The first 65 miles, from the Columbia River to Tillamook Bay
A foraging journey
Crafting dinner from fruits of the forest and sea
Built from the land
A feeding barn-inspired home on Willapa Bay
Logging heritage endures
A changing industry with deep roots
‘We Are Still Here’ Photographs of Chinook life by Amiran White ((below))
Do & See Our Picks Columbia-Pacific butterflies
Accessible recreation ‘The Goonies’ turns 40
Eat & Drink Our Picks Crabbers rebound
Live & Stay
Our Picks
Seaview shines
A family’s arts legacy
History & Heritage
Our Picks Liberty Theatre at 100 Memories of Bayocean
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Contributors
Readers’ views Directory
MEET the CONTRIBUTORS
Lissa Brewer
Lissa is the editor of Our Coast and features editor at The Astorian, where she compiles Coast Weekend and The Astorian’s Weekend Break section. She’s fond of books, museums, lighthouses and meandering along the region’s hiking trails and beaches.
Jenna Dennison
Jenna is the contributing editor of Our Coast and associate editor at The Astorian. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she enjoys rainstorms and a good cup of coffee.
Julia Triezenberg
Julia is the education supervisor at the Columbia River Maritime Museum and a regular contributor to The Astorian. She coordinates the museum’s adult education programming, volunteer and docent program and equity initiatives with fellow staff.
Shanna Madison
Shanna is the photographer of Our Coast and multimedia journalist at The Astorian. Raised in Montana and relocated to the Pacific Northwest, hiking, outdoor recreation and reading at the beach are how she spends her time outside the newsroom.
John Bruijn
John is the production director at The Astorian and has been with EO Media Group 24 years. He is design director of Our Coast Magazine and does layout and design work for several other EO Media Group publications.
Rebecca Norden-Bright
Rebecca is a reporter covering education and the city of Astoria, among other things, for The Astorian. Outside of the newsroom, she can usually be found reading, watching soccer or scavenging the coast’s vintage and antique stores.
Emily Lindblom
Emily is the marketing director at Astoria Co+op and a freelance journalist in Astoria. She has a background in community reporting and a master’s degree in multimedia journalism.
Jaime Lump
Jaime is the administrative assistant at the Lower Columbia Preservation Society in Astoria. Researching regional history and sharing untold stories are two of her passions. She contributes regularly to The Astorian on local history and architecture.
William Dean
William is a retired investigative journalist who left newspaper work to take on a new challenge: writing novels. Since moving to Astoria, he’s published three suspenseful tales set in the Northwest and also writes about the local craft beer scene.
Joanne Rideout
Joanne is the creator and producer of The Ship Report, a local maritime radio show and podcast now in its 21st year. The Ship Report airs on KMUN 91.9 FM in Astoria and on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
David Plechl
David is a commercial brewer and freelance journalist based in Astoria. His work has appeared in The Astorian, the Chinook Observer, The Columbian, Portland Mercury and the Portland Tribune.
Marianne Monson
Marianne is the founder and president of The Writer’s Guild of Astoria and the author of several books about women’s history, including “Frontier Grit” and “The Opera Sisters.”
more CONTRIBUTORS
Peter Korchnak
Peter is a regular contributor to Coast Weekend and The Astorian. He is from Czechoslovakia, a country that no longer exists. When he’s not writing, he explores the memory of another in the podcast “Remembering Yugoslavia.”
M.J. Cody
M.J. is a regular contributor to The Astorian, Our Coast and Coast Weekend. She travels and writes, always looking for people, places and things that bring her surprise and delight.
Rebecca Lexa
Rebecca is a Long Beach Peninsula-based naturalist, educator and author of many chapbooks, as well as the forthcoming book, “The Everyday Naturalist: How to Identify Animals, Plants, and Fungi Wherever You Go.” She teaches classes and leads tours on foraging and natural history.
David Campiche
David is a potter, artist, poet, retired innkeeper and the author of “Black Wing,” a historical fiction novel published last year. He has contributed to The Astorian over a couple of decades.
Linda Hoard
Linda is a poet, freelance journalist, substitute teacher and bird watcher living in Lake Oswego. She enjoys spending lots of time on the North Coast in all seasons.
Pat Welle
Pat photographs birds and their habitats while exploring the waterways of the Pacific Northwest. Occasionally traveling to places well beyond home, she looks for backgrounds and details that connect birds and wildlife to the spaces they’re found.
Do & See
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Our picks: where to spend a day on Our Coast Do & See
Wings Over Willapa
By Lissa Brewer
One by one, hikers stepped off the metal barge, peeled away their life jackets and set out, supplied with backpacks and walking sticks, on a 6-mile round trip up the center of Long Island, a lush and wild corner of the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge accessible only by boat.
Their destination was the Don Bonker Cedar Grove, a towering stand of 1,000-year-old western red cedar trees, and one of the last remaining patches of old-growth forest in this part of Washington state. Most people get there by kayak. For those staying the night, the island is dotted with 20 tent campsites in five locations.
But this trip was for an afternoon. It’s a signature event of Wings Over Willapa, a weekend of birding and nature immersion organized by the Friends of Willapa National Wildlife Refuge, and one of only a few such opportunities to visit the island.
The three-day festival is timed each year to align with the peak of the fall migration season along the Pacific Flyway, typically in late September, when millions of birds travel south between Alaska and Patagonia, stopping by the pristine waters of Willapa Bay.
