokys and the Appalachian Country was that people were integrated into the landscape. The hollers, you know, some of it, of course, you remember, if you watched the movie Deliverance, there was sort of an image that was conveyed of these people that was really wrong.

SS: The inbred-

LB: Inbred, you know, people will shoot you, you know-

SS: Mutants, almost, yeah.

LB: Yeah. You know there's always a seed or kernel in any stereotype that's true and yet they draw it a different way. But I think one thing in being in Eastern Tennessee and people really being embedded in the landscape I think that has influenced me. One of the places I got to work when I was in college was up on the Chippewa National Forest in Minnesota, which has a lot of jack pine and is very flat and you need a compass to find your way around. I loved working there. I remember seeing one of the largest eagle nest I've ever seen in my life. It was a couple tons large.

SS: In a big tree?

LB: In a big tree, and big, white pine. It was different white pine than what I saw in Eastern Tennessee. One of the things that helped me was recognizing those 00:37:00differences. I kind of remember as a kid that I had a literal part to me where I probably thought it rained all over the world when it rained. The time when I really figured out it didn't was when I could see it raining in one place and not in another. Getting to be exposed to those differences in geology and geography and the ecology of a place was really wonderful for me. I worked on Montana for 8 ½ years. I love the Rocky Mountains. There's something about them. You're at 3,000 ft. elevation at the base of the mountains and they're just there and the wildness of the grizzly bears and such. I miss them yet today, and I've been gone since 1989. I wouldn't move back, but I love them. 00:38:00It's like they're a part of my heart. I think one of the things growing up in the East taught me, one was the diversity of possibly, the wide range of species and interactions, the way in which humans were in the landscape and to always appreciate that and to appreciate differences and I think that helps me in the work I do today.

SS: You mentioned the trip out West. I promise I won't reference Chevy Chase's Vacation. You mentioned Grand Canyon, Disneyland, or Wally World, right? But joking aside, in terms of the cross section you would get of new landscapes, bigger mountains, then you saw what do you remember about the first exposures to really different landscapes and the bigger topography of the west, for instance and some of the places and types of places and types of geography that really 00:39:00impacted you?

LB: Well, the Grand Canyon is an obvious one. In terms of you know you hear about it; you see pictures of it and yet to be there and to stand there to actually be in that place and experience it-I think I remember is a feeling of awe. Then, to experience, I was about 8 at the time when we did that, moved out to Livermore for a bit, 8 or 9, and one of the formative memories actually that I have of that: I was the oldest of 4 kids. We were driving and of course didn't have air conditioning then. I would entertain the kids. I would tell stories and I would make stories up. I remember my mom saying something about that to my dad. That's a memory that I have-I would make up stories about the landscapes 00:40:00and try to translate them, even though I didn't know what I was seeing. It's a very vivid memory of that. I remember the petrified forest. That's a place of-

SS: In Arizona?

LB: In Arizona. Visiting that and actually this concept of petrified wood. Zion National Park was a formative place of amazement to me. The Redwoods. That idea that you could drive through a tree. It just kind of-I think what it did was give me a different scale and it was about magnitude, you know. In the East there are so many people in so much small areas and you learn to live with a lot of people, and you learn to experience things on a different scale. The West was 00:41:00massive. Everything seemed bigger.

SS: Did you guys ever come up here to the Pacific Northwest?

LB: We actually drove back this way. We drove north through Seattle and went across Northern Washington and drove through Glacier. I don't remember most of that at that time, but what I remember was we stopped at it was probably on the east side of Glacier and the Flathead Tribe was doing a pow wow. I remember that.

SS: The Blackfeet Tribe?

LB: It was Blackfeet probably on the east side, yeah, because the Flathead were down on the south end. It was probably east of where the fire is right now.

SS: Were they on St. Mary's Lake then?

LB: No.

SS: The famous lake that's just below Logan Pass and then going to the Sun Road.

LB: You know, I don't really recall.

SS: Okay, but you were 8.

LB: I was about 8.

SS: Okay, so.

LB: I recall the event and I might not have recalled where it was until I 00:42:00actually moved to the Flathead Valley and then drove the going to the Sun Road and went, oh, this is where that was kind of thing.

SS: Now, do you remember when you were here seeing any Mt. Rainier, for instance?

LB: I don't recall that.

SS: Because, I mean that's the dominant-

LB: It's the dominant feature, and realistically if we drove across, I probably saw it but it's not in my memory.

SS: Right, right. So, when did you first see Mount. St. Helens in person?

LB: So, my first experience seeing Mount St. Helens in person was actually other than seeing it from a distance driving, but actually experience the mountain was when I started working here on the recovery projects in 1981.

SS: So, after the big blast?

LB: After the big blast, yeah.

SS: You never saw it beforehand in person? Well, you might have when you were 8, 00:43:00but you wouldn't have remembered.

LB: I might have, but I wouldn't remember. I had made a trip over to the coast with some friends when I worked in Idaho. We came over for a concert or some such. It would have been about 1979, maybe 1980. But I don't remember St. Helens. As we drove, I probably would have seen it, but it doesn't stick in my mind. I'd be making it up to tell you it did. You know as I'm thinking about it, I obviously would have seen pictures of St. Helens. I would have seen it in the news because as it woke up it was newsworthy and noteworthy. I think the reason it's hard for me to remember my first impression of St. Helens is that when I had the unique opportunity to work here on what the Forest Service called the Recovery Projects, I actually got to work in the blast zone. I flew in almost 00:44:00every day by helicopter.

SS: This was like a year after, right?

LB: It was one year after the eruption. I was in the middle of the blast zone and it was such an impactful thing. One way I describe the people is it was the highlight of my career and yet my career had just started. Nothing would I ever do after that would I experience it the same way. I spent almost every day in the blast zone. Any day they could fly in, we flew in by helicopter. We would land at these landings and you had all this gray and things around you and there were these massive trees. The area that I worked was actually just off to the west of us and these 6 ft. plus diameter trees that had been tossed down and where I was, they were tossed and crisscrossed. You would try to move around, and I would walk out this tree. Then all of a sudden, I'd realize oh my gosh I'm 00:45:0050 ft. off the ground you know because they had been so crisscrossed. Then I'd go another area and it was all this standing dead or I'd walk around a corner and you could smell death.

SS: In other words, similar to where we are right now, at Ryan Lake, some of these standing dead, which would be considered the scorch zone, correct?

LB: Yeah. It would be in the scorch zone. Then you'd come around the corner and you'd be on the edge where the wave came through and there'd be all green trees off to the side. I would be in all this gray and I'd be covered in it. Your hair would just be like a board and at the end of the day you were just drenched in all this ash and what not. Yet, you'd be walking through it and there'd be this little green plant. I remember vividly walking around one spot and smelling death and coming around a corner and seeing the carcasses of a herd of a number of elk, and, so, I think, because I wasn't embedded in the place before the 00:46:00eruption, that was such a visceral experience that any memories I have of it are just overshadowed by that. It was such an amazing thing to be part of that and to be out in that landscape and to be walking through it and to be one of very few people who got to do that. I felt it was just a gift to be out there. I wasn't like the researchers who came in and they were dashing and looking at things and seeing it for that.

SS: In 1981 they were setting up their first pots.

LB: They were setting up their first plots.

SS: The first year they were just figuring out what they wanted to do, and the second year is when they started doing the veg plots that would then be repeated up to the present.

LB: Yeah, the part that I was on was on the management group as you'll hear the scientists talk, they talk about well the managers just wanted to get in there 00:47:00and cut the trees and recover the area. Well, one of the challenges is nobody had ever experienced this before, so nobody knew what was going to come of that and whether it's blow-down or fire-kill trees. If you are going to get an economic product out of something there's a limited time window. Just the nature of what had happened here managers did what managers do and they organized, and they coordinated, and they came up with a plan for how they were going to do a variety of areas. They had four detailers who had come in and were helping them on the planning on the east side, like the Clearwater drainage and different places. Then they decided decisions had not yet been made about what would be the boundary. There was a portion of the National Forest Lands that were north of the volcano and Green River and there's a place called Tradedollar off to the east of us and Miners Creek and not knowing where the boundaries would wind up, 00:48:00they decided they needed to plan as if. They needed another person. I had been offered a job at the Eldorado and when President Reagan was elected he put a freeze on government hiring and the way it was interpreted by many departments that included moving amongst government jobs and by the time they took the freeze off in March they had determined they could only hire one person and they had made 3 job offers and the job they wanted to hire then was a community planner. I no longer had a job. I was finishing this advanced program and I needed to find a place for a new assignment and so I was available and here at St. Helens they needed somebody, and so I got offered the opportunity and it was like what an amazing gift to come north here and to spend I think I spent about 00:49:006 months working in the volcano. Again, I was on the opposite side of everybody. I was on the north end of the volcano.

SS: Were you down by Morton, or?

LB: No, it's actually just sort of west of where we are right now. If you could throw a rock this way-

SS: So, up here, okay.

LB: Most everybody else worked on the east side on the Clearwater drainage that we stopped and visited on the field trip. Before there was Windy Ridge there was a little landing zone up there and it was full of really light pumice. It was like little marbles that would roll around. Most people worked from that spot. Their helicopters would land there, and they would work east. I was in this area just to the west of us, where we're sitting now.

When we would fly in, we would fly on the west side of the volcano. There was 00:50:00actually a little air strip that was out by Chelatchie Prairie they had rented a field out there. It looked like this whole little air area. There'd be 6 or 8 helicopters there. We would fly in on the west side of the volcano and I could actually see it puffing and doing things. Then we would land, and you were supposed to be within a certain number of minutes of your helicopter.

SS: In case the mountain got angry again.

LB: The reality is you couldn't get very far in those minutes and so we all kind of played a little bit with that time zone and whether this is true or not I remember most of the pilots had been Vietnam air pilots. They were a little bit wildcat-ers, and they'd say you know if it's going, I'm not waiting around. Climb in, and so it was just a phenomenal experience being in the place, being 00:51:00grounded. One of the memories I have on Green River is that we couldn't work alone and so each helicopter had a helicopter manager that would come with those of us who were doing the work and they would follow us around. One time we came up on this little cabin that was I'm sure not authorized and I remember being very nervous because you could see there were things situated around on it with dust on it and wondering whether to open the door or not, wondering if there might be somebody in there. We finally got up the nerve and kind of pushed the door open and there was nobody in there and there was this dusting in there and there were air mattresses. They were still about ¾ full. You knew that somebody had been there at some point around the time of the eruption. They're just 00:52:00amazing recollections for me of being in this place, seeing so many different things, getting to be a part of that. One of the memories I have too is there were a number of times when helicopters would go down, crash.

SS: Because of the intake of the ash? Or just-

LB: It could have been other mechanical difficulties. We used what's called interdisciplinary teams to help weigh out different things, so a hydrologist, might be a silviculturist, a wildlife biologist and we would schedule because you really couldn't drive very far in, so you used helicopters and there was a large Sikorsky that would carry a number of people and I had scheduled the helicopter to bring this interdisciplinary team to walk around and talk to them about ideas and we got bumped because they needed to put down what was called 00:53:00poly-binder [dust abatement] on some of the landing areas so that other helicopters could land. The amazing piece to me-it's where you start, depending on whether you're religious or believe in things, you just kind of go, interesting-is the day that we got bumped from that helicopter actually when they were dropping the poly-binder nobody else could be in the helicopter with the pilot because of the nature of the work they're doing and its hydraulic system failed and he managed to land. He wasn't killed, but he managed, he was going across treetops and he just clipped the top of a tree before he landed in an old clear-cut. He actually did crash. He was okay, but the reality is if that had happened with all of us in there-

SS: Somebody would have died, probably.

