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Fixing the forest Mail Tribune / Roy Musitelli Property owner George McKinley, right, shows a forestry restoration crew the effects of a four-month logging project that took place about two years ago on land adjacent the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. McKinley hopes to rehabilitate the land with the help of a federal grant and the Lomakatsi Restoration Project. Grants help a Greensprings landowner restore his acreage and create a few jobs By PAUL FATTIG GREENSPRINGS - Logging slash and sediment choke the dry stream bed. A thick forest of bull thistles stands where trees once stood. Bare ground lies unprotected before the pounding rains of fall. But George McKinley is looking past the logging impact on the 120-acre parcel he bought two years ago shortly after the timber was cut. He sees a healthy forest of the future. "In 20 to 30 years, you'll see the return of the overstory (canopy)," he said during a tour of the property. "You will see an identifiable streambed again with an increased flow. "I would think that 20 years from now, there would be the opportunity to do some forest health thinning that will actually pay for the operation," he added. His dream is taking root today in the unnamed seasonal stream draining into Keene Creek, a tributary of Jenny Creek, which flows into the Klamath River. The seed money is in the form of a $25,000 grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help restore upland riparian areas to improve the downstream fishery. McKinley's property is one of many islands of private land bordering the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument. In addition to agency experts, McKinley is working with the Ashland-based Lomakatsi Restoration Project to help rehabilitate the land. The nonprofit group promotes stewardship based on ecological restoration and diversity as well as forest-friendly employment. Lomakatsi has received a $5,000 grant from the Eugene-based Alliance of Forest Workers and Harvesters to coordinate the restoration work on McKinley's land. "This puts people back to work in the woods," observed Lomakatsi Director Marko Bey. "One of the things we want to do is keep people working in the woods." "There is so much work to do in restoration, hundreds of years of work," added Oshana Turtle, grant writer for Lomakatsi. This project, which began Friday and continues through next weekend, includes training as well as on-the-ground work. Part of the work will entail planting indigenous species such as Ponderosa pine, sugar pine, Douglas fir, silver fir, dogwood, cascara, alder, thimbleberry, wild rose and white oak. The plants are grown at a community nursery at Jackson Well Springs outside of Ashland. "In some of the area, we will be cutting vegetation," Bey said. "But in other areas, we'll be planting to reduce erosion problems." They'll burn some of the smaller material while using bigger debris to reduce erosion, he said. Six paid interns and 10 volunteer interns will participate along with Lomakatsi staff. The project also includes the Seven Generation Multicultural Workforce Training Program, which includes American Indians. "We didn't have these conditions pre-European," Bey explained. "So we want indigenous people to help restore the land." That's where Dennis Martinez, co-director of the Takilma Tribal Project and an expert in indigenous land-use practice, comes in. An American Indian living in Hayfork in Northern California, Martinez is one of the featured speakers during the training session. He urges a soft approach when it comes to giving Mother Nature a helping hand along a streambed. "If you are going to err in a stream like this, you always want to err on the side of caution," he said. "We humans really don't know what we're doing. We are still learning as we go along." But the planned restoration on McKinley's property is a positive step, he said of the land where indigenous people lived and hunted for centuries before the arrival of settlers. In fact, during a tour of the parcel last week, a Lomakatsi worker spotted a glassy black obsidian spear point jutting up out of the dirt on a logging road. The spear point was likely already in the ground when settlers crossed through the area along the Applegate Trail in the mid-1800s. Much of the area was logged in the early 1900s, when loggers were seeking wooden treasures in large sugar pines. The land, slightly above 4,000 feet elevation, was logged again in the 1960s. When it was last logged during a four-month period two years ago, about 2 million board feet of timber was cut. The logging firm followed the letter of the law but failed the test for environmentally friendly practices, McKinley said as he stood at the edge of the recently logged area. "They took out the most economically valued trees without giving ecological consideration," McKinley said. "The better prescription would have been to leave some of the more dominant, older trees." The land bristles with bull thistles that are naturalized but not native to the region. Debris covers the logged unit. A stump juts out of a stream bank. At the lower end of the unit, a logging road cuts deep into the soft dirt of the mountainside. Noting there has been little rain on the site in the past two years, McKinley fears a gullywasher would scour the streambed and send a wall of debris down the mountain. Contrasting that sight is a 40-acre adjacent parcel upstream that McKinley also owns. He has employed what he calls the "single tree selection" method to logging. "Most of my property I targeted for selective thinning," said McKinley, 40, who was reared on a tree farm in Michigan. "I'm trying to increase the average age of the stand while creating what I think is a more natural spacing at the same time. "A thinner forest is more in line with natural densities, natural composition," he added. "With a multiple entry strategy, you can enhance forest health and produce economic return here for as long as I'll be around." Although the current project involves working by hand, McKinley plans to a use mechanized approach next summer to remove some of the larger slash and rehabilitate the stream channel. "Our hope is to make it easier for other private landowners to do these kinds of projects, to work with groups like Lomakatsi, to integrate the wisdom that people like Dennis bring," McKinley said. "We need to do more of these things wherever we can. "You can meld ecological consideration with enough economic return to log," he added. "You can work in the woods and still be ecologically considerate." Reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or e-mail him at [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.