In 2024, Wings Over Willapa offered nearly two dozen events. Kyle Smith, a forest manager with The Nature Conservancy in Washington, led hikers through the 7,600-acre Ellsworth Creek Preserve near Teal Slough, where the conservancy and refuge have formed a partnership to restore habitat for salmon, black bear, cougar and elk.
Nearby, the Port Townsend, Washington, based Discovery Bay Wild Bird Rescue brought live owls, hawks and falcons to greet visitors. Naturalists also took to parks and sloughs for early-morning bird hikes, authors prepared talks and kids enjoyed wildlife-themed crafts.
On Long Island, sunlight filters through the forest canopy onto soft beds of moss and fern. Coral mushrooms sprout below the trees. And between the push and pull of the tides, you may just find yourself alone with a song sparrow, humming a tune from a wooden post.
Hoffman Center for the Arts
By Marianne Monson
When Myrtle and Lloyd Hoffman, a musician and a painter, left their home, property and modest savings to the coastal community of Manzanita after their deaths in 2004, it was a first step in establishing a local center for arts and culture.
More than 20 years later, the Hoffman Center for the Arts offers a gallery and performance space, clay studio and sculpture garden. The place is envisioned as a home for artists, writers and horticulture enthusiasts, where people of all ages and backgrounds are invited to connect through creativity.
The center is run by a nonprofit board of 12, numerous volunteers and by executive director India Downes-Le Guin, who brings a background in creative writing and arts programming.
Classes offered range from life drawing to basket weaving, with scholarships available. In the gallery is a rotating cast of work by artists with ties to the North Coast. Exhibits are typically displayed for a month and may include paintings, photographs, collages, ceramics and textiles.
For writers, the center awards the annual Neahkahnie Mountain Poetry Prize. The North Coast Squid, its literary journal, is published in odd years. Even years see the Word & Image project, pairing visual artists with writers to respond to each other’s work. The resulting creations are displayed on gallery walls and printed in a keepsake book.
A clay studio features five electric wheels, two slab rollers, a glaze room and two electric kilns. Courses are offered for beginning to advanced potters, with kiln services also available. Outside in the Wonder Garden, volunteer horticulturalists work with native plants. The garden is also a meditative space for people to sketch or write, and poetry is regularly sought for display.
Whether you consider yourself a writer, a visual artist, an art enthusiast, or a beginner on your creative journey, this is a place to build upon an interest or explore something entirely new.
Long Beach Peninsula
Manzanita
Artistry. Outdoors. Adventures.
Banks-Vernonia State Trail
By Rebecca Lexa
Over 21 miles between two quiet towns in the foothills of the Oregon Coast Range, hikers, cyclists and equestrians share a trail where a railroad bed once opened up stands of Douglas fir and cedar to lumber-hauling trains.
Banks-Vernonia Trail, which was recently designated a National Recreation Trail, was Oregon’s first “rails-to-trails” park, part of a growing movement that promotes turning abandoned or otherwise unused railroad beds into multi-use recreation areas.
The railroad line was in use through the early 20th century until it was abandoned in 1973. Oregon State Parks later took over the right of way and, with encouragement from local trail enthusiasts, began converting the former railroad bed in the early 1990s. Last year, it was designated a National Recreation Trail.
Most of the route is graded, though there are some slopes along the way, and it gains about 1,000 feet of elevation in the 7 miles between Manning and Tophill. The main trail is 8 feet wide and paved, but there are also gravel sections that are easier for horses, such as the alternate route at Buxton Trestle. Well-maintained trailheads include accessible entry points, and most have restrooms. Leashed dogs are also welcome.
The trail wanders through forests of varying ages, from fresh clearcuts to mixed conifer and maple. Now and then, the route may be punctuated by fall fungi or an old apple tree, linking the area to an agricultural history. As it parallels Highway 47, traffic noise is a constant, but this doesn’t prevent ample birding opportunities, including where the route follows or crosses the Nehalem River.
Banks-Vernonia is the northernmost section of the Tualatin Valley Scenic Bikeway, a 50-mile route that starts at Rood Bridge Park in Hillsboro and ends at Vernonia Lake City Park. For an extended ride, cyclists can commute a few miles up the highway to Pittsburg onto the Crown-Zellerbach Trail, another railroadturned-National Rail Trail that stretches to Scappoose.
Trail use is largely limited to daylight hours, so plan accordingly, and keep in mind that both trails have bike repair stations along the way.
FisherPoets Gathering
By David Campiche
As spectacular as an ocean storm itself, the annual FisherPoets Gathering blows into Astoria on the last weekend in February, gathering people of the commercial fishing industry for a weekend of poetry, music and salty storytelling. Big water and back-breaking work are part and parcel of these dangerous professions, whether fishing for Dungeness crab, Chinook salmon or winching up a 200-pound halibut from the bottom of the sea.
Those who read share their love of the big water, fishing and the dangers of the Pacific Ocean with skill, humor and delight. And if sometimes there is an element of pain or danger in their offerings, listen carefully as they express their souls. Their travails are the stuff of big hearts and solid fortitude.
Fishermen display their deepest feelings with self-effacing modesty. Time and tides support the legacy. Discipline has shaped these hearty men and women of the sea. Certainly, Mother Nature can swing with a hard fist, only to lay down hours later, softly as the flutter of a seabird’s wings.
Each year, crowds wrangle over who wears the poet’s crown. Everyone has a favorite. Crowd-pleasers like Dave Densmore and Geno Leech draw gasps, foot-stomping and laughter, year after year. But there are so many. This gathering fills the town, with readings at theaters, breweries, and bars, plus music and art. Fighting storms on the water from Cape Disappointment to the Bering Sea, one forms alliances.