LB: Yeah, he would not have had the ability to get that far. One more person in 00:54:00there _____ [Sam talks over LB].

SS: Because of the weight.

LB: The weight. And so, you had this kind of craziness that went on. It was almost like you knew you could die any day. The volcano could take you out. The helicopters could take you out. We were working long hours: 12 plus hours a day, lots of days in a row and in this ethereal place. It created this just odd kind of community as well that I say for me that experience felt like at the time like I would never top that experience. I have had more amazing experiences working for the Forest Service and they were different. None of them were quite like that visceral effect of being in this, you know we all know the earth is a living creature and it's all these different things, and yet it felt so, you 00:55:00really felt the aliveness.

SS: Interesting.

LB: And the impact and I can't even-I don't really have words to describe what it was like and I just feel so grateful to have had the opportunity, especially not being a scientist. Much of the work I did wound up being, you could do it work for naught. It was the in-case work and much of those areas wound up being part of the area that was traded to a timber company and they actually did log those areas, but they were traded from the National Forest in order to access some really special parts that are now part of the monument. Also, it was during that part of time when a lot of people were involved with trying to influence, well, what would be the boundaries of the monument, the different alternatives that were looked at. At that day and time, I didn't really understand all of 00:56:00that. When I came back later in 2000 as the Deputy Forest Supervisor and got to be part of it again, I got a whole different experience of the place.

SS: So, you worked 6 months in '81. Were you involved also in ensuing years as the Monument was negotiated, fought over, eventually created?

LB: I was not part of that. After I worked here on that I actually got a permanent job offer working on the Flathead National Forest in Montana. So, I went there in the Fall of 1981 and got enamored of the Rocky Mountains and the Bob Marshall Wilderness and that huge landscape. I have to admit, although I'd had this amazing experience at Mount St. Helens, you know I tracked it, but I was not a part of the creation of it. It's one of the things that are sort of 00:57:00about me, I get to a place and I can just love that place. Mount St. Helens always has a special place in my heart. I keep coming back here today because of that, even though I work at the Columbia River Gorge, being able to connect with the scientist, even to be in the place it's a special linkage. But it didn't become my passion like it did for some others.

SS: Exactly, but in a way, it is a passion, though.

LB: It is, it just wasn't, I wasn't part of that creating the Monument. I probably didn't even know all that stuff that was going on. I remember meeting at the time he was the District Ranger, because the Monument hadn't been created. I think I met him once. His name was Ken Johnson. They're driving in towards and they're going towards the Green River, so if we had gone on that 00:58:00road, if we had turned that road would have taken us around and around this, and right around that corner is where part of the spots I would have worked.

SS: Lynn is describing another road because we're hearing vehicles drive on the other side of Ryan Lake where they would go or if we would go if we decide to go on that.

LB: Yes, orientation for your tape, yeah.

SS: Or, it sounds like what the heck? Tell me a little about Ryan Lake since we came here first and this was, I believe the first place that one of the teams came like 10 days after the big blast.

LB: It's my understanding, from Jerry Franklin and others, that this was one of the first places that people were able to get to and actually experience. I'm going to speak to it more from the manager side because that's probably what 00:59:00I'll be more accurate about. As the Monument was developed, separate from the coming and learning about the ecology and learning how the ecological processes were going to come through, as they developed the act and thought about all the purposes and right now, I couldn't rattle the main purposes off to you. There was a time when I could. If we do a transcript, I'll write them out for you. I'm sure somebody else is or your researching them. One of the purposes is around recreation and interpretation and another is around allowing ecological processes, nature to continue unimpeded. One of the challenges that we have here is how do you create that Monument in that setting that will allow nature to teach us so many lessons and for us to observe what's going on.

And yet, connect people with place, which for me is one of those important pieces and from a managerial standpoint one of the things that the act designated is you create a comprehensive management plan and I believe that you're carrying a copy of that around with you.

SS: Yes, I always carry around best sellers in my book, in my truck.

LB: What I'm going to encourage you is to hang onto that management plan because they're hard to find anymore. There aren't that many copies and it's one of those unique parts that after the act was created, or after the enabling legislation occurred, the process started to find that balance and where were the places that we were not going to allow public access? Where were the places that we would develop? Where were the different experiences that we were going to create? As you study that management plan, you'll notice there are different 01:01:00kinds of experiences. Here at Ryan Lake we're at the north end. We're right on the edge of the Monument, the designated Monument.

SS: Where would be the line as we're looking at right here?

LB: So, we're looking out at the middle of Ryan Lake.

SS: And the mountain in back is what Strawberry Mountain you said before?

LB: No, the mountain actually to the east of us is Strawberry Mountain, so our backs are facing Strawberry Mountain right now. I'm going to look at it and make sure I get the right-Goat Mountain is what we're looking at to the west. So, the Monument boundary would be just to our north and one of the places with where we are here at Ryan Lake, actually the Monument boundary is just on the other side of the lake. So, the lake itself is not in the Monument, the designated Monument. Then, the boundary turns and goes up that ridge line and follows Goat 01:02:00Mountain and heads to the north. A piece of what we're looking at across the lake from us is not in the designated Monument but if we're to look a little bit further to the south, it is. It's one of those intriguing things where you think about how did they come up with these lines? That's an interesting negotiation process that goes on. I believe they looked at about 7 alternatives ranging from every impacted acre plus some to a variety and they-

SS: Chose D I believe, didn't they?

LB: I believe so, and it involved a lot of land exchanges are a big part of the act. A big chunk designates what land exchanges will occur. It also incorporated all these different features that had occurred as a result of the eruption and so from a recreation standpoint and connecting people with nature, you'll see 01:03:00that throughout the Monument the spot that we're at I think we've heard one car come in behind us, it's not as accessible as many other places. This is what you might call a more dispersed area. Many people who visit the Monument go up the visitor's center corridor, the [Highway] 503 corridor and they'll drive up. It's basically the highway was recreated. They worked their way up the hill, moved the road away from the Toutle River, so that, as more things occurred, the road would be safe and in essence the Forest Service built visitor's centers on their way in. The first one was at Silver Lake; the Mount St. Helens Visitor Center told the story of the human dimension and it's actually on State Park land. As it went further up, Cold Water was constructed. Mount St. Helens Visitor Center 01:04:00opened in '86. Coldwater opened in '93 and it told the story of the biological [responses] and then they went further on up and in 1997 Johnston Ridge Observatory opened. The Forest Service was managing 3 major visitor centers on a paved road. There's some interesting little dynamics that go with that. For example, when they opened Johnston Ridge Observatory, if it had not been a fee charged for the visitor centers; there was no money to open the visitors' center. A part of that is later, when I came back, one of the things that we learned is it costs about a half a million dollars just to run a visitors' center.

SS: A year?

LB: Yeah. And that's just staffing and some of the operational pieces of it. That's probably an underestimate in terms of not covering the real maintenance that happens. So, if your appropriated budget say is a million dollars and you 01:05:00have three visitors' centers that alone are a million and a half dollars, you need a fee program that those people are visiting help pay it. That's the really developed site. It gets all kinds of visitation, huge amounts of school kids come here. On the south side you've got Ape Cave and the Trail of Two Forests closer to the Vancouver area, still a little harder to get to. This area that we're at right now, Ryan Lake, you know we're probably closer to Rainier than we are to the south end of the Monument, if you thought about driving somewhere. It's a very dispersed area. You have to want to get here. We're actually-if we were to look west and south, we're near Mt. Margaret which has all kinds of very dispersed [recreation] -

SS: Over that way, right, and to the left?

LB: Yeah. To our left. It's one of those places that you sign up to go in because it's a very long hike and you hike into these individual spots where you're' really experiencing kind of a wilderness effect. Here at Ryan Lake you can drive to it. I think we've heard the second vehicle in the time we've been here.

SS: And a diesel.

LB: Yeah and it doesn't get a lot of visitation and yet what people are experiencing is the edge of the blast zone. Right here you can see trees that are laying down. You see standing dead. You see the understory coming back in and you can experience kind of the edge of the power of what the mountain happened. This is one of those sites that was set up as people could come in for multiple reasons. One is communities want economic benefit from this, and one of 01:07:00the frustrations communities along Highway 12 have, so Packwood, Randle, is that they don't get the economic benefits. Actually, if you're in Castle Rock and Toutle, you probably don't think you get the economic benefits either, because here we have this amazing experience and yet it can feel like day-trippers for people.

SS: Right.

LB: But there was a big emphasis put on getting access for people, both for the tourism effect and then to experience different parts. Places like Ryan Lake, we're on what's called the 26 road here. When we went to Windy Ridge, we're on the 99 road. Those actually put you through the blast zone. You're experiencing different parts of it. On the 99 road, one edge, as you're on the west side you're in the Monument and on the east side, Clearwater drainage, you're outside the Monument. Again, you're getting to see and experience different things.

SS: What do you think they got where they got things right in the management plan and where did they miss the boat, in your view?

LB: So, great question. I think they got some amazing things right. I'm going to hit on a couple that I think are big issues and probably may never go away. One of the things that I believe they got right is that we would not build a cross-Monument road. There was a lot of political interest in a road that would connect the _______[SS talks over LB].

SS: Johnston Ridge with Windy Ridge, right?

LB: 504 corridor to Johnston Ridge, and you really couldn't do it from there. You'd have to cut across at the Hummocks, but that would cross the Pumice Plain, come around the corner and hook into Windy Ridge.

SS: Right to Spirit Lake, even, right?

LB: Right, yeah, you'd be going by Spirit Lake. The interest in that-you can understand why people want to do it. I've had my moments where I've sat at Windy 01:09:00Ridge and gone, "Wow, I wish I could drive there. I wish I could teleport." So, I understand it. From a tourism standpoint and people getting to experience that it would be an amazing thing. From the standpoint of ecological processes and natural recovery, much less trying to build a road and maintain it, it would have been, and I still believe would still be, a nightmare. That said, when I was here as Deputy Forest Supervisor even in the early 2000s there were people who had actually been able to set aside money in the Washington legislature to do an environmental impact study to locate a road. We were able to successfully work with a variety of people to, and I'm going to use my managerial political aspect to help people understand why that was not a good idea.

So, that's one thing I think they really got right. Another thing I believe 01:10:00personally believe we really got right was the area that at least until today has had limited access for the general public in the most studied area around the volcano.

SS: Which would be?

LB: Which would be right around the Pumice Plain around Spirit Lake. To go in there, you have to have a permit and it's not general public access. Again, this was a very controversial thing when I was here on the Forest-in the 2000s was the idea as people learned that there seemed to be some big fish in Spirit Lake there was a proposal to allow fishing and to do it through some kind of a lottery system and we were struggling financially. We were in that situation where we had to look for really difficult choices. In 2000 we did a permit with the state to operate Silver Lake Visitor Center. We were successful at that and 01:11:00we eventually transferred that visitor center to them. That was really hard for me as someone who really wants to connect with people. That's the connection that's closest to the interstate. People who aren't going to drive all the way up and you can't even get up here in the wintertime, we gave up as a Forest Service the opportunity to really have that connection with people. Yet, we couldn't afford it. We had done that. We had had to make the hard choice of closing the operation of Coldwater, because we really only had the funds to operate one visitor center, and, so, at the time here, we are closing facilities and here are people coming up with what they perceive are creative ways to generate money. With the crossroad idea their idea was you'd charge a toll and it would underwrite the cost. Well, the reality was the cost of building the road and maintaining it you never would have had any money to do those. But, if 01:12:00you don't really stop and think about that and you're a general public or legislature and you go, well, you're closing visitor centers and you won't do this idea? Those were difficult. The fishing idea was one of those. You had some really powerful people who very much wanted to create this unique experience of this lottery of being able to fish on Spirit Lake. It got very intense. Within my own agency it was hard for our regional office to understand why we were trying to stand firm about why that would not be a good idea and so I think those are things-

SS: Was it mainly the science idea?

