The Zybach Collection · Elliott oral history · November 8, 2017
A road, a forest, and forty years of change · Listen & read · 5 minutes
What changes when you return to a forest after forty years?
Ride toward Dean Mountain with Jerry Phillips, David Gould, Bob Zybach, Amber Ross and Randy Wiest. A road built by the Civilian Conservation Corps opens a conversation about work, changing forestry goals and a familiar landmark.
These are the participants’ memories and judgments. Hear their voices, follow the published words, and explore the place they are talking about.
Start listeningNovember 8, 2017 · Tape 7-C · 16:46–21:54
One continuous excerpt from the original field recording.
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David Gould: Part of the CCC route, here. p. 140
Bob Zybach: So this is the CCC road up to Dean’s Mountain? p. 140
Jerry Phillips: It is. p. 140
David Gould: It doesn't look too much different when my grandparents brought me out here. Except it's got rock on it, it didn't have rock then. p. 140
Timing is approximate for quiet or overlapping remarks.
David Gould: They're filling [forested] holes. See how much opening you get in these groves? Guess that's what those birds need to land in. p. 140
Timing is approximate for quiet or overlapping remarks.
Jerry Phillips: It still amazes me, when they built their camps, they swore they were not going to lose a single day's work, ever. And they didn't. They carried that out for seven years. They never lost a day's work, and they took Sunday off. And they never killed a man. Here are all these 18, 19 year-old boys, p. 140
Jerry Phillips: no hard hats, no canopies for the tractors, using explosives all the time, never killed a single kid. p. 141
Continued from page 140; speaker inferred from the printed paragraph.
Bob Zybach: Wow. p. 141
David Gould: They got a lot done, too. It’s not a very big camp where we’re going. p. 141
Timing is approximate for quiet or overlapping remarks.
Jerry Phillips: They broke all of today's industrial accident rules. p. 141
David Gould: That's why they're still alive, I guess. p. 141
Randy Wiest: They focused on staying safe instead of being protected? p. 141
Jerry Phillips: Well I went around and interviewed three of them for my book, and I found all those three. p. 141
David Gould: Kids from the city, too, they got some of them. p. 141
Jerry Phillips: Scattered all around western Oregon, and Charleston, Brownsville, all these different places. Of course some went back home again. Some were from Missouri. p. 141
Timing is approximate for quiet or overlapping remarks.
Bob Zybach: Jerry, if you had to do it over, would you still have them convert the myrtle to fir, or would you tend to just leave the myrtle as it is? p. 141
Jerry Phillips: Well, we have so little of it that that was never really a question that we dealt with. We probably would have left it, since there's so little, but the mission was, originally, to try to grow pure Douglas fir on all the land that was available. p. 141
Jerry Phillips: Of course, you had to try to harvest all the old-growth fir, get rid of it, ‘cause it wasn't growing, and get rid of all the alder, ‘cause it was worthless, and then get pure Douglas fir in all the rest. So you would eliminate maple -- of course, we had very little maple -- and myrtle, which was also very, very little. p. 141
Jerry Phillips: But we're living in this day and age where we're celebrating diversity of all kinds, so we probably would've been directed at an HCP [ESA Habitat Conservation Plan] to keep it. p. 141
David Gould: You all want to go down to the waterhole first? p. 141
Bob Zybach: Sure, and we got to come back this way too, don't we? p. 141
David Gould: ‘Cause the waterhole's down that way and the lookout's down that way. p. 141
Jerry Phillips: Well, you want to turn right here. p. 141
Bob Zybach: We'll get it on the way back. p. 141
Timing is approximate for quiet or overlapping remarks.
Jerry Phillips: You intend to go up to Deans Mountain? p. 142
David Gould: I don't know if we can get up there or not, but we can see the road from here. p. 142
Jerry Phillips: Probably a locked gate. p. 142
Amber Ross: Yeah, we've got a key, we can get up there. p. 142
Timing is approximate for quiet or overlapping remarks.
Jerry Phillips: I haven't been up there for. . .well, I guess it's been forty years. And I know it's changed totally, but it's still there. p. 142
Bob Zybach: Well that's one of the most historic places on the whole forest. p. 142
Jerry Phillips: It's the most historic. I said in my book – p. 142
Amber Ross: It’s clearcut now. p. 142
Bob Zybach: What's that? p. 142
Amber Ross: It's clear cut now. p. 142
Jerry Phillips: It's probably the only. . . p. 142
David Gould: We're here. p. 142
Jerry Phillips: . . . it's the only landmark most people know on the forest. p. 142
Timing is approximate for quiet or overlapping remarks.
End of the excerpt · 21:54 on tape 7-C. Continue with the original sources.
Dean Mountain is the destination named in the stop heading. This map shows the Library’s existing place record; it does not trace the vehicle’s position during the recording.
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Explore Dean Mountain’s photographs, interviews and videos →
Contributors: Jerry Phillips and David Gould, narrators; Bob Zybach, interviewer; Amber Ross and Randy Wiest, participants. Recording, published transcript and photograph catalog: Bob Zybach / Oregon Websites & Watersheds Project (ORWW). America’s School Trust Library prepared this excerpt, passage timing and listening page with AI assistance.
The displayed words and speaker names come from the published transcript, entries 2641–2675, with the wording preserved. Paragraphs are grouped for listening; the passage titles and learning question are the Library’s additions. Square brackets belong to the published transcript and need not represent spoken words.
The audio is a continuous 5:08 excerpt with no internal cuts; its level was reduced slightly to prevent distortion from encoding peaks. Two machine transcriptions were compared with the published text to place the passage markers. This is approximate passage alignment, not a verbatim caption track or a completed human listening review. Short or overlapping remarks may not match the highlight precisely. The native player lets you replay or adjust the position.
The four stop photographs are linked by their printed frame numbers, not by an exact second on the tape. The original PDF’s filename contains “20191108”; its interview title and page footers identify November 8, 2017.
In the opening of this tour, Bob describes Internet publication, transcription, education and research uses. The published opening transcript, page 2, records David Gould’s assent; Bob describes earlier agreement by the other participants. Separate checks of the recording channels recovered the brief affirmative replies; speaker attribution follows the printed transcript.
Recording and transcript: In Copyright. This educational listening page grants no general license to reuse the recording, transcript or photographs. See the Collection’s individual rights statements, including the photograph’s status.