Then there are the nights on a placid sea when the sun sets like golden thunder and, at that very moment, none on the water would trade their lifestyle for riches or hard cash. These poets will tell you stories in heart-futtering detail. They will laugh and hoot, blush and cry. You will, too.
Come listen when the clouds open over Astoria and you expect nothing from the readers but the pride in their voices, or just maybe, comradeship over a good beer. This is a proud and talented bunch.
Banks-Vernonia
Astoria
On the Oregon Coast Trail
A photo essay by Lukas Prinos
The journey begins
Evening light hits the observation tower at the Columbia River South Jetty, where the Oregon Coast Trail unfolds into the mist. The trail follows Oregon’s 363-mile coastline south to Brookings. Hikers typically set out from the north.
Miles of sand
Fishermen gather at Fort Stevens State Park. The first 16 miles of the Oregon Coast Trail follow a flat, wide beach past the Peter Iredale shipwreck until an inland turn at Gearhart.
Coho salmon
Fishing grounds
Larry Smith inspects a coho salmon in his cooler
From left, longtime friends Larry Smith, B.K. Srinivasan and Al Onkka share a laugh while they wait for the fish to bite.
Bull kelp
An annual seaweed, bull kelp can reach heights of more than 100 feet each season, forming an underwater forest canopy. In recent years, more than two-thirds of Oregon’s kelp forests have disappeared.
Eat & Drink
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Eat & Drink
Our picks: where to spend a day on Our Coast
Location
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Location
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Feasts. Eateries. Libations. Recipes.
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One wild weekend
Forging friendships through foraging
Imagine living in a land where the fruits of the forest and the sea can be plucked at will and transformed into a gourmet dinner, and then realize that, in fact, you do. The bounty of the Pacific Northwest is well-known, and celebrated for good reason.
Words: Ryan Hume • Images: Lukas Prinos
Plates are garnished with the lichen old man’s beard, or Spanish moss.
Fresh chanterelle mushrooms can go for $40 a pound during peak season. Willapa Bay oysters are shipped around the world. But the forest and the bay can be deceiving, offering plenty of poisonous alternatives to the good stuff, so it doesn’t hurt to have an expert on hand.
Enter Matt Nevitt, purveyor of all things wild. Formerly an engineer at Nike, Nevitt decided to exit the rat race more than a decade ago to pursue his lifelong passion of living off the land, a different sort of hand-to-mouth existence that he learned growing up in Raymond, Washington.
Nevitt has cultivated a reputation as one of the premier foragers in our region, providing restaurants throughout the Pacific Northwest with wild mushrooms and other found goodies. Chances are, if you are a fan of fine dining on the coast, you have nibbled on one of Nevitt’s treasures.
His company, Wild Foragers, also sells directly to the public through the North Coast Food Web in Astoria. Foragers, by nature, are notoriously secretive. They have to be to protect their special spots.
“I see myself as a farmer,” Nevitt said. “Or, more accurately, a caretaker of the land. All of the patches I visit tend to become more abundant each year, because I’m doing things to promote propagation and spreading seeds and spores as much as possible.”
So it was indeed a rare opportunity for Nevitt to offer a two-day guided tour of his choice patches among the waterways that slip through the trees off of the pristine Willapa shores. The spoils of this adventure would go home with the lucky participants. The apex of the experience — an allinclusive trip with a cost of $425, including tent camping on-site — was a Saturday night pop-up dinner at Wild Foragers’ Raymond headquarters, a celebration of the abundant wild foods of the area.
This event had gestated for more than three years, ever since Nevitt met Kenneth “Kenzo” Booth, chef and owner of Būsu in downtown Astoria. Būsu’s playful, Northwest-driven, Japanese-inspired menu relies heavily on local, foraged ingredients.
Nevitt was one of Booth’s first vendors, and the two soon became fast friends, dreaming up a way to combine their talents.
“(Matt) is incredibly kind,” Booth said. “And those are exactly the kinds of humans I want to be around, work with, and (I) consider him family.”
Jonathan Jones cooks up mushrooms on a Kasai Konro grill.
The planning
The October sky was shockingly blue and crisp above the Willapa River on the first morning of the event. These were good omens for the campers as they arrived to pitch their tents on the lapping waterfront of Wild Foragers headquarters, a property bought by Nevitt in 2014 on the original site of the Pacific County Marina.
“I’ve heard old stories of giant ships from Japan that once docked here to unload oyster seed and load up with our local trees to take back to Japan,” Nevitt said.
The property had also been an oyster cannery and a boat shop before Nevitt and his father helped build the house that now stands on the shore.
“Our area has long been known as one of the epicenters of the best wild mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest,” Nevitt said. “Also, Willapa Bay is considered one of the cleanest natural estuaries in the world due to many factors, including all the oysters filtering the water.”
The weather was just sheer dumb luck, but everything else was meticulously planned. Nevitt called on friends and family months ahead of time to arrange everything just so. Two long, live-edge tables on the dock that spilled out over the river had been harvested from an old-growth tree by Kaley Hanson, a friend of Nevitt’s who is a woodworker and owner of Raymond’s Pitchwood Alehouse.
The warehouse on the dock had been transformed into a semi-outdoor kitchen, though the structure itself had plenty of room for prep work, and a walk-in fridge Nevitt designed himself. Jessaid Pagán Malavé, a project manager from Seattle, was on hand with his partner, Cerena Gonzalez, to help make everything go smoothly.
Pagán Malavé had met Nevitt not even a year before, having taken one of his foraging classes. He soon took another.