LB: The real key was around natural processes taking place and being able to do to the science and to do it in an unimpeded way. And so that was our why, you 01:13:00know, if you thought about the big why of why we were not supporting this it was, although you could come up with all kinds of different answers, we've already have had challenges were people are perhaps going into areas they aren't supposed to be, and we don't have enough people to manage that.

SS: Give me some examples, then.

LB: One example would be folks maybe going off trail and finding their way down to Spirit Lake and places where they're not supposed to be.

SS: In other words, creating a whole new social trailing system that would lead to what have you, right?

LB: Yeah. That's a great term that we're using these days. So, unauthorized trials we're calling them social trails these days.

SS: That's what the Park Service uses too.

LB: The concept of that is that people are finding their way to some place and one of the ways that we had managed impact trying to find let people experience 01:14:00the place and yet mitigate the impacts so that we still were having the ecological process to occur unimpeded was to try and delineate trails. Some places we would put them. I know some of the scientists would wish they weren't there, although they like being able to use them themselves. But, that said, once you've put the trail in there then you have that challenge where people decide I'm going to cut the switchback and I want to [SS interrupts LB].

SS: So, the course trial becomes a bunch of social trails.

LB: It creates that opportunity.

SS: Erosion problems.

LB: If we don't have enough people out there engaging with folks and connecting with them and making them aware of why not to do that, more of that occurs. We had already had some challenges with that. What we knew on the fishing thing, one is you're putting more boats in. Separate from the ecological and the social are the science processes. There's all kinds of safety issues. You can be out 01:15:00there on Spirit Lake and the wind shifts and the log mat moves. From a search and rescue standpoint it's very difficult to get to. We had a whole number of reasons we had identified, but the science one was the big one. At the time congressman Brian Baird, you know, he was trying to address a lot of different interests that society has, and he loves Mount St. Helens, by the way. Yet it was difficult for him to understand why we weren't supporting this fishing proposal. It goes back to what did they get right in the management plan. I personally on my belief they got that right. Now, a lot of people today are saying, hey, at the time a lot of this was coming up it was 20 years later, and it was 25 years later. Here you and I are sitting it's 35 years later, but the point they were making is, well, that was good for the time, but you know some people's view is we've learned what we can and it's 25 years later, you need to 01:16:00allow more access, you need people to experience it. As we're finding from the work that people like Charlie [Crisafulli] and Virginia [Dale] and others are doing, we're still learning lessons and we don't know when those lessons are going to cease, if ever. Yet, it's difficult when you're not a scientist with that long-term view, it's difficult to understand why can't we allow more public access. Why can't we have those experiences? I think in the management plan some things that they really got right was this idea of creating, again this is the people connection part, creating different experiences so those hardened places where you're going to bring a whole lot of people, you know, you're going to have a whole lot of impact, like the visitors' centers. Then having a system to 01:17:00allow people to actually be out in the Monument and have an experience like Mt. Margaret, and there's only a certain kind of person that's going to ever have that experience.

SS: And go to Mt. Margaret.

LB: Many people will never go to Mt. Margaret. They couldn't make the hike, or they wouldn't want to do it [SS talks over LB].

SS: It's a pretty steep mountain, too.

LB: It's very steep. It's challenging to get to. It's an amazing place, if you ever get there. I believe you know today you're seeing the Monument staff look at broadening some of the experiences, so perhaps having more activities that happen on Coldwater Lake.

SS: Right.

LB: Finding ways to have [SS interrupts LB].

SS: That was a new lake after the eruption, correct?

LB: Yes. There are two lakes that were actually created by the flow that occurred [SS interrupts LB].

SS: That blocked the little valleys.

LB: Basically, blocked it off and created a new lake, and Coldwater is one of those. So, they're finding opportunities maybe for some canoe or kayak camping; you know, we're trying to again create different types of experiences for people.

SS: What mistakes do you think they made? Or, I won't say mistakes that "they" made, but let's say the political process may have not permitted or things that could have been better. That's probably a better way of putting it.

LB: You know one thing that I think we're studying again today that's one of those questions about how would you do it different then, if you knew then what you know now, is the installation of Spirit Lake Tunnel and then the sediment retention dam down on the Toutle that the Corp [of Engineers] manages. Part of the idea with the tunnel was mitigating the lake level that should things occur there would be an ability to kind of control what might occur downstream.

SS: In other words, a big, huge mudflow lahar of an even, well, greater size than-

LB: Greater size or even a similar size going down the Toutle River [in 1980]. So, one of the things that they wanted to do was to be able to control Spirit Lake's level should something major occur and so they've created this tunnel and in theory you can allow water to flow out of that and manage it. It has been a very challenging, a very, very challenging thing to manage. I know there are many scientists who feel like it should have never been built. It's one of the things that has affected the dynamics.

SS: In other words, they would classify it as classic over-engineering, correct?

LB: Yes. I think I've heard that word with it. You know and again I go back to the day and time, and I try to put myself in those times and go whether I would agree with it or not, I don't know. I can see with the intensity of what has 01:20:00occurred with the pressures around all the impacts that occurred down the Toutle River, I can understand why there was a push from a safety standpoint to do so. I can also see the science side which is this is not allowing ecological processes to occur. The way that's still playing out for the Forest Service, the Corps built the tunnel. There's an agreement between them and the Forest Service that the Forest Service would actually pay for the maintenance of the tunnel. Well, the Corps, though, is the only ones who actually have the engineering expertise, so every so often and if you've looked with binoculars at the inlet to the tunnel you'll often see the big log mat will come over and every so many years there has to be something done to mitigate that because things are getting 01:21:00jammed up by the inlet and it usually costs a million or two million dollars.

SS: There's a small log mat right now in front of it, but not the massive type that-

LB: Not the massive ones that we've dealt with in the past.

SS: And some of them start getting sucked into the intake.

LB: They'll get sucked into the intake and what we've had to do before, they'll actually fly in a big crane and they'll set up buoys around and they'll try to use the crane to move things. It generally will cost a million plus dollars. What's challenging as a manager is that's a safety and health issue and so, when it happens and we have to deal with it, there's generally you can find dollars to pay for that, and yet you look and think what could you have done with that million dollars to help-

SS: Something else.

LB: Whether it's to connect people with the place or to deal with backlog maintenance on a road or to deal with something else. Those are the things 01:22:00that's much more challenging to get money for. They create this deferred maintenance. The part [of the reason] why the tunnel will get to be revisited is in this last year rather than just the log mat question, there's been this place where it's built kind of through a fault and the tunnel itself has had a shift and the opening is much smaller in some places. I don't want to give you numbers, because I'll give you the wrong numbers, but that is leading to a more integrated look at what is the long-term solution here? The solution may be simply to fix the tunnel. It may not.

SS: How do you believe the rainbow trout got into Spirit Lake? What's your opinion on that?

LB: Well, I've heard various stories and for this. I probably listen to Charlie Crisafulli more than anybody with the idea that, given the nature of the fish 01:23:00and what not, that it likely was introduced by somebody.

SS: A private interest?

LB: Most likely.

SS: Right.

LB: Most likely.

SS: Somebody with an axe to grind, maybe?

LB: You know, I don't know, that it's an axe to grind so much as maybe somebody who thought they were doing a good thing. The axe to grind that you can experience is this idea of why do the researchers get to go there, and I don't? Because that's hard to understand, especially if you were connected to this place.

SS: Well, before, correct.

LB: Well before the eruption, for many people, this is in their hearts and this was their mountain and some of those people can't come back. They felt like the mountain betrayed them. For other people, I think they feel like, because of the approaches we've taken, that they've been cut out of some place that they 01:24:00actually probably have more right to be than anybody else. Whether you agree with that or not, I can understand their viewpoint. So, when you look at the why would somebody do it, I think we have to be open to lots of different views. One way that I often look at this is I like to-this is a thing I use with my employees as a manager-is one is assume positive intent. When we get some kind of thing that comes out of Washington, DC, like a new travel system or something, you know, the people back in Washington aren't sitting there twiddling their thumbs and thinking how can we make their lives miserable? What could we do to them now to take up productivity? They're doing something because they either need to follow some guidance from the president or the Secretary of Agriculture or were trying to save money and that initial impact is significant.

But they didn't do it just to get us, even though we often feel that, and, so, 01:25:00to help my employees sometimes not get into a negative place, [I suggest they] assume positive intent. And one thing, I ask them to do think at a minimum three alternative explanations for something. If you can come up with three alternative stories, then it at least broadens your mind to not getting locked into especially a judgment that may not be true. One of the ways I try to look at this is, you know, you can easily get into the negativity of we don't have enough money or there aren't enough resources or I'm not allowed in or those scientists have locked me out. So, one way that I really believe in public service and I think that's my job, is public service, [is that] I feel honored to be entrusted to manage these lands. So, I need to help my employees in 01:26:00particular to be able to think about that. Instead of saying what we can't do for example, because there's so many more things we could do with more resources, with more partnerships, but instead of saying what we can't do let's tell people what we are doing. Here at Mount St. Helens, yes, there are all kinds of things we could be doing, but here's what we are doing. Let's build from that story about things. It's one of the challenges, like the story on the fish.

One story could be, yep, we're going to get those scientists, because they locked us out of here and we're going to mess up their research. Another story could be this was my place and I really want to come back there some day and if there's these big fish they're going to let me come back and fish because I know, someday, we'll be able to do it. Another story could be some weird airplane pilot flew over the lake sometime and threw a fish in. You can get kind 01:27:00of weird, but... And the challenge is that you have to figure out today does it matter what the answer is. In some cases it really does matter, because if somebody is doing it with a negative intent to negatively affect say what we're learning or because they believe that by doing that it's going to mean that the unimpeded process is no longer valid. And, so, you've got to let people in, then it really matters to understand it and to be able to manage that and deal with it. If it's one of those things where it's more about how we move forward and what are we going to do today, if you get stuck in that place of believing that people are out to get you, then it can be much more challenging to think about how do I believe coalitions that really believe in this work. Whether it's 01:28:00managing my employees in the scenic area, where we struggle-we have millions of people visiting a very small area. We're one of the most visited places in the National Forest System.

SS: I'll bet.

LB: Parking lots are filled [SS interrupts LB].

SS: Are you talking about-?

LB: At the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area.

SS: Okay, right, right.

LB: We struggle because we're overwhelmed.

SS: How many people do you have on staff?

LB: Our total staff is about 49 and about half of those, though, work in fire. The number of folks that I have that are trying to deal with the ecological piece specifically and/or the recreation piece, we have 15 or 16 of us and in the summer, we grow quite a bit. But it's really challenging. It's very easy there to get in the mood of we don't really even get to set a course of action that we believe needs to happen, because we're either overwhelmed by visitors or 01:29:00by political interests or by friends groups who believe that what they want to do is the right thing to do. You have to find a way through that, because otherwise you can just drive yourself crazy, get ulcers, feel frustrated, not serve the public well, and it's one of the things that, back to your question of what did they get right and what did they get wrong, is I think in many of these places that were designated, and this is maybe a bigger picture view-Mount St. Helens, the act passed in 1982, the Columbia River Gorge Scenic Area Act in 1986, and in the State of Oregon there were a number of wild and scenic rivers designated.

