Part V. February 23, 1991

PART V: February 23, 1991

[Interview conducted by Bob Zybach, beginning at the Oak Creek Guard Station and continuing in the forest. ]

Bob Zybach: You know about the Guard Station?

Marvin Rowley: Nope.

Marvin Rowley: Well, the old buildings that the 3-Cs built were the . . . this is one here to our right back here, was the guard station.

Bob Zybach: The laboratory sign up there?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. That used to be a garage, and they put the addition over the top of the garage. But the old original building is the one on the back end of it. And this building right ahead of us here is part of the old buildings, but all the rest have been rebuilt. And there was a residence here before they built it. You see the old orchard. And it’s grown over with alder and things, there are just a few that are left there. There’s another orchard on this side, there were some real good fruit trees on this side of the creek. And that’s pretty well overgrown.

Bob Zybach: Now, do you know anything about the trees down here on the left of the creek? Are those wildlings, or… looks like they’ve been hit by beaver here lately.

Marvin Rowley: Dr. George Barnes established a survival plot right here on this slope. Might have been during the 1940s. It was one of the first times they got good survival on a grassy slope. And there were studying this for quite some time, into the late ‘50s. That’s how all the first Douglas-fir plantation died—they were overcome by the grass. And this grass here was a variety of oat grass.

Bob Zybach: Is that brachopodium we were talking about?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I don’t know the scientific name. I talked with the people, it’s a variety of oat grass, you see it hangs on into the deep shade.

Marvin Rowley: Yep. This is the only place anywhere I’ve seen Doug-fir in grass.

Marvin Rowley: But it discourages everything else. It makes it look like a park. You see there are not any ferns coming underneath there, the brush died back. It died back because the grass takes moisture . . . when it gets up to that age you get kind of a characteristic, it’s just like a park.

Bob Zybach: Now, George Barnes, was he with the Forestry Department?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, he was a professor in the College of Forestry. They called it the School of Forestry then. A researcher.

Bob Zybach: What did he use to get the fir established in the grass? What was his method?

Marvin Rowley: I don’t have that available. I was out here with him on a tour, and he was talking about it. At the time, they were talking about spacing. We thinned through here, the other research project, just about 300 feet up on the hill. Mike Newton treated the Doug-fir with herbicides, killed them the year before we logged them, to determine if he could get them to shed their bark and be a lighter wood when they were hauling them.

Bob Zybach: I’ve got a question on this grass and fir. Have you ever seen grass that hangs in this shady of . . . have you ever seen grass and fir growing like this before?

Marvin Rowley: Only on Oak Creek.

Bob Zybach: Nowhere else, anywhere?

Marvin Rowley: Not on McDonald Forest. I haven’t seen it anyplace in Oregon where you get this kind of relationship. Usually when it gets deep you get the herbs that grow in the deep shade instead of grass. But in here, across over there, where they’re doing all their research over there . . .

Bob Zybach: Uh huh.

Marvin Rowley: This grass was in that whole area. It runs all the way up to the top of the ridge. I haven’t found it down in the Baker Creek, yet. I don’t know whether it’s creeping through, or . . . I have an idea it’s got a fairly heavy seed that doesn’t blow very far.

Bob Zybach: I’ve got another question right here. There’s beaver coming in and they’re hitting these trees. I found a research report by a man named Storm that said they stocked beaver on Oak Creek in the 1940s. Do you know anything about that?

Marvin Rowley: Never heard of it.

Bob Zybach: What’s the earliest you remember beaver on the Forest?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, beavers were here when I was here. In 1946, there were some beaver.

Bob Zybach: On the other side of Oak Creek, or Soap Creek?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, Soap Creek, they were just way down low on it, just inside the gate on Soap Creek. In fact, I don’t remember them really being there. They were coming in around Sulphur Springs. There were some there. But they weren’t like they are now. Here now they’re up every draw. And they’ve progressed up these. When I started in here in 1973 as manager, there were hardly any beaver dams above . . . there were maybe one or two above this road that goes across to the left up here, and in just a few years they worked up there. And the Botany Department has a place they bring their classes out and they’re studying the ecology. And I asked him what he’s going to do about the beaver, and he said, “Well, what we’re studying is the change over time.” It didn’t matter to them.

Bob Zybach: That was my next question to you. What do you think they should do with the beaver?

Marvin Rowley: Control them. I don’t think . . . they do a tremendous job as far as change in the characteristic of the stream but when they get over populated, their population will take care of themselves. They’ll get diseases and things will kill them down. And they outlive their food supply, or out produce their food supply, and then they pick up and move out. They don’t stay if they haven’t got food, they go looking for it. But if you’ve got some valuable species there or something, you’re going to have to control your beaver or change your species.

Bob Zybach: Do you think there’s any valuable species on the forest that makes it worth trapping these, or do you think it’s worth it just to let natural controls . . .?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, I think natural control. I think if they would let people trap in here it would be a good idea. To keep the population down, keep them viable, keep a healthy population. Without the trapping they’ll get . . . they told me that when the population builds up against this food supply they start fighting each other. And the pelts aren’t worth anything. They can’t even sell them, they’re all scarred up. And the buyer doesn’t want them. So we’ve got those things working together.

Bob Zybach: Can you think of anything else in this spot?

Marvin Rowley: No, this was the area . . . what’s the name of that, I wrote a letter to a woman that was thinking her grandfather was buried on the forest?

Bob Zybach: Would it be LeGrand or Tortora?

Marvin Rowley: No. I can find it back in the office if you don’t have it somewhere. He settled this, I think he . . . I don’t remember whether it was a land claim or a homestead. And then he sold it. That was in the 1850s, and he sold it to a son-in-law.

Bob Zybach: Is that Robinette?

Marvin Rowley: That may be it. I don’t . . . And the son-in-law owned it. It was in the family. I followed it all the way through until after 1900. It was in the family until about 1900. Then it went into other ownerships and eventually the school got it. But it had broken up . . . it was interesting to see how it changed over time.

Bob Zybach: But she thinks he might be buried out here?

Marvin Rowley: Yes. She didn’t know where he was buried. And from what I could get, I didn’t know either; he’d gone into business in Corvallis some time before that. And I just gathered that no, he wasn’t buried here. I just figured he was buried somewhere else because he hadn’t been around here that long. It was a Donation Land Claim, because I tried to find the thing. There’s no record of it in Benton County. Because I was looking for, she told me a Donation Land Claim, and I looked for all the Benton County Donation Land Claims with that name on it. There weren’t any. I checked with Lincoln County, because Lincoln County was part of Benton County at that time, and there weren’t any there. And finally, I found it in the records in Portland, from the BLM office in Portland, it wasn’t even down here. But see, I had to go to Portland to find it, and it was misplaced.

Bob Zybach: Well, the Robinette DLC shows up on the map. But as you say, no survey notes on record.

Marvin Rowley: Well, the survey notes are in Portland, at the BLM office in Portland.

[At Casey Randall’s Arboretum]

Marvin Rowley: Apple trees. And I think they’re volunteers—wildlings. But we used to eat apples off them every time we’d come through here. In the ‘40s they were good, in the fall. These trees down here are natural. They might have been planted by someone. Casey Randall started an arboretum up this creek, in early 1950s. Then he died, heart attack, suddenly, and nobody ever followed it up.

Bob Zybach: So that arboretum that was started here was by Casey Randall.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, Casey Randall.

Bob Zybach: Was he with the Forestry [School]?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, he was the professor, the tree identification, dendrology professor.

Bob Zybach: We’re seeing about, I don’t know, looks like 100 dogs. Probably ten of them. What do you think about the recreational use of this forest for people running dogs.

Marvin Rowley: Fine, if they keep control of them. I think if they just get out here and let them take off, they got problems. I had a government trapper trapping coyotes out here. The sheep people ran sheep here, and he wanted to get some coyotes and see if he could stop the loss of lambs. And I told him, sure you set your traps, but you don’t put them close to the road, you put them back away from the road a little bit, there are people walking dogs through there. If a dog gets

Marvin Rowley: caught with your traps, you’re in trouble. He said, “Oh, I won’t do that.” Well, he went right up there and did it. And I found the trap after a dog owner watched his dog get caught in the trap and released him, and I went up, he told me where it was, and I went up and I pulled it up and took it home with me. It was 20 feet off the road, it was right there!

Bob Zybach: We just passed . . . is that the sedimentation test there?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. That is water quality research that that Forest Engineering and Pete Klingeman in Civil Engineering have been involved with for years and years and years. They started that in the 1960s. And a lot of what they found out on this stream by the control, we have a place up stream where they put material into the stream, and they measure what arrives down here, and every time they had a heavy rain they measured bedload movement. One of the things that they arrived at here that helped in setting up the laws for water quality is the early requirements of the law were more stringent than what happened in nature. If they’d have stayed with that water quality, there’s no way they could maintain it. Because the bedload movement just can’t stand that.

Bob Zybach: They were trying to overcome nature and erosion. Natural erosion.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, they were just looking at the water quality, and the amount of sedimentary, suspended material and the type that just raises and drops if you disturb the streambed and you just can’t control it to that point. But then they, I think that this here dirt matter, debris, they started picking up on the debris in this creek. And then, in fact they were throwing limbs and stuff, branches in up here and measuring what got down at the control station. The sizes, and all that kind of stuff. This has always been a very difficult place to stock. They’ve tried to; they’ve planted it and planted it over and over again. You see a little ____ right there in the middle of everything right there?

Bob Zybach: Yeah.

Marvin Rowley: They fenced that. They planted and put a fence around it. So that the deer weren’t able to browse that. They’d come in with a deer browse . . .

Bob Zybach: So you think this open field here, part of the difficulty, part was competition from grass, but part was deer browse?

Marvin Rowley: Deer browse. You see, there’s another one. They have new fence enclosures in here.

Bob Zybach: Who did that?

Marvin Rowley: I think George Barnes and Robert Kenniston, Dr. Kenniston. They were professors in the ‘50s. All of them are dead now. But this research project here with the fence thing has been there for better than 30 years, and I see now that it’s almost non-existent.

Marvin Rowley: But they put hardboard on that; that was a national study. They had three or four duplications of this around the United States. One in Florida where the tropical type of situation, one in the Midwest, and this one out here in the Northwest, and I think they may have had one down in the Southwest where it’s dry. They put these particleboards, send them to all these places with different kinds of paint, different glue structures, and then they test them, they drop a weight on them and measure how far it indented over time. And this helped them develop the particleboard industry we have in the United States today. [It] was developed because of techniques that were proved by these things.

Bob Zybach: Who designed this experiment, or who worked on it?

Marvin Rowley: Well, the Forest Research Lab with a whole variety of people over time. I’m not sure.

Bob Zybach: We just passed our wood products, stream sedimentation, grassland conversion, and a failed arboretum out of that . . .

Marvin Rowley: I didn’t point out . . . there were a couple of trees back there that Casey planted. And we’ll see some up here that are hickory.

Bob Zybach: What impact is the research on this creek, do you think, having?

Marvin Rowley: It probably keeps some people from operating.

Marvin Rowley: The old sawmill that the school put in? A Corley sawmill, war surplus sawmill was given to them. It was right here.

Bob Zybach: On this corner here, this intersection.

Marvin Rowley: Right where the blackberries are is where the mill was. The road up there on the slope is where they brought in their logs. They had a roll away, they just rolled them across down on the roll away, no power equipment. Roll them in and sawed them. The lumber came back down this way and it was all hand. There wasn’t a live roll in it, hardly. I think there was maybe one live roll off the head rig. We sawed all the logs for the Forestry Club Cabin in this.

Bob Zybach: Did this mill have a name?

Marvin Rowley: No, just school sawmill.

Bob Zybach: Was there anything here before the sawmill?

Marvin Rowley: I don’t know. I never saw that before that. The old mill that was here in the First World War days was right above us. Along with this structure, they built a grader shed, they called it. The school had a road grader, and it was right up here. We’ll get out and walk around here. It was right where that blackberry patch is growing! The fence post right down there.

Bob Zybach: Yeah.

Marvin Rowley: That was another one of those fenced plots to plant trees inside of.

Bob Zybach: Okay, we’re by a blackberry patch here at the intersection of Homestead Road, and this is where the road grader shed used to be. Looks like the Indian plums are growing.

Marvin Rowley: Now, right in here . . . there was a building right in there. An old, I think probably either living quarters for the people in the sawmill or a residence at this point. There’s a stream coming down there, and there could have been farming in the early days.

Bob Zybach: Was there a building still there when the sawmill was there?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, that building was there when we went to work in ‘73, and one of the first things I did was buy a metal detector to pick up bullets in the trees over on the Dunn Forest. And I was trying it out, that old building, I thought I’d do some sleuthing. And I went around over that thing, and I got a good strong ding. And I started digging, and I came up with a boot. And what was ringing the thing was the rivets or the eyelets, they were copper. And I dug that thing out, I don’t know how it survived, but it was still hanging together some. And I found some machine gun clips, the National Guard used this for maneuvers. And they’d left a string of live clips, and I found that when I was messing around. But that was right on that flat there somewhere.

Bob Zybach: Your best guess, a mill house?

