Now more than ever, Oregon, the nation, and the world need another national park.
Figure 1. Lost Lake on the Clatsop State Forest. Source: Oregon Department of Forestry (Wikipedia).
Though it’s a hell of a long shot, I propose a huge national park in northwestern Oregon that won’t fully flower for at least two centuries after its establishment. To create the park, the federal government should acquire vast ecologically and hydrologically significant tracts of state and private timberland and reconvert them to federal public parklands.
An Impoverished Landscape Waiting to Be Restored
The very largest of Oregon’s trees—and arguably the largest stands of forest in the world—were in the northern Oregon Coast Range in Clatsop, Columbia, Tillamook, and Washington Counties (Map 1). The largest specimens are long gone now, having been clear-cut and replanted as monocultures going on three times or more in some places. Yet, it is still an incredibly productive—albeit presently impoverished—landscape, about as close to Portland as Shenandoah National Park is to Washington, DC.
To both pay off an ecological debt from the past and invest for future generations, in these 2020s Congress should establish a North Oregon Coast Range National Park. Since it takes several hundred years to regrow forests of 12-foot-diameter Douglas-firs and Sitka spruce—even in the north Oregon Coast Range—we must start reconverting state and private timberland to federal public parkland immediately, as we don’t have a moment to waste.
As I proposed in my 2017 Public Lands Blog post “Converting Private Timberlands Back to Public Forestlands,” the purchases could be financed through increases in the state fuels tax, the weight-mile tax, and DMV fees, a logical exchange because Oregonians would be mitigating the climate change impacts of burning fossil fuels by conserving and restoring the state’s forests. In addition, the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund could be tapped.
Map 1. The dark green is the Tillamook and Clatsop State Forests, the medium green (southwest edge of map) is the Siuslaw National Forest, and the lightest green is generally forested private lands. The red is Oregon Common School Fund lands, and the tan indicates Oregon state parks. Source: Oregon Department of State Lands.
A North Oregon Coast Range National Park should start with the public forestlands that are the Clatsop (Figure 1) and Tillamook (Figures 2 and 3) State Forests, which haven’t been hammered quite as repeatedly as the private industrial timberlands. It should also include vast amounts of what are now private industrial timberlands held as “long-term” (aka “ten-year”) investments by pension and hedge funds. It should particularly include the Necanicum watershed in Clatsop County, and in most particular, it must include the Klootchie Creek watershed (also locally spelled Klootchy), which is noted on Map 1.
Figure 2. Previously logged stand on the Tillamook State Forest. Source: Alanna Risse (Wikipedia).
Figure 3. Alas, the more typical landscape of the current Tillamook State Forest. Source: Tiger365 (Wikipedia).
Park It or Lose It
In 1977, a few conservation colleagues and I were touring private industrial timberlands in Clatsop County. It was part of a foundation effort to seek common, or at least neutral, ground between timber and environmental interests in Oregon. While the foundation was picking up my travel costs, it was not covering my bar tab. However, the timber executives had expense accounts and were happy to buy (a great story to tell back at the office), so I migrated to several of the most expensive liquors, wines, and spirits on the menu of a now-forgotten hotel lounge somewhere on Oregon’s north coast.
After everyone was liquored up, the conversation turned to Klootchie Creek. At the time, the nation’s largest Sitka spruce could still be found standing along the creek (Figures 4 and 5). Farther up Klootchie Creek was the site of what had been the world’s largest Douglas-fir until it blew over in the Columbus Day Storm of 1962 (not a surprise, as almost everything else around it was clear-cut).
Figure 4. The Klootchie Creek Sitka spruce in better days, once the world’s largest. Source: Clatsop County Parks Department.
A Crown Zellerbach executive (who was trying to outdrink me, and I him) said of what had been a magnificent old-growth Douglas-fir forest of 12-foot-diameter trees, where there are now only clear-cuts and plantations, “We knew in the 1950s we had to log it then, or it would be a national park by now.” Though I was well buzzed, my mood immediately turned sour.
Later the talks broke down when some conservation organizations sued over logging in the Mapleton Ranger District on the Siuslaw National Forest in Lane County. The timber industry said it couldn’t talk if conservationists were suing, and we conservationists observed that we couldn’t be heard over the roar of their chainsaws. I consider the Mapleton litigation (which enviros won) one of the first skirmishes in what became the Pacific Northwest Forest Wars.
Figure 5. The Klootchie Creek Sitka spruce today: the world’s largest Sitka spruce stump. Windstorms in 2006 and 2007 finished off the giant. It was always vulnerable to wind, as an inadequate buffer of forest was left to break the gusts. In 2011, the Clatsop County Parks Department took another 40 feet off the top of the remains, citing the risk of it falling on visitors. Source: North Coast Land Conservancy.
In days of yore, the forests of the Necanicum and other watersheds of the northern Oregon Coast Range were among the most magnificent in the world. Today, they are generally being clear-cut for the third or fourth time by profit-maximizing firms. In the future, the forests of the Necanicum and other watersheds could again be massive and majestic cathedral forests of Douglas-fir and Sitka spruce.
A North Oregon Coast Range National Park would restore the magnificent forests and the salmon runs and again become a secure haven for northern spotted owls, marbled murrelets, red tree voles, and many other old-growth obligate species. Over time it would also safely remove a massive quantity of carbon from the atmosphere and securely contain the carbon in a rainforest of very long-lived trees. Future generations would appreciate that.
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be.
Now put the foundations under them.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)