Born in Puerto Rico, he spent years in New York City in the finance industry before heading west. “I used to think people who picked berries out of a bush were crazy,” he said.
Consider him a convert.
“I worry for a living,” Pagán Malavé said. “We needed a plan and needed to work backwards. He trusted me with helping to bring his vision to fruition.”
Soon all that worry would pay off as three borrowed boats were attached to a small convoy of trucks and the 20-odd foragers in muck boots were whisked away to undisclosed locations along the estuary that
Nevitt has sniffed out, cultivated and nurtured for years.
The group of hunters was diverse, hailing from all over the Northwest. Some were chefs Nevitt has supplied, others were foodies, or naturalists. They ranged in age from early 20s to early retirement. Most were novices, so Nevitt’s advice was on full display, teaching the participants how to clean mushrooms with a knife before placing them into a basket.
That first day’s haul was impressive. “We were able to find some great varieties of wild mushrooms that I was hoping to find. In particular, we found some of the most photogenic chanterelles and hedgehogs I’ve ever seen, and they were also some of the largest specimens I have ever found,” Nevitt said. “I led the group into the patches and they found them and they were so excited to find such amazing mushrooms.”
The Willapa Bay area has long been known as one of the epicenters of the best wild mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest.
Matsutake mushrooms grilled with salt and pepper on a bed of lichen and a splattering of chili garlic oil.
Eat & Drink
The kitchen
Back at the warehouse, jutting out above the river, prep had been ongoing throughout the day while the foragers had been hiking through the woods. Booth had enlisted his old friend, Thomas Carey, to pull off the big meal. The two had met nearly two decades ago in the now-closed kitchen of Le Bistro Montage in Portland.
Nevitt delivered all of the mushrooms to Būsu a few days earlier. Booth gauged it was about a week’s worth of prep for the main courses, though pickling started in the spring.
Nevitt estimated that over 90% of the ingredients used in the sevencourse menu arrived in the kitchen from less than a 20-mile radius.
There was a gas grill on the dock and propane burners for pots and pans, and, of course, an oven and stovetop up the hill in the house.
Booth and Carey were later joined by Jonathan Jones, the executive chef of the Astoria Golf & Country Club, who showed up with a very large piece of kitchen equipment. A Kasai Konro grill is a monster of a
box typically used in Japanese cooking, like yakitori, where small pieces of meat or vegetables are grilled inches away from a special type of smokeless charcoal called Binchōtan, which reaches impossibly high heats and can be used indoors.
“I was fortunate to get the third released in the United States,” Jones said. “I could not wait to use it so I thought it would be a great opportunity to break it in and put it out and see how it performed.”
This was only half of the grill. Jones and his wife, Stacey, hope to utilize the whole beast with a new cocktail and small-plate eatery called BAR X.O., which they plan to open in Astoria.
“I have not worked with Kenzo before,” Jones said. “But my wife and I are huge fans of his craft. To be honest, his izakaya is one of the main inspirations that made us feel like we can come out here and create a dining experience for the great community of Astoria.”
Everyone in the kitchen fell into a rhythm and spirits remained high through all the chopping, sauteing and grilling.
Chef Kenneth “Kenzo” Booth holds a bowl of black truffle miso mushroom soup with rice noodles and pork at Būsu in Astoria.
The feast
After a very long day, the whole crew was ready to sit down on the dock and eat through the dusk. The vibe was certainly camp casual — muddy boots, jackets, rain gear that never saw a drop. More people showed up, friends of Nevitt’s, including the tablemaker, Hanson, whose gorgeous work was now lined with an assortment of pickles and glass bottles of fresh Willapa Hills spring water that had been pulled straight from the source that afternoon. Nevitt produced a keg of Culture Shock kombucha, out of Seattle, frothy with a bit of bite.
Booth’s cooking philosophy is to follow the seasons and the pickles on the table reflected these transitions. Pickled fiddlehead ferns and oxeye daisy buds — bright, salty bursts done in the style of a caper — represented spring, while curried pickled chanterelles and rehydrated shitakes seasoned with soy, ginger and apple cider vinegar spoke of the autumn.
Soon, large platters of freshly shucked Willapa Bay oysters arrived — briny and pungent under a punch of mignonette — and the crowd turned ravenous. Looking down into the water surrounding the dock, you could see there were plenty more to be had.
“They are mother nature’s gift to us,” Jones said. “They are packed with so many great flavors and also they are super healthy and very abundant.”
But this was October in the Pacific Northwest, when the wild mushroom is king. Following the luxury of eating oysters on the dock, the remaining courses would be vegan and prominently feature mushrooms, each attached to its own wine pairing prepared by Jones, who was the evening’s sommelier, having won multiple awards at a winery before moving to Astoria.
“Personally, I’m a meat eater,” said Jordan Probasco, a longtime friend of Nevitt’s and a chiropractor in Astoria. “I was a little skeptical about a completely vegan meal coming at me and making my tummy tickle with excitement, but it did. Literally everything they put in front of us was epic. I tend to be a picky eater, but remained open to whatever came my way that night. And I’m glad I did. It was phenomenal.”
The first soup of the night arrived and set a high bar. Thai red curry paste and coconut milk were blended with five pounds of lobster mushrooms and a kelp dashi. The flavor was intense with just an edge of heat.
Next, thick slabs of matsutake mushrooms were grilled and served with a
crispy chili garlic oil on top of a spindle of old man’s beard, a stringy type of lichen that’s high in Vitamin C, and which Carey jokingly referred to as, “the merkin of the forest.” Anyone missing meat that night found their sustenance in that fleshy, charred slice of matsutake.