Marvin Rowley: That’s what I’d guess. That went along with this mill. There was a flume . . . and it started way up, we’ll go up where the head of that flume was.

Bob Zybach: Okay. Now that part of that flume was still here when you were still working wasn’t it?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, when we built that road up there, west fork of Oak Creek Road, the 6020 Road in 1963. And some of the props on that flume were still standing. If I really look hard, I think I could find . . . they had brick sometimes at the base.

Bob Zybach: Going through the E.E. Wilson maps I found a map of the proposed flume in 1915.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, that’s what you were telling me. Here we can see it. See right down there, you see two pipes sticking up. Well those two pipes I think were associated with the log lift where they brought the log out of the pond.

Bob Zybach: Oh, so the pond was right in through there?

Marvin Rowley: I think they dammed this creek up right there, and where those two come together, they had the pond in there. And there were some old boards in there. I think this thing here was a sawdust pile, where it burned, where these berries are so heavy.

Bob Zybach: Are these two pipes the only two things that you know that are left from that?

Marvin Rowley: That’s all that . . . I think we can get down there.

Bob Zybach: Okay. Looks like something’s nibbled that alder right there.

Marvin Rowley: See this is where those old boards . . . it was underneath it. The first time I saw this, see this is a piece of railway stuck in the road here.

Bob Zybach: Do you remember any stories about this mill or anything?

Marvin Rowley: No, except that one of Bill Davies’ students said his grandfather worked in this mill, in the First World War time.

Bob Zybach: Did he say what they cut here?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, they cut the timber off the hills. Doug-fir.

Bob Zybach: Was it a tie mill?

Marvin Rowley: I don’t know. But they cut whatever floated. I have an idea that it was more than a tie mill. That’s wire tied around that.

Bob Zybach: That looks pretty recent though, that doesn’t look like anything with the mill.

Marvin Rowley: It’s too small to have been mill wire. It’s probably something somebody is doing some research—tied something down.

Bob Zybach: So this is where they yarded the . . .?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, I think they had their dam right down there, or somewhere here. It’s really not identifiable. And a lot of times . . . when they built their dams like that they didn’t move a lot of dirt to do it. They put some big logs across and cut lumber and tucked them in and blocked the water off that way. There’s an old barrel that’s got a heavy rim welded on to the top. Of course, those were a lot heavier barrels than they make now. See, there’s a piece of lumber.

Bob Zybach: Looks like it’s been through a fire.

Marvin Rowley: I think that’s just rot.

Bob Zybach: Is this kind of a bed through here? Can you remember any road beds?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, not that you could identify through here. I think they dropped their logs in, and how far they backed the water here, oh, probably 700 or 800 feet up the road here, where the first skid trail came into the creek. So they floated the logs down from there. And I think I can find out for you.

Marvin Rowley: I worked in an old stud mill on the Missouri Bend on the Alsea, the first summer I was here and going to school. Art St. John had built that mill . . . he’d built a steam mill just below it and sold it and he built this one on the upper end of the pond.

Bob Zybach: On Missouri Bend?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. It was back up Salmonberry Road, I think they call it. I put this ore culvert in. In 1964 we had the big flood? That was designed to take this stream at the 100-year flood. And in ‘64 the water came right up to going over the road and went down again. Didn’t come over the road. And we had big mass land failure up above.

Bob Zybach: In ‘64?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. And I think what did it was surge. It probably came down, it went up for a period of a few minutes and came down when the surge passed.

Marvin Rowley: On this 6020 road, we did an experiment in using Reynold’s Road Packer. It was liquid material that the guys were promoting to compact the road and require less rock. We used it . . . you mixed one gallon with 500 gallons of water. And you put it on and you worked it into the soil—with a rototiller. And we took a sample down to the university, and all they could tell us it was about 35 percent sulfuric acid and the rest of it was pulp liquor. So we took one 500-gallon tank and worked this strip right here to just around the corner. And then the next 500 gallons we used pure sulfuric acid in 500 gallons of water. And before we got it worked in good, it started raining. And it muddied this thing up and the darn mud stuck to the tires of the truck and it was really the gooiest mud you’d ever seen. And then we ran this pit run rock in here out of a pit up above, and it was 8” minus. And we eventually put the crushed rock on top of it. But right up around the corner . . . we never did get pit in here, or any chuckholes. Right here . . . we built the road in ‘63, and in ‘74 or ‘75 I replaced this culvert right here. The old one had plugged and I couldn’t unplug it. And when I dug through here with a back hoe, I was expecting these big rocks and real hard digging. And the ground came out of here like big pancakes. And there wasn’t a sign of a rock in it, it looked like brick. And the sulfuric acid, as near as I can think, had broken down that rock.

Bob Zybach: Do people still use that technique?

Marvin Rowley: No, they have other ways of doing that. I never took soils, but I think the idea [was that] it made it compact closer together. But it also broke down and made it kind of homogenous material.

Bob Zybach: Before we forget, we just went through that arboretum. I wanted to find out a little bit more about that back there.

Marvin Rowley: When we go back. . . . That flume that came up this creek was on the other bank of the creek.

Bob Zybach: On the far side?

Marvin Rowley: Outside. Here. And I never did find any on this side.

Bob Zybach: Do you recall any names associated with the mill down there at the intersection or this one up here?

Marvin Rowley: No, I never knew any. Only that kid said his grandfather, and I don’t remember his name. But right in over there beyond that bigger tree is where I can remember the flume structure being intact yet in 1963. You find out that those old structures, once you disturb them, they can disappear almost overnight. Just rot down to the ground.

Bob Zybach: What do you think causes that?

Marvin Rowley: Just the rotting process that’s going on.

Bob Zybach: Okay, we’re on the west fork of Oak Creek?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, this is the west fork of Oak Creek.

Bob Zybach: How has this changed through here from what you can remember?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I did a shelterwood on that hillside and interplanted underneath it all. Kind of an experiment of my own. We rigged up a west coast tower right here on this landing sky line and cable yarded that down trail with about 3/4’s, down through there. Came across the creek with it suspended. Now you can hardly see it. This trail is the . . . old road to this mill. Where they flumed lumber and they got in and out with the equipment. I don’t know exactly how much of that understory floating survived.

Bob Zybach: The understory plantation?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. I see some of it.

Bob Zybach: Could that be natural seeding that’s just coming up there?

Marvin Rowley: Could be some, but we planted it. We can go over there and find out.

Bob Zybach: Who planted that?

Marvin Rowley: Students. I supervised the planting of it. Think I planted a little. There’s a washout.

Bob Zybach: Can you remember very many washouts? Is that pretty common up through this country?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. Common. The nature of the ground.

Bob Zybach: Do you think logging increases washout? Does it accelerate the process?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, if you do it wrong. If you do it right, it doesn’t hurt it. You have to study your ground. Like this big slide they had up on the back of the hill, I did that. Trying to fix the situation between me and the four-wheelers. We salvaged that hilltop. When we finished, I went down, putting in waterbars on a dirt road about every 100 feet. Big waterbars. And then they came down and hit the rock road and down around the corner there’s a place . . . I cut a waterbar in there that you could drive over. And that was one that wasn’t gonna give up. Well, the four-wheelers over the next 10–15 years had got in there and cut out every waterbar and in ‘64 when that flood hit the water came from the top of the hill down and through all these failed waterbars and the only one that didn’t fail is the one on the rock. Dumped all the water off on a steep hillside and the big thing gave away and it went a half a mile.

Bob Zybach: How many acres is that, about?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, half of an acre, estimate? A tremendous amount of dirt, you’re looking at 100 feet across and maybe 50 feet out to this way, but it broke off at about 15-20 feet deep, and — FOOSH! — it turned to butter or soup.

Bob Zybach: Do you think mountain biking caused that stream to follow the old road?

Marvin Rowley: Well look at it. It’s running down the road. Now whether that’s hurting anything; it’s not, right now. But that type of thing, if you get that started and you get a big bunch of water [that] drops down here and that saturates, if there’s any place that’s going to fail, it’s going to be along those saturation lines.

Bob Zybach: Well, we can see by this drainage here that this road’s been here for 70 years, but it took the mountain bikers to divert the stream.

Marvin Rowley: Well, yeah. We logged up this. Used it for a skid road once. And we put it to bed when we got out of it. You see that _____ ground running out here between these two streams? I have an idea this all came from a slide at one time. I’ve found timbers down, six foot in the ground there. As far as the location of that sawmill, it changed so much that . . . There’s a big iron wheel down here, let’s see if we can find that.

Bob Zybach: So the mill was built out here on the toe?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, it was built . . . I was thinking up against the hill but . . . that may be it yet. Yeah. There. As these things mature and they get disturbed . . . There it is. These fire bricks, these have been moved. They were down in here. This is a place I’d like to see them do a dig.

Bob Zybach: So we’ve got an old mill site here with fire brick and an old wheel.

Marvin Rowley: This was obviously somewhere in here with a boiler, maybe under the slag. And the flywheel that . . . I think they ought to haul this flywheel down and put it in front of Peavy. But it’s not anything that the ordinary citizen is going to tackle by itself.

Bob Zybach: You don’t think the two of us should take it out today, huh?

Marvin Rowley: No, I have an idea it weighs a thousand pounds.

Bob Zybach: How about this depression here?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I think this thing right here is probably where the boiler and the steam sat and I don’t know how they drove it out this way.

Bob Zybach: How about that old metal over in there? Is that new, or is that part of the old structure?

Marvin Rowley: Where do you see metal?

Bob Zybach: Up where we’re . . .

Marvin Rowley: No, I think everything you find here would be part of the old structure.

Bob Zybach: And there’s some wire rope right there. There’s brick everywhere through here.

Marvin Rowley: That looks like, that’s a fire brick isn’t it? This one right here? You got a fire brick. See the fire pit was in here, they built it right on the ground, I imagine. And you see these layers, leveled off things, that’s part of the mill structure some way. Here’s an old barrel here, again. Cans.

Bob Zybach: Now, what do you think about that type of research. What they call historical archaeology, where they come in here and research the history of an area. Is that compatible with forest use?

Marvin Rowley: Oh yeah. No problem.

Bob Zybach: Do you think that’s a reasonable use of Mary McDonald’s income, archaeology?

Marvin Rowley: Here’s an old cable. Well, you see one of the things we have to look at to use a resource wisely is how they used it in the past and what the effect of that use was on it. And then you get a

Marvin Rowley: real guide where, “hey, that was a no-no,” or “hey, look it didn’t hurt to do that.” So studying what we’ve done in the past, and maybe the things that happened 200 years ago or 100 years ago are more important part of the research than you’d find if you could study a little bit of it right now, and you could pick up a wide part if you could follow it through time.

Bob Zybach: How much do you think this canopy up here, this hardwood canopy has to do with the mill, and how much to do with this erosion?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I think it all has to do with the mill. You open up bare ground, over on the coast, or anywhere you get real bare ground, you get alder coming in on it faster than anything. And I think you see everything that was open to bare ground has come into alder. We’ve had some of these massive land failures right here, there’s one right there, and there are several up this road and off over that way on this slope above us you’ll find a bunch of them. And I think we had some very large mass landslides sometime in the past.

Bob Zybach: We’re coming up in madrone . . .

Marvin Rowley: See where this one came out down here? Where they came down and blocked the creek and then the creek washed through it. And there you see a stump, way down in there below. And so that’s pretty well alder. We see things like this big old stump here. That was the type of tree that was here in the past, and there’s a cable wrapped on that stump, it was used for some kind of anchor.

Bob Zybach: Now, is this the first we’ve come into madrone on the forest here?

Marvin Rowley: Where’d you see madrone?

Bob Zybach: Right in through there.

Marvin Rowley: Oh, yeah. Well, that’s the first I’ve seen. Do you see it on up this slope?

Bob Zybach: Yeah.

Marvin Rowley: You don’t often see it down in a place like this. This is obviously some kind of an excavation by humans.

Bob Zybach: Yeah. Do you think this is probably an old road bed or some kind of logging storage, or something?

Marvin Rowley: It looks like it . . . it might be some kind of road bed. It could be that they were bringing the logs in up here to that mill.

Bob Zybach: Uh huh. That goes all the way to the mill up there?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, it goes on up there.

Bob Zybach: I’ve got a question. Do you think that that’s a reasonable activity for forestry students? Do you think they should be involved in this kind of archaeology, or do you think there should be cooperation between the departments, where maybe history or anthropology [comes] in here and does research on this kind of area?

Marvin Rowley: Well, probably the cooperation. But I think that some way in the education of the forestry student they should get the awareness that when the see something like this they recognize it.

Marvin Rowley: And I say, usually the guys that drive in, you can see in here obviously we had Douglas-fir down close to the creek. Where, that stump down there, it was a Douglas-fir. And, although there are some close to it now, but now the alder and—there’s a cottonwood in there.

Bob Zybach: Yeah. And we just passed a cherry a little earlier.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. So the hardwoods have filled in here. This slope up here has really not been harvested.

Marvin Rowley: I don’t think they . . . I think it was too young for them to log back there. But they may have logged it and it might have come up afterward, too. I do see some stumps in there. And how’d they get it down here, well it was horse-logged for sure. And as steep as this is, they may have had a hi-lead machine in here—a donkey yarding into it. If you did some scouting around here … now they had the fire in 1949.