A lot of people have an image, and probably not so much with younger people today, but in my generation, who had an image in their minds of Senator Hatfield 01:30:00and what they believed he was about and all this kind of perspective about timber and harvesting and, yet, if you were to go back and look at the congressionally designated areas that he helped influence and set aside and help be a guiding force behind, you would be amazed at the number of places he had his fingers on. The last one before he retired was the Opal Creek area in the Willamette National Forest up out of the Detroit Ranger District. He was driven about resolving the conflict because it was a conflict and finding a way through that and they came up with things like a recreation area. There's a part of it in wilderness, a part of it in management. You go back and look at those bits and pieces and it was some of the, in many ways it was some of the last efforts where we were finding our way through solutions. Yes, sometimes they were politically negotiated solutions and compromises and yet it's amazing that we 01:31:00have them today. One of the things that I like to do rather than, because I'm not as embedded in the research as the scientists are here at Mount St. Helens, I like to think at the more global perspective and so pull myself up to that higher level and visualize the landscape of all these places that got designated and think about how amazing it was, that period of time. If you start listing all these places out, looking at the designated rivers, you can see a real comparison between Oregon and Washington. Look at the number of rivers-and I'm not going to give you the number, because I'd be wrong.

SS: That's okay.

LB: The number of rivers in Oregon and there are very few wild and scenic rivers in the State of Washington.

SS: That's true, yeah.

LB: A piece of that is that moment in time and a time when the way the 01:32:00congressional process was working still facilitated-there was certainly a lot of trading that was going on and such, and yet it facilitated finding your way through those. To me, that's one of the lessons that I like to take away. That's probably the relevant part I can share with you because again I'm not as immersed in it as the scientists were that the land use designations are probably the bigger concern.

SS: We are at, what lookout point is this, Lynn?

LB: We're at Strawberry Mountain Viewpoint. If you look off to the west, we're looking down the Green River drainage and one of the things that you can notice as you scan the horizon is you see places where you don't notice any down material, others where you can see the trees are all down and they're gray and 01:33:00they're pointed towards us and then some places where you see a few, occasional standing dead. And then, the amazing thing when you look out, is that you also see standing green trees. For me, this is one of the phenomenal experiences when I worked here. You would be in an area where all these big, giant 6' diameter trees were tooth picked and scattered around. You come around the corner and see standing dead and then all of a sudden as you wandered across, you'd be on this ribbon of green trees where the blast really hadn't affected. There may be a little dusting in the understory, and it was like this just odd transition from standing dead to green trees. That was just a phenomenal experience and it was hard, as you were out there, to even visualize how the movement had come through. Here we're seeing a variety of those parts of pieces.

SS: Some of it is the natural regeneration that is in the foreground there where you see are those probably silver fir or noble fir?

LB: Probably they're silver fir and noble fir. There's a lot of noble fir up this high.

SS: Because we're up a little higher, right?

LB: Yes. We're up in fairly high elevation, so you are looking at some noble fir here. Then you'll see some true firs. Looking down through the Green River Valley you'll see it's definitely quite reforested compared to what we're looking south at.

SS: And you look at this landscape today, 35 years later, you were here after basically year one.

LB: Mm-hm, year one.

SS: What's the difference between the first time you would have seen this versus today? LB: So, the tremendous difference, of course, is that it's green. At that time everything was pretty much shades of gray unless you were along the edge of things. That was either through the coating of things that had happened or what 01:35:00had come through. So, you see a lot, a lot of green through here. I think we're seeing, obviously, some of the regeneration has grown taller, whether it was survived by being under snow or whether it's come in naturally. You're seeing a height difference in things and you're starting to see much more of a patch mosaic of what's out on the landscape.

SS: Exactly. It's maturing.

LB: It's maturing.

SS: Slowly, but it's maturing.

LB: One of the other things, and it's not totally obvious here, but we talk about this over at the visitor centers, is some of the standing dead trees are starting to fall down. So, the trees that were left standing they hadn't been blown over. As time has gone by, 35 years is a long time. That root structure is gone and what not. At Coldwater, what used to be Coldwater Visitor Center and is now the Learning Center, there are actually some sideways trees and what not 01:36:00that aren't really trees because they knew in order to have people have that experience, they needed to create that because it wasn't going to last naturally. You can't really tell that here, but if we look up the hill you can see there's still some standing dead and there's some that are tilted over. Some of those that are laying down they probably came down in more recent years. They didn't come down as part of the blast.

SS: We're looking at a combination of the blast zone and the scorch zone. A little bit of an interface of both.

LB: Correct. A little bit of interface.

SS: Up here's it's a little bit of I'd guess you'd say a scorch zone because there's standing dead and you can see it on the other side of that little knob in front of us.

LB: Yeah, and off to our north and our west is where you started hitting the zone where it really started fading out. Again, you get the edge of the green. The area that I worked in which was called Miners Creek which is definitely 01:37:00farther to out west you could wander that line between what was amazing you could be in a scorch zone and everything was gray and it was hot and it beat down on you and then you could actually move over 5 feet and you were in a green forest. If you didn't look back towards the scorch zone you wouldn't know it was there. That was one of the most phenomenal, meaningful ah-ha's to me about just the way nature is.

SS: You could almost make an analogy, although this is a bigger scope, to tornadic activity, where tornados will completely destroy certain areas and then they won't touch anything else. Then they'll move around.

LB: Yeah and the way that they will move down and pop in and out. Obviously, this happened in different ways, and yet I think that's a great analogy.

SS: You ready to move on?

LB: You bet.

SS: What do you think the cultural place of Mount St. Helens is within the 01:38:00Pacific Northwest and extending that to U.S. history?

LB: Great question. So, within the Pacific Northwest, it's an interesting one in my mind, because you have all the things that you hear about, like Rainier is this image people have and it almost supersedes a place like Mount St. Helens, even though you have all this that's occurred. One of the intriguing things for me is that within the sense of the Northwest, I think it's here. I think it's an important place and I think it actually in my mind somewhat gets lost in between Mt. Hood and Mt. Rainier as physical places. But when I think about it in the context of U.S. history, or even the world, but particularly U.S. with it being 01:39:00in an eruptive phase during the lifetime of a number of people in the continental 48 states with the amount of coverage it had it's one of the iconic things that people remember where they were when. For a whole generation, I think, it has a really special connection. It's like, and I don't want to liken it to the Twin Towers thing, but it's sort of those you remember where you were when Kennedy was assassinated; you remember where you were when you learned about the Twin Towers; you remember where you were when Mount St. Helens went off. I think it has a place in our psyche as a society. Now that's changing a little bit as we get out there where it's 35 years past the blast and there's a lot of people now who weren't even born when it erupted. So, I think that's 01:40:00shifting a bit in terms of how it's seen and how it's experienced. That's probably where I would stop and see where you want to go next.

SS: For you personally what is the place cultural or otherwise of Mount St. Helens. You've talked about it it's like hugely impactful thing in your life, one of your favorites, if not your favorite place. Tell me why. Explain.

LB: I think for me it's one of those places where I really became aware of how small we as a species are in the place of things. We're so engaged in the world and we have so many impacts and we have all these things we can invent and make, and yet being in the blast zone right after or in that year after the eruption and just seeing the power of nature and the forces that had occurred and the way 01:41:00in which they interacted with each other, it gave me a whole different perspective on the place of humanity, not only on this world, but as I think about the solar system. It's an interesting. I don't know why this is coming to mind, but with the pictures that are coming back from Pluto. It's amazing to me that as a society that we can invent things that can travel for decades and take pictures and send them back to places that are-

SS: Four billion miles away.

LB: That are amazing distances away and you just think about how do we even conceive of those kinds of things? What amazing things are out there in the universe. For me one of the connections about this place is it has so many different parts and pieces that mean so many different things to folks. And just experiencing the power of nature the degree to which we are very small within 01:42:00that and it sort of changed my trajectory of thinking. I'm an experiential learner in many ways and that was an experience that most people don't ever get to have and so I think that's one of the foundational people for me. Another piece is, as a manager, one of the things that's really important is I think I've mentioned earlier is that idea of connecting people and I really believe one of my roles is I believe in public lands. I love the National Forest and I also believe in public lands in general and one thing that's really important to me is having those be relevant to people as we go out in society, so that this great idea of the federal lands is still of value to folks 10, 15, 30 years from 01:43:00now. One of the really neat cultural aspects of a place like Mt. St. Helens is it can connect people to that. There can be a whole lot of national forests and people might go there or not or the local people go there and yet this is one of those places people come from all around the world and in part because it's accessible. There might even be volcanos in their own country, but they can't get to them. Here they can come, and they can have wonder and awe and be amazed and value that experience, so I think having places like this helps people make the connection that values public lands which will help value things that they don't understand as well, and hopefully keep that for future generations.

SS: How has St. Helens and what has happened here since '80 affected the management of other volcanos in the Northwest or areas around. Rainier would be 01:44:00the obvious one, but you've got Baker, Hood, those would be the ones that I would think of that are considered potentially eruptive. I think Adams less so. It's a less frequent erupter. Jefferson hasn't erupted in a long time. South Sister is-

LB: It's got its little bulge. The most significant way that I think when you think about that is what's happened with the Cascade Volcanoes Observatory and the network there and the work they do through USGS. One of the things that they were tasked to do, and I think they're now finished with it was to come up with, in essence, a volcano plan for each of these potential volcanos, which we didn't really have before. Even with St. Helens, we had our plan after the eruption and yet it was one of those it became hard to keep it a priority, even to keep it up to date.

So, like, when I came to the forest in 2000, I tasked the fire management 01:45:00officer, who was also our volcano emergency response coordinator, with [the task to] make sure that plan's ready and up to date. He's like, oh yeah. Well and then when it did start erupting, it was like, "Oh, now I get why we should have it." But through that work in 2004, 2005 there's actually a paper that was included in one of the compendiums about the response network and the emergency management coordination and it was after that USGS put a primary focus on coming up with a plan for each volcano. So, that's one specific way it's really affected it.

SS: What is the general gist of those plans and basically emergency public safety focus?

LB: Those are primarily that, if something started happening, who are the partners you're working with. What do you have to do depending on what's going on? How would you evacuate people? What are the early warning things and 01:46:00conceptually you keep it up to date with the names and phone numbers of contacts and what not? I think the other piece where it's effective, again this is primarily USGS, is that idea of the sensing and the ability to do monitoring and depending on who you are, of course, there's much more here with Mount St. Helens then there was a desire to have more other places. Again, when the volcano started re-erupting in a different format in 2004, 2005 we actually had folks who came down from Alaska Volcano Observatory and they got to experience it, because they've had experiences up there, but not the same ones. What we learned in that eruption was the people management.

SS: In St. Helens?