Perhaps the most playful dish of the evening was the wild mushroom congee with porcini mushrooms and wild sea spinach. Congee is a savory Chinese rice porridge that Booth often likes to include on his menus. Here, considering the significance porcini mushrooms play in many Italian risottos, this was kind of a cross between the two — it had the creamy base of a congee and the toothiness of a risotto. The wild sea spinach was certainly not the same leafy green one finds at the grocery store and added a nice color and a hint of salinity to the dish.
Anyone who has eaten at Būsu knows that Booth is a master of a steaming bowl of ramen, and the Kare Miso Ramen he served on the dock as the last rays of sunlight faded
Fresh oysters are prepared with a mignonette sauce.
was nothing short of phenomenal. The depth of flavor achieved in a broth consisting of miso, hedgehog, chanterelle and maitake mushrooms filled the soul with earthy gulps of umami between slurps of slick noodles.
The last main course was also a mainstay of Būsu’s menu — a vegan wild mushroom okonomiyaki, which is an Osaka-style savory pancake. Stuffed with cabbage, braised chanterelles and tofu, Booth employed a doctored-up vegenaise instead of the traditional Japanese mayonnaise to keep with the theme of the night.
Dessert was provided by Nevitt: a coconut and huckleberry pudding with chia seeds — a nice, soft landing after so many wonderful, eccentric, filling courses.
No one walked away from the dock hungry, kitchen staff included, as some turned in early and others kept the momentum going at the waterfront. Around fire pits and with an acoustic guitar played by Probasco,who had also played at Nevitt’s wedding, the good vibes carried deeper into the night.
Goodbyes
The boat arrived at the dock the next morning and the foragers, now including the kitchen staff, piled aboard for one last hunt. The Serenity, piloted by Capt. Chuck Stepp and his dog, is an old converted houseboat that Stepp, a mechanic who lives down the waterway from Wild Foragers headquarters, has been fixing up for years.
A 20-minute boat ride would reveal one of Nevitt’s most private patches. Across the bay, rang out the shotgun blasts of duck hunters.
Up a rocky incline, the land evened out into a grassy field before spilling down into the woods. Right in the middle of the field stood a fairy ring of porcini — a natural formation mushrooms sometimes take, where they grow in a near-perfect circle, almost reminiscent of Stonehenge in England. While a magical site, the porcini were too buggy to pick.
“I haven’t said anything like this over the weekend,” Nevitt said to the group. “But foraging patches are special places. Some are passed down over generations. If any of you want to come back to these places, please let me know first. And maybe someday you can show me yours.”
There was a decent haul that morning, but not as fruitful as the day before. Back on the dock, the crew communally split up their gathered bounty and decamped back towards their real lives with a bag full of treasures and at least a few new friends.
Miraculously, the weather had held through the entire weekend, but as Pagán Malavé pointed out, it was the people that made the experience so successful. Nevitt hinted with the success of this weekend plans are already in the works for another culinary adventure next autumn and those interested can get on the wait list by reaching out to him on Instagram.
Before the group departed, one participant, Alex Brodeur, of Portland, mentioned he would really like to try another oyster plucked right out of the shadow of the dock.
Nevitt obliged. Down at the shoreline, he looked at the water level. The tide was too high. Not missing a beat, Nevitt took off his boots and waded in deep, dunking underwater, gathering bivalves, so everyone could have one last treat.
Wild Foragers
Follow Matt Nevitt at @ForagerBox on Facebook or @wild.foragers on Instagram
Wild mushrooms top off a dish at Būsu. The restaurant is donation-based, with hours and menus updated online.
Foraging patches are special places. Some are passed down over generations.
Matt Nevitt, left, founder of Wild Foragers, and Booth, center, welcome guests to dinner at Nevitt’s property in Raymond, Washington, and preview the courses they’ve prepared.
Evening light at the Wild Foragers property in Raymond, where dinner was followed by coconut and huckleberry pudding for dessert.
Hiker’s Camp
Over Tillamook Head, hikers follow the route of Lewis and Clark as they traveled to a Clatsop village in search of a beached whale in 1806. At Hiker’s Camp, within Ecola State Park (“ecola” means “whale”), cabins are offered first-come, first-served for through hikes.
Lion Rock
The sun sets over a sea stack at Arcadia
Beach, near Arch Cape.
Hug Point
Access to some sections of trail depends on the tide and season. Hug Point gets its name from the close navigation of stagecoaches that used the beach as a highway.
Live & Stay
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Boardwalk
A wooden boardwalk leads through the forest at Oswald West State Park.
Wild mushrooms
Mushrooms poke through moss on a tree along the Cape Falcon Trail. Fall is peak season in Oregon for foraging wild fungi.
Cape Falcon
Sitka spruce and hemlock meet jagged basalt rock at the tip of Cape Falcon, the site of Oregon’s northernmost of five marine reserves.
Short Sand Beach
A lone surfer splashes through the waves as sunlight pours onto “Short Sands,” a popular cove with a picnic area.
Driftwood
A wooden From Short Sand Creek, hikers continue onto the Sitka Spruce Trail, then to a grassy meadow known as Elk Flats.
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Neah-Kah-Nie Mountain
At 1,680 feet, this summit is the highest point on the Oregon Coast Trail. A subject of Nehalem-Tillamook stories, people have hunted and gathered plants here for millennia.