Bob Zybach: That’s one thing I wanted to ask you about.

Marvin Rowley: It burned to right here.

Bob Zybach: This eastern most?

Marvin Rowley: Well, it came down the slope from above. They were burning slash up there and it came down this hill and it burned into this canyon here, and it ran that way and it ran all along the top of that ridge over there. But it didn’t come down the draw. It ran off up in places through that timber over there, on the north side where they logged it, burned it clean.

Bob Zybach: Did they give that fire a name?

Marvin Rowley: No, it was just slash fire. That fall they had the fire burning all the way from Coos Bay to Columbia River. There’s another piece of cable.

Bob Zybach: That looks newer. Must have come from one of your operations.

Marvin Rowley: No, I don’t think we were up here with that type.

Bob Zybach: What is that, about 1 inch cable, ¾ inch?

Marvin Rowley: That’s 1 inch at least. It’s broken.

Bob Zybach: That looks a lot newer than World War I, though.

Marvin Rowley: Well, it looks that way. I don’t know how it would have got here otherwise. There hasn’t been any logging activity down in here, except for little tractors that would use a lot smaller than that. I don’t know that we got into this. Right up around the corner, up this way, I found, a hollow log that I figure a bear had lived in using it as a ...

Bob Zybach: So, were you telling Royal that you found one area where you thought a bear had holed up? That’s right up in this draw here?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, right up that. I found bear sign in here quite often. In fact, on top of the ridge here we had girdled young growth. That’s the only place on the forest where we had any girdling, taking the bark off. Right up this way.

Bob Zybach: Now you also mentioned hearing cougar.

Marvin Rowley: I found that a mile north of here.

Bob Zybach: Just a mile north of here?

Marvin Rowley: I was sitting right up here on the ridge one time looking out this west property line, and saw two silver fox kits playing around a stump.

Bob Zybach: Silver fox?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. Just running up and down, jumping on the stump and jumping on each other just like dogs playing. Just as silvery as could be. Long tails, bushy long tails.

Bob Zybach: How about flying squirrels? Have you ever seen . . . ?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, yeah. Flying squirrels are all through here. When we were logging, thinning in there,

Marvin Rowley: every once in a while you’d disturb a flying squirrel nest. I’ve seen flying squirrels in a stump, nesting in a stump as low as 5.5 feet from the ground.

Bob Zybach: About 5-1/2 foot?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, actually, the nest was a foot and a half off the ground.

Bob Zybach: Now, all these old stumps in here, this is from when the mill was in here, isn’t it?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, this is from the mill. I don’t remember seeing these cables like this before.

Bob Zybach: Now, that looks like a groove worn in that rock there, doesn’t it?

Marvin Rowley: That is. That’s a cable run on that. That would give you an indication that they cabled yarded. That’s a line come over that for quite some time.

Bob Zybach: Well this might not have been horse-logged in here. This could have been a real early highlead.

Marvin Rowley: Well, it could have been a combination, too. Lot of times on these things they used horses to pull the lines out and what have you.

Bob Zybach: This has got to be one of the earliest logging jobs here in the forest, yet we’re seeing all kinds of signs of diversity. Do you think that’s related?

Bob Zybach: Well, loggers have always been diverse!

Marvin Rowley: Well, not the types of logging, but we’re seeing cherry and madrone and yew wood.

Marvin Rowley: Oh, well, yeah, probably related to the condition it was in when they left it. They didn’t have to restock; nature did almost all of it. I might talk about these three trails. In 1974 I was in Switzerland, and Switzerland has a system of walkways they call “Wanderways,” that lead from the cities through the forest and they’re posted. You can get maps that show where they go and how long it’d take you to walk and what you see there. And I thought, man, that’s a good idea where you’ve got McDonald Forest so close to Corvallis there and off of north 29th you could just come right up the hill and develop the trails. And I proposed it to John Beuter and the dean, and they kiboshed it. They didn’t want it.

Bob Zybach: Not at all?

Marvin Rowley: No. And what they did, by default, they let them do this kind of stuff. Because they didn’t do any recreational planning, now the mountain bikers, they put a trail where they want to put a trail, and we don’t have any control over it. If we come out and tear it up now you’ll hear all kinds of growling.

Bob Zybach: So you think these trails were put in, but if they’d followed your suggestion and put in a trail plan and developed it . . .

Marvin Rowley: Put in a trail plan and developed it and then they’d be where you want them to be and not where they want to be. And you could put the interpretive things in, we’d have had an excellent change, we’d have the Department of Recreation, Forest Recreation Department was a major department, and I was working with Kent, what was his name?

Bob Zybach: Kelly?

Marvin Rowley: Kent Downing! He was a recreation professor who was doing inventories of forest use with students, questionnaires just like they’re doing today. And we had some places, key places, indicated they used a lot and how they liked to use them and things to build on. And as a logging engineer, I mean, I was perfectly understandable that that’s what we ought to do. Well, as forest economist, John Beuter figured it was too much.

Bob Zybach: But looking at it from an economic standpoint, do you think that by controlling where people go in the long run, that that might be a good investment?

Marvin Rowley: Not only would it have been a good investment, it would have saved us millions and billions of dollars in the United States if we’d have been doing it all the time. We wouldn’t be faced with the spotted owl situation and the marbled murrelet and all this garbage that preservationists go at us with if we’d have done a better a job at relating them to the forest to start with. But I don’t believe the spotted owl is an old growth habitat. That is spotted owl habitat right there. Eric Forsman found his first nest he studied right down here within 400 feet of where this flume went from this mill.

Bob Zybach: Now, they claim there is no spotted owl on the forest right now.

Marvin Rowley: Well, I don’t know. There was when I left in 1986. Whether there is now, they logged pretty close to where the one I knew was. But I’ve seen spotted owls on the forest—mostly on Dunn Forest. And I’ve seen them close to the logging; I see them in the second growth stand. I saw a pair of them, just the day that we were taking our overstory off and I was walking on ahead of where they were falling. And there was a pair of spotted owls [that] got off the ground and flew up and off, and I followed them and just kind of watched them. And they flew again, and flew again. I went about my business and when I came back, they were sitting on the ground where they were the first time. I couldn’t identify anything on the ground that they were there for; there was nothing that they were eating. I couldn’t see any disturbance. But they were right back to the same place.

Bob Zybach: Have you ever seen other types of rare birds, or unusual birds? Have you ever seen bald eagles?

Marvin Rowley: I saw a golden eagle.

Bob Zybach: A golden eagle.

Marvin Rowley: Right up the hill from the other sawmill. I’ll show you where I saw it.

Bob Zybach: Okay, what they call Dimple Hill now, that area?

Marvin Rowley: No, just on this main road. Migratory, for sure—just going through. But it was sitting on a limb right alongside the road, and I identified it with the gold head. And when he took off and flew out, he went down the road and just filled the road! Big wing span, bigger than any bald eagle.

Bob Zybach: Do you know Don Dickey?

Marvin Rowley: No.

Bob Zybach: Okay. Do you think something like this could be . . . Wow! Another . . .

Marvin Rowley: Now that’s half a wheel. Big wheel.

Bob Zybach: Yeah. Now they used to have leather bands or something on them didn’t they?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, they used leather on those, and these here came in half pieces that bolted together here. And they’d pour a Babbitt in these for a bearing.

Bob Zybach: Do you think interpretive stops could be integrated with a trail in something like this, or do you think it should be put aside and used for archaeological students?

Marvin Rowley: Well, how are you going to keep people out of it? They’re here already. If they’re going to do anything you better go along with them as much as you can and make it an interpretive spot and find out all you can about the thing—like you’ve got some material on who built the

Marvin Rowley: flume, that original deed of where it was going down the river, and [that] this was the start of it. And some signs in here.

Bob Zybach: How about vandalism or maintenance?

Marvin Rowley: Well, the vandalism is a real problem. Maintenance, I think they’re getting into where they could afford the maintenance.

Bob Zybach: Maybe student labor or something?

Marvin Rowley: Look at the top of that grand fir there. Yeah, students, we hired, you’ve got all kinds of students here. They’ll work, especially if they’re going to keep the recreation thing going to give them opportunities to develop stuff and put their ideas to work.

Bob Zybach: Do you think the people we have in there now are more receptive to that kind of development?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. Yeah, they are now. Bill Atkinson is and of course they’ve got two full time people working now on recreation haven’t they? I would have developed the trails. I think I’m better able to develop trails than those women down here that probably haven’t had any experience in engineering, she knows what you can walk and that’s all you need to know, and we could have engineered these trails out.

Bob Zybach: Well, you know the soils here and you’ve built roads all through here.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Do you think they should have her working with somebody maybe from engineering, or something?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I think she’s getting some valuable experience and I think as long as they supervise it . . . See, you can see this thing here. Now that berm there, that was a mudslide that came down here. It didn’t come off of there, it came from way up there. There were enough slides up here to just fill the area we’re in here now. And the creek cut through the middle, I think down in here. I’m trying to remember, I think down here is where I saw a plank sticking out of it.

Bob Zybach: Okay, and you said that plank was six feet under the soil.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, way down under the soil. You see, that’s down to bedrock there now, and that’s probably where the stream was to start with. The stream doesn’t want to go up on top of dirt when there’s this type of material.

Bob Zybach: Well, we’re looking at an old . . .

Marvin Rowley: We’re looking at an old plank. See, it’s flat there? It goes right back in underneath the soil.

Bob Zybach: So you’re . . . three, four feet of soil.

Marvin Rowley: But see, that wall is a lot steeper than that back this way. This is almost down to bedrock.

Bob Zybach: Does that look like . . . that doesn’t look like natural rock there does it? Is that squared? That could be natural.

Marvin Rowley: Probably as natural as any rock here.

Bob Zybach: Is that the same board you’re talking about? Or are there enough boards that . . .

Marvin Rowley: Oh, I don’t know. I remember seeing one here, and that was definitely a board. I thought it was on up the creek and . . . at the time I saw it . . . it may have disappeared by now. I’m just looking for stuff sticking out of the dirt. I found this type of thing up at the Blodgett Tract. Find a log with a cut off end sticking out from underneath ten feet of soil, where dirt already had settled in.

Bob Zybach: Well, there are more boards.

Marvin Rowley: That one has broke off on something and has dropped down, right through here.

Bob Zybach: Right through here?

Marvin Rowley: Well, yeah, where the, one side or the other.

Bob Zybach: Ah ha, there’s a kind of a groove through there.

Marvin Rowley: This groove, I don’t think people made it, but they put the flume through there. This gives you an illustration of [how] this ground has been in transition for a long, long time. You see a deal up there? This probably slid off of that into the creek. When did it do it? It did it 200 years ago or something. You’ve got these . . . and this tree and that other one were probably on it when it slid, because they corrected themselves. And this one here has leaned out. It probably leaned out when it happened.

Bob Zybach: So you don’t think this is caused by logging?

Marvin Rowley: No, I think this is probably caused by the Indian burning. Every tree that’s like that is caused by that.

Bob Zybach: If you’ve got a group of them?

Marvin Rowley: Well, even the group of them. The group of them might have been rode down by snow and tipped up all at once. Just because they did that, doesn’t mean that it happens from landslide. You have to look at the ground and see if you can see evidence that something happened there. But, in fact, I had the experience once on a tour. The SAF student section was putting on. And over just below the Forestry Club Cabin they’d had some levels of growing stock studied in there, and they planted 4 x 4, 6 x 6, 8 x 8, 10 x 10, 12 x 12, back in the 1930s, 1936. And in this draw, in 1940 we had two foot and better of snow in this valley. And right down where they planted 4 x 4, all the trees were turned up like this, any that survived. So they had this long sweep. Then this college graduate student said, “This ground was unstable and that’s the reason those trees got that sweep on them.” So after the crowd thinned I went to the student and set him straight.

Marvin Rowley: We rocked most of this road right out of this rock pit on the 6020 Rd.

Bob Zybach: Okay, so that’s an old quarry right there, on that switchback. Now, will we be going back to what you called the Peterson place?

Marvin Rowley: We ought to go up there. Somebody’s working up there on that.

Bob Zybach: Now were looking at a lot of sprouting in there. Lot of hardwood?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, yeah. Bigleaf maple. We treated that I don’t know how many times, but it keeps coming back. That’s where I get disgusted with these people telling us about monoculture. You never get it. That’s what you might aim for, but you never get it. You don’t have to worry about monoculture, especially with bigleaf maple. And Eric Forsman’s spotted owl nest was about halfway up that slope right there, just almost straight ahead of the pickup, maybe a little bit off to that side from the pickup. And the nest up there was in a broken-top tree, it was probably 24-inch tree or 30-inch tree and it was broken off at about this, and it had turned up and grown a couple of tops up from that.

Bob Zybach: So it was just a second-growth tree with a broken top?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, basically. I’d say 100 years old or so, it was not 200 or 300. There is a strip of old growth along that slope.

Bob Zybach: Was he looking for spotted owls?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. I don’t know when he got started on the spotted owl bit, maybe when he was doing his bachelor’s degree. And he just spotted one over on the head of Oak Creek, by the big clearcut we did over there. And when he came back (he went in the military or something), and he came out and we’d clearcut where the spotted owl was. And I can remember him coming into Bill’s office . . .