LB: At St. Helens here in 2004. The nature of it, you know, most of the top of 01:47:00the mountain had been gone in 1980 and the subsequent one so when this eruption happened there was the whaleback [lava dome in the crater] starting coming up. It's the toothpaste thing. It started filling in the dome. It cut the glacier in half and then the glacier came back around. We have one of the only growing glaciers in the world. So, what the modern-day media what became of our event was managing media. Twice a day down at the forest headquarters we were doing press briefings and USGS folks would come over and we would be doing those. And then I believe we had 16 to 20 satellite trucks that were up near Coldwater Ridge trying to constantly be taking images of the volcano and so we were doing daily press briefings there for over a month. I remember one time Willie Scott, who was at USGS, was doing the briefing and they asked him something about what 01:48:00happens when [an eruption occurs] and right then, of course, they were showing their little TV thing and right then the mountain started spitting stuff, and he went, "Oh, you mean like right now?" So, it was that difference in timing where here we were 25 years after the original eruption, and you could basically, because of the electronic equipment we have today, you were watching it happen in [real] time.

SS: Wow.

LB: And the world was watching it.

SS: Wow. That was basically a lava dome.

LB: It was a dome building eruption. There was a harmonic tremor that scared people a lot.

SS: Was it a 5?

LB: I don't recall. Yeah. One of the learnings I had thinking about the cultural piece was we reopened Johnston Ridge to the public after a while-we didn't close the entire side off and there were some people from USGS, who were really 01:49:00concerned about that.

SS: About what?

LB: That we weren't closing enough area off. I couldn't quite understand what was going on because again the volcano wasn't going to likely do like it did in 1980 and one of the ah-ha's it took me a while to figure out is I realized that for some of those folks they were struggling with what had happened in 1980 and the idea that people had died and it was some of the same scientists-

SS: On their watch, so to speak.

LB: And it had happened on their watch and they were scared it would happen again, and it was a really interesting learning for me. I think the one other thing I mentioned, and this isn't so much about volcanos, I think we're learning a whole lot through the monitoring of the way the ecological process is working that's informing how we manage forests and what are all the parts and pieces and how do they interact together. In many ways, that is one of the most substantive 01:50:00offerings of the lessons that are here.

SS: Now, is there any relationship in terms of management plans to Lassen? It's at the southern tip of the Cascades. It had a pretty major eruption, although not on the scale of this. It's a dormant volcano, you could say active, but-

LB: I don't think there's a real strong connection. It doesn't mean there couldn't be. I think there's things we learn from seeing what happened in Mount St. Helens that it'd help explain what you see physically at Lassen. You know the little hammocks that they had never understood what those were and then all of a sudden it went, Oh, that's what that is."

SS: The debris avalanche on the north side, right?

LB: Yeah, and so but in terms of the say the two forests connecting I don't think so. US Geological Survey with the work that the Cascades Volcano Observatory do they have a variety of papers, a number of things about Rainier 01:51:00and Hood and different ones about being ready. I think where the connection from a management side with Mount St. Helens has actually been more with Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Where that is, is because some of the folks who worked here after the initial eruption on getting the interpretation things ready and basically putting together world-class service for folks, really demonstrating the Forest Service has a strong skill in those. One of those folks wound up working over at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and we did things like ranger exchanges where one of their folks would come up here to Mount St. Helens and work at Johnston Ridge, and one of our folks would go there and learn some things. So, we've had that kind of employee exchange.

SS: So, how well do you think that the Forest Service has become at managing 01:52:00parks and monuments, or monuments is essentially a park with a different name. It was fairly new a while ago, now there's quite a few. What's your take on that? And you can focus on this but a general comment.

LB: You know the Forest Service in large part we actually have a wide range of elements to the Forest Service. We have the National Forest System Lands, which would include National Forest, National Grasslands, National Monuments, National Recreation Areas and all those. Before I talk about them, I'm going to mention we also have a series of other deputy areas that many people never know about and one of them is International Forestry. We provide technical resources to many countries around the world who will ask for assistance around things. We have a branch that's around state and private forestry which is a very strong linkage with the states around things. One piece that's relevant here is we have 01:53:00the largest research organization around the world, the research branch of our agency. Sometimes people think of the Forest Service as it's that land base, and I just want to mention there's these other pieces that kind of get lost and most people never know about that are actually helping inform land management and providing service on a broad scale.

SS: Which really expanded dramatically in the '70s and '80s. The invasion of the -ologists, or whatever you want to call it.

LB: Yeah, well, and the piece that happened then was you know we've had different eras in the management of the forests. The initial phase of setting up was actually to protect them from some of the things that were moving across from the east coast. We actually had some primitive areas and the concept of wilderness areas back in the 1930s. A lot of folks don't realize that.

SS: Primitive areas, yeah.

LB: As we moved into World War II, there was quite a bit of work done where the National Forest provided a lot of material to build airplanes, spruce for airplanes, that kind of thing. In the late '50s, early '60s, a lot of it was providing a lot of wood products for all the houses for the emerging society.

SS: Baby boomers, yeah.

LB: So, a big chunk of our workforce managing at that time was foresters and engineers. In the evolution of the '60s we had all kinds of acts: the Multiple-Use Sustained-Yield Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, Wild and Scenic Rivers, you know NEPA, those kinds of things and then in the early '70s with the Monongahela and the Bitterroot decisions led to the National Forest Management Act, which is what you were calling the -ologist thing.

We started diversifying what our skills sets was and really incorporating a much 01:55:00more integrated capacity, so we'll have folks: hydrologists, wildlife biologists, fisheries biologists, landscape architects, that whole suite of folks and then working in a really integrated fashion to think about integrated activities. So, we've been through a variety of evolution over what's a land and resource plan. Here in the Northwest we had what was called the Northwest Forest Plan which then got incorporated into each plan. We're now in the process, a new planning rule came out a couple years ago, I think 2012 I guess it was, which is redefining how we'll do plan revision for the future. So, all those things affect this and the learnings from Mount St. Helens I said earlier the things 01:56:00that we're learning about the parts and pieces and what's left behind, and if you're doing active management or even how you approach what might be called restoration of an aquatic system, those kinds of things. There's many lessons from here. We learn from a lot of different places, but much great information has come from St. Helens.

Back to your question on managing "parks or monuments," you know one of the pieces that I think, our budget process is not well-suited for these because we, so for example the Park Service has a place-based budget. So, Mt. Rainier gets a place budget and then they get to compete for special programs. In the Forest Service, it's a program-based budget and you compete based on outcomes. One of 01:57:00the things we're in the process of exploring is what would be different if we were valuing people and place and linking those together so some work we've done here in the Pacific Northwest Region we've actually done focus groups in a variety of communities and employees. We have a suite of concepts that I won't go into in great detail, but there's four big ideas to it and it's the notion that nature matters and nature provides and we find the greatest good by being in community. Those are concepts that apply across the board and we're exploring how can we be more effective at that. So, you see the agency move much more towards collaboration and collaborative groups and things. That said, a lot of our focus may be on how do you deal with say ecological systems that are out of balance, so the east side with fire situation, and less so on how do you manage 01:58:00a place like the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, where I've got a unique mission. My mission is not about producing wood products or different things, but it's about protecting and enhancing the cultural, scenic natural resource and recreation.

SS: Which is a preservation, Park Service type mandate.

LB: It's more along those kinds of lines. Although, the other part of it, there's a second purpose and that is to help facilitate economic activity to the degree that you achieve the original purpose. So, it's kind of a got a little bit of both. Our budget process is not set up around how do you fund that kind of work. I think we're in an exploration mode. We have an interesting suite of unusual places in that there are several national volcanic monuments. There's actually another one in Oregon, the Newberry Crater Monument.

SS: That's right, yeah.

LB: Over on the Deschutes. We have places like the National Scenic Area I 01:59:00manage. We've got the Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area, Hells Canyon National Recreation Area. Over in Idaho we have Sawtooth and you hear National Recreation Area, and you go, "Oh, well they all must be the same." And yet they're not. Their underlying legislation says what their purposes are.

SS: So, all of them are a little different.

LB: Yeah. So, if you hear the word monument or you hear the word National Recreation Area, you have to kind of remember that that you have to go to the organic legislation of each place to see what the real purpose is. I think we're learning and we're doing better at that. I think it's a skill. In many ways one of the neat things about it, which is slightly different than the National Park Service, is that if you go back to our founding principles around finding the greatest good, it's a slightly different approach.

It isn't just protect and enhance. It's recognize that that greatest good is going to change over time and yet you've got this role of nature is providing all kinds of different things out here. Think about the information that's being provided. You think about the recreation experiences folks are having. Just one thing that we heard from folks in our focus groups was that people come here because it's iconic landscape. They love the waterfalls, the rivers, the mountains, and it didn't matter what their political spectrum was or what their views are of, well, should you cut trees or not cut trees. What's really amazing is many people value the same thing. They can't always talk about it. I do think places like this let people come together and at least have that dialogue.

SS: For a while, anyway.

LB: Yeah.

SS: The salvage logging work-they went crazy and they were really busy. Tell me 02:01:00about that. We maybe mentioned it at the start, but we did not go into details, so that it something that I would be remiss if we did not include.

LB: Great question, so there was a variety of things that happened with the salvage logging here after the eruption. For example, Weyerhaeuser started almost immediately logging and replanting and, because of the nature of private lands, and the way that was structured, they could do that very quickly and they did. With the Forest Service, one of the pieces that we do is go through the National Environmental Policy Act and so there was a team, actually, an interdisciplinary team. Again, we talked a little earlier: a hydrologist, a life 02:02:00biologist, fisheries biologist that worked on an environmental analysis to think about how you do that. So, two things happened. One is that they identified harvest activities and areas and then once they had a sense of what the actual Monument boundaries were going to be, it wasn't until that that on the National Forest that they started actually doing the operations. For example, one of the areas where I did some planning, as we talked earlier, some of that area was actually transferred to Weyerhaeuser and then some of their lands came into the Monument.

SS: That was a tradeoff.

LB: Yeah, and so they traded area up here where along the Road 99 to the Windy Ridge and we've drove along places where harvest had occurred. At that time probably within that year after one of the things the Forest Service did was try 02:03:00and say, "Okay, how do you do this?" Many of these trees were case hardened. Just from the heat. It was like, if you tried to hammer a rock into them, you couldn't.

SS: They're still alive, but-

LB: Yeah, or they were dead, but they were almost like concrete. A lot of them had different things in them. In putting the sales together, this is sort of an oddball factoid, but at the time in the early '80s many companies had paid a whole lot of money when they were [expecting to be] cutting older trees. They maybe had overbid some sales and there were some economic challenges going on in the Northwest at the time in terms of things and some of the things that happened is, if you were a timber company and you bought one of the salvage sales from Mount St. Helens [area], you got what's called contract term adjustment on your other sales. If your contract was 5 years long and it was 02:04:00going to take you 2 years to do a sale up here, you got 2 extra years to do that, which really could help them economically. One reason they did that was to give people an incentive to buy the sales. Another thing that happened is that, although there were a lot of large trees and a lot of wood material, it was really challenging, one, to move it out and, second, to mill it. Things like the saw chains and then when they actually had the saw blades at the mills with the kind of conditions that the material was in. [the tephra abraded the blades of chainsaws and blades in sawmills]

SS: Because they were so hardened.

LB: Because it was hardened. There was so much dust. There was so much of the volcanic pumice. It just really affected the mechanical things. You actually had people to my recollection, and I'm getting old enough now I could be forgetting 02:05:00things, I remember thinking there was a mill that was down in Medford that was hauling from here at Mount St. Helens down to Medford, Oregon. Again, you think about why would they? A piece of that's probably around the economic part. You had a pretty active thing going. There were a lot of logging trucks thorough the area. One of the objectives, of course, was a concern about, just like after a fire, that you don't have a lot of vegetation on the soils and if you got a lot of deep soils and you get heavy rains that we're going to have a lot of erosion. Some of those things that scientists were concerned about, about well why are they planting or why are they seeding. From a managerial standpoint, it's one of those things that you learn to do to actually help stabilize things. It gives you that nexus point where there can be different opinions about things. I do 02:06:00not remember how much volume they took out of here. I should remember it, but I don't. It was hundreds of millions of board feet. A lot of that was in the Clearwater drainage.