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Turn after turn
Logging pride endures
in the Willapa Hills
Words & Images: Riley Yuan
At five o’clock in the morning, Tony Snodgrass is in the parking lot of the Willapa Thriftway in Raymond, Washington, smoking a cigarette and waiting. The lot is empty aside from his idling crummy, and the asphalt glistens wet beneath the street lamps. It’s December, so it’s chilly and gusty. But inside the cab of his truck, it’s warm and dry. And clean — cleaner than the other guys’ crummies, Snodgrass points out with a smirk.
Within minutes, two sedans peel into the lot. Michael Neumeyer climbs out of one, and Julian Quirós out of the other. The three exchange goodmornings, with Quirós’s being nonverbal — a nod and a smile — as he speaks little to no English. They toss their bags in the bed of Snodgrass’s pickup and climb into the cab. Neumeyer rides shotgun while Quirós sits behind him, covers his face with his hoodie and goes promptly to sleep.
He stays asleep for the duration of the hourlong drive to Doty while Neumeyer and Snodgrass banter about football and the radio, tuned to a pop station, drones softly on in the background. It’s still nearly pitch dark outside, but occasionally, oncoming headlights light up the cab just as one man turns toward the other or glances up at the rearview mirror, revealing a cheekbone, or the corner of a mouth, or an eye. These features give little away though, except, perhaps, for a certain, quiet alertness.
Part of it is the early hour. As the day goes on, bodies and tongues will warm up and become more expressive. But only to a certain point. The woods are no place for performances. Swagger will not help you down in the hole.
Chips fly out of the kerf of timber faller Allen Slusher’s back cut through an aging alder tree.
This job is always gonna be hard work, It’s getting physically easier on people … but now it’s more of a mental game. And individual loggers, regardless of age or experience, still yearn to be tested by it.
A Douglas fir tree seen mid-fall as cutter Allen Slusher looks on at its stump.
Quirós’s features, hidden beneath a hoodie, reveal nothing at all. They remain hidden until the very last minute, when Snodgrass is backing the truck down the muddy two-track where everybody parks their crummies before hiking a short distance up to the landing. Snodgrass and Neumeyer spill out of the front seats and into the surrounding darkness as soon as the truck comes to a stop. Quirós yawns, rubs his eyes and stretches. His mannerisms confirm that he is the newest member of the crew working this logging side — a salvage job in burned-over, second-growth timber on state land — and that his day is only just beginning.
Outside, Neumeyer begins pulling things out of the bed of the pickup: a rucksack, a power saw, a gallon jug of water, jerry cans filled with gas and bar oil, and some plastic shopping bags full of bratwursts that he will later cook over the warming fire and share with the rest of the crew. He dons a pair of caulked rubber boots, a raincoat, a pair of rain pants and a dirty, hi-vis vest. Up on the landing, Snodgrass has already fired up the yarder, which is now coughing and groaning like a giant beast of burden. It’s half past six, and the rain, illuminated by the machinery’s floodlights, is a spitting one.
The firewood Neumeyer sets about chopping is already drenched. But after dousing it with a few glugs of gasoline and layering on enough of the previous shift’s empty grease gun canisters, he gets it to go — just as Quirós and the rest of the rigging crew make it to the landing. Jacinto, rigging-slinger, and Jose and Alexis, choker-setters, have arrived separately, with Jesus Diaz, the crew’s do-it-all hook tender. They are all originally from the same part of Mexico: Michoacán. And aside from Diaz, who has been here the longest, only Jacinto speaks English.
“Good morning, Michael! Good morning, Tony!” he yells over the din. And just then, the yarder’s whistle blows a few times in quick succession, signaling that Snodgrass is preparing to raise the skyline cable, along with the carriage and the attached choker cables that will ride it down into the hole and bring back up the logs. It’s a petulant, high-pitched sound — a bike horn multiplied by a million — and piercingly loud.
Once committed to memory though, whistle codes also constitute the quickest, clearest channel of communication in this steep, gnarled terrain. They are how Snodgrass and Jacinto will signal the majority of whatever they are seeing and doing — the former by pressing a button in the yarder cab and the latter by squeezing the trigger on the Talkie Tooter transmitter dangling from his waist. They will take no breaks, and by quitting time, they will have choked, yarded and processed upwards of 30 turns, or batches of logs.
But that is still eight hours away. Now, the carriage is hurtling downhill for the first turn of the day, with the rigging crew on its heels.
“Let’s go!” Jacinto yells. For a second, Quirós sticks his hands into the warming fire, rubbing them vigorously together as the flames lick his fingertips. And then he pulls on his gloves and dives off the edge of the hill with the others. They’re a nice pair of heavyduty work gloves— insulated on the inside and coated with rubber on the outside, all while remaining pliable. Later, the warmed-up tongues around him will call them “b — gloves” and rib him good-naturedly about shelling out for them. But can you blame Quirós? He was just curled up in the back of the crummy with a hoodie over his face. Ten minutes later, he is crashing through the brush and the dark and the driving rain, mere flesh and bone in a world made of wood and steel.
In a way, he might as well still be asleep. Like building skyscrapers or sending people into space, there is something so fundamentally preposterous about what he is about to do — about pulling whole trees out of the forest. Something about doing this work that demands one suspend all sense of what is safe or reasonable or even possible. Something about logging these rain-soaked hills that compels one to move and operate as if by the logic of a dream.
Jesus Diaz poses for a portrait while hiking the hills.
History & Heritage
To shield or to embrace
It turns out somebody had beaten Snodgrass and Neumeyer to the landing. His voice crackled over the citizens band radio while Snodgrass was still backing down the two-track and Quirós was still sleeping.