Bob Zybach: Bill Davies?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. And saying, “You cut that where the spotted owl was!” And he started looking and he found this one here, and he’d also found one over by the boot. At the time . . . and this one here is the one he studied. He rigged up ropes so he could rig up and climb trees around it, and took picture of it, right into the thing. I saw three pictures, when he had his seminar; this is the one that he showed the most of.

Bob Zybach: What did you think about the quality of his work?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, he did an excellent, excellent study up to a point, and from there he lied.

Bob Zybach: You think so.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: We’ve got this on tape.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. He lied. He said that the spotted owl habitat was a multiple story forest and he found the thing with some old growth associated with it.

Bob Zybach: We’re looking at an even-aged monoculture by most environmental standards, I think.

Marvin Rowley: No, no that’s a two-aged stand. This is a young stand over here, and an older one that way. But . . . then he came up with how much territory they needed, and they needed a multiple story forest. They didn’t need an old growth. And then he found one nest on the Dunn Forest in a second growth stand, and he wouldn’t tell anybody about it. He didn’t put it in his research; he didn’t do anything with it.

Bob Zybach: How do you know he found that?

Marvin Rowley: Because he told John Beuter about it three years later. And this year, about three months ago, I found out where it is, because my brother told me. They were skyline logging in there, and he said this spotted owl’s hanging around their skyline when they were yarding. And I said, “Where was that?” And he described it to me and it fit where John Beuter and Eric Forsman were when Eric told him he found it in the second growth in that area.

Bob Zybach: What would be his motivation for manufacturing information?

Marvin Rowley: Well, his motivation for withholding information is he wants to preserve old growth. Like at the end of his seminar that I attended, he showed a picture of old growth logs at the scaling ramp in Philomath, and said “There goes our spotted owl habitat.”

Bob Zybach: So it’s political?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I wouldn’t call it political. I’d call it his philosophy—to promote his philosophy to preserve that.

Bob Zybach: So, the end justifies the means.

Marvin Rowley: That’s what I’d say.

Bob Zybach: How about Glen Juday? His work on old growth? You don’t want that on there?

Marvin Rowley: I think Glen Juday years ago was either ignorant or lying. There’s no way. . . . I went to one of his talks for Earth Day, the original earthy day they had on the campus. And I don’t, I’m not a botanist so I don’t remember names of things, but this purple long-stalked orchid, it belongs to the orchid family, it’s got a tuber down under the ground. And he was describing this plant to us there, and said in about 400 years when they got a lot of old rotten stuff down in the ground this plant came in and it was very important, it fixed nitrogen. And it only came in on the old rotten material you got on the ground. And here about a week or two later I’m out walking through a stand and it’s the same stand I told you about, the 4 by 4, 6 by 6, 8 by 8, 10 by 10 plots. It’d been planted by the CCC in 1936, and had been thinned by hand once and with horse once. And I was walking in that stand—I think it was about the time we were doing the horse thinning. And here’s this plant he was talking about, growing all through that stand. Then I got to looking at it, and sure enough, it was growing on rotten wood, it was growing on all the old stumps. And every old stump, this would be around that stump. Then I got to thinking about that, I’m looking at it, and I said, “You know, I’ve seen that plant in the forest all my life, and I’ve seen it in all age classes.”

Bob Zybach: But where they did that planting, that was some old oak savannah, like you were saying earlier. So that’d be the first . . .

Marvin Rowley: Well, it had had second growth. They’d logged it, clearcut it. It had come up after the old oak savannah into a stand, and they’d logged it and then they replanted it. They probably logged it before the university bought it, about First World War time.

Bob Zybach: Would that be the Calloway Creek Mill?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, it’d be in that area.

Bob Zybach: How about the work that Mike Newton is doing on old growth?

Marvin Rowley: Well, Mike’s got his own philosophy he’s promoting. They’re closer to mine. But he’s talking about you could keep a stand for a long period of time until good growth on it, depends on how well we manage it. If we keep the rot incident down by taking out the trees that are getting rot in them. Now, with the understanding that there are animals [that] need woodpecker holes and stuff, for their livelihood, we can leave a certain number of those. That’s a concession that we’d make to keep a viable multiple species inventory on the site if those species were important to us. And I’d say we never know whether they’re important a lot of times until later. So they’re important if they’re there, maybe.

Bob Zybach: So that’s three different philosophies. One person’s saying that we should grow for animals, one for plants, and one for timber, for human products. What do you think the answer is?

Marvin Rowley: Well, you need to meld them together. But melding them together isn’t preserving everything. Not going into a law, because the human species, which Eric Forsmen and Glen Juday are part of, is going to disappear from the face of the earth if they don’t manage the resources. And mismanaging the resources is not doing anything, and it destroys it.

Bob Zybach: Now, you said two of those people in their research you think are dishonest?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I don’t know how I’d say that. I’d say they did dishonest things. They didn’t tell people the truth. They didn’t . . . true research lets things fall where they may. If Eric Forsman is doing research and he goes out here and he finds a condition and he doesn’t report that condition,

Marvin Rowley: he’s as at fault as I am if I’m a chemist and I take two things together and I get a reaction and I don’t report the reaction!

Bob Zybach: Well this, as we both know, is an emotional issue. And a lot of these people from the other camp have accused Mike Newton of dishonest information. But you don’t hear it swung back the other way.

Marvin Rowley: I don’t think Mike Newton has done the same type of thing. He has slanted his material as much as he can toward his philosophy, but I’ve never found him to out and out lie about it.

Bob Zybach: [There’s a] saw going on a Saturday.

Marvin Rowley: Well, they’re either precommercial thinning or they’re doing some hardwood work up there.

Bob Zybach: Maybe they’re hitting those maple sprouts again. . . .

Marvin Rowley: [The] flume went right through where the road is. It was probably about at the elevation of the roadbed on the far side, and it dropped at a fairly steady pace right there. I’ve been down through there with a cat so many times, I doubt if we’ll find any. . . when we were building the road we yarded it back up . . .

Bob Zybach: So that’s an old cat road on the other side over there?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, we came right down off the point. We’d come straight down, and we’d just yard it back up the hill. And we pulled up on this side. We did have one skid trail that went down across the creek. It crossed the creek right in here somewhere. We took the logs and pulled them out and we got going. The logs . . . we yarded them, had a skid trail that came out on this road just above this little creek down here. We had a landing. Where was the landing? I think we may have had a landing right there.

Bob Zybach: Now they won’t allow that kind of yarding or putting in landings any more . . .

Marvin Rowley: We had a landing right here. Oh, yeah, they wouldn’t . . . you don’t see them after you’re gone a while. This [is what] we used to call Deep Creek.

Bob Zybach: Deep Creek, right here?

Marvin Rowley: It was cut way down. We put the culvert in up above. It had a pool of water and it all silted full.

Bob Zybach: Do you think names like that should be put on a map?

Marvin Rowley: I don’t know. That was our name, I don’t know if it ever got a lot of usage.

Bob Zybach: Now we’re getting back into the old arboretum area here.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, this . . . these were planted, I think, but it’s just gradually filled in. These trees are some that Casey Reynolds planted, the pines and the cedar, the incense cedar, right across the creek there’s a three or five, six hickory.

Bob Zybach: What was his purpose in putting in an arboretum here?

Marvin Rowley: Well, they were going to develop an arboretum here that would be exotic and natural, it would be used for dendrology.

Bob Zybach: What was wrong with the one at the . . .

Marvin Rowley: The Arboretum?

Bob Zybach: The Arboretum, yeah.

Marvin Rowley: It was further away, and this one would be more a natural setting, fit in with the other stands you see here. We can see, too, some pines that really only adapted to that site. They’re dying

Marvin Rowley: back, because anything but their roots structure can’t fit into that ground good. There are some down here, see the cedars coming in underneath there?

Bob Zybach: Yeah. Was that planted or are those seeded?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, those are Casey’s. All these, Casey put in.

Bob Zybach: Do you think this overstory that’s coming up should be taken out and let these trees go, or do you . . .

Marvin Rowley: No, I think you ought to let it find its own way. You find what’s good there and what isn’t. You try to open that up and . . . they planted Port Orford cedar over on the west slope of the ridge north of the TV tower. All through there, and it was down underneath there, scroungy little Port Orford hanging on. And when we thinned it . . .

Bob Zybach: It shot right out.

Marvin Rowley: It started coming up. These were lodgepole pine. That, oh, Al Berg used to crow about these and how they’d survived out there in that grass, it was very important to keep that seed source. And Al Berg’s gone now and I don’t think anybody ever worries about it.

Bob Zybach: Looks like these trees won’t be far behind him.

Marvin Rowley: See, they planted it with the idea of planting the lodgepole and then planting Douglas-fir in the shade of them. And you see that row of Doug-fir, it never made it, and the lodgepole did. So the Douglas-fir didn’t really adapt to coming under that.

Bob Zybach: What was the purpose, to provide some shade or shelter?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, just plant shade. That’s what they . . . different kinds of pine. They’ve got the lodgepole, the ponderosa, probably, and then Doug-fir, and out here on this side of it, you see the few Douglas-fir coming in the shade of that one, but the shade [on] both sides was too much for it.

Bob Zybach: Is anybody doing a follow-up study here to see which ones of these species have made it and which ones haven’t?

Marvin Rowley: I doubt it, anymore. I don’t think they [have] any researchers who’d be interested in doing it.

Bob Zybach: It looks like there’s a lot of naturalized pine out there.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, they’re seeding. They’re seeding like mad in there, aren’t they?

Bob Zybach: Yeah. Maybe Al Berg was right.

Marvin Rowley: Well, he had a point. But as I say, nobody’s following it up. And I don’t know that Al did. And you’ve got some incense cedar, does pretty good on that kind of ground.

Bob Zybach: Now some of these pines . . .

Marvin Rowley: There was an old road that went on down this way, out to the south fence here, that I had an idea had something to do with a mill here.

Bob Zybach: Now we’re at the 6021 turnoff here.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. And this road, now when Peterson had the homestead up here, they forded the creek right down below us.

Bob Zybach: Straight below the intersection here?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. Just above that water research lab. They forded that and came up.

Bob Zybach: What do you know about Peterson?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, I don’t know anything about him. Just that they lived here in the early days. This road was a terrible, terrible road to maintain, erosion wise. This ground is highly erodible and of course you see the grass that’s coming in underneath the stand? It’s a real ally to you. But this ditch was very deep. And you can see the road is three feet below the ground. Well they didn’t push that dirt out, it all sluiced out around the road down the mountain and down the Willamette maybe.

Bob Zybach: Is this naturally seeded or plantation?

Marvin Rowley: No, these are all natural. See this came up in oak? Some of it up above here, we’ll get into some plantation. But this was natural. These are lower sites.

Bob Zybach: You think site III?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, low site III probably. Right ahead, plantation. That right there.

Bob Zybach: Right on this first bend here.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. Those are all plantation. Planted in the early ‘50s I think. I’ll look at my book, at my stand histories, and see where I got it down from.

Bob Zybach: Now you’ve got all the stand histories point by point? Now, in Royal’s interview you mentioned having a map of the Columbus Day storm blowdown.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, I think it’s still hanging in there somewhere or another. But here again, more of these lodgepole pines. And for a long time they came up here and cut the Douglas-fir out of the lodgepole pine! Kept it . . . and there’s some over on this side. And nobody’s doing it now, I’m sure.

Bob Zybach: So that was a fairly big arboretum?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, these weren’t part of Casey’s. These were research studies, these lodgepole pine. And even at the strip down there, that wasn’t Casey’s, that was research. And I don’t know who instigated it. Al Berg was part of it.

Bob Zybach: Now, Roy Silen has been working on the Pine Race Study for some time. Did he have anything to do with the pine around this area?

Marvin Rowley: No. Well they’ve got this rocked now. This was a terrible mess. There are old landslides in back here from the early days. Mass land failures up here.

Bob Zybach: Now there’s old fencing through there.

Marvin Rowley: Well, there’s a fence here but above, on the other person’s property right here there’s a push out that stopped right here and blocked this road. Right here where these blackberries are. I shut that down. There was a barn. I shoved it down. Bill Davies had me . . .

Bob Zybach: The barn?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Now there’s an old chestnut tree out there.

Marvin Rowley: Where’s that?

Bob Zybach: And a grape back there, and some pears and some apples. Was the orchard bigger than this before?

Marvin Rowley: This was the house.

Bob Zybach: Okay. And you call this the Peterson house. Does any house here . . .

Marvin Rowley: Oh, no. You see the age of those trees is probably 60 or 70 years old. It’s been gone that long. Where did you say that chestnut is?

Bob Zybach: Oh, let’s see. I think . . . I’ve only been up here once looking at the trees. I’ve been up here with you. That might be it.

Marvin Rowley: That might be it.

Bob Zybach: What do you think about these old orchards here? We’ve gone through and identified some of the old fruits and things, do you think they ought to be rehabilitated?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, some of them should be. If you had a rare one, if they haven’t been sowed somewhere else, that’s a chestnut.