SS: What were the rules about how to do salvage logging?

LB: In terms of rules?

SS: [Wind obstructs audio] What were they required to do? The access, the [win obstructs audio] resources, etc.

LB: A lot of that is figured out when we do our environmental analysis, whether it's salvage logging or using vegetation management to create a different landscape conditioning and whether you do a stewardship sale today or, you know, a timber sale, it's through our environmental analysis that we look at how wide 02:07:00a riparian stream buffer might you leave. Do you leave standing trees? How much down woody material do you leave, that kind of thing. That gets determined in the environmental analysis and then it's supposed to be translated into the contract. We would lay out in the contract, and I'm going to make something up: let's say you actually had some shrubs going along a riparian area. It might be that for 200 ft on either side of the stream you wouldn't be doing situations in there. In a regular sale you might have designated say 8 large trees per acre that they'd leave. You might have so many snags you'd be asking them to leave. That would have been a part of that. Again, it's through the contract. We would put in those conditions and then we have what's called a sale administrator who 02:08:00is actually out there with the contractor and it's their job to know the contract, to know what's required, and to be monitoring on the ground to make sure the contractor is actually doing that. Sometimes that can be challenging, especially if it's a helicopter sale and it's a long haul away.

SS: You mean helicopter sale, you mean?

LB: A helicopter sale would be where you're using a helicopter as a way to remove the material.

SS: To pull the logs, right.

LB: Most of what was done out here, there's probably three different types of logging. One is what's called ground base equipment. Maybe a rubber tire skidder or tractor. Another would be cable logging, and that can be where you might drag one end of the log, you lift one end and drag one end. It might be where you have what's called full suspension: the log is lifted off the ground and you have a tower and you put a cable out a certain distance and tie it off 02:09:00somewhere, and then, [third, there's] helicopter [where] you're just flying the logs out. So, the sale administrator's job is to be out there checking things, make sure they're doing it, and in different sales, in different operators, you kind of learn a little bit about who to pay attention to-

SS: Doing things. Need to watch them.

LB: What the quality is. There are mechanisms in the sale. Let's say, if we learn that there was going to be untoward environmental damage from something that was not recognized initially, there actually is a mechanism in the sale contract to terminate the contract for that. That requires our Washington office Chief's approval. There's a whole series of things. Oftentimes, the contracts will be several inches thick. We do inspection reports and all that kind of thing.

SS: How long do you remember it took for the Forest Service to address the salvage logging issue on their lands. Obviously, you didn't have any say on the Weyerhaeuser lands.

LB: Correct.

SS: But was there still concerns, even with on the Weyerhaeuser lands because of how it would affect erosion dynamics?

LB: I think the Forest Service was paying primary attention to how they would be managing the national forest lands and there's a mix of conditions here where the lands that are to the west or the east of Road 99 are within an area that's totally a National Forest now. So, that's where most of the impacts were identified as things we had an effect over. To the north, it was a mix of federal and private and to the east it was primarily private land and so I think where your question came in was more as they were negotiating what land 02:11:00exchanges would occur in order to create the monument and have it be all national forest. It was negotiations around what conditions you wanted the land to be in. That was more of the Weyerhaeuser part. In terms of the environmental analysis, they got on that pretty quickly. The folks who, they actually within a year they had done their first environmental analysis. It covered quite a bit of area that's on the east side of the current Monument.

SS: Is that where we are, basically?

LB: We're on the east side right now. Yeah. The area that I was brought in to look at, I say I came on May 18 of 1981, which I always thought was sort of ironic, was an area they weren't sure whether it was going to be in the designated monument or not.

SS: Because? Any reason?

LB: Because at the time there was a lot of negotiation going on boundaries and options and the different options being looked at. In some options it would not have been in the Monument, some options it was. What they determined to do was be ready for just in case. Because if you waited, when the possibility could happen that you needed to move, but it was kind of not timely and so part of my job was actually facilitating the environmental analysis and then figuring out where should we be removing trees and where shouldn't we.

SS: In short, how would you say-explain that. What the designations were, in terms of zones. Just a general synopsis of that.

LB: Of?

SS: Of removing logs, where not to and where to.

LB: A piece of that is often you're looking at how steep is the area. In the area I was looking at there were some really amazing riparian areas with major 02:13:00waterways going through them and so you might be looking at leaving material there. There might be other areas where say there was just what felt like you threw down pickup sticks and things were all kind of intermingled and as you look at it and think about-and, again, in this case you're not thinking about natural processes, but you're' saying okay, if this is part of the national forest, the objective would have been to remove some of that material so that it could grow in differently. There were some areas that were really steep, you know 120%+ slopes, and you kind of go, "That's an area you wouldn't remove trees from," you want to stabilize [it].

SS: Don't touch, right.

LB: You look at variety of those things. Of course, after the eruption it was a slightly different situation, but you're often looking at what kind of habitat. Is it an area where you've had nesting bald eagles? Or is it an area with elk 02:14:00winter range? If, for example, you might do different kinds of treatments in an elk winter range than you would do in a forage area. One of the things that we're seeing today where we've had less what you would call clearcut or regeneration harvest on national forest, and in many of the western states there's a concern about the impact on elk populations, because they benefit from that open area and the forage and there isn't that much of it anymore. So, the side effect of that is that we have this really large herd of elk on the west side of Mount St. Helens because you've got this huge forage area.

SS: I saw a bunch of them this morning while leaving my camp.

LB: Yeah.

SS: In the debris avalanche lower area.

LB: Right.

SS: They were sprinting across the road, two huge bucks.

LB: Oh wow.

SS: They were big, man.

LB: You know part of that is it's a forage area. Part of it is some of the seeding that was done and part of it is, when you look around, there is not a 02:15:00lot of open area that's providing that. When we try to do environmental analysis and think from a wide suite of objectives the way we're looking at it today, you're really thinking on a big planning scale. Kind of how does this area fit in the landscape and what are the functions and roles it's playing? Also, on National Forest, recognizing each landowner has different management objectives, so how you're going to manage an area might be different if you're a private landowner versus if you're the Forest Service versus if you are the Park Service, for example. But you're really saying where does this area fit within the area around it, trying to think about the big picture objectives that you have and then finding ways to balance that. Anadromous fish, for example, is a big thing. We have a lot of areas in the Pacific Northwest where one of our real 02:16:00goals is to ensure we can have a [SS interrupts].

SS: Keep that connection to the sea.

LB: Mm-hmm. Yep.

SS: Theoretically and otherwise.

LB: Right. We actually have places now where we've removed dams. One on the Gifford Pinchot Forest here we removed a dam called the Hemlock Dam.

SS: Where was that?

LB: Down near the Wind River Experimental Forest.

SS: Okay.

LB: Down near there, and that was primarily around facilitating steelhead coming up and within the day that we rewatered the stream, that afternoon they saw a steelhead upriver. It's that kind of impact you're having.

SS: Now, the salvage logging on the Weyerhaeuser lands where they just took everything, did that affect the watershed at all because they just stripped it?

LB: It would be hard for me to make a statement about that. I think Weyerhaeuser 02:17:00might identify that is that the watershed was already so impacted by what had occurred that removing all of the material would not have an additional effect and that they were going to mitigate that by their replanting. If you were to talk to somebody from Weyerhaeuser, they feel very positive that they got that material removed and replanted and a new stand growing very quickly.

SS: Do you agree?

LB: It would not be the way I would manage for the National Forest system. That said, again each landowner has their own objectives and if the way you want to look at something is landowner objectives, I think they achieved what they did. Now, if I look at it as a real function would be around having more of the parts and pieces of the ecosystem that are naturally there, I don't think it achieved that.

SS: How and when did the sciences become central to management planning discussions at Mount St. Helens? I know we talked about the -ologists in the '70s, but did that happen immediately or was it like you just had managers and then you added scientists later?

LB: I think that the way you just described it is probably [true]. It probably provided an interesting opportunity in that while the mountain existed as this kind of snow cone effect where people were coming and recreating, there was probably general science going on. This forest does have an experimental forest. There was connection with scientists.

SS: You're talking about Wind River?

LB: Yeah. However, often between, although we've got this great research branch, we have two things with research at that time that we did. One was the basic research that occurred in the experimental forest and another was where 02:19:00scientists might have interfaced with managers. I didn't work here early on. It would be a supposition for me to say did they have a strong interface. What I would guess did occur, though, is when the mountain started bulging and such, obviously with USGS there became this very interfaced and then I think you had people like Fred Swanson and Jerry Franklin and Jim Sedell who saw the possibilities and they worked for Pacific Northwest Research Station, and they were ready to come in. My sense would be you know they had to work hard to be able to come in quickly to be on that front door. I think they were fairly early involved in the conversations. Managers were in a learning phase about how do you do all that interactive and there probably were a lot of tension points.

SS: How and when did the prospect of a Volcanic National Monument emerge? That was early on for you, but still you saw happen. You became involved with it in some way later and throughout. How did that happen? Describe that process.

LB: So, a great question again with the role that I had back in 1981, I wouldn't have been part of that.

SS: Still, you observed it.

LB: Yeah, what I observed was I was working out in the field. There was a district ranger for what at the time was called the St. Helens Ranger District. He was involved working with the forest supervisor and others in the conversation. There was certainly a number of people involved. There were scientists. There were community members. There were legislators. Similar to any kind of place, there's the dialogue that goes on about what should occur. One of 02:21:00the conversations was around just make it a national park, for example. There was a lot of dialogue about how big should it be? What options? What alternatives? That piece was going on. I was here in 1981 working on the Tradedollar area. It was probably later, probably about 3, 4 months after that I learned that, okay, it had become part of the area that was going to be the Monument and so I think the act passed May 26 of '82. It was one year after I had been here. Over that two-year period, all the negotiations are occurring. One thing I know that was really important to the Forest Service, is, especially this idea of it being a national park, is demonstrating that, yes, we do have 02:22:00the ability to manage places like this. The community folks who were nearby wanted it to be a national forest because of some concerns they had around the limitations that occur in national parks. One of the things, at least for a while, that we really demonstrated was the strength of our ability to do this. We had world class interpreters. We actually had people from the Park Service coming here to learn from our people.

SS: Really?

LB: Yeah.

SS: Who were the stakeholders in creating the Monument? Just draw a sketch of that.

LB: Ones that I would be aware of-obviously, the scientists who had an interest. The State of Washington, various state agencies, the National Forest Service community members. I think there were national environmental groups who were involved because this was one of those things that's sort of precedent setting 02:23:00and so, similar to many other places, you had both local and national interests.

SS: Was the Sierra Club involved?

LB: I believe so, yeah.

SS: What's some of the big, local organizations up here in Washington? Then and today that may have changed.

LB: Right, so then and I don't know if it's a group that was involved, probably there's other people that would be more encompassing on this, but Audubon Society was a big group in this area. Sierra Club, as you mentioned. The Wilderness Society is actually a fairly robust, they go up and down in terms of their presence, but at that general point in time they were fairly active. There is a group called the Gifford Pinchot Task Force that was actually created in 02:24:00the '80s and their sole purpose was monitoring and influencing what happened on the Gifford Pinchot Forest in terms of management in large part because in the State of Washington there's a lot of private land.