“Morning, George,” Snodgrass replied. It was the boss himself — George Bridgewater, the 71 year-old owner of Bridgewater Logging, who is typically up by half past midnight on a workday, out on the landing not long after two, and loading the first log truck of the morning some time between three and four. As almost every one of his employees will point out independently, Bridgewater is usually the first person to arrive at the side, and the last person to leave.
His movements and mannerisms are also the most measured of them all — seemingly, at times, to the point of slowness, though what appears to be slow is actually just deliberate. It certainly has nothing to do with age or ability. Rather, it has to do with experience, feel and dedication to a principle governing all forms of manual labor: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
There is another thing that makes Bridgewater stand out, as much as he loathes drawing attention to himself. In a sea of ball caps, hoods and orange hard hats, the boss wears a simple leather cap, caked in a layer of grease and dirt that any seasoned woodsman will immediately convert into a sense of vintage. Nobody seems to know more than this, though word on the landing is that Bridgewater has never not worn it — not even when he used to fall timber by hand.
Squint real hard, and Quirós’s gloves and Bridgewater’s cap might just look like competing, if not mutually exclusive, responses to logging’s most fundamental and inconvenient reality: many millions of tons of wood do not simply walk themselves off one of Earth’s most productive but unforgiving landscapes. People have to go out there and get it. The scales are mismatched, though. The exposure is extreme. Harvesting timber, like other human attempts at wrangling nature, ends up being a physics problem of deadly proportions — one that has to be survived as much as solved.
So the question is, do you shield yourself from nature, or do you embrace it? Do you try to limit your exposure to the elements, or do you let them weather you? Do you opt for the protective, rubber work gloves, or the worn, leather cap?
It isn’t binary. Methods of coping with objective danger and discomfort exist on a spectrum, and any number of variables affect where you might land on it. Age is one of them. And here, Bridgewater and Quirós are perhaps representative of their respective generations.
“When I was younger, there wasn’t too much emphasis on safety,” Bridgewater recalled. “I mean you didn’t want to do stupid things, but you didn’t sit down and talk about it. You know — ‘We can’t do this, we can’t do that.’ Never did that.”
This was in the 1960s, when Bridgewater was a boy, pulling levers in the cab of a D5 Cat at the bidding of his late father and founder of Bridgewater Logging, Jack Bridgewater. The logging town where the younger Bridgewater grew up, Raymond, was already in decline, though still full of places to down a beer and a steak, or else satiate any other appetite that could be worked up in the woods. Company camps and towns still dotted the Willapa Hills, and there were still a number of gyppo outfits that hadn’t yet been swallowed up by the giants, Weyerhaeuser and Crown Zellerbach. Said simply: most everyone in southwest Washington still made a living, directly or indirectly, off of the trees towering above them.
But the mindset and risk-reward calculus that Bridgewater spoke of defines a much longer period of time, spilling over decades on either side of his own boyhood. Here in southwest Washington, it began with Scandinavian immigrants and the Deep River Logging Co.,
Timber fallers Keith Kramer and Allen Slusher hike down to their job site at the start of a shift.
Timber faller Allen Slusher keeps an eye on the top of an alder tree as he saws through its base.
A logging carriage with attached choker cables travels along a skyline cable.
which, according to logger, historian and Naselle resident Bryan Penttila, “harvested over a billion board-feet of logs from the Naselle River watershed” in the first three decades of the 20th century.
The physics problem that is logging was even deadlier then. And men routinely failed to solve or survive it — were felled or maimed on the job at many times the rate of injury seen in just about any other line of work. To this day, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration deems logging the most dangerous job in America.
And yet, for the better part of a century, the promise of money to be made, and the seeming inexhaustibility of the resource that made it, managed to turn the physics problem into a numbers game, played with as much relentless persistence as ingenuity. Communities could send an endless stream of men into the woods because they had the men to send. And those men took the risk of living cheek by jowl with nature for granted — navigated it with a door-die combination of pluck, nerve, endurance and skill.
Ultimately, what the individual logger earned for bringing these qualities to bear was more than just a living. The pride he felt in doing the grittiest, toughest work out there — in measuring himself daily against the elements — was as big as the timber he felled.
A century later, there has been a subtle, but profound change in the industry. It isn’t the rapid mechanization of logging operations across the board. It isn’t the constriction of timber markets in an increasingly globalized economy, and the concurrent shuttering of so many independent outfits and mills up and down the Emerald Edge. It isn’t the newfound emphasis on safety, efficiency and regulation. It isn’t the way social and political attitudes towards logging have shifted since the timber wars of the 1990s.
It’s the draining of that once-fierce pride out of the logging community itself. The sense that there are fewer and fewer who are in it for the love of it — who have the sap running through their veins.
To those who have seen enough to pinpoint it, this change feels like a relatively recent one.
When asked what he wishes more people understood about logging, Bridgewater’s nephew and right-hand man, Matt Cron, said: “Ten years ago, I would have said the pride in it, just the value of the job, because it comes from the heart. But it’s changing so much now … guys don’t do this stuff now because it’s what they really want to do.”
He paused before adding: “I think a lot of people look at guys who work in the woods … like, ‘Oh you work in the woods? Well, you must not be able to do anything else.’”
It’s hard to say what, exactly, is responsible for this change. As Cron pointed out, it’s still possible, in spite of all the other aforementioned changes, to earn a decent living by logging — especially in this evergreen corner of the country.
But what’s also undeniable is that the various forms of belt-tightening the timber industry has experienced in recent decades have simply resulted in fewer loggers. And for the ones that remain, the philosophy of the industry now revolves around minimizing their exposure and maximizing safety and accountability.
