Leslie Sullivan
March 31, 1995My first job in the forest was on the Umatilla National Forest out of Ukiah in the summer of 1935. One of the staff on the forest there encouraged me to go on to college. I hadn't thought much about going to college before that because we were so poor on the ranch. We were coming through the Depression and times were tough. I thought by going to college I could find something better. So I went to Oregon State and graduated in 1939 with a degree in Forest Management. I loved working out in the woods.
I got my first appointment on the Olympic National Forest in November of 1945 after getting out of the service. I worked in timber management; laying out timber sales, appraising, and preparing timber for sale.
I came to the Ochoco Ranger Station, Big Summit District, as Forest Ranger in 1951. I was there four years. Then I was assigned to the Mt. Baker National Forest for two years. My job there was mostly fire control but I had other responsibilities, too, recreation and range management.
After two years at Mt.Baker I was promoted and reassigned to Juneau, Alaska in timber management. Again, my job was preparing some of the 50-year sales for the Forest Service. Those were some of the biggest sales in the history of the Forest Service. They were the large pulp sales for Alaska Lumber & Pulp and Ketchikan Pulp. We were breaking new ground. I think the reason I was selected to go up there was because of my experience on the Olympic National Forest working in a rain forest and similar types of timber.
I was in Alaska six years and then returned to Portland and worked in the regional office again in timber management for two years.
Then I got an offer to come back to the Ochoco National Forest as Forest Supervisor on June 1 of 1951. I was real happy to get out of the big offices in Portland and get back out in the forest to where I felt like I was doing something visible and for the good of the country. I remained Forest Supervisor here for almost ten years and retired on the Ochoco early in 1975. I've been retired now for 20 years.
Back then the allowable cut was 131 million feet. In the 1950's, we were over cutting, particularly on the Big Summit District, because the trees were infected with needle blight. We were losing a lot of timber so we went in and did extra salvage and deliberately did some over cutting trying to get rid of the blight. But we pretty much held on average to the allowable annual cut.
I was trained in all of the sciences for which they now retain specialists. Not at the depth of the soil scientist but I had soils training; I had watershed training, recreation training and engineering. I was able to run a transit although I was never a certified licensed engineer. Now they have a specialist for each discipline. And so the payroll has proliferated--all of these numbers of people. One explanation is that a good percentage of the energy is expended in making studies and writing environmental reports before managers can do anything on the ground.
As for our relationship with the logging companies I would say it was cordial. There were some adversarial relationships, but for the most part we tried to cooperate and work together. And we got them to do quite a few things for us in the way of road building and so on. Of course, those costs were allowed for in the timber appraisal.
Even before the present climate or environment we tried to look out for the resources and minimize damages to the drainages and soil. The loggers were quite cooperative although the logging practices at that time were somewhat destructive.
For example: It was the custom to build roads up the canyons and little draws and drag the timber down to the landings. Naturally, you always dragged dirt and stuff down with the timber and eventually some of that would wind up in the creeks and muddy up the streams. It was our goal, and I think that goal was accomplished even during my tenure, to get away from that practice and to start dragging the logs to landings uphill and using different logging techniques than the traditional downhill Cat logging.
So even before the present climate where environmentalists have pretty much stopped the logging on national forest lands, we were trying to protect and preserve the land and the general environment, being especially concerned about stream damage.
Our timber sales were sold at oral auction bidding. We would appraise the timber and advertise it for 30 days. We would set a minimum price. At that time there were at least four local big timber companies bidding on the timber. There was intense competition because the timber cutting capacity of these four big mills was greater than our allowable cut. Sometimes the mills would have trouble trying to break even. There were even a few defaults on some of the sales because they couldn't come out. There was also Hines Lumber Company over on Snow Mountain District but that was kind of a separate area. The local companies didn't compete too much for the timber over there.
We did get bidders from outside the area but there weren't too many sales sold outside the area. The local companies bid the timber up to make sure that didn't happen. But some timber was sold to mills in Bend and Redmond and I believe even as far away as Springfield on the west side.
About 1954 the multiple use concept was made law. Nowadays they call it something else but it's still pretty much the same concept. We tried to balance the uses between whatever the land was most adapted to. For example, grazing land, timber land, watersheds and recreation. We tried to blend those so we pretty much got the best use out of them without overriding or conflicting with the others.
By and large most people appreciated the forests and tried to use them conservatively, although there were some exceptions. The grazing was the hardest part. Naturally, when you're up in the mountains and you have rough steep ground, the sheep and cattle like to keg up on the creek bottoms. This was a real problem. They would come down for water and then keg up, make dust beds, and break down the stream banks and so on. We finally had to limit the time we would allow them to spend on these sore spots. We put in water developments and developed springs up on the hillsides. We even fenced off some of the creek bottoms particularly around recreation areas. For example, Marks Creek has been fenced off thirty years now. Later, Ochoco Creek was fenced off and many of the larger creeks on the forest as well.
On the subject of forest fires. During my tenure we were able to keep most of the fires small. Most of the fires were started by lightning. We had a few industrial fires, slash fires getting away, things like that. 1967 and 1968 were very dry years when we had some big fires. There has been many fires since then that burned off vast acreages. The first big fire during my tenure was in 1968, the Marks Creek fire. It alone burned 5000 acres. It burned so hot the soil, which wasn't too deep to start with, burned. There is no soil left particularly on the south facing slopes where the climate is so harsh. It still is not possible to rehabilitate the area.
We were starting to get away from relying solely on lookout towers back in the late 1940's and eventually disposed of most of them. We kept a few key lookouts mostly as communications relay. The lookout on Pisgah was kept a long time. Also Wolf Mountain on the Paulina District and Snow Mountain on the Snow Mountain District. Now there are only three or four lookouts which serve as communications, relay station, as much as for fire lookout. They've pretty much gone to aerial patrol.
Before I retired they relied on our good judgment as far as trying to weigh the impact before we took on a logging operation or whatever we did. But even then we started developing so-called planning teams with various specialists who were knowledgeable about a specific resource.
For example, the soil scientists or the watershed scientists, even archeologists concerned about the artifacts in burial grounds. Their job, before we went in to lay out a sale or any other planned impact, road building, anything, was to prepare an environmental impact report to identify the consequences of what we planned to do and then try to correct it. Planning that was started some 25 years or so ago has been refined.
As for the future in logging, we have to recognize that timber is a resource and that if we don't use it, we will lose it. Surely, there will be some timber harvest but it will be limited to better sites which are primarily best suited to growing timber over anything else.
We've been guilty of reaching out into areas that were marginal. I feel we have asked for some of these problems we have now. For that reason we've got the environmentalists on our back. There will always be some timber cutting, but not the old 131 million board feet of the past. Other uses are getting more important all of the time because of more people using the forest.