Bob Zybach: Yep, yeah that was it.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, that’s it. I’ll be darned.

Bob Zybach: You didn’t know that was up here, huh?

Marvin Rowley: No, I didn’t know that. Probably some of these have been, if they’ve got a unique . . . what do you call it? Lilac?

Bob Zybach: Lilac, yeah. Yeah, that’s got to be near, part of the old homestead.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, you see the house was right there. So this fits it. And I say the thing about these apples and things, is that there’s some, if they find a species or something about to lose, I think they ought to hang on to them.

Bob Zybach: Why don’t I take your picture over there next to that chestnut tree? I stumbled on one of the few trees on the Forest you don’t know! This is what we used to call an eating chestnut.

Marvin Rowley: Well, the problem is it doesn’t have a pollenizer.

Bob Zybach: Is that why there are no nuts?

Marvin Rowley: There are no nuts, they need a pollenizer. Once in a while we’ve found them [to] self pollenize. See there it is, there are no new nuts. It’s an American chestnut probably, because these nuts are small and the European chestnuts are big. They’re like this.

Bob Zybach: It’s an interesting orchard here.

Marvin Rowley: What’s that over? Oh, that’s an alder over there, or something, isn’t it.

Bob Zybach: It might even be a birch. Might have been planted. Okay, so there was a barn?

Marvin Rowley: Well, the barn was up there at the fork of the road, and right here, built off over this side hill there was a shed that was probably 20 or 24 feet this way and 36 feet long. And it had a place where they’d come in on one end with a car, and then it had little rooms in it, like a storeroom, workroom, and maybe a kitchen, or I mean a chicken house on the end of it, and there was storage underneath it.

Bob Zybach: So there were three buildings here? The house, the . . .

Marvin Rowley: The house, I’ve never seen the house. Now, I’ve seen the pieces of the boards.

Bob Zybach: Okay, this lumber here. There’s some metal there.

Marvin Rowley: Metal. And right underneath this . . . now, I found the trail that led to the water at one time.

Bob Zybach: Here’s barbed wire.

Marvin Rowley: And there’s another piece of board I just stood up on edge there. I used the Koller crew [OSU College of Forestry student logging crew] to log in here, that’s who thinned this stuff. And the trail led down here and I found a spring. And I was trying to identify a trail, but I haven’t spotted it.

Bob Zybach: We were talking earlier when I was out of tape about the Peterson homestead here, and we were talking about interpretive trails. And you mentioned that maybe it’d be low maintenance to put in numbered posts and things for interpretive purposes. Can you see, like a spring trail connecting Peterson with the mills, that type of thing? Is that what you were thinking?

Marvin Rowley: Well, this would be a good idea. They’d come up this road and wander a trail down here to that spring and across. I mean to that sawmill, and go by the spring, if they could identify it again. It was right here somewhere, and you may find that spring. And then there was another orchard there on this side.

Bob Zybach: Okay, now we never inventoried this orchard over here. That orchard over, the one you just pointed out there, is that associated with this homestead here?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, you can see it right above this.

Bob Zybach: Okay. When you were working here did people use these orchards for like breaks, lunch breaks and things, eat the fruit of them? Or did people come up and pick them?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, anybody that knew about them. We used to pick stuff up and take it home when we were around the area.

Bob Zybach: Would people hunt in the orchards?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, I suppose. If I knew they were there and there was hunting, I would be looking for it.

Bob Zybach: Is this the headwaters of what you were calling Deep Creek?

Marvin Rowley: No, that’d be one on the other side of this. This would be, this creek comes down to that landing we parked on. That’s just down there about 800 feet.

Bob Zybach: So we’re just above the landing, okay.

Marvin Rowley: I think this somewhere is the area of the spring. I see something already here.

Bob Zybach: Yeah, it looks like an old dish?

Marvin Rowley: Broken dish.

Bob Zybach: Let me grab a picture here, too.

Marvin Rowley: You’ll find a building site or something, too. But if they built there, they needed water. You start thinking, well, however did they get water here? Probably have to return another day, we won’t get it all in one.

Bob Zybach: Yeah, yeah. Now you said the shed they had here was still shedding water?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: What kind of shingles did it have?

Marvin Rowley: I think they were cedar shingles.

Bob Zybach: Was the barn, now that was still standing?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, I shoved that barn down. It didn’t leak in places, but it had a lot of leaky spots, like you get where your parts would be totally exposed and parts wouldn’t be.

Bob Zybach: Was there any photographs or anything taken of these structures?

Marvin Rowley: Not that I know of. I was under instructions when I get to these things to get rid of them.

Bob Zybach: Do you think that was a good policy?

Marvin Rowley: Well, Bill was worried about hippies moving into them. And they were having people move into them and get to smoking pot, and they’d worry about fires in the summertime and they didn’t want people using them, seeing them there.

Bob Zybach: If you had it to do over, would you do anything different?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, I’d try to take a picture of it. You couldn’t have preserved that thing and made it usable for a very long period of time. It was one of them that was settling into the dirt.

Bob Zybach: But a photographic record or something . . .

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, a photographic record would have been ideal.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, I’d walk the ground ahead, for miles ahead, and criss-cross it and look for stuff, problem areas and things that were emergency jobs that ought to be done quickly. Then I’d go in and talk to Bill about what I saw. And go back out and keep on working. And our first management plan for the forest was two sentences long.

Bob Zybach: Was that the ten-year plan from 1959?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, it was to start at the north end of the forest, and do everything that needs to get done until you get to the south end.

Bob Zybach: Was it written down or just spoken in two sentences?

Marvin Rowley: Well, that was just Bill’s statement: Just start at the north end and thin and salvage everything, do everything you need done until you get to the south end. And try to get there in ten years. And some of these things that we were doing then, his philosophy, and of course mine at the time, and I still lean heavily toward it, is to take the little patches of trees that blew down there and are leaning and have this cleared out and gone. They wouldn’t be . . . they’d be sold instead of left to rot. And my attitude now, I mean leaving these here bird trees, I’d leave bird trees, but the bird tree would be a bigleaf maple.

Bob Zybach: You think that works as good as an older fir or something?

Marvin Rowley: You look at them, and those . . . out on my farm I’ve got a “live chinquapin snag,” I call it. It’s got green limbs on it; it’s probably got 20 holes in it that big around.

Bob Zybach: About four or five inches.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, they’re like this. And I betcha there’s a rookery of birds that come out of that every year that’d surprise you. Well, I leave that, it doesn’t hurt me, and if I had a Douglas-fir that looked like that I’d leave it. But I don’t know that I’d take a tree like this here that’s selling for $400 a thousand, and it’s got $300 worth of wood in it, or $400, I don’t know that I could really say my bird population was going to be worth what I’d have to leave that for it.

Bob Zybach: And you think that you could save the bird population anyhow?

Marvin Rowley: I think I’d build bird houses. I’d try it some other way.

Bob Zybach: You think a $400 bird house might be a bit much, then.

Marvin Rowley: I think it’s a bit much. I think you’ve got to be economical about those things.

[Break in interview]

Marvin Rowley: Early ‘70s maybe. Wayne Seim is the director down there now, he was director when they put those wells in. He’s been here forever.

Bob Zybach: Now one thing we haven’t done on these oral histories. I’ve talked to a lot of farmers, and Royal has talked to a lot of the people that were in forestry, but we haven’t talked to Fish & Wildlife people or Ag people. Can you think of some names that would be good to maybe to do oral histories with them, to find out what they did on the forest?

Marvin Rowley: Wayne Seim, there, but he’s just concerned with what goes on in that research area there.

Bob Zybach: How about Ag, say down at Soap Creek?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, Jim, what’s his name? Retired, the guy that did the early work. Retired. And Jerry Green lives off Conifer now. He was the herdsman out there for a long time.

Bob Zybach: How about from Botany or Fish & Wildlife, or . . .

Marvin Rowley: Well, Harold Sturgis was a game biologist for the Fish & Wildlife Department that covered this area. You can look over the old records of research that went on here and pick up a lot of that. Evelyn Bulz did some work out here with the pileated woodpeckers. She started some out here, did some over on the coast. But she’s still working, she’s a name you read every once in a while on the woodpecker issues. Pretty good work. She’s real aggressive. I’d rate Evelyn Bulz a top scientist on wildlife research.

Bob Zybach: And she got her start here on the forest?

Marvin Rowley: She did. She did work on the pileated woodpecker. She worked over in the Ukiah area with the pileated woodpecker in the pine area. And I never read anything that she slanted, I mean she told the story like it was. Sometimes I didn’t like the tone of it, but she never slanted anything she did.

Bob Zybach: You could trust what she came up with?

Marvin Rowley: If she came up with that, see, that’s what she came up with.

Bob Zybach: Whose work in old growth then? We talked about that a little bit earlier. Whose work in old growth could you trust, would you?

Marvin Rowley: I’m not sure. Jerry Franklin, but I think Jerry Franklin, this is just personal, I don’t know him well enough and it’s my gut feeling that he’s slanted his work toward the way he wanted it to come out. But I’ve never known him to go out and lie about it. I think that . . . I want to go down here a little bit and then turn around and go the other way. See that tree right there, leaning? And the next one? And there’s one, two, three—those are all hickory. There’s a couple, three, out of that cluster that are varieties of hickory.

Bob Zybach: So that dates back to the arboretum.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. And that one right there, I was on the grader, and I had a load of junk I wanted to get rid of. I started out just working right across that flat with the grader, and got within about two feet of that thing and something, the shape of the leaf or something caught my attention and I stopped. And looked at that darn thing and didn’t push it over!

Bob Zybach: Did this arboretum have any name or anything? Did anybody call it anything?

Marvin Rowley: No. If you call it anything, you call it Casey’s Arboretum, I suppose. Casey Randall’s—Casey Randall’s Arboretum. And he didn’t finish it, because he’d just started it. I think he worked on

Marvin Rowley: it about a year or two, and just getting the ideas going and he died. He died of a heart attack.

Bob Zybach: You were in a panel with Glen Juday, and . . .

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, they were going to put on these panel discussions out in the rural areas and acquaint the people in the timber industry and out where the timber was growing with the truth.

Bob Zybach: Was this in the late ‘70s?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, it was during the ‘70s. And they tried to get somebody from the logging industry to be a panel member. And they’d ask them, and then they found out what it was and they said, no, I won’t do it. And about three days before it was to happen, they called me. Wanted to know if I’d go over there and talk about timber from the loggers’ standpoint. And I kinda knew about it, and I said, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” Man, look at that beaver dam! They’re really coming up.

Bob Zybach: Yeah. We’re just up from the intersection from the arboretum road here.

Marvin Rowley: Looks like they’ve got the water raised about four feet right there at the dam.

Bob Zybach: Just in the two years I’ve been on the forest here we’ve been seeing an increase in ponding, I don’t know if populations. And damage to the old orchards. Do you remember anything from that symposium?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I remember that Glen Juday was on it talking about the old growth, and he modified his stand considerably, because he knew that the timber people were mostly in the crowd. But he made some statements that I contradicted when I got up. And he was talking about, saving the old growth because they needed the big wood and all that for future generations. And I said from the logger’s standpoint, the sawmill’s standpoint, the faster we get rid of the big old stuff the better off we are.

Bob Zybach: Do you still believe that?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. From that standpoint. I’m talking about from the logging standpoint. Because, the reason is that, if we had all second growth stands, we don’t need the size of equipment that we need to take old growth out, we don’t have the same problems of getting it out, and the sawmill doesn’t need the same type of equipment. They can go automated quicker. So you can’t automate a 52-inch log very easily at all, but you can automate a 24-inch one.

Bob Zybach: So with all the automation, is that costing jobs do you think?

Marvin Rowley: Well, automation switches jobs from one thing to another thing. It’s amazing that with things automated we’ve got more people employed in the United States than we had 20 years ago. It switches jobs. It’s hard on people that get displaced, but then they move into something else and I think with the aggressive technology coming in, it creates jobs, it doesn’t destroy them.

Bob Zybach: So it’s more like computer or engineering or manufacturing.

Marvin Rowley: They go to computer and engineering, and then it goes into refining the product. We got a tremendous thing that we have hardly touched in here in these hardwoods. They mill it here, some of it, if they can sell it. They ship it to Los Angeles; they make furniture out of it down in Los Angeles or San Francisco or San Jose or somewhere, and then ship the furniture back here. When we buy furniture from the East Coast, and this oak is hard to dry but it’s not much harder to dry than the eastern oaks—the only thing is that they don’t know how to do it, and it takes so much more time than it does to dry alder, so they dry alder.

Bob Zybach: When you were here, the concentration was more on growing softwoods. And we’re standing in a nice hardwood patch here. Do you think maybe the Forest should concentrate some more on hardwood growth?

Marvin Rowley: This is probably a better hardwood site here than it is Douglas-fir site. Do you see that Doug-fir blew over right there? Look at the tap root on it.

Bob Zybach: Shallow root.

Marvin Rowley: It’s nonexistent. The root can go down only 24 inches into the ground, because this is shallow soil, got a clay pan underneath. But the oak and ash, they put their roots down and if we totally utilized the hardwoods you may find out that they put out more volume per acre on this in hardwoods than you could Douglas-fir. They don’t grow any good. Go up the slope a little bit and you get all kinds of Douglas-fir.