The physics problem that is logging was even deadlier in the first three decades of the 20th century. And men routinely failed to solve or survive it — were felled or maimed on the job at many times the rate of injury seen in just about any other line of work.
Michael Neumeyer unhooks choker cables from yarded logs.
Processor operator Chad Bair prepares to load his first log truck of the morning.
Rigging-slinger Jacinto pulls choker cables down from the logging carriage.
History & Heritage
For every one of his employees whose boots touch the ground, Bridgewater now carries insurance at a rate of $19 per hour through the Washington Department of Labor and Industries. Jobs that used to take the manual labor of an entire crew, working together out in the open, are now done with a man or two, holed up in the climate-controlled cabs of modern machines. As Trace Conklin, an operations manager at Weyerhaeuser’s Raymond sawmill put it: “If we could get to the point where no hands touch the lumber at all, we would.” Or in other words, the rubber gloves, and
not the leather cap, are now the default.
Which, to Bridgewater and Cron, isn’t a bad thing. After all, the physics problem itself hasn’t gotten any easier.
“This job is always gonna be hard work,” Cron said. “(It’s) getting physically easier on people … but now it’s more of a mental game.” And individual loggers, regardless of age or experience, still yearn to be tested by it. It’s why Quirós got made fun of for his gloves that day on the landing. It’s what Snodgrass meant when he said, while pulling levers in the yarder cab, “Sometimes I miss being down in the rigging.
Just the hard work of it.” The men that Cron and Bridgewater have working for them are still steeped in pride and camaraderie. And in an age that sometimes seems designed to rob them of both, it is equally by design that they have retained these qualities.
“Terrain changes, timber changes, markets change, everything changes, but to do a job in this day and age, it takes people,” Bridgewater said. “I don’t care what you’re doing, you need people. So by God you better treat them right. You want the most out of them. And that’s what I try to do. I try to lead by example.”
Terrain changes, timber changes, markets change, everything changes, but to do a job in this day and age, it takes people. I don’t care what you’re doing, you need people. So by God you better treat them right.
Timber faller Keith Kramer looks on as three trees fall, domino-fashion.
A feller-buncher prepares to lay down an entire hemlock tree after sawing through its base.
History & Heritage
Planning and vision
Back out on the side, Diaz is down in the hole.
As a hook tender, he doesn’t have to be here. Jacinto has things fully under control in the brush, whereas Diaz’s primary responsibility amounts more or less to masterminding the entire yarding operation. The placement of the skyline cable, the triangulation of various smaller ropes and cables that will pull the skyline into place, the designation and rigging of multiple, faraway stumps and trees as anchor points for blocks and pulleys, the way that an entire hillside of downed timber can be covered in the fewest and most efficient yarding corridors — all of these things are a direct result of Diaz’s planning and vision.
But he’s here anyway, helping to choke logs, piling onto Quirós with the jokes, and occasionally relaying messages up to Snodgrass. Part of it is the presence of a reporter, whose safety can be better ensured with an extra pair of experienced eyes. But another part of it is what Bridgewater was talking about: leading by example. Plus, Diaz likes it down here. He started in the brush 20 years ago, with Bridgewater Logging, doing exactly what Quirós and the other choker-setters are doing. And he still prefers to spend his days hiking all over the place, breathing the fresh air and keeping an eye on things.
Unlike Bridgewater, Diaz does wear a hard hat. But the two men still share identical philosophies, when it comes to facing the elements. Beneath his raincoat, Diaz is wearing nothing but a hoodie, a hickory work shirt and an undershirt. It was all he was wearing several winters ago, when he was logging in the snow and ended up with frostbitten fingers and toes. It’s all he’s worn since, opting primarily for the protection his mind offers him.
“You just hang in there, and say to yourself, ‘I’ll make it, I’ll make it, I’ll make it,’ and that’s how you learn how to control all that stuff,” he said. “It’s all in your head. If you think about it, it’s bad. But if you start doing something, you know, bullshitting with those guys, playing around, stuff like that, it goes away, and you’re fine.”
“I’m not a robot,” he continued. “I got problems, everybody’s got problems. Maybe you feel sad or something. But then you come sit over here, quiet, you hear a couple of birds, you hear the creek, and you’re just calm, and relaxed. That’s it.”
The whistle blows and the carriage starts back down from the landing with three empty chokers, and something else dangling from one of them. Jacinto stops the carriage, whistles back with the Talkie Tooter, and lowers the chokers down. It’s the plastic bag full of bratwursts that Neumeyer brought up to landing. Only now, they’re wrapped in tin foil and piping hot, and there’s a bag full of hotdog buns alongside them, and bottles of ketchup and mustard, too. Neumeyer has even thought to cook up a brat for the reporter. They choke the logs, blow the whistle, and send them back up. They tear into the sausages, dribbling ketchup on their rain coats. They say, “Gracias, Michael,” out loud. Some of the tin foil gets balled up and scattered — strange, silver mushrooms sprouting in the brush. There is a hint of diesel and grill smoke in the air. The rain falls, and falls, and falls.
Log truck driver Tom Betrozoff poses for a portrait in front of his loaded truck.
BayOcean, Oregon
BayOcean, Oregon
BayOcean, Oregon
BayOcean, Oregon
BayOcean, Oregon
BayOcean, Oregon
Refill
Rachael Davis fills up a water bottle at Barview Jetty County Campground, near Garibaldi.
Supplies
A picnic table of essentials ready to be packed up. Hikers can resupply in towns like Manzanita and Rockaway Beach.
Packing up
Christopher Smiley disassembles a tent before leaving the campground at Barview, preparing for a new day’s journey.