SS: More than Oregon?

LB: Yes. There are more National Forest in Oregon percentagewise. Here in the State of Washington you've got the Colville National Forest on the far eastern side, the Okanogan-Wenatchee, the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie, the Olympic and the Gifford Pinchot.

SS: What's the one in the south, in the southeast?

LB: The southeast you have a district off of the Umatilla.

SS: That's what I thought.

LB: The Walla Walla Ranger District.

SS: Right. The Umatilla's in Oregon, mostly.

LB: Yeah. Their forest headquarters is in Oregon and all the other districts. One of the concerns the Gifford Pinchot Task Force had is, if you look at, and they were primarily focused on old growth, but if you look at the, again, a 02:25:00visual of imagine you're in a satellite looking down and you think about getting to the ocean, the Columbia River, and then you look at the state lands which are managed for the school trust fund and the private lands, the National Forests really are that transition zone and so the Gifford Pinchot's primary task has been monitoring and engaging in this National Forest. They get engaged a little bit with monument type things but it's not their key focus.

SS: Right.

LB: Obviously, one of the big groups now that's a key thing and have tried to involve over various iterations over the decades is the Mount St. Helens Institute, and that's sort of the idea of having a friends' group that helps accomplish some of the things that we want to do.

SS: Is that a cooperative organization just with the Monument?

LB: Yes. Pretty much so. The institute is their own organization. They're a non-profit and their focus is Mount St. Helens.

SS: They are separate, but they work integrally with the Forest Service.

LB: They work integrally.

SS: That's what I meant, yeah.

LB: Yeah.

SS: They have one like that in Canyon Lands and most places where I've been.

LB: This is about the fourth iteration. There was something called the Mount St. Helens Educational Fund. There's been different varieties and one of the challenges has been they do great work and it's hard to raise the money. And we don't have the umbrella like the National Park Foundation for them to operate under. We do have a National Forest Foundation. Their focus, they've identified focus areas, and this isn't necessarily one of them, and they're a fledgling.

SS: How strongly did timber interests fight to minimize the size of the volcanic 02:27:00monument? And within the Monument minimize wilderness or scientific reserve areas?

LB: Yeah, that's a great question and I probably don't know.

SS: Should we go read your management plans?

LB: Yeah, you can tell a bit about it in the management plan because some of that's reflected there. I think the other piece with it is as you look at how the balance came out amongst the alternatives that congress considered in designating the Monument, you can kind of see the reflection there of trying to find that balance between where should be those areas of ecological processes versus removing things. Again, in a time of evolution it was just 1976 when the National Forest Management Act had been passed, and actually the forest plans 02:28:00for this part of the country had not occurred yet. I was on the Flathead Forest and our plan came out in 1983. The plans here actually came out in around 1990, '91 and '92.

SS: Now the wind stops. Okay, we're on the record again. You were just saying-sorry, I had to turn it off for a minute.

LB: What was I saying? Oh, about the forest plans.

SS: Right.

LB: In this part of the country the first iteration of the land and resource management plans were coming out in 1990, '91 and '92. At the time when the volcano had erupted and we're going through this process much of that work had not been done here in the Pacific Northwest. Before we had Land and Resource 02:29:00Management Plans under the National Forest Management Act what many areas did was have what were called Unit Plans.

SS: Now is this the 60 Act or the 76 Act?

LB: The '76 Act is the National Forest Management Act. Before we had that, we just had to do a forest plan. One of the ways that we managed was we would have unit plans for different sections of the forest and so those are the kinds of things that would help guide what was the purposes and what not. Obviously with the volcano erupting, it provided a different option for this area.

SS: What kind of interfaces are there with the Monument with BLM lands?

LB: None.

SS: None.

LB: There's no BLM lands here.

SS: Okay. I just saw this in here. I just wanted to know.

LB: There is one BLM district in the State of Washington. They're actually managed out of Spokane and they manage lands from the east side of the state all the way out to the Whidbey Island.

SS: On your shirt there's a big bug.

LB: Oh, thank you.

SS: I didn't know if it was-

LB: Yeah. Now what you did have here was a number of mining claims. Mining claims are generally-they become a private inholding. There was quite a bit after the monument was designated there was quite a bit of work done to reacquire those claims because there's different things that go with the land but, if somebody's established a legitimate claim, the National Forest might be managing the surface lands, but the miner has the rights to the-

SS: Exactly. The same was true with parks.

LB: Yep.

SS: Did you have a lot here?

LB: There was quite a bit up around the Spirit Lake area. This is an area that, I don't know how many. Again, that's one of the things, if I did know, I've forgotten. But there's a number of them around. One way that you'd know that is 02:31:00of course the miner's car down there [a display near Meta Lake], but also-

SS: Was it gold?

LB: Yes, they were looking for gold. There's other areas. Gold is one of the things. There's other minerals that mining companies have looked at. We do actually have farther to the west there's actually something called Miners Creek. There were areas all up and down there. There were a number of claims around Spirit Lake.

SS: Are those mostly bought out now? Retired?

LB: I think that they've gotten to 100%.

SS: Okay, good. How would you characterize how interpretation developed here? You've got the scientific reserve idea. You've got preservation. You've got different things. Of course, it's a unique animal in the system because of St. 02:32:00Helens is St. Helens.

LB: Right. One piece with it, we've probably always had storytelling and Spirit Lake and the areas around it were really special to people way back when. You had the Girl Scout camp. You had different camps going on here. It was a place that people came and whenever people are coming to recreate you have storytelling. It depends on how you want to label interpretation. One of the purposes of the enabling legislation for the Monument was interpretation and education, so it was built in and it was an expectation that it would be included. I think as the management plan was developed and then implemented, the Monument and the forest brought in people who had great expertise in trying to do that and storytelling on a variety of fronts, some as a cultural story. What 02:33:00was the people's story who were here? Then another part as you start telling both the geology and the biology of this place and one of the really key elements is the interface between the information developed by the scientists and translating that into little modules of information that can be conveyed to people and helping them to be able to take information as it's developing in real time and share that with folks.

The interpretation that you see here at the Monument is done in a variety of ways: some of it's through movies. Some of it's through displays. A lot of it's interfaced with USGS information. USGS CVO [Cascades Volcano Observatory, Vancouver, WA] actually has, or at one time, had a scientist stationed out of 02:34:00Johnston Ridge Observatory and they helped. Then people like Charlie Crisafulli are helping provide information that is going into the messaging and the folks here have a really great training program that they do, actually for their spring training as they get ready it takes about three weeks. Not all of that is training people to be interpreters. Some of it's defensive driving and things, but they actually use the principles of interpretation, the National Association of Interpreters and Todd Cullings, we have probably one of the best interpreters in the entire country. He helps train everybody here and we bring in folks and they're getting the story. They get time to work on their programs. Part of what they're encouraged to do is to think about what is a story that connects for them, because often that's the best story that you could tell. Then how did they 02:35:00take their principles of that and translate it into a story? They do it in multiple ways. One is actually in a spot, so on the plaza at Johnston Ridge or at Windy Ridge where people are sitting there listening to you. Another is this idea of roving interpretation, where you're out wandering around and you come across people.

SS: And you go to Windy Ridge or what have you.

LB: Right and just through the question people ask. You can take that question and can work with how am I going to tell this story here in a way that connects with what they are here to hear about and yet we give some real core messages.

SS: How do you deal with the Creationists here? I mean remember the Grand Canyon thing where they put the alternative view of creation which I thought was very questionable by the Park Service. What do you deal with that because I know there are some active organizations here? I saw them one day.

LB: There is an active organization here [SS talks over LB].

SS: That goes against with the general tenor of post-enlightenment natural history, evolution of history and natural history. That's kind of the general schemata that most people who work with the Park Service, the Forest Service, interpreters in that agency general espouse to. How do you deal with that understanding that these are also citizens of this country who are paying taxes, etc., and this is their land also?

LB: Right. It's a great question. I can't speak for the current Monument manager. I'll just share some of my observations. One is that there's actually a museum down along the visitor center corridor that is dedicated to telling that story, and so they have their own museum there. There is a geologist who's involved with that perspective and believes that the story of Mount St. Helens and the way the eruption occurred, and the different parts and pieces is a 02:37:00classic example that proves that the world was created in 7 days. That individual on a couple of occasions filed applications to do research. You don't just get to come do research. You actually have to do it through a particular process or apply for say a special use permit. They have on occasion submitted applications asking to be allowed to enter the more restricted zone. There's an application process that the Monument uses to evaluate that. At this point, the things that they propose to do have not met that criteria. In terms of people coming and engaging at the place, they would be treated similar to say anybody else wanting to come and say tell their story to people or set up booths or anything. You actually have to have a permit to do that. You have to go through that process. There's very little of that approved here in the monument, in 02:38:00large part because it's not what the objective is but we are guided by free speech issues. There's a whole number of things in the question that you asked about. The things our Forest Leadership Team did when I was here, we used to do an activity called Camporama. The leadership team would spend 3 days on a section of the forest really talking about strategic issues and different things. On year we spent on the west side of the Monument and some other locations and we actually visited the museum where they put forward the idea of Mount St. Helens and Creationism just to expose ourselves to there's a lot of different viewpoints.

SS: Right.

LB: We sat through their perspective and much of it's a bookstore with materials 02:39:00that they believe support that viewpoint. But they also have a display where they show different pieces. As you would listen to the scientists tell the story of the surge and of all the things going down the river, they use those same bits and stories to say this is an example of how this occurred, and this occurred, and this occurred. One of the things as a manager, not as a scientist, but as a manager, that it helps remind me about is how do I be open to hearing lots of different perspectives, because oftentimes some of those unpopular perspectives turn out later to be new information that we have. So, for example, things that we're taking from Mt. St. Helens with the idea of leaving legacies and leaving green trees and leaving snags and down woody material, when we built those into other parts of the management of the northwest, there were a lot of 02:40:00people who didn't agree with that.

They didn't think that was a good way to do it and yet it's now become part of our knowledge and understanding. So one thing that's really important as a manager is how do you stay not necessarily affected by all these things, but open to information. That was one of the things we tried to do was rather than just deciding that's wrong, was, "Okay let's experience it," because they consider themselves to have a visitor center and here, we have all these visitor centers and we didn't necessarily see them that way. It was a good exposure for us. We had some very interesting philosophical talks that evening around the campfire.

SS: I think so. Now you kind of mentioned it quickly there: how has what has happened here at St. Helens in terms of the science reflected back into management policies region wise, even further, but we can stick with this area.

LB: I think you know one of the ways that I would look at it is in terms of the Douglas-fir region, which is primarily western Washington, western Oregon, it's had a major impact in terms of understanding how these systems work and understanding the dynamics of what's going on here. We've learned a tremendous amount about biological legacies. It helped informed the idea of what you leave is as important as what you take. A lot of times when we're doing management and it was looking at, well, what are the areas where you could remove trees from? It helped us not just think of how many trees are you removing and where it is on the patchwork, but it also helped convey this importance of this material left behind. Again, that's standing live, standing dead, and down woody 02:42:00material. That got incorporated into some forest plans even before the idea of the Northwest Forest Plan. Another way it started affecting things was this idea of riparian areas and how important the dynamics of that area are, so you're already seeing some of that information get translated. It's one of the beauties here and one of the things that I love not only here, but at the H.J. Andrews is you know many times, if you wait for information to get translated in a scientific paper, you could be waiting for decades. Decades is probably not correct, but you're collecting data for a long time and then it might take a number of years to get it in. The beauty of the connection here and say at the Andrews is that we took a lot of what we were learning which is both basic and 02:43:00applied research kinds of concepts and starting applying them immediately, and maybe before the papers were written, maybe before the ah-ha's were there. It doesn't mean you got it all right, but you were probably at the 80% level, and you could incorporate them.