Bob Zybach: Do you think maybe some concentration on hardwoods would be a good function of the forest?

Marvin Rowley: Well, that’s what John and I used to talk about there. There’s an area we’ll go by today, that is a second-growth maple stand. And we were talking about preserving and looking at making it a maple stand. One of the problems with maple in management is that it sprouts. The ones that come up from the sprouts, by the time they get to a merchantable size, they’ve got some kind of rot in them. Heart rot. red rot, they call it, red heart. And maybe one out of five of them would be merchantable. But a seedling that comes up and grows, it grows right on up and you hardly ever have rot in it. So if you come up from seedlings, you’d have probably a good usable material for everything that comes up.

Bob Zybach: Do you know anybody that’s done any bigleaf maple plantation?

Marvin Rowley: No. They haven’t because of Douglas-fir. It grows much better, and sells so quickly.

Bob Zybach: How about the grasslands, or . . . we talked about converting grassland to Doug-fir, but do you think some of the native grasses or wildflowers that grow out in the open the way they did when the Indians were here, would that be a valid function of the forest to maintain some of the savannah or prairie?

Marvin Rowley: If it was maintained like this one over here. And you’ve got the problem with maintaining, that is that the thing is always in transition. And as long as it’s in transition the edge creeps and moves. And so if you have fire into it you might get the area to move back again, but if you don’t get fire, the edge creeps in. And to me, managing it is not to keep it from creeping. It’s to keep it viable. And probably create other areas like it. Almost all these species appear where the conditions are. They aren’t lost when one area drops out. A mile away you might find another condition and they’re there. And how they get there, I use the ladyslipper as an example. On my farm I’ve got a stand and when I bought it, it had been a field. This guy I bought it from said he’d summer fallowed it the year he rented the property, and it was a dandy field. Well, it wasn’t a dandy field, it was shallow soil and all these humps, but it was sure beautiful. And I hardly planted a tree on it. But the first year I was there I dropped the blade and scarified it here and there and got reproduction coming, grand fir coming, and now it’s in the stand about this size.

Bob Zybach: About 8 or 10 inch. Oh, no, 12 or 16 inch.

Marvin Rowley: Some of it is 16 inch. It’s been 30-some years. But it’s almost all natural. Some of it came in under oak and I’m cutting the scrub oak out so that the Doug-fir gets through quicker, and helping it. But last year, I had ladyslippers on the bank in there. And I thought, “Gee, those weren’t there before, how did they get there?” Well, I got to thinking about it. I think

Marvin Rowley: ladyslipper seed is one that grows in the duff, it doesn’t grow in the dirt at all. It grows in the duff. And that seed is probably eaten by a rodent and it goes through its gut. And so wherever the rodent drops his droppings . . . and he’s been eating on these ladyslippers. Well, there they are. So the animals, then, you’re talking about the animal population is important for keeping the whole system going. If you destroy the animals the rodents all go. You don’t want to get rid of all of them, but you don’t them to overpopulate. And that’s part of management.

Bob Zybach: Well you hear a lot about these environmentalists. They’ll say, “Well, if we get the wildflowers out of here they won’t come back.” But then they’re not considering the wildlife population for dispersing them.

Marvin Rowley: The reason I brought you down here. I’m standing in the middle of a horse skid trail. And you see it going down here in a groove. See, it goes down through here. And then it went up and crossed the road and went up several feet up that hillside that I could identify at one time. And it’s caved in, there’s been cat logging through here at times, but down here in this hardwood there’s hardly been anything to go in for—till there.

Bob Zybach: What do you think about, these old horse skid trails, they’ll never be here again. And they’re going to fill in. Is there any function the forest should do as far as locating them or managing them or mapping them or avoiding them, or?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I think you could make a sample out of some, show where it was and put it on the map. I think I got this on Royal’s [ Jackson] map. This is one I showed him. But there’s . . . on the west slope of, there west of the 500 Road along that main ridge, west of the TV tower and through there, I can still find them in there. They’ve logged through it several times, and you’ll find pieces of the old horse skid trails. And when we logged in there the first time I found an old skid road where they’d put two logs with . . . crossed logs with notches cut in them and the plank between them, for the horses to walk on the planks and they’d drag the log in the groove. And they drove big old spikes into there and bent them over so that the spikes kind of kept the cross log from wearing out.

Bob Zybach: Do you think, say they came in there to manage hardwoods. Do you think something like this they should avoid? Or does it hurt it?

Marvin Rowley: I would . . . if they want to make an interpretive spot out of someplace on this, either avoid that spot, I wouldn’t avoid the whole thing. If everyone that you found that was there could be . . . I mean, you’d have half your forest taken up in the thing if you worried about every one of them. But there are some of them that are real good examples.

Bob Zybach: Do you think it’s valuable then what we’re doing, trying to go through and locate these and talk about them and explain what they are, so that . . .

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, I think you’d want to take it into account in the management.

Bob Zybach: How do you think . . . what kind of mechanism can do that? I know there’ve been a lot of cases on the forest here where things like this, nobody knows about them so they just go through them.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, when they don’t know about them. There isn’t one person in a thousand that would walk across that thing that would think anything about it.

Bob Zybach: Yeah, even a person who knew what they look like.

Marvin Rowley: But I’ve been . . . I followed it from the creek. And the reason I even got on to it to start with, there’s a culvert up there about where it crosses the creek, and I walked out on that culvert to make sure I had good drainage and I stumbled on this thing, and I thought, “Somebody made a

Marvin Rowley: ditch for this thing all the way, so the water could really get away from this.” Well, that didn’t quite tie together, but I got to walking it and I figured what it was and then I found it on the other side of the road. I don’t know if you’d find it on the other side of the road anymore. And I don’t remember when I first found this, whether it was in the ‘60s or the ‘70s! It was a long time ago.

Bob Zybach: Do you think . . . now there’s no policy of environmental assessments or impact statements here or anything. Do you think that it might be good to start mapping these and develop some kind of policy along that line?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I think for your interpretive deal, like I said, if you could identify the one and put it on this road or someplace where you could have a number and tell them this is where the old logging was. And point out the stumps. See they logged all these hillsides went down to that mill, and they got down there some way. And I think if you cut across here now you’d probably find more of those up here. And find your good ones and show this is where they drug the logs, and have a picture of how it happened in a book. They never dug those ditches, they just drug logs and then they cut the first log went through, kinda dug a little bit, and the next one dug a little more, and the next one dug a little more, and pretty soon that was the easiest way to go. Once it drug through and broke stuff out of the way the next one went easy.

Bob Zybach: How would you describe this location right here? Well, it’s on Royal’s map . . .

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, it’s on Royal’s map. We’re about a third of a mile up from the junction of the road there.

Bob Zybach: Okay, and halfway to the creek.

Marvin Rowley: And I think where that hit down there, it looks like to me that they probably floated those logs down to that mill and that creek, whether they did it by hand or if there’s water back up that far, or what.

Bob Zybach: Okay, one more question before we take off from here. We were talking about it a little bit. You said, where the edges creep, on some of these meadows, you’d have to maintain them, so you’d have to say, put in fires, or something, like the Indians did, or use herbicides to . . .

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, you’d have to do something to keep them from creeping if you didn’t want them to move.

Bob Zybach: Well, is that a valid function of the forest? Should the forest try to keep a number of different vegetation types growing?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I think it should keep all the vegetation types it’s got going. But I don’t know that would be a thing that you need to keep them going where they are.

Bob Zybach: I see. You could go into new areas, that maybe that they’d logged or something.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. I think when you make a clearcut you basically do the same thing over again. On some of those, those south slopes, they’re really not, they’re site 4, site 5 even as far as growing timber, until you get it up and cover the ground, because they’re so dry, and such shallow soil. And some of them are going to stay that way. I’ll show you one today that you can . . . as far as open oak savannah slopes, if you don’t do anything it’s going to be as long as you and I and the next generation or two. It’s been that way for 150 years, and there’s really nothing to say it’s not going to be that way for the next 150 years. It’s got some creep going, but the creep is slow.

Bob Zybach: Out of 15,000 acres in here, and say maybe 10,000 or 12,000 used to be savannah and prairie. And they’re trying to save all the old growth, maybe I don’t know, 500 acres of old growth or 1,000 acres, maybe that’s all that was here originally.

Marvin Rowley: Well, yeah, that’s all it was. The old growth that they’ve got here now, they probably cut some of it, but basically in this area here, on these ridges the old growth that is here is what was there before. We cut a little bit of it, but you didn’t…where you don’t have old growth you didn’t have any trees at all back when the Indians were here. Like in these areas here …. I was looking off across over on that other ridge over there. I came by here one time and I spotted a lean-to. Had a metal roof on it. The old road that was here, there was a road here before this one. It went up this, I don’t know if we should take time, but that’s it right there.

Bob Zybach: Oh, I see, that cutbank going up to the right there.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, you can go up there, and you can follow that through to where it comes up to the Saddle. And where it crossed this little draw, there was a dam just above it, and there was piping out of it. Now, I . . . when I first, found that, I figured maybe there was a sawmill there, but there’s no evidence of a lot of cutting there. And I have an idea that it’s highly possible that these people down here had a pipeline, water supply run out of that and run down here.

Bob Zybach: Maybe to help sluice the logs down the creek or something?

Marvin Rowley: Well, no, just for their water supply.

Bob Zybach: Okay, now you have this marked as a mill site on Royal’s map. But you don’t think it’s a mill site anymore?

Marvin Rowley: I’m not sure of that. We called it a mill site because there was a dam there, and a pipe was there, but when you get to thinking about what was above there, there weren’t a lot of big stumps up there, above it, which is usually where it’d have to have been.

Bob Zybach: I want to kind of wrap up that one discussion on the prairie. We’ve preserved most of the old growth that’s been here for 150 years. It’s still here and there’s a lot of politics and everything else, biology or whatever, to keep it. But there’s hardly any of the prairie or savannah left. Do you think that those areas should be increased or just a representative sample.

Marvin Rowley: Well, but the reason the old growth is here, is because the ecology of the old growth, it didn’t have to be . . . it’s not on the cutting edge of things, it’s on the fading edge. But on the prairies that you’ve got are on the cutting edge. And the activities around the edges there, there’s always the tendency for this bigger stuff to creep in and take over. And once it goes into it, like I say, I don’t think you can viably reverse it. There’s a corner right up here, you’re familiar with.

Bob Zybach: Was it a DLC . . . well it wouldn’t be a DLC corner, but an original land survey corner?

Marvin Rowley: This is a quarter corner, I think, right here.

Bob Zybach: Okay.

Marvin Rowley: I didn’t even bring a map.

Bob Zybach: Just a brass capper?

Marvin Rowley: Where’s the yellow tag? Oh, let’s see, there used to be a yellow . . .

Bob Zybach: There’s a bunch of blazing up ahead of us there.

Marvin Rowley: Oh, that don’t mean nothing. That’s . . . those little white things are the cruise . . .

Bob Zybach: Here’s a metal post.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, that’s just marking the culvert.

[Break in Interview]

Marvin Rowley: Hmm. 1956. Brought here.

Bob Zybach: Brought where this alder is here?

Marvin Rowley: Well, up to the little clearcut in it. We did a thinning. Did I tell you about the golden eagle?

Bob Zybach: Yeah.

Marvin Rowley: It’d sit on that limb right there. I drove up here, it was in the road, and it got up and flew up and landed on that thing, and I sat here and looked at it and it got nervous and it turned and went back down the road.

Bob Zybach: Just 15 or 20 feet from you, then?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, I mean I was just sitting here looking at it, and “Man, that’s a big bird! And it’s not a bald eagle. But it’s golden on the head.” And I went home and we had a thinning sale that this little road that went down across the creek right there, our landing was right there. And, see in these things you talk about managing the stand, whether you’re managing the darn thing or not. Then there’s a big tree that blew down out there that woods, and when I was logging in here every year we went through and picked all that stuff up at the same price that we did everything else. And that went out. I could turn the skidder or crew loose and they could put as much wood on the landing picking that stuff out, or almost as much as they could and if I’d run into difficulty on it, I just billed a little time of labor time onto it, told Bill what we were doing.

Bob Zybach: Do you think all those repeated entries did any damage, or do you think not having that fiber there hurt anything?

Marvin Rowley: No, I wouldn’t even think it was missed. We leave enough wood fiber on the ground when we take the merchantable stuff. We leave the tops and the limbs and the stuff you’re leaving about 80 percent of the wood fiber that ever was there stays on the ground anyway! That thin that comes out isn’t the whole deal, you got the needle drop and the limb drop that’s on that thing for 80 years. There’s stuff on the ground. You’ve got your tops and your roots and everything that’s left there when you take that out.

Bob Zybach: We had a forest biology teacher, I kind of want this on the tape, teaching the kids right now that once they logged the ground and they clearcut it, they took out all the wood fiber. It had to be pointed out to them that there were roots and stumps left behind that was pretty large amount of volume going into the soil there.