SS: The ideas had enough substance and validity based on what you were seeing happening that there was a legitimate reason to apply or try to apply all elements of various ideas and analysis, right?

LB: Correct, and so one of the things you might think about is, prior to incorporating some of the ideas in the Douglas-fir region, you often would have a fairly standard prescription you might use for, again, this is where you're removing vegetation to provide wood products for society, and it was probably that you would clear cut, remove a lot of the material, pile it, burn what was left over, and then you'd come in and plant new Douglas-fir on an 8x8 [foot] 02:44:00spacing, which meant you had way more trees than you needed and you were going to go in and pre-commercially thin, so you got the best. That was a pretty standard prescription and we evolved to a much more complicated place where we were, and generally it would be say 20 to 60 acres in size and create edge for elk, and such, so we became more complicated in the idea of leaving more features behind. One of the things that we saw when we would do trips down at Blue River when I worked there, we would take people out is some people called it a term they might use is "dirty forestry," whether you agree with it or not, not knowing what you're seeing, a lot of times if you look at a clearcut and as it starts growing in it looks clean, so to speak.

Now what they were seeing was places with big trees laying down and with snags left and maybe the new young trees having started growing in and they're looking at it and it looks messy. You could call it messy or dirty. One thing we learned through some of the studies we did down there with people who looked at people's reactions was that a lot of times people's understanding of what they were seeing, whether they liked it or didn't like it, could be affected by their perception of whether it was messy. So, we actually did some studies where we would try and say okay give us your impression beforehand and then we would do a little education about what they were seeing and then gives us your impression and see if there was a shift as they got educated. So, pretty much throughout 02:46:00the Northwest now, I think, you would see with the biological legacies as well embedded. Again, that didn't wait for being proven. One of the ways we talked about it at the Andrews, because we looked at it both with this part as well as what is the landscape level management look like, and we would talk about it on some of the engagements that we have with people is we can't wait for it to be proven to try it out. I think a lot of what we learned here at St. Helens got incorporated in that way.

SS: You mentioned the Andrews pretty briefly. I kind of would like you to address how the Andrews, how you see the Andrews and the LTER eclectic ecosystem science dynamic work that came out of that place, how you think it affected this place and how you see this place came back and affected what they did leading 02:47:00into when you actually became District Ranger right down at Blue River, correct? I mean, you worked with them intimately for years.

LB: I think a piece of it it's sort of that interesting thing in time is that in those early decades the Andrews became what was called the IBP, one of the IBP sites, which was something that Jerry Franklin helped get set up with this idea of the International Biosphere Program.

SS: Biological Program.

LB: Yeah, Biological Program. Then it eventually led to this concept of long-term ecological research, which is more about integrated research.

SS: Right.

LB: And that notion of finding a way to bring different people together. One of the ways I think these two places are interrelated is you had people committed to place. You got somebody like Fred Swanson who's a geologist; somebody like 02:48:00Jerry Franklin, who is a forester type; Jim Sedell and Gordie Reeves who are aquatics people and they were all working together out of Corvallis connected to this idea of these places and some of them had more connection than others. So, Jerry grew up in the Camas area you know, so this was a special place to him, and yet [SS interrupts LB].

SS: It's his home turf.

LB: It's his home turf.

SS: He has a cabin in Wind River.

LB: He still has a cabin in the Government Mineral Springs area, and he's dedicated to the Wind River Experimental Forest and he had ideas and visions of how can we help make these experimental forests be more in terms of what they produce. You had that interesting core network of people and they were used to working together in an integrated fashion and then I think they've been evolving that for a long time so that when the mountain erupted it was early in that 02:49:00process. I think coming here and into this setting actually threw them together in that idea of integrated and maybe in some ways helped evolve the way they thought about it. That's just my observation from outside and in the LTER network concept, where there's a little bit of funding that helps create that reward for doing integrated work, one of the beauties there was having a place and a very active National Forest where the juxtaposition of time and place and who was there and so you had this set of folks. Jerry was the lead with the LTER group. You had managers at the forest who were interested in changing and learning.

It was one of the magic moments in time where everybody came together, and so I 02:50:00think partly it's two different places that are really special to a set of people and then each of those constellations. So, you have a core set of people and then at each of the locations they have a different constellation of people that are around them, but that core group keeps the linkage and the dialogue going back and forth. Then, the other piece I think that I've seen is that you have people who are passionate about place. Like Charlie Crisafulli. He's been here since the beginning and it's his passion and it's his life in terms of his work. Between having that one set of people who were core and then having these other folks and having the idea of things like pulses, which St. Helens wasn't 02:51:00the only place they've done pulses, some down in California in different places, but having that idea brings scientists together I think has evolved thinking.

SS: The pulse, the strength of the pulse, and the continuation of the pulse over time on a consistent basis is much stronger here than the ones they started down in California.

LB: Yes.

SS: Which don't continue anymore.

LB: Right.

SS: They did Sequoia [Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park], basically, and I think they did two of them, maybe, or three, maybe?

LB: Yes, I think that's about right. I think that's one of the challenges with any long-term research is how do you keep people interested? It's one of the beauties I think they're working on here; is how do you really hand it off to the next generation? And what's going to get them interested in being here because they're coming in at a different trajectory. The original folks here are what made it interesting here, different than say Sequoia, is you're seeing the real change. You came in at an amazing event.

SS: Some of the awe factor has been mitigated.

LB: Right.

SS: It's still fabulous, but it's not oh, my God! Stunning, blow your mind away. Well, the first few years when there was still mostly-

LB: Even the first 20 years. Now the challenge is, too, the new people coming in now only is the awe factor mitigated some, but they never experienced the real humph. What will motivate them? What will keep them here? I'll tell you I think over the years it's taken dedicated people. It was really exciting to hear that Rob Mangold [PNW Station Director] has supported this. There were timea with certain station directors with Mount St. Helens and its work wasn't necessarily the Station's priority and there's at least one of the pulses, Jim Sedell when he was station director at Pacific Southwest Research Station down in California actually underwrote the pulse because one, he was committed to it and, two, it's 02:53:00part of his heart place. So, just like any transitions, trying to think about how you do handoffs and how you really keep long-term work going. It will be fun to see Mark Harman's log decompositions studies designed to go 200 years, and see, okay, what really happens when Mark retires?

SS: Right. So, how would you characterize the aesthetic of Mount St. Helens, pre- and post-eruption? What is beautiful? And why do people have different concepts of beauty for this place?

LB: That's a really great question. So, my sense, starting with the last question, why people have different concepts of beauty is, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. I think often one of the pieces I believe, our 02:54:00role as public land managers is to help provide opportunities for people to make memories. I think much of how we form our concept of beauty comes from our childhood, from the values that we experience from the experiences that we have and so from that is where a lot of the different senses of beauty come from. Many people who were here prior to the 1980 eruption who had spent time on the lake, who had been on the mountain, who had sat down in Portland and looked at the mountain.

SS: Had grown used to the Fuji-esque look.

LB: That was their context for things. For some I think that was ripped away and I've talked to people who feel like the mountain betrayed them. They 02:55:00anthropomorphized the mountain, like that it did this to me, like it took this away. How could it ever do that? It's an interesting piece about how our psychology works, about how we connect with place. The beauty of that is they were so connected to place, which is really a neat thing because place is embedded in our souls.

SS: Exactly.

LB: For me, not having visited prior to the eruption, I don't have that context other than pictures of the place, or if I had ever visited, I don't remember it. For me, part of the beauty of this place is the evolution part, being here in the middle of the blast zone, standing out there and feeling the power of nature, and that's a word that even today you know 30 some years later, what I 02:56:00remember is power, a feeling of power and awe to be standing out in this place and know, one, that it had happened and, two, that it could do it again any minute and I could be dead. It changed me in a bit, and I love the way in which the mountain is evolving. One of my favorite moments is actually in 2000 I got an opportunity to walk up into the crater and sit at the base of the dome and it was an ah-ha moment for me because sitting there eating lunch, being exhausted and wondering if I'd ever make it out, but it was listening to it and it was like listening in a bowling alley. There were all these boulders rolling down the side and it was noisy.

SS: Because the dome constantly is slowly growing.

LB: Well, and it wasn't just the dome, they were rolling down the sides of the peak and my ah-ha was until I sat there, I had never had a context that there 02:57:00would be that noise there. It was one of those ah-ha's about being open to experiences and place because I kind of doing as a duh thing and hit your forehead. Once I experienced it, it's like duh. Well, of course. This is a geological event going on. Of course, it's noisy. Of course, rocks are rolling down. Yet, it had never occurred to me. That's for me one of the beauties of the place is that. Another beauty for me is seeing the joy on people's faces when they get their ah-ha moments and knowing that the experience they're having here is maybe creating new little scientists for the future, maybe creating senses of wonder that people will take back with them. One of the not-joyous parts is when you see somebody who's sort of like, well, is that all there is. It's kind of 02:58:00like, oh my gosh. That's a piece, it's both the evolution of the place biologically and physically and then the interconnection of people with place for me that creates the beauty. A memory I have from 2000, when we were having the 20th anniversary, which was a big to-do. Twenty years is sort of a big moment.

SS: Forty will probably be.

LB: Forty might be. Fifty, for sure, will be. But I remember being out here on Road 99 on the way to Windy Ridge and I had my uniform on and I would listen to people talk, and they would tell you their stories about it and the ah-ha moment was listening to somebody come up and go oh my gosh it's changed so much. I believe how much has grown in. And then the next person would come up and say it's so devastated. I can't believe how nothing is happening. One of my 02:59:00experiences was these were people who had seen the area before, been here early, right after they opened the road, was that piece about how everybody experiences a place differently and to have that juxtaposition of moments. I had another one of those on the Andrews once where we were doing a field tour and Stub Stewart [forest products business leader], who was a big donor to OSU Foundation, was on that and one of the pieces, of course, was about timber industry and we were talking about the importance of biological legacy. He was getting really upset and he pointed his finger down at piece that was laying down and he went that's a Cadillac there. He actually turned around and said to me, "There will be Nuremberg-like trials someday and you will be found guilty." Art McKee, who was the manager of the Andrews Forest [SS interrupts LB].

SS: Of what?

LB: Of not providing economic value, you know, that these were things that we were leaving behind, and he could not get around his mind why it was okay to leave this piece of material that might be worth $8,000. It just didn't make sense to him. He couldn't understand it. So, Art took him off to talk to him about it, because he's a big donor to OSU and it was very important. He had that experience. Meanwhile, Stan Gregory, who's a fisheries person with OSU, was walking up from a riparian area where he had taken some folks from the National Parks Service and had been talking with them and they were like this is horrible. I can't believe this is actually good management, and, so, it was that juxtaposition in the same moment in time of people seeing the same things and not liking for very different reasons. Those are two points in times that I will always remember, because they helped me keep context about there aren't right 03:01:00answers out here and remember that, and for all that we're learning, we will always learn more. If we ever think we have the right answer, we're probably kidding ourselves, because it's a matter of continuing to observe and learn and modify.

SS: That is a perfect final answer.