Marvin Rowley: Not only that, all the humus that’s created to get up to that point. The needles last three years and never more than four years, on hardly any of these trees. And do you know how you can look, some of them last longer than others. I mean, on Douglas-fir, you might have some that lose all its needles in two years. I mean, hold them two years and the third year they’re gone. And some of them hold them four years. Well, you can tell looking at that tree right there how long the needles stay on that tree. You see, the only place the needles grow is when this bud is developing. So there are needles—there’s one year’s growth, there’s two years’ growth, and there’s the third year’s growth, and there’s the fourth year’s growth, and there are needles hanging on back there to the fifth year. But there aren’t any in the sixth year. And so, you give this thing a life of a stand needle drop, and if it held them five years, and dropped them, that’s unusual holding them five years. Then they drop off and the only ones you see are the last five year’s growth of greenery up there. All the rest of it, 70 years of them, have dropped on the ground. And all the little limbs as you start pruning out like that, all the limbs and stuff drop on the ground. If you didn’t manage this stand, you would find that there’s a tremendous amount of debris [that] drops on the ground, as it comes up. You start with 400, 500, 1000

Marvin Rowley: trees to the acre, by the time it’s 50 years old, you’re down to 200 or 300 or whatever, and at 70 years you’re down to less, and where did that go? It went this way.

Bob Zybach: How about the argument that having those big logs laying there creates these micro climates for certain salamanders and stuff?

Marvin Rowley: I think that our log debris that develops even in logging provides that thing. I’ve found them, go out in my own field and I find those critters in it.

Bob Zybach: If you’re talking about a bear log though.

Marvin Rowley: Bear log, how many bears have we got? How many bears do you want in this stand? We don’t want too many of them, because you build a bear population in here, you’re going to have people all around the fringe crying and moaning and groaning, the bears are going to be in their garbage, and there’ll be problems. You don’t want bears, you want them back in the hills.

Bob Zybach: How about these artificial snags they’re creating out there? They say those are supposed to last 50 or 60 years.

Marvin Rowley: They’ll last 100 years [unintelligible]. They’ll be here until the next generation and the next generation. But I never shot any tops out while I was here. I left trees that were uneconomical to harvest and my crew came along and shot them off the year after I left. They were wanting me to take the tops out all the time I was here, and I didn’t believe in taking the tops out. See this one here? Nobody took the top out of that, that blew out on its own.

Bob Zybach: So do you think this idea of making snags is . . .

Marvin Rowley: Well, I think it’s a little bit on the far-fetched side of . . . let’s see, what am I? Look at all the wind blow right here, that you could pick up. You want to let that stuff rot? I can hardly believe it. There was a pioneer road

Bob Zybach: . . . over to King’s Valley?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. And down the Baker Creek and there’s an old road that goes right down, just along the toe of this slope, around, hits the creek down below here just about where the clearcut is. And right down there at that point there is an old plow, steel plow, with a big log chain thing tied on to the front end of it. I have an idea they were using that plow to build that road.

Bob Zybach: That’s the one that comes up from Baker Creek there, isn’t it?

Marvin Rowley: Well, it just ends. It goes down to Baker right there, and it ended right there. I couldn’t find any evidence of it going on any further.

Bob Zybach: Now this is Starker’s?

Marvin Rowley: Well, see those three dead trees down there?

Bob Zybach: Yeah.

Marvin Rowley: Those are ours. Right down there in the bottom right below us there, is where that plow is. And I couldn’t find any evidence of the road going on beyond that. And I never found evidence of a road coming up Baker Creek this way. The only road that’s there was the old logging road that Nicolades and Rooney built in 1950. And I helped locate that road, was the last problem we did as senior engineers in the spring of 1950. We came out here with Harry Patterson and flagged that road through from Sulphur Springs on up to that T. J. Starker property. And Patterson told us that that was going to be the road they were going to log on and OSC was giving them right-of-way.

Bob Zybach: Do you think it would be a good idea for the Forest to try to acquire this property?

Marvin Rowley: I think Starker is doing a pretty good job of managing it at this point, and to me it would make no difference whether they controlled that or we did. I think, in fact, it may be a good contrast between private management and university management.

Bob Zybach: It looks like the only difference, from what I can see here is that university management has tops blown out of the trees!

Marvin Rowley: Well, Starker may do something like that nowadays.

Bob Zybach: Yeah. Now this trail here, do you know anything about it?

Marvin Rowley: [unintelligible].

Bob Zybach: Do you happen to know what name these flowers are?

Marvin Rowley: No, I should. But…

Bob Zybach: February 23rd, they’re…There’s some kind of . . . log down.

Marvin Rowley: That’s a blow down. Somebody blew a big peg in the ground.

Bob Zybach: Yeah.

Marvin Rowley: And we got a line cut through here.

Bob Zybach: We’ve got some split in here.

Marvin Rowley: How’s that? Well, that just probably split apart. I don’t know what did that.

Bob Zybach: No, there’s a bunch of stuff split right here. Somebody’s been doing some kind of work in here.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, they put a line through here. Probably . . . see none of these have [unintelligible].

Bob Zybach: Well, let me get a picture of that . . .

Marvin Rowley: What I was looking for, I think it’s right here.

Bob Zybach: Okay. Oh, this little trail right here?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, see there’s the blazes?

Bob Zybach: Yeah.

Marvin Rowley: And this [unintelligible].

Bob Zybach: So who here …

Marvin Rowley: It come across. See? It was blazed up like this, and . . .

Bob Zybach: So people could follow these little blazes here.

Marvin Rowley: Well, yeah, if you could find the blazes you could find the trail. Because the property line runs this way, these aren’t the property line blazes, these are trail blazes.

Bob Zybach: Okay. Would you mind putting your hand right there so I’ve got a . . .? I’ve got this being recorded, so it’s …Now this went from the Saddle to Kings Valley?

Marvin Rowley: Yes, this went from Oak Creek Saddle went up to the top of the ridge and down toward Kings Valley. That’s what I was looking . . . I didn’t think it was so far up on the hill. But see, there’s another…

Bob Zybach: Oh, okay. So these blazes are, they blazed the trails through here so people could find it. So what was the trail used for?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I just assume it was transportation. Back when they ran horses and walked.

Bob Zybach: But there wasn’t a wagon road or anything through here?

Marvin Rowley: No, it wasn’t a wagon road, it was just a trail.

Bob Zybach: Who would have used this trail? Down on Sulphur Springs, there’s a trail down there that goes to Kings Valley from there?

Marvin Rowley: Well, I think what they were doing was back in those days then had to go down and buy a few staples or get the mail, if they didn’t have a wagon to ride in it was probably a lot quicker coming over the top of this hill. The trail went right up there . . . It was on top of this ridge back this way. I don’t think back here you’ll find anything except possibly blazes.

Bob Zybach: Did this trail have a name?

Marvin Rowley: Not that I know of. Although it could have been . . . probably the people back when they used it had a name for it.

Bob Zybach: Now we’re on the trail right here.

Marvin Rowley: I think so. I think we’re on the trail.

Bob Zybach: Of course, we’re not next to a blaze, that’d be.

Marvin Rowley: I think in the dark you’d find it better than in the daylight. It’s harder. You can feel it right here, there’s a good level spot. Seems like it went right through here.

Bob Zybach: Why would you say that you could find it better in the dark than the daylight?

Marvin Rowley: You can feel a flat spot. It looks like it went right out through that way, on the “cougar-kill” road.

Bob Zybach: Cougar kill?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, right on that next point there, they came out and there was a fawn that had been killed and half-eaten, and they hide it. Went in and ate the soft parts out, the liver and the lungs and ate from the back and the hide was rolled up. And I went talking to Harold Sturgis or Francis Ives about it, said I found this deer kill out there, and what would have killed it? And I told them how we found it, and he says, “It’s a cougar.” I said, “How do you know?” and he says, “Well, they go in and they eat the soft parts and then they nuzzle in there eating it, and just pushing it rolls the hide, rolls them up like somebody rolled it up right ahead of him, as they’re crowding into the meat.” It was right here. We built this road in 1975.

Bob Zybach: What do they call it now?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, the 680 road.

Bob Zybach: How long did you call it the cougar-kill road?

Marvin Rowley: Well, that’s what we called it when they were surveying it.

Bob Zybach: Oh, I see, as you were first putting it in.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, the crew I had found the cougar kill and named the road.

Bob Zybach: When they did the wildlife survey here, when Angela was doing that, she marked down several species. That’s why I’ve been asking. Like cougar and that, and they put question marks, McComb and the others, they questioned whether there’s any cougar out here at all.

Marvin Rowley: Oh, there’s a lot of cougar here. I get up here on the ridgetop in the wintertime when there’s

Marvin Rowley: snow on the ground, I’ll find cougar tracks along the ridgetops consistently. Over on the Dunn Forest and Forest Peak, I found them there every time I was up on top in the snow. I found cougar tracks. Bobcat, I’ve seen bobcat down there, I saw a bobcat go by the Arboretum. Just above there. I saw one up on top of the hill up here, a big old female that was nursing a whole batch of kittens from the size of her tits hanging down, almost dragging the ground. Side flank just hung down there and the tits were about three inches off the ground.

Bob Zybach: Now you mentioned silver fox. Did you ever see red fox or grey fox out here?

Marvin Rowley: Not out here, specifically; in this area, coyotes.

Bob Zybach: Did you ever hear any story of any wolves out here?

Marvin Rowley: The only wolf story I got is at Bellfountain. My son was hunting down there just up Reese Creek, and he said this animal got up and ran across the front of him and he said he never saw anything like it. And he described it and it described wolf. He said, “It wasn’t a coyote!” And I went in to the Horner Museum and looked at the stuffed wolf. It looked just like my son had described it.

Bob Zybach: They’ve got the road blocked.

Marvin Rowley: Aren’t going to get through here are we?

Bob Zybach: Well it looks like you might have a little room there.

Marvin Rowley: I’ve been stuck in California and Oregon and Washington, I don’t think I ever got stuck in Idaho yet! We were cruising timber down west of Santa Rosa, between Santa Rosa and the ocean. On an old, [unintelligible]. And the roads went down the ridges and around, and this one road they told us that if . . . we couldn’t get out on it, we had to go back the way we came in, and there was a ford across the creek. But they said it was a real shortcut, saved seven or eight miles, but they said there was a slide across it we couldn’t get across. And Gene and I drove down there . . .

Bob Zybach: Who is Gene?

Marvin Rowley: Gene Pitts, he was kid I worked with at Umpqua Plywood.

Bob Zybach: So this would be somewhere between 1952 and 1957, somewhere?

Marvin Rowley: Well, it was about 1952, ‘53. And anyway we decided we’d ford that creek. We had a Jeep station wagon, four-wheel-drive Jeep station wagon. Just dropped off in the creek and pulled it up on the other side, 16 inches of water next to the bank. And drove up around the corner, and sure enough the slide that was blocking the road was just a little sloping too much for us to think about trying. If we’d have taken our shovels and spent an hour digging, we could have dug our way across it. Well, we turned around and went back and this creek, like I say, I dropped off the bank into it. And there was no problem getting off it. But going back, I looked at it and I figured the best way to do that was hit the bank one wheel at a time, instead of trying to make two wheels climb that bank—to hit one wheel at a time and just climb up. And that’s what I did. And the first wheel hit it and it spun. And when they spun, that thing settled down in the water, the water caught it and it took it sideways. And when it stopped moving the water was running across the floorboard. And, like I say, we were eight miles from the nearest people. And it was 10:30, 11:00, 10:00 in the morning. Our gear in the back had floated . . . the back end of it was so deep in the hole the water was almost up to the castings. Our gear was in dynamite boxes, floating. And we looked at that darn thing, and we said, well, the distance we got to walk to catch a ride, we’d have to start walking about 2:00 to get

Marvin Rowley: the other crew that went out. And we decided we had till 2:00 to get out. And we worked, we got out and pushed the front around to try to stay dry. And stopped and ate our lunch. When we got our lunch ate we had it figured out, we just baled off into the water. And we’re talking about December. Colder than all get out! And I cut me a big pry pole and pried the front end up in the air and the back end up in the air and dried the motor out with the rags we had. Got the motor where it’d run.

Bob Zybach: I don’t know. One thing I wanted to ask you. You ever hear that hill in the middle there called Fogle’s Peak?

Marvin Rowley: That one down at the…

Bob Zybach: With the planting on it?

Marvin Rowley: This one right here?

Bob Zybach: Yeah, that one out in front there.

Marvin Rowley: The one here with the planting on it?

Bob Zybach: No, no, the next one out there.

Marvin Rowley: Way out?

Bob Zybach: Well, halfway in between. There’s the old Forest Peak to the right, Coffin Butte out there, and then one in the middle there, that big rounded hump.

Marvin Rowley: Oh, I’d never heard anything but Forest Peak out there.

Bob Zybach: Anyway, there you are out in the middle of the water in December.

Marvin Rowley: Anyway, we got it dried out and pried up in the air, and we got in and the first rattle out of the box, the first try the front end jumped up onto the bank. But I couldn’t get it moved from there. We had an old piece of hay wire.

Bob Zybach: Lot of people using the Forest today . . .

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. Then [we] tied this piece of hay wire onto a little tree up in front of us. Wrapped it around the hub on the thing, and went ahead on her, and pulled the tree out. Hooked onto another one, just a little tree, hooked onto another one, and went ahead on it, and that thing wrapped and got to wrapping on there, we could have climbed a tree with it then. Used a rope for a winch and threw a couple of bites out and wrapped on the bites.

Bob Zybach: That was how you were able to get out on it?

Marvin Rowley: We were out by 1:30 and we went on to cruising timber until 3:30. We got two hours of timber cruising in that day.

Marvin Rowley: December 1969 - January ‘70, and this is where Eric Forsman had his spotted owl and spotted it. The first one, and we logged it when he was gone.

Bob Zybach: Just the back side of what they call Dimple Hill now.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, we’re talking about that young stand there. And we did that with a Madill, 70-foot Madill tower. And that was the last job we did with Gary Ferguson. When we got done with that one, he took the tower to Valsetz and split from us.

Bob Zybach: Was that a pretty happy breaking up, pretty agreeable?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, yeah, it was agreeable. We arrived at a conclusion to what to do. It wasn’t a fight. I didn’t know why he wanted to take off, but I heard later that he was turning 30 and at 30 he

Marvin Rowley: inherited this bundle. And we were in the partnership, and his financial advisor, bookkeeper, advised him to get out of the partnership. Because the partnership every partner is liable for every other partner’s problems. And I’m sure that’s why he did, but he never said that.

Bob Zybach: Have you heard that hill called anything other than Dimple Hill?

Marvin Rowley: Mitzi Point.

Bob Zybach: And that’s the only two names?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. Mitzi Point, John O’Leary named it Mitzi Point after his dog.

Bob Zybach: Oh, okay! I’d heard the name Mitzi Point, and nobody knew where that name came from, so you know where that name came from.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, he had a dog named Mitzi, and I think it died and they buried it up here somewhere. He was doing a triangulation. You want a little coffee?

Marvin Rowley: See that was a panorama. The treetops were all below your level.

Bob Zybach: Okay, now, there’s some pine right here. Are those planted?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, those were planted in the 1930s. [Unintelligible] planted those pine.

Bob Zybach: Now, we were talking about ridge trail system. And we’re coming out from Dimple Hill and we’re going towards Lewisburg Saddle here. One of the things is, we can see on all the old maps, that these were prairies and stuff. Do you think it’d make sense to open some of these up so you can see those old panoramas? Or just wait until they log them.

Marvin Rowley: Well, you could manage them for a viewpoint. We did that around the corner, there, did a clearcut and left a viewpoint.

Bob Zybach: Do you think that should be maintained?

Marvin Rowley: Depends on how desperate you are. They’ve got all kinds of views; they can go to the top of that hill to see the same view. So I can’t see taking several acres and rubbing them off or topping them out or whatever you’re going to do to make it when you’ve already a view somewhere similar to this.

Marvin Rowley: Here in the pine they planted in the ‘30s. Look at the Doug-fir. That’s where most of that ….

Bob Zybach: Why did they plant pine here?

Marvin Rowley: Why?

Bob Zybach: Yeah.

Marvin Rowley: Well, they thought it might grow good on these south slopes. It was before the days of knowing that there was a seed source that would be valuable. Most of this pine is susceptible to a needle problem that’s caused by too much water.

Bob Zybach: Now this is an old oak savannah in through here.

Marvin Rowley: There was a strip of old growth going up the hill right here. I never figured out why it was there, or why it is there yet. There’s one down the east slope there. Now right here I had a west coast tower set up, and you look right down through that slot right there, I had it tailholded across the property line. 1200, 1400 feet down the hill there. And we thinned all that up through here. In fact, part of that down there I yarded with a cat underneath the skyline. This is a highly unstable area, around this hillside here. Old growth on it, I think it just stayed wet and didn’t burn good. 1964, the year of the flood, and all the mass land failures, from right

Marvin Rowley: down below us here all the way over to that creek there was a crack open in the ground where it sunk down 12 inches and opened up like this, just along through where those trees are.

Bob Zybach: But it never went anywhere?

Marvin Rowley: Didn’t go anywhere. This is that wet. You see, all this ground has got that wet.

Bob Zybach: There’s a creek running right through here. Does that have a name to it?

Marvin Rowley: It goes down into Jackson Creek. Headwaters of Jackson Creek.

Bob Zybach: Oh, okay.

Marvin Rowley: In ‘46 I was in the freshman engineering class, down in Jackson Place, down below us here, he took us out in the field. See that road up there? See that post, that white post? He says, “Pace up there and back and tell me what the distance is.” Look at it now. That means that all these trees that are there now weren’t there in 1946.

Marvin Rowley: This little slide out right here happened in 1964.

Bob Zybach: So all these happened about the same time in 1964.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, in 1964, they happened all the same day. In 1964 we had one of those unusual deals, they had, I don’t know, something like six inches of rain that fell in a week or two-week period. The ground was almost saturated. And then we had about six inches more [that] fell in two days. So it just come down in bucketfuls, and the ground saturated, and if you follow engineering, what happens when you get a mass failure, you basically, the water builds up along a place where it can’t go through, an impervious area, and builds up and it can’t get out as fast as it comes in, and real soon it just lifts, hydraulically lifts that slab off and loosens its friction hold. Here’s another place where all these pines were planted, down below us.

Bob Zybach: Was it planted at the same time?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah.

Bob Zybach: Was that CCC?

Marvin Rowley: No, I think that was college students.

Bob Zybach: So this is like your last sale?

Marvin Rowley: Treated them maple, left them standing for snags and left all the trees on the site that were low value lumber. Most of them were just low value. Well, these cookies are a treat. They’ve got about a cup of sugar in a hundred of them. And a half a cup of molasses. But then there’s oatmeal and oat bran, hazelnuts, filberts and raisons.

Bob Zybach: What do they call those now, those health food bars?

Marvin Rowley: Granola type of thing? This stand right here was done at the Columbus Day storm in 1962, it blew the overstory down and left a scattering of trees and that was coming in as as understory. So we set a cable, that Bantum yarder up right here, pulled the overstory off, and we hardly had to plant a tree on that stand.

Bob Zybach: Now you told Royal that that was about the most significant event in the history of this Forest here. Do you still agree with that assessment?

Marvin Rowley: You mean the Columbus Day storm?

Bob Zybach: Yeah.

Marvin Rowley: Oh, yes. It’s 100-year storm, maybe a 500-year storm. We really only have one other indication of a storm like that on the west coast. I’ve read up on the Olympic Peninsula they’ve had a blow down that was equal to it.

Bob Zybach: In 1921?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah. Somewhere way back. But this one hit the whole Douglas-fir region. The time of day it hit, they hardly lost a life. If it’d hit two hours earlier we’d have all been in the woods.

Marvin Rowley: One thing in school, for a while I kept forgetting, I kept mentioning the Columbus Day storm, then I realized to most of these kids I was talking ancient history. They couldn’t remember it; they weren’t around.

Marvin Rowley: This slope right here blew down in, I think the fall of ‘50 or ‘51, just almost 100 percent. And they logged it. They had an A-frame right here on the point, and they called it, this used to be called the “A-frame Stand.” They used that name on it.

Bob Zybach: On what, the 630 and the 600, Patterson?

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, it was right back there on that point where the A-frame was set up, and they logged it to it.

Bob Zybach: Was this the same blow that blew down the Corvallis watershed trees?

Marvin Rowley: No, no, the Columbus Day storm did that. And anyway, this was the first area where they were successful at getting any kind of control of big-leaf maple. It wasn’t 100 percent successful, but they did knock the bigleaf maple.

Bob Zybach: How did they do that?

Marvin Rowley: With an herbicide. And I don’t know what they used. I think it was probably the Agent Orange, 2,4,5-TP or an earlier component of it.

Bob Zybach: Who was the one that did the experiment on that?

Marvin Rowley: I think George Barnes was the one that started it.

Bob Zybach: This trail would be the one from Lewisburg Saddle to Baker Creek? To Sulphur Springs?

Marvin Rowley: It came up here on top of the ridge.

Bob Zybach: Oh, okay. So this would be the one coming from Dimple Hill down to Lewisburg Saddle.

Marvin Rowley: Probably. I have an idea that this goes off over here, to Dimple Hill. I’ve never found it. I thought they had one that went down into Baker Creek, but I never did find any evidence of it.

Bob Zybach: What do you think about this kind of work here?

Marvin Rowley: I’m glad that somebody else is doing it.

Bob Zybach: Why is that?

Marvin Rowley: I think it’s nonsense. I think it’s reinventing the wheel. We know more about shelterwood than they’re discovering here. But one of the problems, we didn’t document it. And this is documented. But down this slope again, down that draw there, is probably I’d say one of the most unstable areas on the forest, because it’s part of what we had over there and it continued right on across here, down through here, and down through this draw. There was all kinds of old windthrow, just continually windthrowing, and a rather sparse stand. And they went ahead and made a shelterwood out of it, and they lost about half of what was left of it. You see the root wads there after the windthrow, after they made the shelterwood. I doubt that they’ll be able to keep this stuff for any length of time. Up here, this is more stable.

Bob Zybach: Now, we’re looking at this area where they’ve done shelterwood and created lots of snags and they’ve scarified the soil. What do you think about scarifying the soil as a site preparation?

Marvin Rowley: That’s a good deal. Scarifying the soil, you get reproduction coming where you got bare soil, and you get reduced competition from the brush and the grass for a little bit, if we get it coming. But it’s sporadic, I mean, these trees here may produce cones in a year or two, next year or so, but whether you get a seed source that throws out on it soon enough before the brush takes over. I’ve made this type of thing without scarifying, right down there on the north side of Sulphur Springs Road where they made that clearcut. I did the same thing, back in 1975. And I got a beautiful stand of brush. Because I had an understory of oceanspray and hazel, and dogwood and big leaf maple and I let the light into it and it just developed twice the size almost overnight.

Bob Zybach: Well, they’ve got a lot of sprouting right here, but they’ve also planted some fir in there.

Marvin Rowley: Yeah, they’ve planted this and also they’ve sprayed these clusters. They killed the top up here, but they didn’t kill this, this is live. The only problem is, keeping this down till those get above it. And then they’ve got it made. Let’s see if we can find . . .

Bob Zybach: Okay. Here’s some old cable. Is this type of logging more dangerous?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, yeah, it’d have to be.

Bob Zybach: How about the cost?

Marvin Rowley: Well, it’s more costly in the thinning, you get less volume per acre off it, so you got to rig up, the rig up process is the same on less volume, and then, if you’re going to protect the trees that are left, you can’t rub them or sow-wash your line around them or . . . you have to get them straight, and that means you’ve got a lot more time in making the rig up.

Bob Zybach: That’s one term we haven’t got on one of these tapes yet, is “sow-wash your line.” Can you explain that?

Marvin Rowley: Well, it means rubbing the trees, getting into the bite. You know what a bite is?

Bob Zybach: Oh, yeah. I actually know what sow-wash is, I just, somebody’s going to be listening to this 50 years from now and they’re gonna wonder what the heck it is.

Marvin Rowley: Do you know where the term “bite” comes from? It’s a sailor’s term. Being in the bite of the line, when they were sailing the old sailing ships and they had all the rigging running around, it was a term that they used there, and it just translated onto landlubbers.

Bob Zybach: Do you know where the term sow-wash came from?

Marvin Rowley: Probably had to do with the Indians. And I think that sow-wash was a people that were inclined to pull wool over your eyes. Not tell you the truth. Or that at least the white men perceived them to be that way.

Bob Zybach: Now, here’s an old stump down below us on the left here. Is that some of your earlier work?

Marvin Rowley: I don’t think so. It looks new.

Bob Zybach: It’s pretty new. Got a couple sprouts on it.

Marvin Rowley: I think it’s mine, and I think it’s a handsaw that cut it and not a power saw. But it’s deteriorated to where you can’t see . . . they didn’t need one over here, evidently.

Bob Zybach: Nope.

Marvin Rowley: I don’t think we’d have fell it down the hill like that, I had an idea, back in the ‘30s especially

Marvin Rowley: they had, what did they call it, [a] work study program, federally funded. Amazing how some of these old things can disappear.

Bob Zybach: Yeah. Was it a pretty clear trail through here?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, yeah, this was like one that had been laid out.

Bob Zybach: What’s the trail date from? Was it an old trail?

Marvin Rowley: Oh, yeah. I never knew when this one . . . now you say you have records of one going from Lewisburg over to Dimple Hill?

Bob Zybach: Yeah.

Marvin Rowley: I have an idea that this trail is the one that goes there, maybe improved by the Forestry students over the years. Back when I was in school we used to have what we called Arboretum Day. And on Arboretum Day the whole faculty and student body went to the Forest and they did maintenance type of things until noon. At noon they ate bean-hole beans. And afternoon they had contests. But from 8 to 12 they did maintenance projects, and it seems I can remember them having a trail maintenance crew there somewhere.

Bob Zybach: Now you told Royal ten years ago that you thought that the attitude was better, that those kinds of traditions were a good thing.

Marvin Rowley: Oh, yeah. I guess they got everybody to them, and if you didn’t do them you didn’t continue on in school.